BoxFour

Programming trade schools were (are they still?) quite popular for a long time - see lambda school et al.

They weren’t a panacea either.

Universities never kept up with current practices and to be honest I don’t really think it’s their job to.

Universities aren’t vocational schools. An undergraduate education can, at best, teach you how to learn complex topics independently and give you foundational knowledge you can build upon later whether you’re going into industry, pursuing a PhD, or doing something unrelated.

The place for you to learn “practical” software development is an internship or an entry-level role, assisted with a lot of self-directed learning that hopefully university made possible for you.

Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product

Doesn't this still line up with the original point though?

The incumbents had the exact same opportunity to capitalize. Blockbuster could've leaned into streaming hard before Netflix.

I do think that's become a bit harder recently, though, so the original point is slightly less relevant (though obviously still exists, see for example OpenAI vis-a-vis DeepMind). Big companies are much faster on chasing trends, even if they end up amounting to not much. See crypto, for example. I do think part of that reason is because the current wave of companies capitalized where incumbents faltered, so they're desperate not to make the same mistake.

It's incredibly common in retail/food service/hopsitality/etc.

Usually about covering shifts.

I'm not sure what your point is, to be blunt. It seems like you wanted to make some weird argument about the semantics of the word "abuse", and are now implying one of:

1) Beastiality isn't sexual abuse

2) Beastiality laws are pointless because it was already illegal under existing abuse laws (it wasn't, as we've repeatedly discussed)

3) Sexual abuse requires physical harm

all of which are pretty gross (1,3) and/or pointless (2). I don't really feel the need to argue any of this any further, so I'll leave you to it.

I'll be blunt: I don't really feel the need to argue about that point. It's sexual abuse.

yes it was illegal to sexually abuse animals

No, it wasn't. The laws are quite explicit about what "abuse" means, and if you take a gander at most laws (including Washington state's circa 2000 or so) in the context of animals it usually explicitly refers to physical harm (for example, mutilation) or improper living conditions. Charging them under Washington's existing abuse laws would've required the animal to be physically injured, which it wasn't. It's quite literally why they had to pass a new law.

I don't know why I have to explain this, but:

1) Sexual abuse can occur without physical harm or injury.

2) Beastiality is sexual abuse.

There was a very famous case back in Washington state back in the early 2000s where a group of men were sexually abusing horses. It was uncovered because one of them died, and the other could only be charged with trespassing because it wasn't illegal at the time to sexually abuse animals.

What I said, verbatim, about that case.

What part of that is incorrect or warrants clarification, exactly?

in cases where the animals aren’t harmed

What an odd thing to say about the sexual abuse of an animal.

I don’t think the semantics are very important here, I think it was clear I'm talking about sexual abuse specifically without this odd clarification.

The only counterpoint here is, I think, that the severity of such punishments seems to be vastly underestimated.

I suppose I disagree: Modern forms of this ("cancelling") are well-aware of the economic impact it can have on individuals, and indeed often this is the intended outcome. People on all sides of the political spectrum here understand the impact of impoverishment and homelessness (though they obviously disagree on what should be done about it).

The question is not whether we should shun people (we should, with a fair few qualifications), but whether such penalties should be levied for words

I don't see how you ever disentangle these two. For a large part of the populace, there are some combinations of words they will find abhorrent and want to punish. The exact nature of that punishment is up for debate, but we've largely settled on the status quo here.

If you can find some way to keep people from wanting to punish some subset of words universally then congratulations, a few nobel prizes are indeed yours.

Those seem like two different scenarios though, right?

The point of beastiality laws are to give society some recourse to punish people who abuse animals.

There was a very famous case back in Washington state back in the early 2000s where a group of men were sexually abusing horses. It was uncovered because one of them died, and the other could only be charged with trespassing because it wasn't illegal at the time to sexually abuse animals.

how does one get not punishing opinions—even those that would put the listener in danger if implemented—broadly accepted as a value?

Taking you literally, I don't think that's possible. Social punishment (in the form of shunning, boycotts, "cancelling", etc) has been around as long as human society has existed and is incredibly popular.

