demorro

I would be interested to hear of any in my nation that would have me, seems like quite an ask to allow a stranger to join your community when they bring little of value. That's not to mention whether it's legal or not, which I suspect it is not, planning laws are rather strict.

I do not believe I could move to another nation without employment or family relations legally.

We cannot pull together because even pooling all our resources, we could not afford to purchase the land nor the means of survival for ourselves and our families.

These days, anyone can get a free K-12 education, and then loans for college. Generational wealth is not required.

Our system is based around competition, where advantage compounds. How do you square this circle? In the case of two identical people, one burdened with student loans and one not, the one without the burden will win in the market due to being able to allocate more capital.

Amortized over a large population, this creates a systemic effect where those privileged with generational wealth will tend to be over-represented in the set of "winners" the system produces. This seems irrefutable to me. Obviously there will be anecdotes of exceptions, as there will be in any amortized system.

Because she believes that the economy is closer to zero sum than you do. One person having a lot means another person has less, not just in terms of material distribution either, but also the distribution of power.

It is rather strange to have a system where the problem is lots of people don't have access to material goods and power, and you see a few people with huge amounts of those things, and not think that maybe those few people should have less so the majority can have more. You may disagree based on economic analysis, but surely that follows intuitively?

(b) most people could simply opt out, own nothing, and go live in the woods if they wanted to, but would strongly prefer not to.

Almost every single person I know would rather do this, including myself, and can't. The woods are all private property, and unless we managed to hide somewhere, we would be removed by force.

Historically, (at least in my country, Scotland), people have been forced via economic and military coercion to migrate to the cities and adopt a lifestyle of employment and consumption, there's very little free choice going on.

These comparisons are tricky, because software in particular has always been a bit weird about what it means by "engineer". The article gestures at this, the majority of the people with the title are not actually engineers at all, although I couldn't prove it, because we don't have a definition.

The best I have is that engineering is the real-world, practical application of the scientific method deployed in service of human values. (The human values bit is important to my mind, as I don't believe experimentation over disconnected, stochastically generated hypothesis counts as science.)

By this definition, vibe-coding does introduce a wrinkle because it becomes more difficult to experimentally verify hypothesis as you have reduced how much you are observing, but it's not a hard impossibility or anything like that.

If you make a "Are we X yet?" website, surely the answer must be yes or no, or at least something equally terse. That's the joke right, reducing something complicated to a simple yes/no question?

"The roots aren't deep but the seeds are planted" makes me cringe.

one that doesn't just boil down to "a billion is really really a lot of money".

Why? That's the point. It's too much damn money for one person to realistically earn. We all know how long a day is and how fast a human being can think, move, how much suffering they can tolerate, etc. It is an intuitive truth.

There is no conceivable formulation of physical and mental actions a human could perform, regardless of outcome, that could possibly justify that level of wealth relative to the average levels of compensation for other workers in society.

To be fair, reality is a special case

Thank you, you made me laugh in earnest. This is one of the funniest things I've read today.

Winnings.

Surely you can see that not trusting mainstream economics shouldn't be as controversial as the hard sciences. Mainstream economics consistently fails to make correct or replicatable predictions.

If it was unfair, they would presumably reject the offer outright.

My word do people actually believe this. What theoretical econ 101 textbook are you living in?

Which was not contradictory, as they were saying they wanted to quit. I also want to quit all social media, including hackernews, in the same way I want to quit eating Mcdonalds and getting high all the time.

Dead on. If we could wave our magic wands and ban "harmful social media" without negative externalities we'd probably do it, but we can't.

Sometimes I think legislators think laws are these magic documents which just directly mutate reality.

I'm really torn on this. On the one hand I agree with you 100%, whilst on the other I have little faith that our government will implement in a non-damaging way. However, I'd almost be willing to trade some amount of civil-liberty in order to protect us from the rot of social media. If I could ban everyone from "harmful social media" I would, I just understand that's impossible to define and implement without massive unintended externalities.

I'm not naive to how much of a slippery slope that is, and I don't think the government is pursuing this in good faith. Nonetheless, here we are.

It surprises me when people think engineering, software or no, isn't about the physical world of humans, psychological, imaginative, aesthetic or otherwise. Everything I do uses "human stuff" as a base foundation of value. Engineering effort is malformed and invalid without such a thing, and I spend a lot of my time as a technical leader pushing back on people trying to "perform engineering" without connecting to these things.

