jaredklewis

oh haha. Yea, my brain somehow interpreted shell as framework.

But yes, I agree, WP is very useful for those times when you need to run a quick `sudo rm -rf /` command but can't get to a terminal.

Is it? I did a project with WP a very long time ago and was kind of baffled. Like it's nice to have an good rich text editor, I got that part. But the absolute monstrosities people developed to extend WP, when they could have just used MySQL and PHP directly, astounded me. Like I couldn't figure out what WP was offering? It was just like a blog that you could painfully hack into something else if you wanted to. But even at that time there were already loads of great, batteries included PHP frameworks like Symfony or Cake. Why not just skip the painful part and code what you want directly?

Anyway, I probably shouldn't comment as maybe WP has progressed but it doesn't sound like it.

But what if I want to live in a country with a growing economy and improving infrastructure? Forbidding all development does hurt corporations and the wealthy, but just in the sense that it hurts everyone, including them.

If we do want to soak the rich, can we do it in a progressive, targeted way (such as taxes) and not in a NIMBY way where we just say no one can build or improve anything?

We run power lines to everything else: houses, offices, commercial buildings, factories, and so on. Any particular reasons we should have a special exception where we don't run them to data centers?

Where I live pretty much every piece of land has some sort of easement on it: for water, power, or something else. Seems weird to me if we can insist that now everything needs to be frozen and no more infrastructure upgrades.

I'm fine with paper tests as a tradeoff, but in the real world where I am paid to program, I am a strong advocate of advanced type checkers/compilers and other static code analysis tools because they can keep all the code "in their head." They can keep far, far more code "in their head" than even the most gifted programming savants. Literally as I type out a mistake, the type checker alerts me to it.

So in some theoretical hiring example, if I have to choose between two candidates: one which is really good at keeping the code in the head and the other who is less good at that, but who is very skilled at using programming tools like advanced type systems or formal verification tools, then I'd prefer the latter.

Of course in practice, I would of course take a student that I knew had passed their paper test with their own knowledge over a student that likely ran their digital test through an LLM.

If there is something that can be done without human approval, I don't want to call support to do it. I want to be able to do it myself on the company's website. I only ever want to call support if I want something that I think is going to be outside of the usual policy, if that makes sense.

So instead of companies working on their AI support execution, I wish they would just work on their website.

Can someone give me examples of the kind of support they want from a company that could be provided by AI, but could not be better provided by a well designed app and/or site?

I doubt there is a statistical correlation between stock market performance and "avoiding doing awful things," though obviously we would need some way to quantify "avoiding doing awful things" before we can evaluate this hypothesis.

If the definition of "awful" is broad enough, I imagine most public companies will fall in the "awful" bucket, probably with the same distribution of stock performance as the whole market. If "awful" is going to mean something truly extraordinarily bad like dumping mercury into a well or whatever, I would still guess there is no correlation as I've read horrifying stories of corporate behavior at companies with unremarkable stock performance.

That's fair, but I think your original comment could be much more clearly written.

"There was a spoils system in the late 1800s. It sure would be great if we could go back to that time." Technically these can be interpreted as unrelated statements (as apparently the statements are in your original comment), but most people would infer from that they were related and that the reason it would be nice to rollback to the earlier time was the aforementioned spoils system.

Your comment suggests you think cronyism was in some part responsible for America's rise as a global power. Common sense would indicate that we became a power despite the cronyism, not because it, and you've provided nothing to support your wildly counter intuitive claim.

This is your comment basically:

People really need to read their history. When America definitively surpassed the UK in 1880 as the richest country in the world (per capita), tuberculosis was a leading cause of death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis

The advancement of antibiotics did not happen until the mid 20th century, which significantly postdates America's rise to the top. It would be a great idea to rollback science to that time when we didn't have all these life saving vaccines and antibiotics.

I would argue that PE often makes things better for the consumer in the sense that they often buy businesses that are going out of business.

When the 65 year old sole proprietor of a local HVAC business sells it to a PE firm, the other option was likely winding down the business. If the owner had children that were interested in running the business, no doubt they would give it to them. But usually that is not the case. So the owner needs to sell. And if there were capitalized, enthusiastic local entrepreneurs that could buy it, no doubt the owner would consider them. But again, this is quite rare.

So the choices usually come down to: close up shop or sell to a PE firm. All other things being equal (which they never are), I think a market with more businesses is going to be more competitive and pro-consumer than a market with fewer businesses. Further, some economists have found that PE activity encourages business formation, perhaps partially explaining why the US has more small businesses per capita than Europe (where they have far less PE). So it's a double whammy: PE causes less businesses to close and more businesses to open.

A short, entertaining article on this topic: https://www.economist.com/business/2026/02/23/rejoice-privat...

This is insightful. It does sort of feel like the search for the Northwest passage.

It’s only natural to want to defend one’s preferences with these things. Because unlike with some other preferences, such as what IDE, operating system, or terminal emulator you use, version control systems must be shared.

If it is like you say and different people are just inherently more or less suited to different paradigms, then not everyone can be happy.

What it achieves, is that the quality of people who assume office sinks even lower than it is today, since anyone with a modicum of competence, would never divest a business for a low paid, public job.

Unless of course those with a modicum of competence desire to be true public servants. Read about the character of some of our great leaders like Washington, Lincoln or Eisenhower to understand the mentality of a true public servant. Something someone like Kash Patel knows nothing about.

I don’t think this level of virtue is all that rare, though it is rarely rewarded at the ballot box.

Which part of the syntax for fizzbuzz can you not recall from memory? The for loop? Printing to std out? The modulus operator?

There’s almost nothing to forget? I’m just struggling to understand.

