imperfect_blue

Lazy is not bad, and bad writing doesn't mean it's not valuable or insightful.

Using LLM as a writing assistant to properly format your ideas, while lazy, is not the same thing as a slop bomb. They're highly rated because the original ideas are good, even if the writing quality is sloppish, and it genuinely contains human input that you can't get simply by asking LLMs a question.

The problem, in my experience, is that most PMs don't add anything when it comes to drawing up the acceptance criteria.

In your example of an order placement - the PM has no special knowledge of what is a good customer order flow. Developers are usually way better at coming up with those by the dint of experience and technical knowledge of the current codebase and make the appropriate speed/polish trade-off.

PMs acts as an imperfect proxy for what the customer wants, making judgements off nothing more than their own taste. And though there are many great PMs, the taste of a PM is usually worse than that of developers and designers on average.

IMO the main business reason they exist is for organization accountability and ownership, despite the often negative value they bring.

There's no way to perfectly forecast demand; all things equal I'd prefer that companies overproduce and we live in an age of plenty with a bit of waste (which companies are already incentivized to avoid), rather than face shortages in goods.

It's a terrible idea because approximately 90% of the cost of clothing is not in producing it, but in the supply chain - keeping it in stock, transporting it to and from warehouses, the manpower needed to organize and sorting and inspect it.

So by saving the 10% of the cost of the clothing, you end up wasting way more in labor and transport and inventory costs. All of which ends up way worse for the environment than had you just shredded it and treated it as compost.

If you are actually asking a serious question: while a patron is primarily motivated by whatever catches his interest, a corporate conglomerate funding the same investments is motivated by profit. They would have more of a motive to select the kind of investments that will succeed and pay for themselves, allowing for a more economically efficient allocation of resources.

Of course, the kind of investments that might succeed and pay for themselves may not necessarily be the kind that is most beneficial to the public at large - but the same applies to the patron.

Imagine you're asked with building, say, a train network within your country. Domestic regulations demand that, because other countries are not certified up to your country's safety standards, you're not allowed to import any foreign technology from outside your country.

So - in order for you to build that train - you'd need to wait for industries to set up to build every single component up to local standards. And if nobody sets these industries up to manufacture the components you need, you'll have to build it yourself, somehow.

You'd rightfully call this out as protectionism. And the worst part is not even the protectionism - the worst part is that you'll likely get no trains, because in practice nobody except a huge incumbent company can build all the components they need themselves, and huge incumbent companies often have no incentive or no agility to do so.

US healthcare costs are nothing to do with socialism or capitalism.

The reason is two-fold: US is subsidizing the rest of the world's medical research, and US healthcare bureaucracy is among the worst in the world.

Economic growth is a measure of how much goods and services are available to everyone. If that isn't improving, that means your quality of life is lower, ceteris paribus. It means you don't produce enough energy on your own are dependent on Russian gas. It means you don't have enough surplus to sustain a military.

They can but they shouldn't.

Replace phone ownership with race or social-economic status and it should be obvious why profiling shouldn't be done.

You're hurting yourself when you tip.

You have, objectively, less money than before. Ergo, tipping is self-harm.

> It's that they believe they have a religious duty to destroy the state of Israel.

And the US is full of Christo-fascists who believe they have a religious duty to "defend" Israel by any means necessary.

How do you even begin to equivocate this? One wants to destroy a country, one wants to protect it from destruction.

How do you think Palestinians sleep at night? With the threat of Israel, funded by the largest military in the world, looming over them every night?

Israel has never actually wanted to end the lives of every Palestinian - and they've had ample capacity to do. The reverse can't be said to be true. If there's a button that the Iraqi or Palestinian leadership that can press that would wipe out the state of Israel and everyone in it, do you think that they won't press it as fast as they can?

