devonkim

This is HN, we can use an analogy of TCP window size or UDP packet size in an underlying high latency medium and the receiver and sender have very high processing costs. So perhaps solving the unloading and loading logistics is also worth optimizing for like we did almost for free in computing space? But because we don't have ballpark numbers of each terribly well we're going to have some difficulties with a valid non abstract system design discussion.

Many gun proponents seem to think of them like most people do knives when knives have many, many domestic purposes beyond killing things that have a life. Same things with cars given there's many things cars can do besides get people and things from place to place.

One of the core problems we have in software engineering is the longstanding philosophical problem around creation of cohesive, consistent, objective mental models of inherently subjective concepts like identifying a person, place, etc. Look at the endless lists of falsehoods programmers (tend to) believe about any topic.

You’re right that LLMs specifically have no guarantees about accuracy nor veracity of the text they generate but I posit that that’s the same with people, especially when filtered through the socialization process. The difference is in the kind of errors machines make compared to ones that humans make.

It’s frustrating we’re using anthropomorphic concepts like hallucinations when describing LLM behaviors when the fundamental units of computation and thus failures of computation are so different at every level.

This is what amorality means to me in the context of socioeconomics. It operates in an area of reduced dimensionality to economic value because no other value can be agreed upon in trade between cultures. It doesn’t care if a piece of art, nature or human invention is genuinely novel, rare, irreplaceable, invaluable, etc. unless it can be converted into materializable economic value that is itself subjective and present oriented so that we can plan for our future selves about resources as a proxy.

Both ideas can be true. It’s not on their radar because despite their popularity in consumer space they can’t find a business purpose that aligns with their self interests that require such user information. If I’m running a free podcast, in contrast, I might be happy anyone’s even bothering to visit and listen to what I have to say compared to who they are and whether I can assign a monetary value to their attention because spending money on something without clear, intentional, measurable ROI is anathema to our predominant modus operandi in business

I think it’s unfair to say that it’s “lazy.” Neo Marxists understand the way those factors affect impact economics but because they’re very difficult to quantify in a heavily quantitative focused academic environment you’ll see less focus upon it, even when analyzing standard fare free market capitalism. I consider it a double standard to put burdens of analysis more upon one ideology than another. Sociology and religion are already highly qualitative disciplines by nature of the limits of science and our known physical reality (eg. we can’t time travel let alone reliably) and the kind of advantages systems like feudalism, monarchism, mercantilism, etc. work with authoritarian centralized systems is consistent across many societies including why some cultures tend toward syncretism and why others reject certain tenets and customs. The Nordics weren’t Christian, after all, and they absorbed it much more than American indigenous while Black Americans have very different relationships to Christianity than African blacks such as in Somalia and Ethiopia - this isn’t the wheelhouse of economists typically in academics but various humanities departments unrelated to business. Those influences and trends usually get labeled under the standard generic realities of imperialism given so much orchestrated power influences societies en masse while most bottom up movements against these structures tend to come from humanities focused areas away from economic interests like the arts, but this is why the Soviet Union and even China suppressed these freedoms because of the tendency to cause discord and dissent in a precarious society. As such, most leftist literature, especially outside academia (already an institution that must exist within the confines of a funding society), sounds predominantly like they’re criticizing basically every dominant human social construct, which is where the ideological position is cornered. This isn’t to say that I agree with this kind of discourse either because it doesn’t convince people beholden to these dominant constructs.

The double standard I see across all political and cultural lines is people that demand empathy for them while they demonstrate none for an arbitrary outgroup or one specific to their personal lived experience. This is basically using emotion to drive thoughts rather than emotions to inform thoughts. I have doubts this will go away anytime soon given it takes an incredible amount of effort for people to critically examine themselves. I liken it to debugging and reverse engineering your brain and nervous system.

This seems fairly consistent with deep, accomplished experts in any field or craft - their competencies in one area don't necessarily translate well into validity anywhere else laterally or even vertically. This seems extremely obvious even for typically "smart" people such as doctors, lawyers, engineers because among many folks I know scamming these white collar professionals out of money by feeding into their egotism is basically how they make their living. While I don't think we should fence people into professional castes or anything like that but in the modern age of AI and charisma-based validity / authority healthy skepticism seems like a requisite to not be suckered into modern infomercial quackery.

