> But it would take a writer of rare skill – which Nguyen is not – to make it compelling reading.

jesus

This line is basically the review in miniature.

In answering whether Nguyen's argument holds, Runciman decides Nguyen isn't talented enough to be worth judging, then judges him anyway. A book about scoring systems gets scored on the wrong axis. Runciman then uses this to great effect, blending this silly aesthetic complaint with a real structural one.

The structural point I even agree with. You can always take up a new game, but at the social level there is often no other game to play, and you can't opt out of a metric that has power over you. But Runciman doesn't trust the point to carry the piece, so the verdict on Nguyen's prose is enlisted to stand in for a verdict on Nguyen's case.

The irony: to fault the book for not being "compelling reading" is to let a convenient proxy displace the value it was meant to track. That is "value capture" as Nguyen puts it.

…bounty hunting?

> It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point

this is extremely reminiscent of the stackexchange situation

there was some interview where he illustrated the idea of a twin prime pair using 27 and 29

reasoning itself just affords the model a ton of extra forward passes / "time to think"

the, como se dice, "misalignment" between the content of reasoning tokens and the actual output following the end of the reasoning is a separate problem, extensively studied by e.g. Anthropic

reminded of Arthur Whitney's stuff

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777

on the one hand this sucks on the other hand let a thousand schools of steinberger/strandberg-style weirdness bloom

I think Fender are idiots for doing this but I also wonder why companies copy the body style so slavishly. You would think makers of musical instruments would be a little more creative themselves.

It's a pretty restrictive design space. The Stratocaster shape is based on the centuries-old shape of acoustic guitars. The lower dip of the "hip" of the guitar shape serves a practical purpose, in allowing it to rest on your leg when playing seated. The upper dip mirrors the lower hip aesthetically and removes weight. The cutaways in the upper bout allows you to access the higher frets. At that point there's not a whole lot of design variation left without sacrificing some functionality (eg the Flying V shape is not really playable while seated), and honestly most of that design space has already been explored, too. The strat shape is so common because, well, it's a really good and obvious design for an electric guitar, which is why it was one of the very first. If you stray very far from one of the handful of established designs, you pretty much just end up with a worse guitar.

Indeed. The lineage is pretty clear:

Spanish Guitar -> Dreadnoughts with Cutaway -> Flat Solid-body Telecaster -> Flat Precision/Telecaster Bass -> Contoured Stratocaster

The asymmetric body shape was a very clever design out of necessity, as the long-scale Precision bass needed a longer horn at the top in order to avoid neck dive.

Interestingly, the only trademarked part of the Stratocaster, the neck shape, was copied from a Bigsby model, which is based on a Violin Scroll Shape.

Upvoted because you've captured the overall point pretty well, but I will say that the Flying V can be pretty dang comfortable seated if you hold in the classical position (i.e., resting on your fretting side thigh). I almost always play standing anyway, but when I do sit, I usually rest the guitar (acoustic or electric) on my left leg anyway because I find it more comfortable.

As with most things guitar, it's mostly about what works for the individual player.

This is why the materials from Fender keep trying to emphasize that the strat shape was an explicitly creative decision and not a functional one, because if it's primarily a functional design, they've got nothing (see how there's only so many ways to design a shovel, you can't sue someone for copying your shovel design)

> the Flying V shape is not really playable while seated

it needs to be played in a classical position (with a footrest ideally) but it's more ergonomic than the standard strat position.

It's the same reason why bikes all look the same. There's only so many ways to design around a set of constraints.

I guess Steinberger guitars are protected by some branding too, also Steinberger seems to own some patents (maybe the headless/bridge combo?). No idea if they are still valid.

Agreed. I personally don't like the S-shaped ones. But ended up buying one cos there was none else in the store.

"how does it feel to be embraced and extended?"

isn't this also a thing on dating apps

I was going to raise this question here. Then again, the only thing you might get is an identifier of the person that swiped left/right on you. You won't really be able to do much with that, though, unless you reverse-engineer the dating site's API and invoke it directly to access dating profiles. …which apps might be able to prevent by using device attestation / Google SafetyNet etc. (You can't easily extract the auth key required for the API.)