As an amateur home-cook, I find current LLMs incredibly useful as a sounding board for the on-the-fly recipe modifications - for allergies and food sensitivities, adapting preparation methods to available equipment, or substituting produce not available in season. It may not be able to taste the final product, but its reasoning on what's likely to work (and what isn't) has not led me wrong so far.

Windows actually has a built-in remote assistance tool now called Quick Assist. It provides a simple way to remotely control another Windows machine with user consent, without requiring third-party software. It's preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11—just launch 'Quick Assist' from the Start menu, generate a session code, and connect. While it's not as feature-rich as a full remote desktop solution, it's more than enough for parental IT support.

I'm not American and haven't done the calculus here. I'm just pointing out that from an outside perspective, what the American right is doing here is +EV in terms of American lives from their point of view, so it's perfectly rational.

If nothing else, the opportunity cost of a few hundred billion saved eventually, even if it's just a small fraction of US total government spending, can be used to save or improve many many many lives.

Hyperbole like "yeah murder more people its good because I can't tell what is good or bad" doesn't help.

They're doing this because the expected value on lives saved is positive, not negative.

It's the exact same thing as "defund the police" except applied to the entire government. If policing is net negative, reducing it will save lives. If this government program is inefficient / worthless / net negative, cutting it or disrupting it will save lives.

But you cannot doubt that a trans woman is "really" trans. Trying to be the opposite of your biological sex is what "trans" literally means.

Breaking it down, trans has two parts to it. The smaller part is simply describing those who are going through transition. There's no identity requirement here, though most people would consider themselves trans if they're going through transition.

But on the other hand, you can also be trans if you...simply identify as such, even if you make no effort to socially or medically transition, with or without a formal diagnosis.

The flip side is, you also can suffer from dysphoria and wish you were born as the opposite sex and still be cisgender, as long as you don't actively want to identify as transgender for whatever reason.

So I'd say a large part of it is identity based. If (say in a survey) we let people classify themselves into short/medium/tall and it was self-reported like gender was, we'd probably use "survey respondents who identify as being tall" or "tall-identifying people" too.

OP wrote:

A few days ago, Paul Graham published an essay on “Wokeness”. I skimmed it. I couldn’t finish reading it, it made me too upset...I’ve been feeling quite anxious ever since. It feels like the world is crumbling around me.

...as if this sort of mental fragility is something normal. This is the sort of mentality I've come to associate with woke and prig culture.

In my experience, the more "woke" a community is, the more these sort of hysterics are accepted, normalized, even celebrated - to the point of caricature. Part of it is that in those communities, the more "oppressed" you are, the higher status you are accorded, and the subconscious status-seeking primate part of your brain notices this, and molds your thoughts and feelings accordingly. While those on the right also play up their victimhood, it's not held in high status in their communities. You'd get outrage and compassion playing up victimhood in right-leaning communities, but in left-leaning communities you also get more moral weight when you're upset.

The result, I think, is that the American left is genuinely less happy with the world, and more likely to echo doomer sentiments.

I read Practical Guide to Evil to the end. It started out amazingly strong, but suffering from increasing worse pacing problems as the series progresses, where the plot progression slows to a crawl with increasing amounts of build-ups and sidetracks.

Also every second character is LGBT, which was deeply distracting when reading it because of how much it's emphasized. I'm normally not be bothered by such things but APGtE did it especially badly.

Audit is not a foolproof guarantee that no fraud exists, the same way that locking your door doesn't guarantee that no crime exists. It deters opportunists by making crime more difficult and onerous.

In this context, they're just making sure the answer isn't "no, it's not encrypted". Sure, you can lie, and that would fool them. But your answer will be cross-checked with other employees, maybe with other documentation if those exists.

And sure, you can forge all of those as well, as Marsalek did with his bank statements. But these sort of verification significantly raises the bar to how difficult it is to commit fraud: you now need to get several people into the conspiracy to forge those documents and audit trail. Your average employee isn't willing to lie for their company for no good reason and risk prosecution, and may very well whistle-blow on you.

