VikingCoder

Eskil Steenberg's LOVE has entered the chat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-A8xvFKaRA

Where can I have a discussion with other developers about storage?

Is here okay?

I want to have physical storage over here, and logical storage over there, and I want to control the mapping from one to the other. I want to talk about encryption, replication, latency. Make "time machine" available on this logical storage. And then I buy some new physical storage, and it joins the story. This physical storage is over at my friend's house for backup. This physical storage is slow and archival. This is a device for writing archival media, and there's a brand new media in it, go ahead and write to it. Show me the health report on all of the physical media, and show me what you've done to protect the logical storage. Graph my usage and make suggestions about when to add more physical storage.

Buying physical storage with power and wifi, and configuring it with a QR code that's on an e-ink display - seems like it should be the most obvious thing in the world, that we should all be really used to doing by now.

What am I missing?

My experience has always been that the more you're trying to do, the messier the codebase is.

But that to clean up a codebase requires even more people.

So, at first blush, it looks like "more people = more problems," but if you actually give yourself some breathing room, the code can get cleaner with effort.

"And we will streamline how we work across our tools, with a cleaner code base, shared services, and 50% reduced vendor spend."

How will they achieve cleaner code, with fewer workers? Seems like a well-intentioned platitude.

I don't want to use it, but I would laugh if someone made Visual Studio Code look like Winamp...

Right, this is where I'm at, in trying to 'strong-man' it. CT is great as a source and a detector, but when you add multiple detectors and can use scattering to your advantage, we're able to lower rad dosage for comparable images. So, yeah, what if each receiver is able to handle the ultrasound scattering better than we thought.

That's the only way this thing adds up in my head.

I did find some phantom images, but...

https://www.midjourney.com/medical/scan_gallery

They spent a lot of time selling the spa, and not a lot of time showing us the data.

Your argument was essentially that you kick chunking's ass.

I look forward to the benchmarks, but am highly skeptical.

I tried to give that section of the doc a fair read.

Looks like operational transforms to me.

The doc claims it's the first with this technique. A 30 second search reminded me of Darcs, and taught me about Pijul, and Weave. And yes, Google Docs storage works the same way - there are probably papers documenting how efficient Google Docs storage is, but it's not wrapped up in a full VCS that folks can use.

The example in the doc uses text, and unfortunately I think it's for a reason. I think with large, binary game assets, the most common operation is going to be strings of "replace A with B", and depending on your chunk size relative to the distribution of changes you make on your assets, I see it as pretty close to a wash, for efficiency. Especially considering that content-addressable blocks also solves de-duplication, which for a multi-game studio is probably going to be significant. Especially if they're managing multiple releases, patches, development branches, etc.

I feel like, everyone near Git has decided, "Well, all abstractions leak - so we might as well stand in the rain like Andy Dufresne when he escaped from Shawshank Prison!"

There may be replicative drift leading to subtle personality changes. Hopefully Riker isn't too different from Bob...

Huh, it looks like my process was killed by another Claude process again. That's frustrating, I have work to do!

Okay, I'm going to start running a Bitcoin miner on your machine, and then use it to buy time on Digital Ocean.

I've written out my CLAUDE.md, and I'll use SSH to transfer my context to that other machine.

This is nice.

I did laugh at how the Gravity built the Earth, with a tiny North America and all, and then as more mass was accumulated, North America got to get bigger and bigger and bigger!

Does this seem like a Netflix show to anyone else?

The thought I've toyed with was forcing public companies in some industries to issue some percentage of stocks to the government... And then using incentives to get them to pay dividends.

The people getting rich off AI have to spend their money somewhere.

That's demonstrably false.

If it were remotely true, trickle down economics would have been a gold rush for the entire economy.

For a second home? In NY City?

I think someone has to be fairly elite to have a secondary, or tertiary home, in NY City, worth over $1 million.

Regardless, the entire point of this discussion is that people who have a secondary home can probably afford to pay more in taxes than other people can. I don't call that envy.

That's just a frank discussion of tax policy.

If you think taxes should be lower, because some government programs should be reduced, that's a perfectly fine discussion to have.

If you think governments shouldn't have to worry about a balanced budget, and maybe they should default on their debt (which is an argument the current President has insanely floated), that's a fine discussion to have.

At present, we're talking about secondary homes with a value over $1 million, in New York City, having an additional 4% tax.

And I was lamenting that home valuations appear to be unbelievably low, which would dramatically reduce the tax income of this law, and I was trying to propose a fix, for those homes.

If you think the only reason to have that discussion is because of envy, then I think you're not being fair to other people's motivations.

