lukifer

"Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars. Now all restaurants are Taco Bell."

NOSTR [0] is a store and forward relay service, ostensibly a distributed Twitter clone, but also highly extensible [1] to support other functionality.

[0] Notes & Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays: https://nostr.com/

[1] https://nips.nostr.com/

does it simply skew deckbuilding into a new "broken"

exactly, that's why it probably isn't feasible other than casual/social play: there's no change to the fundamental rules that doesn't end up warping the meta-game. (Particularly if the fix relates to mitigating mana flood/screw with consistency: I suspect it rewards combo lists, whose win-cons are indistinguishable from "find three specific cards".)

My thinking is that there's a tradeoff, that you slow your ramping in exchange for cycling (replacing your land for turn). You trade your acceleration towards big spells for more consistency (or just fewer dead draws).

It's alive and well, and the community is welcoming and happy to teach: https://nullsignal.games/players/around-the-world/

Cards release more slowly than the FFG era, but the current stewards (Null Signal) have been doing a great job for the last eight years.

There's a community app to play against an AI, which has a good tutorial if you want to dip your toes in: https://chiriboga.sifnt.net.au/

My biggest beef with Magic isn't the lands system, but that the game is fundamentally stingy with cards, leading to many non-games, and/or turns where you pray for the right top-deck and don't get it.

(This is one major reason I play Netrunner instead, where your action economy can be spent on draw. You might have weak turns, but never non-turns.)

Given the huge cardpool, there's no real way to "fix" MtG that couldn't be exploited in the metagame (aside from limited, or social formats like Commander).

But that aside, I think there are two relatively minor fixes which would go a long way:

- You can spend your "land for turn" to exile the land instead, and draw a card.

- Before your starting draw, Scry 1.

There's a reason why leftists support it

I run in some far-left circles, and trust me, they don't :) Georgism is the neglected middle child of political economy: libertarians see it as an abrogation of sacred property rights, socialists see it as too liberal (a dirty word in that ecosystem).

it centralizes control over property values (and therefore control over said property) in the hands of the state.

The state is already in control of property, in both its creation of the legal constructs, and providing the security backstop for its protection. Whatever one's views of which property constructs are just and/or efficient: the realpolitik of property is that an individual's property right is a secondary one: if the thugs with guns decide to take it, with or without a legal fig leaf, the property claim vanishes in a puff of smoke.

And the thing is, governments already assess property values for tax purposes, relative to nearby "comps", only for property tax (improvements + land value), as opposed to unimproved land value alone. There is certainly a risk of perverse incentive, but (a) if locally adjudicated, the price is somewhat disciplined by owners voting with their feet, and (b) there is a lot of good work being done to improve these calculations algorithmically: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/mass-appraisal-for-the-masse...

I certainly don't claim "a single tax on unimproved land value" is perfect; but it doesn't have to be, just a lesser evil compared to existing income tax on labor, and existing property taxes (a tax on labor with extra steps). And one essential crux of the Georgist argument is: those who work for a living already pay the tax, only to private rent-seekers rather than states and municipalities. (Even owners end up paying indirectly, where the opportunity cost of renting is priced into the purchase cost, aka "imputed rents", which for mortgage buyers is looks at lot like the bank being your landlord.)

If you want development, you don't need to incentivize it.

Or perhaps: we remove the disincentive of taxing improvements. :) Even a revenue-neutral LVT (raise unimproved value by enough to compensate loss of taxing improvements) would shift the incentive landscape, where the numbers now might make sense to build a high-rise on top of what used to be a parking lot, because it doesn't incur new tax liability.

What article? This is an HN-only discussion post.

Half-agree: zoning restrictions and non-essential building regulations are a de-facto government handout to existing property owners.

At the same time, apologists for rentiers will do anything except taxing unimproved land value (which among other virtues, functions as a vacancy tax to reduce unproductive speculation, and incentivize development).

The blunt reality is a zero-sum tension: homeowners and landlords want number go up, new buyers and renters want number go down.

