dangerwill

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If you want a healthy market, your standard cannot simply be: As long as there is more than one retailer in the space, retailers can place whatever restrictions they want on how you pay for their services. Businesses in one sector being able to directly affect consumer choices across sectors is how you end up with cross sector monopolies.

It is bizarre to bring up China here, this isn't about the state dictating the payment system but maintaining a healthy market. It's like a garden, you don't dictate exactly how the plants grow, but you prune them once they encroach onto other plants to maintain a healthy balance.

I brought up Amex because it is common for merchants to not accept it, due to it being a significantly worse deal for the merchants. I am fine with the argument for an even more expansive version of my argument, but I'm making a more narrow argument due to discover, visa, mastercard being so close in how they function that it is not a burden on merchants to accept one vs the others.

What's the difference if they want to force customers to use cash or Visa.

I'll leave the cash option aside because the provider of cash is the US treasury. But yes, I do think it is wrong for a merchant to only allow mastercard or visa or discover. I understand merchants not taking Amex because their fees are significantly higher on the merchant side, but discover, mastercard, and visa are all similar for the merchant. I work in payment processing for a multi billion dollar company and we gladly accept all of these card types. My issue is with visa providing Costco with a kickback, so that Costco then pressures you to have an account with visa. It should be totally fine if someone just happens to have only mastercard cards and wants to shop at costco. I'm against kickback schemes.

As for the AML/KYC ineffectiveness argument, I'm reading through that 2018 study now.

thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa. I don't see this reason stopping someone wanting to compete as though if they can't get the Costco dollars, they have no product.

I'm sorry, are we really saying that it's acceptable for the market to begin preferring one completely compatible payment network vs another? This is clearly an undue influence in the market due to monopolistic power being used as leverage. No one should have to open an account with visa just to shop at a retailer. Anti competitive and anti consumer to the core.

But that really has to do with ridiculous regulations and things like KYC, but we're not ready to have that conversation yet.

Ahhh, fearmongering about KYC. Know your customer is an obviously good regulation for banks to know the type of business they are partnering with for both risk assessment and anti fraud protections. So, what scams are you in favor of allowing by removing KYC regulations?

Oh this is wildly cool! Do cloud providers like aws allow you to upload a custom system image to run as a vm?

We're talking about industry here so political boundaries matter not the geographic definition of Europe. Trade restrictions are in place between the UK and the EU, and thus place a wedge between the two.

All this talk about culture and the author doesn't talk about the fundamental issue: The EU created a European identity yes, but the amount of decentralization and universal consensus required to create the EU means it will never be a functioning state in and of itself. So there isn't a European tech industry, there are highly interconnected but distinct tech industries in Germany, France, Netherlands, Finland, Estonia, Ireland, Sweden. Only very recently has the EU began to try to consolidate pools of capital to facilitate large scale VC funding. There is a bright future I think, as America continues to rapidly decline, but this needs to be addressed. The ultimate irony? The author is English and moved back to London which is emphatically not European now. Going to be hard to cheerlead for the EU from the wreckage of brexit

Great tip! But it only remove's Google's terrible AI summary, not AI generated content from showing up in searches, which is what the OP wishes for. A combination of -ai and before:2022-01-01 is probably the closest we can get to that

It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance

I'm sorry to rebutt your very first assertion but we had been in a cultural and scientific Renaissance and the last 15 years have been the slow unwinding of that. We got lucky that the internet explosion overlapped with the tail end of publicly supported cultural and scientific production.

I hung out with physics majors in college, all of them smarter than us compsci chuds, and uniformly they are absolutely struggling to survive as post docs or in industry. One of my college buddies has worked at nasa for 4 different firms and has had to move to Texas, Kansas, and Maryland for these gigs and has once again landed on a project where the funding got cut and is looking for a new job. Another works in nano scale semiconducting and had to move to Finland to get project funding from the EU since the US has made basic research funding so scarce. And after several post doc roles he is leaving the field after his last grant wasn't renewed, with not an ounce of negative feedback. Just, sorry we don't have any money anymore. He's now going to go into failure analysis for a mobile phone manufacturer to pay the bills.

The woes of cultural production have also been well documented.

We are in a cultural and scientific collapse

If those are "minor" shocks then is it only outright war that counts as instability for you?

If so then what countries in Europe (sans the Balkans) or East Asia do you think are less politically stable than the US?

The US civil war is not the only time the US has been politically unstable. The civil rights movement, the labor disputes of the 1970s, the economic shocks every decade or so from market crashes all have been moments of instability.

What is January 6th if not a concrete example of recent political instability?

