cs702

The OP talks about the drought extensively. Quoting:

there is quite a lot of compelling evidence that period of LBAC [late bronze age collapse], especially the 1190s, was unusually dry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which would have caused reduced agricultural output (crop failures). Interestingly, this would be most immediately impactful in areas engaged primarily in rainfall agriculture (Greece, Anatolia, the Levant) and less impactful in areas engaged more in irrigation agriculture (Egypt, Mesopotamia).³ And, oh look, the areas where LBAC was more severe are in the rainfall zone and the areas where it was less severe are in the irrigation zone.

It's not hard to imagine that will be able to do as good a job as a human accountant in the not too distant future.

It's also not hard to imagine tax authorities using AI to audit everyone's tax returns every year.

We sure live in interesting times.

Arguably, they're a better choice for customers than a shutdown.

I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.

Yes, agree.

Think of it as a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments.

Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition.

Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.

Also, in case you didn't already know, I saw a headline announcing that the sky is usually blue.

Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a well-known brand and customers who stick around.

The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.

Rinse and repeat. The goal is to generate the highest possible rate of return on invested capital in a law-abiding manner.

The little photo of the guy with a top hat, dancing, with high-wire towers behind him, cracked me up. It's a literal "high-wire act!"

the economy is filled with bullshit jobs, bullshit corporations, and bullshit products.

Yeah, it sure feels true.

There's even a book about it, you know, to help people cope with it:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691276786/on...

Yeah, that's true. Sigh.

Sure, touchscreens are cheap, but high-quality touchscreen software is most def NOT CHEAP!

Apple and Google have spent untold amounts of money developing iOS and Android. CarPlay and Android Auto are really nice.

Tesla has spent gobs of money on its touchscreen software too. It's the only native car touchscreen UI I've tried that feels smooth, snappy, responsive, simple.

I've tried the native touchscreen UI of quite a few US and European carmakers. All of them fall short. They feel janky, clunky, obtuse.

Physical buttons are much, MUCH cheaper than high-quality touchscreen software.

Love the title. I think it's a great idea to associate pervasive surveillance with the all-seeing eye of evil incarnate from The Lord of the Rings.

General audiences reading only the title, or coverage of it in the media, will immediately understand it, without having to read or think too much about it.

Reminds me of caveman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47647455

Very interesting. The author claims to have proved that markets can be informationally efficient or competitive, but not both. The implications for policy and regulation are significant.

The author looks credible:

https://philipmaymin.com/about-philip

Thank you for sharing this on HN.

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To the mods: The title needs to be edited to replace the equal sign with not-equal.

... and funny too. A great book!

Interesting, these really old menus would not look too out of place at a restaurant today.

The problem is millions of people have been raised in a bubble built on the assumption that this is a good thing.

Please don't attack a straw-man. I've never met anyone who believes extreme inequality is a good thing on its own.

However, I have met plenty of people who believe capitalism, combined with a safety net and democratic institutions, may not be great, but is definitely better than all other alternatives that have been tried in the past. No other system has produced significantly better societal outcomes.

Hi, I shared the OP. I don't agree with all the points it expresses, but I found them thought-provoking.

If anyone has an outline of to whom the other hundreds of billions are owed, I’d be curious to see it.

Me too. That's one of my questions. The other questions I have are about the shocking misuse of funds.

The legal claims from expropriation, I get that... but everything else was actually borrowed.

Whether the form was debt issuance or unpaid accounts payable, the rest actually was borrowed.

It's kind of an "impressive accomplishment" in my view.

Obviously, but $240B is a lot of money for a country with only 9M households, so, around $27K/household. It's an "accomplishment" of sorts to blow up in smoke that much money per household, with nothing to show for it. How the heck did they do that?

According to the Financial Times, it will be the world’s largest debt restructuring.[a]

Venezuela's economy has been a disaster for many years.[b] Surely I'm not the only one wondering:

Where did all that borrowed money go? If any of it had been spent to buy goods and services inside Venezuela, it would have led to at least some business formation and activity. Instead, there's only been business destruction and constant crisis. It's kind of incredible that the country has nothing to show for all the money it borrowed.

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[a] https://www.ft.com/content/b7f25ca2-827c-40f9-ab1a-57067d8ec... (paywalled)

[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Venezuela

EDIT #2: Former Googlers here say that for a long time it was common at Google to let employees publish code with Google branding on github, in which case the firing was not justifiable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48652851 Yes, I changed my mind again. I have no qualms about changing my mind if the facts justify it :-)

Looks like a textbook example of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.[a]

People like the OP, Justin Poehnelt, who build cool things out of self-motivation that others find interesting and want to use, are now at the mercy of those inside Google who care more about the company's internal bureaucracy and their own role and importance within it. To them, the fact that the OP's project was an instant github hit meant nothing.

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EDIT: Others here are saying that Justin released his code with Google's branding without asking for approval. If that's true, it wasn't right of him, and his firing was justifiable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48650310 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48650192

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[a] https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

Originally meant to be aired on April Fool's day, this hoax documentary's broadcast had be moved to a different date, and, as a consequence, many naive viewers thought it was real.

Now, the hoax has taken a life of its own on the Web, with waves of naive people believing its silly made-up claims about scientists working in certain fields mysteriously disappearing.

The hoax has even made the HN front page.

Sigh.

A superior alternative to standard Muon and AdamW optimizers for training large models.

Fantastic work, instantly valuable, immediately usable.

A big THANK YOU to the authors:

Jack Zhang, Noah Amsel, Berlin Chen, and Tri Dao

There's an old saying, "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

Here we have the opposite: In the land of the one-eyed, the blind are leading.

The blind in this case are all those executives and managers who don't understand much about AI's current potential and limitations, and so far have treated it like a magic button that will solve everything. The one-eyed are rank-and-file employees who maybe sort of know a little more about AI.

Over the past two years, I have found Uber and Lyft rides getting more expensive than taxis in several large US cities, including Boston, Chicago, NY, and LA. Taxis are now 10-50% cheaper in my experience.

When I do take Uber and Lyft rides, I ask the drivers how much they're getting paid, and the amounts they tell me are often 30% to 60% less than what I paid, which is a bit shocking to me.

At some point, Uber and Lyft stopped being service providers that charged riders a fee for value provided. They have become market makers that squeeze as much trading profit as possible by arbitraging the prices riders are willing to pay and the rates drivers are willing to accept. I imagine they are capturing most of the value in each ride today. It's perfectly legal, but let's call what it is.

I'm not surprised about the ride-share driver union.

Was this written by an LLM? It def reads like it!

How I imagine the Nash equilibrium in chatbot ads, driven by profit-seeking in a race to the bottom:

User: "What's the best way to fix this problem I have?"

Chatbot: "I recommend buying this shiny thing here." (Next to it, there's a near-invisible light-gray "ad" notice.)

Let's hope I'm wrong.