fyredge

This argument kind of illustrates why consumption tax is better. It's easy to advocate "lower taxes for everyone!" giving rich people most of the benefit, but it's much harder to advocate for "lower yacht tax!" without pissing off a whole bunch of wage workers.

I was initially skeptical of removal of income tax, but it's replacement with consumption tax makes sense.

Currently, income is "discouraged" through financial instruments such as Securities-Backed Line of Credit (SBLOC), which are very much only feasible in the realm of the very rich. Some part of this loophole can be offset by corporate tax, but corporate tax is based on profit, not income, incentivising all sorts of unproductive spending behaviour e.g. stock buybacks.

To me, the switch to consumption tax does a couple of things:

1. Instill discipline. Higher spending does not equate to higher productivity. By taxing spending, discipline will be instilled in both the consumer and corporation. With consumption tax, there will be no brackets, rather the amount of tax will be based on what the government policy is. Smoking bad? Higher tax. Soy milk more environmentally friendly? Lower tax.

2. Simplify tax situation with "capital gains". You pay tax upfront, now we don't need to evaluate what happens to the value of the stock, that will be the problem for the next buyer. No loophole for capital gains tax with inheritance.

Ones that prevent the scaling itself:

No algorithmic recommendation.

No mixing between known users (friends, followers etc.), recommended users (swipe feed) and advertised content.

No publication of user content. It's social media, not global media.

I posit that these points will be enough to curtail most of social media ills. Don't allow recommendation of slop and there will be a similar reduction in production. There will still be the village idiot that shares slop content, but their reach is limited since they have to actively persuade people to their message, rather than be recommended for being psychologically stimulating.

I hope we're still talking about homosexuality, because you can have support for gay people without being gay. There were more than just black people who protested against what happened to George Floyd. You can absolutely have empathy towards people not exactly like yourself.

Then I'm disappointed that you would think that way. Change is the only constant, in people, in societies, in politics. Change can be spontaneous, but more of then than not, it is slow, gradual, boring, but still change nonetheless. Would you concede to that?

Right, and therefore we regulate them

Yes, because the zeitgeist still changes regardless of enforcement. If all gay people were sentenced purely for their sexuality and nothing else, how long do you think it will take for ordinary folk to change their view? I reckon not long, unless the society is completely devoid of empathy and justice.

And they absolutely should not scale. Scaling is the root cause of all social media ills. If all you see are the 100 people nearest to you, the village idiot will not be able to spread his gospel so easily

This is hauntingly reminiscent of the gun law argument in US:

The government shouldn't infringe on my right to bear arms, mass shooting is a mental health issue anyways, oh but we can't really fund mental health support because my tax shouldn't go towards helping those who put themselves in that situation. Que the same argument for privacy on the internet.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you can't trust the government, then work towards healing it, restructuring it, overhauling it. Subverting the government is such antisocial behaviour, very criminal like.

Seems to me that a single database does reduce maintenance burden, just at the cost of higher risk of failure. The trade off should be for the architect to decide.

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum.

Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind their words. The final product might not adequately reflect their thoughts, but word selection would expose it somewhat. With LLMs, sentences flow seamlessly from word to word, but the intention is nowhere to be found. Things happened and more things happened, to what end?

To discourage rent seeking behaviour?

Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time.

I've always heard of this nugget of wisdom but never really understood it. By punishing those who underspend (by making the next application harder), wouldn't you incentivise inflated research costs, or worse, fraud. Seems like a quick path to a positive feedback loop towards the degradation of trust in academic spending, leading to "poor government efficiency".

That's the nature of research. You try every idea that may be a good avenue and only a handful work out, if at all. That's why quantifying research credibility via publication and citation counts inherently lead to toxic work cultures. The best ideas must be given time to be discovered, not forced out and contorted to fit the requirements of a journal.

If income stream is the metric, then I don't see why 'real' income stream can't be used to evaluate the value of the building instead of the last transaction. If the building sits at half occupancy, then the income stream is 500k, not a theoretical 1M.