As for foreign policy consistency, 7 administrations takes us back to Reagan... The entire movement to sell out our industrial capacity to China and now the movement to try to reverse that have occurred in this time frame. This is just as important as our endless wars in the middle east, imo.

I don't disagree totally but I felt the need to put some nuance here.

The only use of such a product would be fraudulent. Go ahead, make money, but know you would be a scammer or at best facilitating scammers

We're already there. It's one of the causes of why all our physical infrastructure is failing. When we outsourced our manufacturing in the 90s-2010s, we lost all that talent.

It's also why this will be the Chinese century.

ChatGPT still thinks Mississippi has an R in it sometimes.

I'm sorry but even if you manage to resolve the PIP, it is always there in the HR records as a black mark. It will always make it easier (not guaranteed, but easier) to get hit in the next round of layoffs

You are either being wilfully ignorant or don't know how strikes work. Offering to "help" during a strike is scabbing by definition

Quick question: How many years of industry exp do you have? I thought the same way until this year when the burnout got to me too. I thought I was too much of a high achiever to get burnout and yet I'm in the same boat as the author.

Also, once the people who speak up about a problem leave, all you are left with are idiot yes-men in management, old timers doing their job as minimally as possible to not to be noticed by management, and fresh new engineering grads ready to be grist for the mill. When those sorts of people are writing all of the code around you, no matter how good you are, you will be driven insane.

I really wish that Tech people would not go outside of our purview to comment on medicine. Knowledge about how to build and maintain software does not give us any useful intuitions or insights into medicine, but the gigantic egos in this industry turn us all into pundits about what other professions are doing wrong. Stop trying to second guess and cherry pick medical studies that you half read.

Ah that is almost certainly it, it's been so long since I've gotten a roll of quarters from a bank that I forgot that is an option. Thanks!

Generated text =! Intelligence.

No one cares that blockchains are immutable, that doesn't mean that information written there is correct. Just that it was written on X date and the content. You could find proof of the biggest scandal of all time and post it on the blockchain so "the man" can't stop the word from getting out but 99.99999999% of readers would read a version presented by a simple web server and with the value cached in a closed database or memory. Which if the government wants to take down, it can. And if that does go down, no one will save a link to the entry on the blockchain. And on the flip side I could write obvious falsehoods in the same way. Blockchain provides no value for legal attestation nor information distribution.

In practice, the vast majority of blockchain ledgers record the history of scams, penny stock style trading and money laundering attempts.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly and I actively dislike the concept of LLMs for anything real. But nothing will be worse than the flood of outright scams or attempts at rent seeking/middle man creation that crypto was. At least LLMs have some potential use cases (and line level auto complete is genuinely better now because of LLMs)

I think some of the consternation we see from the anti LLM crowd (of which I'm one) is this line of reasoning. These LLMs produce fine code when the code you are asking for is in its training set. So they can be better than a mid level dev and much faster in narrow, unknown contexts. But with no feedback to warn you, if you ask it for code that it has no or only a bit of data on, it is much worse than a rubber duck.

That and tech's status inflation means when we are talking about "mid level" engineers, really we are talking about engineers with a couple years of experience who have just graduated to the training wheels phase of producing production code. LLMs are still broadly aimed at removing the need for what I would just call junior engineers.

Oh I did not know that this had happened. That actually does resolve a fair bit of my worry. Thanks!!

I have to ask, how do you not sound like ~6500 coins jingling together as you walk? I notice when I have like 10 coins in a backpack. Do you wrap bundles of coins in cellophane or something?

You slapped together a wrapper around an LLM and are expecting to be able to charge $7 a month for it? Why?

"Personalized care instructions" - An LLM responding in a seemingly personalized way but with generic instructions is the average LLM chat experience. How is this different?

Given that hn is the forum of yc, I think we should not feel comfortable with it's trajectory even if dang does a great job moderating. Garry Tan is in the ceo chair here and he is currently advocating for a purge of the homeless, democrats, and "anti-tech" people from San Francisco. A Republican who is too ashamed to admit being a Republican (preferring Grey vs Blue or the network state concept) , who drunkenly tweets death threats at his political opponents is not trustworthy.

Very interesting idea but I have to say that those goals are not possible with a simple OS, at least by OS definitions of simple :P

A pet peeve of mine is when projects get named after proper nouns from fiction for no reason. A holocron is essentially an encrypted book where you need the force to decrypt it. How does that relate to leader elections? It doesn't, it's just being twee

My bet for the real reason for this is that it has been widely reported that Twitter artificially boosts Elon's account specifically. Many people noticed when they did this that his posts showed up in their feeds despite them not following his account. I bet this led to a massive wave of people blocking his account (it's as easy to block as it is to mute). And this population of users eventually got big enough for him to notice, and he wants his posts in everyone's feeds again.