If someone figures out how to reliably solve that, a few nobel prizes are probably awaiting them.

If you want to take a subset of this problem, maybe it's possible: Like if you mean corporations specifically, not all private actors.

They can and it often comes up: One of Mamdani's tax proposals was to raise property taxes, though he backtracked on it.

Still, NYC's municipal budget is already the largest in the world by far. When I last looked, it was roughly double Tokyo's and bigger than many countries: NYC's municipal budget is larger than Singapore's, for example, and obviously NYC's budget gets to exclude things countries pay for like national defense.

It's likely they will need to continue raising taxes, but we also need to take a hard look at how effective each dollar being spent is.

Eh, I agree with the general point that rental housing has to be financially viable over the long run. I just don’t think NYC politics lets this particular problem turn quickly into a clean “landlords stop renting/developers stop building” outcome. It’ll look a lot weirder.

Affordable housing is too central to NYC democratic politics for the city/state to simply let a large share of subsidized housing totally collapse. More likely, they keep patching it with public money: arrears assistance, vouchers, preservation funds, regulatory tweaks, etc. That’s already basically the pattern.

The real likely long-term problem is that the city robs Peter to pay Paul: It props up housing operations by reducing funding for other services, creating recurring subsidy obligations, or risking pressure on its fiscal position and bond ratings.

They’re already doing that all the time: Part of how Mamdani plugged the budget gap, for example, was by delaying a classroom size reduction in public schools.

Obviously, I don’t think that’s a great long-term strategy. It turns a blind eye to an enforcement problem in favor of a recurring taxpayer-funded operating subsidy.

I can and do put some blame on Adams here, but I don’t think the story is ineptitude or corruption, at least on this issue. I think his administration mostly chose to prioritize the long-term housing supply problem, even if that meant more short-term pain for tenants.

He had a pretty good "Abundance-style" agenda IMO: City of Yes didn’t go far enough, but passing it at all was a big deal in NYC land-use politics. Various tax policies like 485-x are at least serious long-term attempts to restart housing production, even if the details are debatable.

He dramatically expanded housing vouchers

This is being extremely charitable to Adams. The big CityFHEPS expansion was vetoed by Adams and the city council overrode him. The Adams administration was clearly skeptical of short-term tenant-side relief.

You can see that in simple things like his rent board appointees: Adams-era boards approved rent increases every single year. I'm not saying that's bad and it's in-line with his general view of housing as a supply-side problem. He inherited a system coming off years of freezes and very low increases under BDB, so some correction was necessary.

But overall when given the choice, he did choose to inflict a bit of short-term pain for a longer-term view.

The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago

It has nothing to do with Mamdani, for those of who don't want to bother to read. Most of this occurred under Eric Adams's watch.

Anecdotally, I do think covid made people a lot more aware of how deeply backlogged the housing courts are. It seems like a lot of people (like the anonymous one in the article) realized they could not pay rent and avoid being actually evicted for quite some time.

This is a recurring theme in city problems: Backlogged courts. Sometimes that's to the benefit of the less fortunate (here), but it also often results in terrible outcomes (see: Kalief Browder).

Actually, I think the old references are relevant. Sometimes those bug fixes and workarounds no longer matter. Windows 95 and Internet Explorer are long gone, we don’t need to architect our code base any longer to support them, but everyone’s petrified to remove the support for them.

Or in the language of fences, the fence might’ve been built for a herd of cattle that no longer exists. Raze away!

I think you're over-estimating how much some people care.

I have had coworkers say "Oh I don't know, Claude added that" in response to questions like that without even a hint of shame or self-reflection.

I feel you're correct, and it's why it's a losing battle. It's a spectrum of consequences. The worst outcomes are serious but rare. For most people the most severe outcome they'll deal with are unauthorized credit card charges, which are an annoyance at worst.

The most severe consequences just aren't common enough to elicit any kind of change, and even when they are the response is about cleaning up the damage instead of fixing the upstream problem (how that fraud was allowed to occur in the first place).

Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML, and other stuff in that domain

That hasn't really been my experience, at least not for a long time (decades+). At least since jQuery's been around. There's always been a large group of people whose approach to software development was basically "run these commands, don't worry about why they work".

The tendency to treat tools as black boxes over time isn't new, I don't think.

A silver lining here is that in my experience the non-curious tended to stagnate over time and the curious tended to succeed, but obviously there's more to it than just that.

Specialization is very much a thing in US sports as well, even without relegation and even with profit sharing/etc.

The payoff to being elite at a valuable skill is enormous. Teams generally benefit more from combining players with distinct, elite strengths than from relying on broad generalists who are not truly elite at anything.

This isn’t always possible if you can’t afford to build a team of specialists, or those specialists don't exist at your level of competition. But if you have the resources and coordination (and in sports, the roster depth and cap space) to cover each specialist’s weaknesses, specialization is pretty much always the stronger composition.

A handful of Black Mirror episodes land on a more optimistic (or at least not entirely bleak) note, though "happy" might be overstating it for any of them. Bittersweet, maybe.

Eulogy and Hotel Reverie from the newest season are at 70-75%, and I think they both end on a similarly bittersweet note like San Junipero. The one with Miley Cyrus is at 65% and is about as happy an ending as Black Mirror episodes get.

“Heads I win, tails you lose” as a business concept has been written about quite a bit.

“The Gervais Principle” is an oft-cited one.

There was no contract, the government wanted to have a contract where they'd be able to use the tool to violate privacy rights of its citizens and issue kill orders without a human present and the company said no.

So the contract process worked. The seller wanted certain clauses, the buyer rejected them, and the deal didn’t happen.

Setting aside the supply chain risk designation, which I already said was an extreme overreaction, this is basically how it’s supposed to work.

The government shouldn't be able to coerce a business to do whatever it wants.

Governments coerce businesses all the time to do what the government wants. Taxes are the obvious example, but there are many others like OFAC sanctions lists or even just regular old business regulations.

It mostly works because we rely on governments to use that power wisely, and to use it in a way that represents the wishes of the populace. Clearly that assumption is being tested with the current administration and especially in this particular situation, but the government coerces businesses to do what they want all the time and we often see it as a good thing.

It’s pretty obvious that professional photography takes real skill if you’ve ever experienced the disaster of someone trying to cut costs by hiring an amateur photographer for a major event like a wedding but expecting professional results (the mismatch in expectations being the key cause of disaster here).

I’m not saying it turns out bad 100% of the time, but it’s easy to forget because good professionals make it look effortless. When the skill isn’t there, though, and you're used to only seeing professional photos it becomes very obvious (and again, that's perfectly fine if you're not expecting professional photography).

They don’t even need to do that. Elon is almost certainly pushing Grok as hard as possible right now to them, and it’s not like this administration is especially concerned with running a fair procurement process.

So it’s probably some mix of two things:

1) A punitive “bend the knee us or we’ll destroy you,” which fits their track record.

2) Skepticism that Grok is actually as strong as the benchmarks suggest, which is also a pretty reasonable possibility.

Sure, I said as such:

Of course, the reaction is wildly out of proportion. A normal response would just be to stop doing business with the company and move on. Labeling them a supply chain risk is an extreme response.

Sure, that’s why I said "on its face." This administration is obviously very different than most.

I don’t think Anthropic is wrong to include that clause with this particular administration, and I doubt the administration is internally framing the issue the way I did rather than defaulting to simple authoritarian instincts.

But a more reasonable administration could raise the same concern, and I think I would agree with them.

It’s not obvious that the government should have to power to overwrite this

The government shouldn’t be able to set the terms of its contracts with private companies and walk away if those terms aren’t acceptable? That seems like a stretch.

The constitution is a wildly different premise from government contracting with private companies.

the government will come knocking anyway.

Dario has even said something along these lines at one point: As the technology matures, it’s very possible the government either nationalizes or semi-nationalizes companies like Anthropic.

That doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility if they can’t land on a relationship similar to existing defense contractors like Raytheon, where these kinds of discussions obviously don't seem to happen.