As bad as the whole Iran situation has been, I'm glad that there are still rational actors pushing back within the military. If Trump had his way completely, I wouldn't put off the chance of an offensive nuke being used.

Isn't that better? For one, they're connected to peers they have physically met. Additionally, they won't be exposed to strangers or ads that warp their world view.

I still believe that the government should ban unsolicited algorithmic content (so search engines are exempted), but this is a second best option.

Reading the comments here is an exercise of patience. Why are we so uncreative of solutions to high rent?

Let's just do away with regular renting. Either provide the full service of a serviced apartment, or provide a rent-to-own scheme. In both cases, landlords have incentives to improve the condition of units for better price. In the former case, no equity is built, but you get a much better service, and in the latter case, renters can build equity. And if renters decided to back out halfway, they can sell the paid up equity back to the landlord, some other renter, or to banks who have the capacity to manage the numerous transactions that will happen.

Definitely, and both are also a lot better than starting with none. At the end of the day, I'm not asking for perfect, I'm asking for best effort.

Then table a bill to remove that legislation, that is entirely possible. The point being that all legislation have consequences, but it is better to move forward with the best step we could take than to stand still and do nothing.

Just as there is iteration in software, we should iterate our laws. That is what a functioning government looks like.

The reason is open standard. Obsidian uses markdown, that's it. No proprietary database, no fancy algorithm, no locked in platform, just a convenient way to manage your notes (jesus, that sounded like AI). You can realistically do it yourself, but they've helped you to do it for the low price of an online sync subscription.

That's why I will always hammer on open standards and federation.

Unintended consequences is the price of progress. The alternative is to continue farming by hand, and carry after from the river for your daily needs.

We legislate away unintended consequences, that is the job of government. We put in laws and remove them if they are unsuitable. Analysis paralysis does no one any good.

My take is that I can never be confident that anything an LLM produce will not be broken. Since I will have to check everything it produces anyways, why not write it in a human friendly language, i.e. python? C and rust may have better strictness, but the amount of boiler code to set up that system takes up a lot of mental space that could be better used to architect the problem at hand.

recreationally employed

It is one of my greatest hope for everyone to be able to achieve this. It would shift the workplace dynamic so much that employers would have to work harder (beyond pizza parties) to retain employees since no one would blink an eye at the thought of resigning on the spot.

I think you are coming at this with very different priorities. For most people, installing tool chains is a one time job, that they can grit their teeth through if it works well for them. No one wants to constantly install or reinstall and make sure the installation process is lightning fast.

It's the reason why Linux still hasn't taken off on desktop. People want good application support, not infinite customisations and blazing fast compile speeds. In fact, slow compile speeds might even give people an excuse to go chat with colleagues and take breaks. What you want is not what others want too

Agreed, and to that point, the way to produce such outputs is to absorb a large corpus of words and find the most likely prediction that mimics the written language. By virtue of the sheer amount of text it learns from, would you say that the output tends to find the average response based on the text provided? After all, "over fitting" is a well known concept that is avoided as a principle by ML researchers. What else could be the case?

Thinking of it as an averaging devoid of meaning is not really correct.

To me, this sentence contradicts the sentence before it. What would you say neural networks are then? Conscious?

That still does not satisfactorily answer the question though, why don't they just sign a purchase order with N month lead time? That still gives a well defined price ahead of time.

They've turned the cottage industry of malicious hacking into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise

Thank you for this insight! Crypto truly is the financialization of crime.

I won't undersell the efforts professionals need to acquire their skills, but I also stand by my view that a clearly defined progression makes life a lot easier to navigate. It's why quests are fundamental in RPGs and uncertainty is bad for business. When you can see the path ahead, the problems that need to be solved are clear. It's why research is so painstakingly slow when we are treading on unknown unknowns.

As for those who showed up and everything worked out, consider them lucky, though I doubt there are many of them out there.