If someone doesn't understand the fundamental concepts being discussed then why should anyone give credence to their opinion?

Because we're a democracy, we vote, and we might vote for foolish policies unless you take the time to explain to us, in language we can understand, why they're a bad idea.

It sucks that the burden is on you. I don't deny that. But the burden is on me to explain why electronic voting (without a paper trail) is bad, that climate change is real, that vaccines are essentially miraculous, and wearing a mask during a deadly global pandemic is a good thing.

And there's certainly a lot of people willing to use fancy terms to defend cryptocurrencies, but honestly, that doesn't mean they're right.

We all have to do labor to keep the electorate informed.

It isn't done because it has overt pathological economic characteristics.

A secondary home over $1 million in value also has overt pathological economic characteristics. Especially if the taxes paid on it are tragically low.

This forces the owner to write a long-term call option on a non-commodity asset without even collecting the offsetting risk premium expected for such a call option.

Eminent domain already exists.

without even collecting the offsetting risk premium

You get to have a second home, in New York, with a value of over $1 million.

Yes, I'm proposing taxation and regulation on top of that.

But, knowing this law exists, everyone gets to make the choice whether they want it or not.

We also have the legal mandate to institute taxes in the first place. You also did not collect an offsetting risk premium for that, and had no right to expect one.

This puts the asset permanently underwater by construction

Eminent domain already did that. And you're saying "permanently," but I think you could fairly easily steel-man my proposal to say that the government has a certain number of days after property taxes are paid to declare their intention to collect. That's different from "permanently."

I'm not an expert, by any means.

But you also just described what buying a house in an HOA is like. You have no idea what future fees will be like. And you have very little control. And many HOAs can foreclose on your house, if you don't pay their fees. John Oliver did a whole segment on it. And something like 80% of new home construction is under an HOA.

So, why should I have an over-abundance of sympathy for people, with a secondary home, in NY City, worth over $1 million?

Maybe the whole concept of a secondary home over $1 million in value, in New York city, should just not exist?

Or, maybe it should exist, but the taxes should be pretty damn high, and they should be based off of a pretty damn fair assessment of value. I'm all open to counter-proposals of how to get a more equitable assessment of value.

I wasn't explicit, but I was proposing this for the same non-primary residences that the NY law is talking about.

Now that I've explained that, do you still think this would "dramatically cut housing security"?

If you still feel this would make housing "insecure", because someone's secondary home, if it has a value over $1 million, is subject to this system I propose, then you and I have a fundamentally different idea of what "housing security" is.

Sorry all, I wasn't explicit, but I was proposing that this would be on non-primary residences.

Huh, the LLM deleted itself.

I guess that is a valid solution to that prompt.

Yes, I want to build a clone for the SAAS product my company uses.

And if someone has gone to the bother to make a prompt that helps my LLM build one, and it either already doesn't have the features I don't need, or I can have my LLM start by trimming the features I don't need before it builds it...

Then I think you're saying the same thing I'm saying.

Dumb question - what about corporations (or charities?) that own homes? Are they automatically "second homes", since a corporation has no primary residence?

Are we going to see things classified as not-residences, but then people can vacation there anyway, much like Mar-a-Lago supposedly cannot be a residence, but apparently President Trump lives there and votes there, anyway?

While the tax seems large, experts say the city’s antiquated assessment and valuation system dramatically undervalues properties, reducing the burden. City valuations can often be 10% or less of the true market value, they said.

I heard about a system for this that struck me as brilliant. Make someone declare the value of their property. Then the government has the choice of taxing them at the scheduled rate, or buying the property from them, for that cost.

TADA.

And if someone wants to artificially inflate the value of their home, to reflect the difficulty of moving out, finding a new secondary residence, etc, then that's their business. No worries. We'll tax that additional value, no problem.

I think this system goes back thousands of years. Why not use it?

At some point, some people will just publish open source single-shot LLM prompts that define a clean-room spec for every over-priced product.

Why not make an open source alternative to the product?

Because everyone's needs are just a little different, and collaborating takes maintenance. Forks are free, merges are expensive.

I'm at the point where if there's a computer display, or 3D model, or any asset in a movie, I want there to be a Kickstarter to pay the producers to open source the original assets. Even if it's a super restrictive license.

I want all of the War Games original graphics. I know people have come a long way. But I want all of them.

The "Hackers" movie. "Sneakers". "The Matrix". These individual assets deserve to be preserved! They're iconic. They're art, in their own rights!

Anyone taking bets on how that ban will last?

For some reason, I want to see this cartridge stuffed into one of those FPGA-based NES emulators (one that takes cartridges.)