Personally, if I had to go to Phoenix, AZ for work and stay at a Marriott hotel, I think I would rather convince my boss that this business trip could be a zoom call, and during that zoom call I notice that participants have all sorts of fun virtual backgrounds, filters, emoji in their statuses etc.
Because it turns out, the type who don’t want fun little differences are exactly the types who will gladly go on a business trip to Phoenix Arizona and stay at a Marriott hotel.
> all sorts of fun virtual backgrounds, filters, emoji in their statuses
I don't want more pieces of flair in my life, thanks
You generally won't get to know someone well enough to appreciate their unique aspects unless you see them in person at least sometimes, unless that person has the habit of letting their freak flag fly in all circumstances, which has its own downsides.
> I don't want more pieces of flair in my life, thanks
Then don‘t. My boss didn’t require me to put a minimum of 15 pieces of flair in my status, and personally I just put blur on my background... scrap that, I didn’t turn on my camera at all and just used my standard avatar (which I consider fun in fact).
The power and influence (and damage caused) does not scale linearly with net worth. And you don’t need to have money on hand to be able to use it to harm others, you can e.g. use it as a collateral for loans and funding to build your child crushing machine.
Personally I wager society would be better if the excess wealth of billionaires was simply deleted, or burned. It would be better yet if that wealth was used in our shared funds to build common infrastructure and services. Leaving such wealth in such few hands is really the worst you could possibly do for society.
Why not just force them to to build the common infrastructure and services, and in exchange they get to keep the money? e.g. Jeff Bezos has to build some subway stations in NYC or something.
That way you get somebody with a proven track record of building big projects who is also motivated by money, so the common infrastructure and services is handled competently.
> Why not just force them to to build the common infrastructure and services, and in exchange they get to keep the money?
Because it is undemocratic, ripe for corruption and abuse, will never work in practice (as the rich will inevitably find ways to game the system). What you are describing is basically just aristocracy, where the rich get to decide what is best for the rest of us.
Ah yes. Let's trust civic engineering to a man who ran a company that had front-line workers using piss bottles to keep up with quotas. This cannot possibly end badly.
Uh-huh. It brings clarity to say you'd be happy to have the wealth destroyed. These are two different concepts, and the second one (about redistribution) always muddles these conversations.
1. Billionaires shouldn't wield lots of wealth, because it's scary.
Sticking to that concept makes the discussion a lot clearer. Never mind concept 2, it's haunted by the futile spirit of Marx and he's throwing crockery around.
Personally I am a fan of logistical taxation, where the mean income (including capital gains) pays 50% in tax and every standard deviation σ above (or below) pays extra (or less) according to 1 / (1 + e^-σ).
What will happen with this taxation is that if everybody makes the same income, then everybody pays 50% in tax. If some rich dude is making a lot more money then everybody else, they will lower the tax for everybody else while paying a lot more them selves. At some point (say 3 standard deviations above the mean) you end up getting less after taxes then had your income been lower (say 2 SD above), in other words, the limit is 100% tax for extremely high incomes (and 0% for extremely low incomes). That is, I favor a system that has maximum income, and you are actively punished for making more.
Suppose it's 1999, and I'm planning to expand my online bookstore into a worldwide network of distribution centers and logistics, that can deliver anything at all to anybody, very quickly, though a unified web interface. How can I carry out this major business enterprise without getting very poor?
I guess the board would have to vote to keep my income at the optimum level, or just below, to prevent me from jumping ship to run a competing company that offers to pay less.
I would rather you did not do that. You would create a shit tone more global transfer of goods accelerating global warming, and make societies dependant on unsustainable dirt cheap production practices.
Even if yourself could argue that you’ve done a good thing overall, I’d rather not take your word on that and would rather not have you decide something so extremely impactful.
Friend, they choose our legislators. They control the political process. They own the mass media and the social media companies. Denial isn’t a strategy.
You say this literally minutes after Hungarians elected them selves out of a dictatorship.
I know many democracies around the world are in critical failure modes at the moment (particularly in the USA). But there is still hope. With enough pressure democracy can be reformed.
My parent made a claim that humans have separate pathways for data and instructions and cannot mix them up like LLMs do. Showing that we don't has every effect on refuting their argument.
>>> The principal security problem of LLMs is that there is no architectural boundary between data and control paths.
Hard disagree, TC39 has done great work over the last 10 years. To name a few:
- Async/await
- Rest/spread
- Async iterators
- WeakRefs
- Explicit Resource Management
- Temporal
It's decisions are much more well thought out than WHATWG standards. AbortSignal extending from EventTarget was a terrible call.
More good works from the last 10 years includes .at(), nullish chaining, BigInt etc.
But most of what you mentioned is closing in on 10 years in the standard (Async/Await is from 2017) meaning the bulk of the work done is from over 10 years ago.
The failure of AbortSignal is exactly the kind of failure TC39 has been doing in bulk lately. I have been following the proposal to add Observables to the language, which is a stage 1 proposal (and has been for over 10 years!!!). There were talks 5 years ago (!) to align the API with AbortSignal[1] which I think really exemplifies the inability for TC39 to reach a workable decision (at least as it operates now).
Another example I like to bring up are the failure of the pipeline operator[2], which was advanced to stage-2 four years ago and has been in hiatus ever since with very little work to show for it. After years of deliberation very controversal version of the operator with a massive community backlash. Before they advanced it it was one of the more popular proposals, now, not so much, and personally I sense any enthusiasm for this feature has pretty much vanished. In other words I think they took half a decade to make the obviously wrong decision, and have since given up.
From the failure of the pipeline operator followed a bunch of half-measures such as array grouping, and iterator helpers etc. which could have easily been implemented in userland libraries if the more functional version of the pipeline operator would have advanced.