Cool! Disappointing there's so much focus on the non-sandboxing, I think it's a reasonable trade-off to release early, and follow up with signing later.

- Website looks great overall, but the fixed and overlaid header title is awkward and hurts readability for not much benefit.

- Battery Health on my M3 Max MBP reads as "1%", when System Report shows Condition: Normal, Maximum Capacity: 100%. What is this reading from?

- Handy password generator is great; any chance of an option for "correct horse" [0] style passwords? I find these are preferable for reasonably secure passwords which can still be remembered or hand-typed as needed.

Looking forward to seeing how the app evolves!

[0] https://www.correcthorsebatterystaple.net

Colorado has an alternative service which is entirely driver-owned: https://www.coloradodrivers.coop/

Sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice.

This is not to say that this administration is definitely not targeting civilians or infrastructure on purpose; just that the end result, and the moral culpability, are the same in either case.

I don't disagree. I trimmed "religious and mythological memeplexes" down to avoid repetition. (Also worth considering: de-facto religious behaviors need not be supernatural or "mythological"; you can substitute your own examples of political ideologies that are difficult to distinguish from religions in practice.)

It is obviously a deeply complicated and complex phenomenon. Even the Dennett/Dawkins model of selfish replicators aren't necessarily sufficient, in addition to my claim that the relationship between genes and memes can sometimes be mutually symbiotic (and I'm aware of the great many counter-examples).

To be clear, I don't hold to a particular faith myself (and I've spent time at both ends of the spectrum). I suspect that the so-called "god-shaped hole" is one of many characteristics that varies in the human animal, not unlike those who have a mind's eye and those who don't, or those who hear their thoughts audibly and those who don't.

Enforced religious participation is never proof that religion is what people crave.

While what people crave obviously varies, I think most people do crave something like meaning and community (or flipping it around: selection pressures seem to have selected for meaning and community, presumably at least in part from a green-beard effect [0]). While those can exist independently of faith, we can empirically observe that they tend to overlap quite a lot (again, for good and ill).

While I'd agree with you regarding illiberal theocracies and religious totalitarianism, I'd problematize your framing in two ways: (a) "forced" implies that someone is doing the forcing, meaning presumably someone craves it, or is at least willing to play along [1]; but more pertinently, (b) there is a middle ground between the extremes of "explicit individual choice", and "forced participation": norms, culture, emulation, etc.

No one "forces" anyone in the business world to wear suits, or use LinkedIn jargon; but the incentives are in favor of doing so (and against not doing so), so people play along: some cynically, some internalizing norms sincerely. If we hit a magic History Randomizer Button that shuffled historical contingencies, I don't think we'd have an absence of those norms, but other norms with different details. And I suspect we'd see different churches and myths and holy books, not an absence of them.

To reiterate, I'm just talking Darwinian functionality here, not whether religion is good or bad in a normative sense. If the niche exists, "nature finds a way".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-beard_effect

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iEWTx_APQ4

The fascinating paradox: there are clearly "tells" (slop-smells, like code-smells?) of LLM-generated text. We're all developing heuristics rapidly, which probably pass a Pepsi challenge 95+% of the time.

And yet: LLMs are writing entirely based on human input. Presumably there exists a great quantity of median representative text, some lowest-common denominator, of humans who write similarly to these heuristics.

(In particular: why are LLMs so fond of em-dashes, when I'm not sure I've ever seen them used in the wilds of the internet?)

Examples abound; but for good and ill, the language-using ape seems to be a religious animal, having co-evolved with mythological memeplexes.

There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik).

Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)

This is (tragically) the reason why I remain a tab hoarder: the UI carries an implicit nudge (a costly signal of visual real estate), for my future self to engage with it.

In a similar spirit to OP: it did help mitigate the hoarding, when I began thinking "how hard is it to find this resource/reference again, should I actually need it?". And if it's trivial to google (and mnemonically sticky enough I can trust my future self to remember it), I can close the tab.

The emails are bizarrely sloppy with spelling and punctuation, perhaps many usages of "don't" ended up being typed as "don t", triggering an automated find-and-replace.

