cousin_it

Oh, who gives a damn. Half the games in my Steam library don't work since Apple killed 32bit. When they fix it, I'll know they care about Mac gaming.

Nice! I think you can approximate timing somewhat, by making your web server create the "jpeg" on the fly and send it to the client in timed chunks. The source could even be a webcam, so the "jpeg" would go on forever.

Could great works substitute for having a scene? After all, writers have been inspired by Dostoevsky without being part of the same scene as him, and often without being part of a scene at all.

If people can move freely, and there's no price mechanism to allocate housing and construction, there will be problems. So "taking the market out of real estate" is a very big ask. In the USSR you couldn't freely move to another city, you needed to get government approval on the basis of a job change. People complained about this registration system all the time.

Good point, didn't think of it. And yeah, I don't know in general which goods should be more vs less free-market.

Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.

You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.

Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.

That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.

Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized.

I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.

Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.

Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.

I think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.

At every commit, you need handle the possibility of a serialization exception and retry the transaction.

Yeah, but it seems so strange to me. Imagine if a database simply executed all transactions serially. Then there would be no serialization anomalies (though it would be slow, yada yada). So it seems serializable isolation presents a facade of serial execution, but only like, half a facade. You have to deal with the leak in the abstraction yourself and it's surprising to everyone who hears about it for the first time. I wonder why this choice was made.

Huh? I know nothing about cars, but to me there's an obvious difference. If I saw the top car in the street, I'd say "wow that's nice"; while the bottom one just looks like a regular car. The top one looks like it went to the gym, the bottom one looks like it was puffed up through a straw. Idk if that justifies a 20x price difference, but that's my immediate reaction.

I'm not sure. It might be a real person, just writing in an LLM-like hackneyed voice. Anyway here's three specific paragraphs from the post, each exhibiting that voice and the "rule of three":

Throughout all of these experiences, and so many more than I have time to share, it was the human connection that made it special. The laughter that helped me get through a hard problem. The sleepless nights that reminded me I was not alone. The selflessness of others to get on stage or behind a camera and teach people they didn’t even know, often for little or no cost, just so that others would be enabled to build and have an influence.

They don’t laugh with me when my code fails to compile after I swear “this is the one.” They don’t help me develop an understanding of my software, so that when someone says “how does this work” I can pour my heart out with passionate explanations. Most importantly, they don’t turn their head and smile and participate in the inexplicable elation of saying “we built this!”

I desire to connect with people. I long for the days where I was vulnerable and shared my struggles with engineers who charitably stepped up to support me. I miss taking what I learned from those struggles and sharing them back out as a blog post or presentation, encouraging the next person to overcome the same challenge.

I think this post is either LLM-written, or written in a standard blogpost style of today which is increasingly becoming LLM-like. Sam Kriss had a good recent post pointing out some of the "tells": https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...

Reminds me of the font in Master of Orion: https://www.mobygames.com/game/212/master-of-orion/screensho...

Portfolio websites of designers, where nobody's the higher authority but themselves, are full of scrolljacking and other fuckery.

Whoa there. What's wrong with "undercutting labor markets"? Last I heard, when a profession (e.g. doctors) decides to limit the number of practicioners in order to charge a higher price to the public, that's a bad thing. It benefits the people currently employed in that profession now, but it hurts others who wants to join, and it hurts the public who wants to get the service (e.g. healthcare). The sum of hurt is greater than the sum of help. Cartels are harmful; they don't stop being harmful just because there are borders involved.

I mean, it's one thing if you think immigrants commit more crimes or use more taxpayer money. These are both false, but at least the argument could hypothetically work. But if you say that even perfectly law-abiding, non-welfare-using, good-work-performing hypothetical immigrants shouldn't be allowed in because they would "undercut labor markets", that's plain nonsense. Such nice hypothetical immigrants should be invited in large numbers and everyone would win from it.

When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made.

They're saying that your contribution is negative. Even if their contribution is zero, zero is still better than negative.

When I was learning to draw, I used this free site which has lots of poses and detailed anatomy: https://www.posemaniacs.com/poses

I lasted less than one minute. Can't read anything when there's an unstoppable animation in peripheral vision going blinky blinky blink.

I haven't done the math, but my guess is that a pothole might do hundreds of dollars worth of damage over its lifetime, maybe thousands. If society was willing to pay 1/10th of that sum per pothole to anyone willing to fill it, there'd be a lot more applicants. (Though it might lead to people making potholes on purpose, so the payment needs to depend on road health over time, not number of potholes filled.)

Because I'd rather hear a tale about hunting told by a hunter, not a tale about hunting told by someone who disdains hunting as a day job and considers himself a failure if he can't get a living from actual hunters for his tales about hunting.

Or in modern times, replace "hunter" with "working class".

You didn't answer the questions though. Should the hunter dream about stopping hunting? Should he think of himself as a failure if he can't? Is this way of thinking good for his soul or his art? It's not about caloric surplus.

Making a living through art is such a strange thing to wish for. I always imagine a prehistoric hunter telling tales around the campfire. Should the hunter think of hunting as his day job? Should he wish for a life where he'd spend all his time perfecting his tales, while other people would feed him? If he spends his life hunting in the days and telling tales in the evenings, is he a failure?

I launched my live polling app https://suggestionboard.io, got some first users, now looking at how they use it and trying to improve the experience.

I believe in duty as much as the next guy. But duty goes both ways.

The Earth has lots of resources that are privately owned. The process by which these resources become privately owned has no satisfactory libertarian justification ("land and oil become yours when you mix them with your labor", really?) If the profit from these resources was divided equally, everyone would have enough for food and shelter. The people who have less than that are essentially victims of theft. Society should first pay these people the fair share that was stolen from them, and only then start telling them about their duties to society.

Homeless people have no moral obligation to stay away from benches due to "solvency of transportation systems", if society doesn't care about them in return.

Are you saying that sleeping on a bench, if you don't have anywhere else to sleep, is antisocial?

That series is over, and the magical feeling of being in an open-ended fantasy world is really hard to replicate when we're not kids anymore. Loom is another game that gave me that feeling.

But there was one idea in QfG that I wish more games would use. Namely, designing three different solutions for every problem the player is facing. This idea works so well to create a sense of possibility in a game, I don't know why it got forgotten.

I think this depends on the subject. Something like math or music is "learned, not taught": you spend a lot of time practicing by yourself, sometimes asking a teacher when you get stuck. But something like CPR or assembling a drum kit is "taught, not learned": the teacher guides you through the motions and you're done.