This whole process happening is exactly what happens in a quest in Cyberpunk 2077. There’s an e-mail chain where a gang tried to extort a corporation and gave up after being unable to reach a person.

I sincerely hope that the game doesn’t become prophetic in the manner Idiocracy has.

Switzerland has a slightly high suicide rate (not the best inverse metric of happiness but a correlation on unhappiness at least) for a country with such high standards of living, so if we look into suicide rates over time we also see a conundrum that over the past 20+ years the suicide rate is overall decreasing but has mostly flattened out. But from what I've observed anecdotally it still has problems like other developed countries with legacy industries declining (see: watchmakers and other artisanal crafts trades rather than mining) where boomers in the country are pretty miserable and that will probably be noticed in macro level statistics.

The irony of the fabled Seattle complaints of the “freeze” is it’s not unique to the region whatsoever and due to so many transplants in the past 15-ish years along with so many locals forcibly relocating out of the city people are more likely than ever to be interacting with those that moved as adults / other transplants.

For me as someone that grew up in the region the people, nature, and weather are sufficient enough for me. Having lived in several other large metro areas in the US I’ve pretty much felt like an alien species even though it’s not like I don’t feel welcome. In the PNW being weird and unconventional is kind of celebrated regardless of socioeconomic castes historically, but that’s certainly eroded as the problems of hyper growth have strained everyone.

That would be an HOA moreso than the features of a condo, although a condo tends to imply an HOA in the US. The irony of my experiences with an HOA is that its actions tended to suppress my property value rather than preserve or grow it.

When I talked to people in shelters before that was literally the top reason they were there. Oftentimes it starts from car trouble or a health episode causing loss of income. Without friends or family that can take them in they go to a shelter if they can (those with pets oftentimes go directly to the streets or their cars). Many are able to find employment again soon but many don’t and a downward spiral begins quickly. Somewhere around 30-40% of Americans cannot afford an emergency $1000 expense and it’s probably only going to go higher.

That’s also not considering whether they’re open or existing anymore after so much time has passed.

History is written by the victors unfortunately and world history gives me little reason to believe things will be different this time around. Part of the point of erasing all these things is quite similar to destroying the past to control the future. But from their perspectives this is all corrupt, immoral, unethical information barely distinguishable ethically or even worse than Mengele’s experimental data. Except even people left of absolute insanity somewhat concede the relative scientific validity of all the data obtained while those ordering the deletions and redactions now have zero authority nor experience in the fields.

It’s a pity that creating anything of value takes at least an order of magnitude more effort than to destroy something, but I suppose this is why we’re funding back-ups and archives of all this data out there.

There's 3a which is "cherry-pick customers / clients to make it appear that privatized services are more cost-effective than public services that are by default providing services." Picking and choosing one's customers already makes it an invalid comparison if one wants to talk about value.

But essentially creating self-fulfilling prophecies or moving goalposts is one of the oldest tricks in the book by dishonest folks of any ideological alignment. In an alternate universe where socialism / central planning is the default ideology if we wanted to make as unfair of a comparison demonizing private sector we'd have asked half of Silicon Valley companies to forego VC funding, not allow them to do M&A, demand that they be able to serve the general public for even the most obscure of problems, and so forth. That sets them up for failure out of the gate by measuring them against the criteria of the status quo and eliminates any of their advantages over a centralized planning system. And in fact, a large part of these ridiculous restrictions is exactly why NGOs are structured to fail to make much progress on any of the important societal problems they work on.

There needs to be generalized a term for NIMBYs for resisting various solutions to a number of issues because this pattern in liberal democracies around the planet isn’t exactly helping anyone make progress on the more core issues these folks seem to also be interested in.

The three Rs were in order of priority but because reduced consumption didn't exactly translate into what works for a sustainable economy under current incentive paradigms almost anywhere in an economy with lots of consumption we kind of wound up with the least important of the guidelines being what we could more reliably practice (the reasons are another discussion entirely).

Almost all the most pressing problems for the human species seem to be Wicked Problem classes and it's part of why I don't have a lot of expectation that any of them will be solved even _if_ catastrophic events like constant war and mass deaths happen. I also have doubts that whoever survives any of these kinds of events would be more genetically predisposed to solving these problems in the future either.