There simply isn’t denying the political nature of this mission. Majority of statements from NASA about it specify America’s need for space dominance, thank the Trump administration, and assert American exceptionalism in some other way.
The discussion on HN simply reflects the rhetoric which comes from NASA.
Also the picture of the US is totally fictional for the vast majority of people. The US has fostered an environment where only a tiny subset of the population can start a business. Even opening up a restaurant you are usually met with an avalanche of paperwork, of requirements to fulfill, and unless you have a lot of money to fix any issue, they rule some aspect of your business in violation. Even a tiny business like a food cart you need to make sure you keep it x meters from a public restroom, that your neighbors don‘t complaint, that you provide 2 parking spaces per gas-burner (or 3 if you use an induction stove) etc. etc.
Anti-capitalist here: Our point is actually the same point as the one Anti-feudalists had. The consumer hostility observed under capitalism is simply a corollary.
To be fair feudalism (the row-farming kind) kind of collapsed because people found better deals with the rise of trade and mercantilism and such. It wasn’t anything anybody needed to make points over.
IDEs seem headed in the same direction. Seriously, watching Codex rip apart binaries in parallel and Claude go from nothing to app in one prompt, I’m pretty sure there’s no need for me to look at any code. I’m fine using tools that just emit machine code if that’s more efficient.
It is easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of feudalism.
I kind of like the story of how Malthus had his theory of societal collapse because he couldn’t imagine a better system then mercantilism. That societies would rather collapse then to end their colonial monopolies.
I see a similar theory today with around depopulation, that as society gets older and relatively fewer working age people there are, that society would rather collapse then we find a better system then Capitalism.
I am sure Malthusians could find similar reasons for why collapse was inevitable as the population grew.
For example I can imagine a young Malthus debating with the elderly Adam Smith, and Smith saying something like: “When societies open up their markets, those big bulk carrying cargo ships will be able to ship the required food to the food scarce areas. And when they do, they will enrich them selves as well as the farmers whom they buy the crops from, as the price of the grain will be much higher in these over-populated regions”.
The young Malthus, however, is not convinced and will reply: „Then the population will still grow, both in that ‘new market’ (as you call it), and among the farmers whom acquire that new wealth; and eventually those farmers will make wars or famine with the neighbors and those merchants over the scars resources. Societal collapse is inevitable.“
We most generally lump Mercantilism in with Feudalism. The transition to Capitalism came with the rise of Liberalism (not the American political definition, the political philosophy one), which involved a lot of revolutions.
(I think I agree), Georgist here, Our point is also that these rent-seeking abilities (something which even the creator of capitalism famously hated the land-lords quite a lot)
This is the issue with something like Cursor and VC's funding because I feel like these private equities essentially seek rent in their own way by hollowing out the products from within, to maximize profits without doing efforts in a manner very similar to Rent-seeking, and most large companies also feel like a rent-seeking on the monopoly that they establish (like google or facebook)
I have made someone who was communist/socialist agree to georgism and I have had someone who was extremely capitalist agree to georgism, and to be honest, whether it be georgism or anti capitalism or socialism, I think that the world just wants a system where a person is treated with dignity within the economic cogs.
My opinion is that as long as we can all agree on the last premise about dignity for individuals within the economic cogs, we can all have meaningful conversations to make that a premise, hopefully a reality.
(I feel like the people who might deny dignity to people within this particular context, have either a bias/incentive to not look towards the problem, or are uninformed, or lack the energy to fight towards change within the system, and more importantly the _hope_ that the future can be better)
I am not hopeful about the current political systems (even around the whole-world at times), I feel like there should be more information and decentralization within politics.
Essentially, politics really just feel unaccountable to me, your vote really stops mattering to politicians if/when money starts talking. But technically, this system can be broken through with enough votes.
I really hope for a future where politics and politicians feel accountable and genuine, maybe even someone from down the street who we can have some chats with to actually know them.
Ironically or unironically, just as how the landlords pushed against Georgism/George within really making political difference, The same is happening right now as well where Online landlord monopolies dictate how people interpret and vote by using their algorithms/influence.
Politics like many other problems feel like a chicken and egg problem, like things work until they don't and things don't work until they do. At a more individual level, stepping outside of most algorithms and the reason why I joined hackernews is for doing something like this, myself.
Anarchist here. I can definitely see the appeal of Georgism. And if we must have a state (while we Anarchist work to dismantle the state apparatus) I am personally not convinced Communism is a superior alternative to Georgism. And I think you could probably convince many anarchists alike (as long as you strategically avoid mentioning the role of the state). And in either case, I will definitely stand next to a Georgist during the revolution in solidarity against Capitalism.
re: Anki. It is not as optimized but you can do SRS with physical flash-cards.
* Have something like 5 bins, numbered 1-5.
* Every day you add your new cards to bin nr. 1 shuffle and review. Correct cards go to bin nr. 2, incorrect cards stay in bin nr. 1.
* Every other day do the same with bin nr. 1 and 2, every forth with bin nr. 1, 2 and 3 etc. except incorrect cards go in the bin below. More complex scheduling algorithms exist.
* In a classroom setting the teacher can print out the flashcards and hand out review schedule for the week (e.g. Monday: add these 10 new cards and review 1; Tuesday: 10 new cards and review box 1 and 2; Wednesday: No new cards and and review box 1 and 3; etc.)
* If you want to be super fancy, the flash card publisher can add audio-chips to the flash-cards (or each box-set plus QR code on the card).
Because it turns out, the type who don’t want fun little differences are exactly the types who will gladly go on a business trip to Phoenix Arizona and stay at a Marriott hotel.
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