It's practically guaranteed. Most people will have no more need to learn how to perform miscellaneous knowledge tasks well if at all, and thus won't.

In every case up until now, a jump in abstraction has moved us forwards in ease of understanding the underlying artifact at a conceptual, human level. High level languages are effectively runnable documentation.

It's possible to say that LLMs producing code may be the same category of thing, but the non-determinism and ephemerality of it all makes it difficult to imagine.

it's really hard to imagine why you think you'd have a better take on this than Google.

Do you mean this as an appeal to Google being the home to great talent, or more as an endorsement of the specific guidance provided by this specific style guide, Google or no?

Because if the former, I think I do almost everything better in my context than Google would. It would be hard not to considering the difference in organizational scale.

They are absolutely deniable. Huge swathes of people deny them.

Perhaps you have framed this overly strongly, but I think I get what you mean.

I have worked in companies where "X is not complete" would be logged as a bug. Even beyond that, non-completeness often leads to behaviors, especially as users bed in around non-complete interfaces, that are obviously bugs, crashes and the like.

If software represents a theory, any expansion in that theory (new features) will tend to lead to non-completeness, which will tend to lead to bugs. This is almost a mathematical certainty.

Engineering around this implies restating your theory, and thus performing partial or total rewrites of your software, quite regularly. It's not as crazy an idea as it sounds, I'm sure there are architectural patterns that make this manageable.

I liked this article (although I found the scrolling effects distracting)

If you want somebody else to care about a thing, you have to care about it, too.

This has always been the crux of it for me, you're right to focus on intent and human to human communication.

Does this imply that we must redefine our ground rules for what constitutes art? Yes, I think it does. The exact same image, one hand-drawn, and one generated, could be art on the one hand, and merely an arrangement of colour on the other. Even if a person interprets meaning from the generated image, I still might argue that it does not qualify as art. I have interpreted meaning from hallucinated shadows on my wall, clearly not art.

This makes it rather impossible to declare something art merely based on the artifact. Art may become a concept that is only stable within a tight-knit community of trust.

I still struggle to accept this when my colleagues are producing implementations with AI assistance that are consistently broken and don't do what they think they do. As yet I can't square this circle, no one is better at their job than they were before.

I feel that I am faster and better, sure, but trusting self perception would be an absurd thing to do.

I am anti-gun despite guns being extremely effective at propelling metal at high velocity. I am not anti high-velocity metal, nor do I believe guns should never be used under any circumstance.

This post is absurd, childish binary thinking.

I find it hard to agree that the stdlib is poorly designed and implemented. In my entire career it has pretty much worked entirely to spec.

Yes, it can exhibit non-optimal performance, and in some specific cases (regex's especially), extremely poor performance, but that's not the same as being poorly designed and implemented, especially given the breadth of the thing.

Consciousness is unique in that we, as yet, have not identified any externally observable properties that could not also occur in the absence of consciousness. This is not true with matter.

Normally when we debate what something is, what we are actually debating about is what it does, with the implicit assumption that the "is-ness" of a thing is defined as the complete collection of all the properties it exhibits.

As it does not seem possible to do this with consciousness, it is not possible to debate it. It is conceivable that this implies that consciousness cannot exist, but that depends on your metaphysics.

Does anyone in these comments not have ADHD? Seems like neurodivergence is so common now we might as well think it typical, and be perfectly happy condemning tools and systems that don't work well with it.

It always has in my experience, you merely have to make it true.

This is also my point of confusion. People in the comments seem to be saying that MCP is necessary due to discoverability, but I fundamentally fail to understand how a protocol can make interfaces discoverable to an LLM in a way that wouldn't also be achieved by making traditional interfaces more discoverable to a human. These things mimic human behaviour after all.

Surely people aren't saying we haven't solved API discoverability by now and need new tech for it.

Who are you to decide that a child is not a fully autonomous person? Sounds like you're imposing a normative rule based on societally derived presuppositions of right and wrong, which is exactly the point. We're just haggling over where the line should be drawn and you think it should be drawn somewhere further back than others do, but there's no truth to be found here.

What is the point of having a speculative market if everyone has access to the same information and capabilities? You might as well just direct deposit a proportional share of all economic growth relative to investment into every citizens account and be done with it.