I don't like "Wrappeds" (low-key social hack to manufacture normalization of surveillance capitalism?), but with HN being public, I succumbed to temptation. Very fun, 10/10 no notes, surprisingly good for a small sample set this year.

You write comments like you're trying to win a Pulitzer in Political Economy while trapped inside a middle-manager's strategy meeting.

"I'm not a capitalist, I am a creativist... Capitalists make things to make money, I like to make money to make things." - Eddie Izzard

It's more about the viability of making any kind of living from one's creative work, not motivation to create. (Though for creative works with large upfront costs, eg films, ROI motivation is relevant for backers.)

I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.

They're inherently different: creative work (especially in a digital, trivially replicated format) is non-rivalrous, and at least partially non-excludable. "You wouldn't download a car." [0]

Property rights are a social technology to balance incentives and peacefully negotiate scarce resources (including time and effort). It's helpful to think about them in reverse: that they encode legitimacy to use force (usually via the State) against anyone who violates the right. That doesn't make the force right or wrong, a priori; it simply describes what happens. Exactly when that force is legitimate is the question at hand.

"Intellectual Property" is a post-hoc neologism. What we actually have are three very specific institutions: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. The last is arguably more like regulation than property: persistent brand identity to prevent fraud and confusion. Copyrights and patents are extremely clear in the Constitution, that their purpose is collective, moreso than an individual right for its own sake: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Hence why they expire: at some point, the incentive has already been provided, and the body politic benefits more by their being open-sourced.

Whatever "rights" framework one subscribes to, it is an extremely thorny question, whether they include the right to alienate those rights, to give them up on purpose. We allow people to alienate their labor, an hour at a time; but not to do so for a lifetime (voluntarily sell one's self into slavery). Many US states now refuse to defend "non-compete" clauses: that you cannot constrain your future self from working for a competitor for X years, even if you wanted to, even for very lucrative terms in the contract.

I'd argue that intellectual/creative works, are more like non-compete clauses: you actually create more bargaining power if you limit the scope, and take away the capacity to give up future bargaining power.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_gZZHu4TBk

If it is the case that consciousness can emerge from inert matter, I do wonder if the way it pays for itself evolutionarily, is by creating viral social signals.

A simpler animal could have a purely physiological, non-subjective experience of pain or fear: predator chasing === heart rate goes up and run run run, without "experiencing" fear.

For a social species, it may be the case that subjectivity carries a cooperative advantage: that if I can experience pain, fear, love, etc, it makes the signaling of my peers all the more salient, inspiring me to act and cooperate more effectively, than if those same signals were merely mechanistic, or "+/- X utility points" in my neural net. (Or perhaps rather than tribal peers, it emerges first from nurturing in K-selected species: that an infant than can experience hunger commands more nurturing, and a mother that can empathize via her own subjectivity offers more nurturing, in a reinforcing feedback loop.)

Some overlap with Trivers' "Folly of Fools": if we fool ourselves, we can more effectively fool others. Perhaps sufficiently advanced self-deception is indistinguishable from "consciousness"? :)

The dilemma is, the one thing we can be sure of, is our subjectivity. There is no looking through a microscope to observe matter empirically, without a subjective consciousness to do the looking.

So if we're eschewing the inelegance / "spooky magic" of dualism (and fair enough), we either have to start with subjectivity as primitive (idealism/pan-psychism), deriving matter as emergent (also spooky magic); or, try to concoct a monist model in which subjectivity can emerge from non-subjective building blocks. And while the latter very well might be the case, it's hard to imagine it could be falsifiable: if we constructed an AI or algo which exhibits verifiable evidence of subjectivity, how would we distinguish that from imitating such evidence? (`while (true) print "I am alive please don't shut me down"`).

If any conceivable imitation is necessarily also conscious, we arrive at IIT, that it is like something to be a thermostat. If that's the case, it's not exactly satisfying, and implies a level of spooky magic almost indistinguishable from idealism.

