0thgen

How much of a standard is it though, really? To me it just looks like "Call your docs SKILLS and organize it like this".

And if you're just making docs and letting your models go buck wild in your shell, doesn't an overspecified docs structure ruin the point of general purpose agents?

Like, a good dev should be able to walk into a codebase, look at the structure, and figure out how to proceed. If "hey your docs aren't where I was expecting" breaks the developer, you shouldn't have hired them.

Feels like a weird thing to take "this is how we organize our repos as this company" and turn that into "this is an 'open standard' that you should build your workflows around".

In what type of society do I not have to do that? Even if I live in a society where everything is collectively owned, I’m still forced to work for the collective (of which I have one share among the population, essentially giving me about as much control as a “vote”)

What is the difference exactly? Being forced to work for the democratically elected government versus being compelled to work for private businesses?

I think the fact that people can pick and choose which contracts to engage in, can back out at any time, and in many cases if you live in a rich country, opt out altogether. Even if there are "pressures" (either socially induced or biological) to work in some form, "consent" seems like a perfectly reasonable word to describe modern conditions.

Like, do we really, truly believe the current world is no different from the feudal past? Is that not hasty reductionism?

When you say "weaponized to", it makes it sound like there's some actor attempting it. Don't ideological bubbles form naturally? (People like to hear what they agree with)

In the case of controlling election outcomes, how is the current situation different from the pre-internet era of tv/radio advertising? Aren't political agents always trying to "control" elections? The core argument I'm making here is: doing so is very difficult

A lot of the counter arguments people have made seem to be: "no one can choose whether or not to participate in the system, therefor it's serfdom".

I'm curious why people don't just extend this to everything then? In order to survive in the modern world (whether it's a capitalist or socialist economy): I'm required to work, I'm required to follow the law, I'm required to adopt social customs of my peers, I'm required into a certain language, I'm required to use utilities. So why the focus on "techno-feudalism", if all of you would describe _any_ system of requirements as feudal?

Feudalism isn't just defined by "lock in", it also describes the social structure of individuals, and how contracts were made.

It seems that the real reason for calling the current system "feudal" is because it comes politically loaded with "bad / coercion", not because it actually fits the description. It's the same as when people call capitalism "wage slavery". Rhetorically convenient, but intellectually lazy.

Isn't "work or starve" just a fact of nature? In what system do people not have to work to survive? (aside from a system where robots do all the labor)

Can you explain how feudalism in the past had a far milder impact on individuals?

I guess one difference is, the factory workers pushed towards engaging in brutal labor actually had it rough.

It's unclear whether the current system bring "horrible conditions" that need addressing. I don't want 9000 email providers, and the centralization of platforms has probably made life better. The argument that it crushes innovation might be true, but the number of "startups" that seem to gain large amounts of VC funding is quite high (they must be innovating something).

My gut reaction is generally "centralization / monopolies = bad", which is probably the feeling of a lot of people here. But we should actually ask ourselves whether the natural tendency towards centralization actually makes sense economically, especially since many aspects of the internet (communication, email, AI, compute time, etc) are all looking more like "utility" markets (where naturalistic monopoly formation has long been accepted by economists).

"You can control the people of the entire world with computers. Their socialization, their education, their culture, their employment, the very flow of money, all of it is controlled by computers. It's easier than ever and you don't even need to commit violence. The lash is no longer literal but economic."

This feels like it rests on a belief that "nudging" and subliminal messaging are actually effective. The evidence on that stuff is pretty weak, and the evidence we do find has small effect sizes.

The reality is more likely that the "online world" is insanely complex and hard to control. Even with a tech oligopoly, the number of players and interests groups in massive. If companies had the power to completely control the entire world and every aspect of life, they would have (assuming they had the incentive, which I'm sure you believe they do).

"You're just worshipping the billionaires" is not a good rebuttal to the author's arguments. You haven't addressed

"Try getting a job without LinkedIn. Try buying a phone that doesn't run android or iOS." Your argument here would apply to everything then, why restrict it to "techno"? Try driving a car without buying gas from a small number of oil companies. Try using electricity without going through utility monopolies. Try using a credit card without going through... yada yada.

Does that mean we currently live in oil-gas-electro-feudalism? If you really think that, then your fundamental argument is: 'the social order is the same as it's always been', which just seems unnecessarily reductionist.