Because a minor coordination failure across an enormous company is...not worth chastising them over?

Because if you cry wolf too many times about trivial innocuous issues, nobody will believe you when companies are actively being evil? My default assumption on seeing this sort of headline is already "outrage bait".

In theory yes, it's more secure.

In practice personally auditing the installation script for every program you're going to use and the installation script for every update is grossly impractical, for the same reason nobody reads EULAs. In the end it still boils down to trust.

Speech can be injurious if they cause someone reputational damage through slander, but I'm not sure that's what's meant here.

Tit-for-tat makes perfect sense from a game theory point of view, even ignoring the egregious abuse of data for nefarious purposes by the CCP.

I cannot understand why you would think so, even in a first world nation.

Who would grow your food? Who would make the tools and fertilizer that enable the farmers to grow your food? The robotics and software that enables those tools and fertilizer to be produce? Who would organize, transport, package, preserve and process the produce so that you can access it?

Apply the same questions to healthcare, education, transport, construction, entertainment, etc.

Some jobs are superfluous and arise out of coordination failure, that's true. Lawyers, administrators, salespeople and parts of finance and the government comes to mind. But "most people could stop working" is an unreasonable assertion.

Because for everyone to make what they want to make is, as of current year, a pie in the sky fantasy until scarcity is solved, and perhaps not even then.

There are 8 billion humans, the world doesn't need another hundred thousand programming languages or web frameworks or game development platform or even indie games or fiction or music or film, produced every year when the whim strikes someone's fancy. Even if we could, who can even consume that much content?

Being a cog in a machine at least means you're probably doing something of value to someone instead of writing another book that nobody reads.

As of now we have no better solution to coordination failure except to create the AGI that will save/doom us.

Trello boards export to JSON, would you consider it open? OneNote notebooks are also an open and well-documented specification, as well as local first and backed by a very reliable company, which makes them just as open as Obsidian by those standards.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_file_form...

Open source != Free != Libre, I didn't expect to need to make that distinction. And of course, Obsidian is free to do whatever they want to do.

But primarily, my intention is to to advocate support for and investment in ecosystems/features around open-source alternatives like logseq and AppFlowy, and to discourage investment in the Obsidian ecosystem of plugins, primarily because of lock-in risk.

The features may be available in the new app, but your existing setup will break. Your existing relations and notes will break if they used any Obsidian specific feature, of which there are plenty. Any notes you use to dynamically summarize/organize/sort/filter other notes will break, and probably can't be trivially recreated in whatever app you switch to.

The most basic type of links, links to other notes, will generally work fine yes. But what about links to headings? Links to blocks? Links to attachments? Embedded blocks? Embedded files? The more you've used Obsidian's features, the more stuff will break.

Searching by tags is trivial. What about searching by properties? By done/undone status? By note attributes, by tasks, by attachments, by block-level searches? What about filters?

The simplest use-case being, if I simply want to view the list of all undone tasks across a set of notes on a separate app, sorted by priority, as I can now on Obsidian? Not trivially possible, as far as I know.

Reminders and any calendar-like functionality are definitely not carried over across apps, either.

Like I keep saying, if you limit your functionality to just markdown basics, it'll work fine. Start using the exclusive features of the app or even just the tasks plugin and it's no longer so simple. Something like the Kanban plugin is just impossible.

If you use a subset of its features and don't rely on any particular plugins, yes, you can seamlessly convert between some tools — because in the end, it's just Markdown and some basic features like tagging and linking are shared.

"But my workflow is portable!" is really not a good response, when a workflow like OP's, or even one that depends on a few key plugins, becomes very much not portable. The more you buy into the ecosystem, the less portable your workflow will be. "Don't buy into the ecosystem" is not a reasonable take at all because that's the entire point of Obsidian over competition, the (mostly open-source) ecosystem that they have with the first-mover advantage.