I think we should add that the outcomes are worse at _all_ socioeconomic levels. The rich get screwed over as well in this system as well. It's unfortunate that so many of them have better overall outcomes and/or myopic experiences that many are emotionally invested in being _able_ to pay exorbitant amounts for more personalized care - regardless of the societal consequences - as an interpretation of "freedom."

But hey, it's not like the US is a democracy exactly given that public opinion generally doesn't translate into policy changes anymore.

Resources are not always in terms of material terms. Poor people with family, friends, associates, familiarity of a region, etc. stay there. What's a bit unique for American migration patterns in the past 60-ish years people have become less and less mobile for economic opportunities and the cultural shift has sometimes become more resentful toward those that feel betrayed by those leaving regions for better economic opportunities. In a lot of countries people are happy and even envious of those leaving their areas of origin. The underlying reasons for lack of mobility is another heatedly debated topic altogether but there's absolutely plenty of things the poor, particularly rural ones, absolutely have plenty to lose.

Up front though in every other thing I’ve read is that this is going to be hard, so that doesn’t seem like a fair argument either. I don’t tell people that the VI text editor is easy to learn or even that it’s even superior to anything at all, only that’s worked for me and that I hope everyone finds something that works for them. It’s not like we need any more barriers to helping people code and write, yet they all take a set of complex practicing to be proficient given we aren’t wired by genetics or anything do such complex activities such as language and walking upright.

I think more broadly you’re talking about the concept of “third places” and this has been suggested as another reason for decline of community. However, my argument is that the Internet replaced the “third place” for most people given it’s where people are spending time in terms of attention and resources rather than necessarily physical presence.

We can look at a bit more regulated industries like airlines (see: Boeing) and see that it’s not necessarily working whatever path we’re on is certainly not that approach.

Yeah, error messages start to become more opaque as well which makes debugging even tougher, which is kind of the opposite of the point of using multiple accounts. But really, AWS not having proper namespaces in its constructs that’s ubiquitously supported (IAM paths were attempted. Attempted) hampers a lot of things

Sounds like you like myself have taken Rob Pike’s take from long ago to heart http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf

While plenty of things have happened since that paper, I have this sinking feeling that he was right and we just stopped trying to really expand and explore what’s possible. But it may be more a matter of the state of academia than about the domain itself. It’s not like people were getting a bunch of conference invitations for GPGPU applications with ML until hype freight trains hit. This sobering reality of academic hegemony and grant chasing kept me from ever getting terribly interested in systems research unfortunately.

I don’t really see the software ecosystem catching up that quickly is the thing. Sure, we have some support for hardware like Google’s TPUs and Coral but the field’s practitioners and researchers are oftentimes so behind the curve of general systems work like dealing with the nuts and bolts of libraries and package management that anyone trying to compete against NVIDIA will need to spend a lot of time investing there rather than yet another group of ML engineers that shudder at the thought of packaging and distributing their software to the public and supporting frameworks for years with partnerships and continued investments doing a lot of work that’s basically toil and extremely undesirable for said ML engineers.

Xtreme marketing was absolutely going on back then - remember the Mountain Dew ad campaigns? Yeah....

Any long-lasting solution requiring continuous investments is going to require more impact on the people side than the technical side. Hiring maybe one or two technical wizard asshats at a company may work for a bit but can’t scale in that eventually asshats will either drive away enough potential contributors or clash with another asshat. Any company actually needing said asshats to conduct business has a form of organizational tech debt in that they’ll need to spend a lot of resources managing around said persons in the end while said person’s ego continues to grow convinced they’re primarily responsible for successes.

Also read something casually that (I am suspecting probably falsified but a new one at least) that plastics were found in a lot of cardiovascular deposits following autopsies.

A lot of the point of the experiments is specifically to provide for evidence that critics tend to have about what poor people do with money. Because a great, great many people basically believe (falsely) that poverty is essentially a choice made by poor decisions more or less and that it is a personal or moral failing. There’s so little evidence for this it’s kind of crazy but then we take a look at those with that kind of attitude and see a huge bias