If you can’t even write a for loop, how can you verify the ai code you generated isn’t going to wipe the prod database?

Yea, that makes sense to me. But again, would not address most (any?) of the complaints in this post.

I don’t disagree with your post but I’m still unclear on how you envision gatekeeper should work.

You want the ability to choose a different “authorities” that verify and sign binaries? That makes sense to me but is unlikely to relieve any of the issues in the post.

Also what do you mean by “even yourself?” What would that option look like?

This take is insane.

The charges could be very serious but I’m not sure what that has to do with anything, because being charged (or even just arrested) is not the same as being convicted. The author of this post claims both of their charges were dropped.

So, what, let’s torture anyone that _might_ have done something “serious?” No judge, no jury, just if a cop thinks you might have done something, straight into a psychological torture cell for weeks and months while they think about your case? wtf

Also, your description of their experience as “not pleasant” just kind of blows my mind. Like it was a long line at the DMV or something.

I linked that study because it is particularly interesting because they run the mass spec test on archived blood samples.

But there are other studies and meta analyses which cover other countries and come to the same conclusion.

I think many of the studies claiming to find significant population level decline are older and overstate the issue due to the methodological errors outlined in my previous post. If you are thinking of a particular one, please share a link.

I am not familiar with the research on testosterone levels in animals. In humans, while not conclusory, I do think the evidence suggests that increasing rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome are the proximate cause of testosterone decline.

testosterone levels have dropped without a solid explanation

There is a solid explanation.

First, before the adoption of mass spec, studies used a less accurate method of measuring testosterone that overstated testosterone levels.

Also, the studies showing the population level decline in testosterone generally controlled for obesity (which naturally lowers testosterone) using BMI. But BMI is a very crude measure.

When studies control with better methods like BMI + waist circumference, and only compare samples using the mass spec measurement method, the unexplained population level decline goes away. After fixing the measurement method, what remains of the decline can be explained by BMI + waist circumference. In other words, modern men are more prone to obesity and metabolic syndrome, which naturally reduces testosterone. Case closed.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22150314/

I'm GenZ, my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) and my kids are Millennials.

My understanding is that Gen Z comes AFTER millennials, so if you are Z, your kids can't be millennials. Maybe you are Gen X? Also, if your kids are 25 now, then they would be gen z, not millennials.

P.S. Don't shoot the messenger, I didn't make up this dumb system or these dumb names ^_^

I agree with everything in your top level comment.

They fund more than 10k research grants a year. These grants are for research into basic, unapplied science that would be extremely unlikely to get funding from the private sector. But this research is the foundation for the applied science whose breakthroughs power our economy.

Basic science also increases our understanding of the world and universe, an admirable goal in its own right.

Which changes to CPI since 1983 do you most object to?

How are you measuring the "actual standard of living?”

I would have thought the bulk of the crypto mining was done using ASICs.

Still a lot of overlap with running a datacenter of ASICs and a datacenter of GPUs, but both are significant capital investments.

Insider trading is unethical

It is illegal to insider trade in financial markets, which makes sense to me. But financial markets and prediction markets are different; one exists to surface capital, the other information.

Insider trading is forbidden in financial markets because allowing it would be a disincentive to participation by non-insiders, which would be bad because it would reduce the amount of capital the market was able to provide.

In prediction markets, allowing insider trading would be disincentive to participation by non-insiders, which would be a good thing, because the market should surface the most accurate information as possible and insiders have more accurate information than non-insiders.

and has long been recognized as such.

Prediction markets are in their infancy. They've only really existed for about a decade and even now are tiny compared with markets like commodities or equities. So I don't see how this could have been "long recognized."

It is outrageous for you to suggest that it is a good thing.

This is not an argument.

You certainly wouldn't participate in a market where you did not think you had fair odds.

Of course I wouldn't and I wouldn't advise anyone else to do so. But why would we want uninformed people participating in prediction markets? I don't think they should.

What does "fair" even mean here? If Alice is more informed than Bob about X, she'll probably be better at making predictions about X. I guess it is "unfair," but what would the point of a prediction market be if we only allowed uninformed people to participate? Then it's more like a survey of what the average person thinks will happen, which is probably common knowledge, so we don't need a market to find that out.

Finally, since you're trying to work the information angle, would you care to share any legitimately meaninful information you've gained from prediction markets?

Prediction market odds for elections and important world events are regularly quoted in the press and AFAICT seem to more accurate than pundits and and oped writers at predicting the future. A low bar, but still, if we are going to speculate about the future, we might as well see what actually informed people think.

What is unethical?

The good point of prediction markets is that they provide information. This information is available to everyone, for free, which benefits everyone.

Insiders help achieve this. Insiders have information and by participating in the market they then expose and share that information. So this is good. If we ban insiders, we're just banning accurate information from getting into the market. If we do that, we might as well just ban prediction markets altogether. I don't have a strong opinion either way on that, but a prediction market without insiders is pointless.

The current setup does sort of seem like a tax on being stupid. Why would any non-insider participate in these markets? You’re just asking to get screwed.

Though it’s not that different from the stock market, where the folks at WSB happily give their money to Citadel, Jane Street, and friends, because every once a while, one of them hits it big after going all in that the ball lands on green.

Gambling is a hell of a drug and there are good reasons why it is illegal in so many places. Prediction markets have some good externalities (information), but it’s another addictive outlet for those vulnerable to gambling addiction.

I kind of see what you are saying, but it reminds me of “if you build it, they will come.”

They won’t come, because they won’t even know about it. A more accurate aphorism would have been “if you build it and tell everyone about it, some of them might come.”

Humans probably don’t want the site to succeed, because they mostly don’t know it exists.

What are you going to use instead?

I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years

What's the secondary source then?