It sounds absurd to modern western ears, to think of Mind as a primitive to the Universe. But it's also just as magical and absurd that there exists anything at all, let alone a material reality so vast and ordered. We're left trying to reconcile two magics, both of whose existences would beggar belief, if not for the incontrovertible evidence of our subjectivity.

I, Pencil (Revisited): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-carson-i-penci...

It’s a problem with representation generally. The political theorist Benjamin Studebaker uses an analogy of getting into a hot air balloon: there are ways you can be of service to those below, giving them an overhead view, maybe warning them of danger, etc. But the further up you go, the less you have skin the game, and the less the little ant-people can truly be real to you.

Rather than trying to force a round peg into a square hole, I’d say this a case for refactoring bicameralism: one house of professionalized legal specialists and technocrats, another house chosen by rotating lottery for short stints of public service by random citizens (sortition).

Unless I’m missing something, that’s quintiles of absolute wealth. I’d be curious how the data shakes out for the lowest quintile calculated relative to costs of living.

Fair points, I can't say I disagree, and I'm aware of the trade-offs I'm making. (I was actually tempted to use the word "bribe" when describing the Apple Tax!)

There are a couple meaningful points of divergence in the ecosystem: Mac vs iOS (the former has some self-sovereignty, even if there are risks of backdoors/etc); and, cloud vs not (I mostly avoid cloud usage, iCloud or otherwise, and when I do use it, I treat all content as public).

I agree about the trust problem. Varoufakis might make some valid points re: "Technofeudalism", but then Bruce Schneier was making a similar analogy over a decade ago. I've heard cogent arguments, that early feudalism evolved from rational self-interest, that serfs were willing to trade some degree of autonomy for safety, and it does feel that many "normie" users (especially with iOS) are making a similar rational trade, even if it sets up an asymmetric power dynamic, and risk (inevitability?) of future betrayal.

I'm curious if you have any examples in mind for Apple, re: "do not suffer consequences when they break that trust". IMO, they've done okay at putting actions and costly signaling behind their privacy rhetoric, and I think they'd take some kind of market hit if they were to blatantly break that trust. But I'm curious if you think there are past instances in which that already happened, which maybe I've forgotten or am neglecting, or if it's a threat model of the future.

The better analogy might be, "when the morality police call the restaurant, they divulge which table you sit at every day during lunch". And it's also not clear that it would be noticed: national security letters, gag orders, parallel construction, etc.

It's just another principal-agent problem, and I agree that a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal; and, that a decent solution (while not perfect) is reputation stake and aligned incentives, check and check in Apple's case. I too think Cook is sincere, and I trust them as far as I can throw their products, which is to say, a little. (The Apple Tax is so they don't have to rely on a sketchy big-data business model.)

That said, computing and InfoSec have some unique contours, in a way that trusting a mechanic or a lawyer does not. Those can have catastrophic failure modes as well (crashing from a shoddy repair, getting sued based on bad legal advice), but they aren't systemic to society, and have lower switching costs.

And I ultimately think it's a false choice. When it comes to meatspace security, it's possible to have trusted and accountable public institutions, and allow citizens to have some means for self-sovereignty (2A, locked doors). It would be foolish to rely only on one or the other, either as a society or an individual.

So I'm deeply grateful for the Stallman types, pushing forward the capacity for self-sovereignty. Even if it doesn't currently meet my needs from a risk/benefit tradeoff, I still benefit from the ecosystem, and its BATNA, and I look forward to the day I sever my dependence on Apple's ecosystem, whether or not they betray my trust.

I use 4K Blu Rays when I can, for the best possible quality. And I continue to be staggered at just how bad the UI/UX is, compared to DVDs (which was arguably somewhat worse on average than VHS).

If I didn’t know better, I’d think the manufacturers were actively trying to sabotage physical media. That the default UX should be “insert disc, wait three seconds, hit play” is not exactly rocket science.

I tried years ago, I don't think I got it working, ended up using Rhasspy/voice2json instead (TIL: the creator of both is now the Voice Eng Lead for Home Assistant).

Looks like the GitHub is still somewhat active, although their roadmap links to a dead Trello: https://github.com/leon-ai/leon