The term techno-feudalism is clearly politically loaded rather than empirically descriptive, and I think your response makes that pretty clear.

Sure, there are pressures for resource procurement that influence our decision making.

The difference is whether the hierarchy is baked into the legal system and less difficult to vertically navigate.

interesting! that's a mathematically provable statement? or do you mean, most data can be represented as a graph? (I'm not asking antagonistically; I'm genuinely interested in the statement you made)

one benefit (idk if it applies here) is if the select/put/delete statements didn’t require loading the data in memory; so you could query massive data files with limited RAM and not have to solve that problem yourself for each data storage format you’re working with

I like the idea of using select/put/delete (sql-style syntax) to query non-rdb data storage. It sort of raises the question of, could there be 1 universal language to query relational databases, text file storage (json, csv, etc), and anything else.

Or put another way, is there any data storage format that couldn’t be queried by SQL?

r should just transition to being a statistics package for the python ecosystem.

I doubt most users care enough (even if this is a real issue). So it seems like the only way this practice could be mitigated is if it somehow is unaligned with OS vendors' (apple, android) interests.

Like, maybe it harms Apple's reputation as privacy champions, or creates security vulnerabilities or something

Fair enough. Then it seems that should be the lawsuit rather than murder though

wouldn’t you also have to sue car drivers, consumers, and everyone else who touches the fossil fuel industry? (which is everyone)

also, what about lives saved / sustained through the use of fossil fuels? Do you subtract each climate related death by the number of ambulance trips and plastic used in medical products?

just thinking out loud here

I have never needed anything more than pip in 8 years of development, and have always run into issues with r packages (every new version of r seems to break 30% of existing tidyverse packages)

Id second this. I used to lose a lot of productivity via desktop tweaking, and have now converted to sticking with gnome defaults (as people have said, gnome really does "stay out of your way").

hypercustomization is cool, and I like that KDE gives hobbyist something to experiment with.

I think in the long term though, KDE and gnome need to solidify. Something gnome-like for the base user, and then a layer of customization on top of it for the KDE hobbyists (with successful experiments integrated into the gnome-layer).

I'm all for diversity of desktop environments, but there needs to be a common core (especially since linux is driven by open source development)

any advice for what developers should do given you think workforce reduction is on it’s way?

Ok. But should "purpose" be redefined as "outcome", as the parent comment suggests?

My thought is no, and that's why "purpose" and "outcome" aren't synonyms in the english language

fair enough; I agree with that

I'd say you're right here that private prisons are an example of a "bad actor" causing a major problem, and I'd even go as far as supporting abolishing private prisons (though some crime would still likely exist regardless)

But it still isn't clear that the other major problems mentioned (world hunger, economic instability, environmental damage, chronic disease, war) can be eliminated purely by eliminating bad actors

Fair enough. It'd be impossible for me to argue that there aren't bad actors doing very bad things But to what extent are problems due to (a) bad actors, versus (b) structure issues, resource scarcity, trade-offs, collective action problems, etc

And even if we suppose bad actors are 100% responsible for the world's problems, the systems-level analysis (if I understand it correctly) would still suggest that the solution is "structural" (cut off all the leverage points that allow bad actors to manipulate institutions)

Say, in the case of the opioid crisis (which most of us agree was caused in large part from a bad actor), do we abolish pharmaceutical companies, or do we abolish the structural pathways (marketing, lobbying) that let them do bad things?

I lean towards the latter, but don't know if it's any more feasible than the former

so one solution (especially in the case of private prisons) would be to disband the bad actors

But do you see the value that comes from thinking about this as a structural problem? Until we completely cut off the pathway that gives private interest groups access to the levers of criminal law, bad actors will keep emerging

fair points, and in another comment I point to tax service companies lobbying for complicated tax laws in the US. I'm fine admitting that bad actors do bad things

now, to what extend do you think the majority of the world's problems are caused by (a) bad actors, versus (b) structural issues or resource constraints. 100%? 70%? 30%?

What we devote our attention to depends very much on that question (as well as what changes are easy to implement)

fair point, and there are more real-world examples we could list (big tax services lobbying for more complicated tax codes)

I guess the question then is: what major world problems can be fixed by eliminating / preventing bad actors, and what problems require a different solution?

I'm not claiming to know the answer

is the purpose of chemotherapy to make people lose their hair?