nologic01

The irony is that they are defending the right of a manufacturing cartel to limit the options of what these valiant freedom fighters can do with stuff they own (with the "hard-won" money they managed to rescue from the evil "taxman" :-).

But assuming they indeed want the "freedom" to have unrepairable cars, what about my freedom to want a market that offers them. Same with a market for cars that are not surveillance devices etc. Are their needs more important than mine?

Political extremism turns people into ugly entitled morons. Alas its not a sad circus to watch from afar. They are taking society down to their sociopathic dark world.

A repairability index is about as objective as can get: a list a components and their modes of failure along with a checklist of:

* what can be repaired by the owner using spare parts, instructions and common tools

* what can be repaired by an independend third party

* what must be repaired by the manufacturer

* when must something be junked and how much of it can be recycled

These are not "opinions". At some point we need to start calling out the criminal indifference of vested interests (and their shills) to the sustainability question

Very interesting find, even though not their target:

"Interestingly, there is in fact a noticeable downward slope in average sentiment over time for those topics as well"

I would speculate total sentiment on HN is trending down. Its the disillusionment with tech.

"right to Repair is incredibly popular because it’s common sense—at least to those who aren’t manufacturers. Society works best when we are empowered to fix our stuff"

here is the next win for common sense: a repairability index. invented in france where they know a thing or two about revolutions

https://grist.org/climate/why-frances-new-repairability-inde...

Python is now bigger than what even its most keen friends ever imagined might happen. This is not automatically solving the issues, nor make it more likeable to those who dislike it, but it does incentivise serious plumbing work.

Something I noticed about all these projects (and they are quite a few) is that they are quite old (some going back ~2 decades or so).

I wonder what is the dynamic behind that longevity. Music hasn't changed ofcourse but on tech side I would think there are significant new possibilities.

Is it something related to the difficulty of implementing low level algorithms (famously a lot of linear algebra stuff goes back decades and rests on C / Fortran libraries). Is it that there isn't enough interest to justify new efforts or are those systems already near "perfection"?

I think what you are asking for is for an abstraction layer that is on top of what the current systems do. LaTeX is a very good analogy, as it is a set of macros that hide away the numericity of the underlying TeX typesetting system. Once upon a time people did use TeX to write papers because LaTeX did not exist yet.

Such a higher level macro system must make tradeoffs between sufficient control and conciseness (though its typically possible to insert low level code in between the macros since before any macro can be executed, rendered etc. it must be converted to the lower level anyway).

Developing such a system is probably a task for tech-savvy musician rather than a music-savvy techie. Its value proposition would be precisely to crystallize composition "invariants" that are expressive and versatile enough to enable people to compose genuinely new things.

But you should keep in mind that all LaTeX papers look a bit alike :-) (though much better than Word papers).

Excellent storytelling, fluidly integrating geospatial data and other visual elements and statistics in a smooth flow.

Who knows, maybe one day such a "visual space" inside a browser would be interactive, a Google Earth type of thing as far as navigation goes, but with data queries that allow on the fly to populate various widgets. An expert could livestream a story or "save" it for later publication.

One day humanity will recognize that people have divergent tastes in programming languages syntax that have no obvious rational basis.

Me curly brackets, you no curly brackets. Etc.

Today is not that day.

Thats a rather incomplete business model description of banking.

There are at least three distinct elements and largely unrelated to core banking: payments infrastructure / gatekeeping the private/public monetary system, managing interest rate risk (which is what you describe) and managing credit risk.

Add to that countless "non-core" intermediation activities which nevertheless, depending on the type of bank can be major revenue sources.

Maximazing social utility is indeed the key question but how to do it in a sustainable and future proof way is hardly ever seriously asked.

Any references to narrow banking been tried and "not working"?

Separating the issue of private money from providing commercial credit risk insurance (ala CDS) should be possible.

There should be more of this. Much more. From different angles and view points but with the same clarity and directness.

Banking is in a deep, existential crisis for decades now and the march of digitization only increases the pressure to find a way forward.

In response techno-solutionists imagine all sorts of replacements, whether it is "fintech", or "banking-as-a-service" or "crypto" but all are hopelessly shallow and incomplete, almost insultingly crude.

What is entirely missing from these neobanking movements is any straight definition of what is the purpose of banking and bankers. What is their irreducible value proposition that cannot be delegated to machines and algorithms. What is their role in society. Are they allies or enemies of surveillance capitalism? Are their users clients or products? Can there be an honest relation with the sovereign monetary system and the lender of last resort or is private banking a scheme to privatize profits and socialize losses? Last but not least, what role, if any, should they play towards environmental sustainability.

The questions and challenges are pilling up and there are no breakthroughs worth mentioning. In a parallel universe we might have something like BN (banking news), where all sorts of individuals, teams small or large, would pimp their blogs, radical ideas, open source solutions or fancy software products, but above all a positive, forward looking vision for a crucial sector.

Is there some sort of citizen science we could engage-in with these datasets? When zooming in on Euclid’s view of the Perseus cluster of galaxies I see some very strange stuff :-)

Landed gentry owning the political process reminds of feudalism, not democracy.

The city's residents don't live in autarky in an island or some remote planet, they benefit greatly and in countless ways from being part of a nation state (and even more abstractly, the human collective comprising other nations etc).

Unravelling that complex web of dependencies is not easy, but pretending it does not exist is not viable moral stance either.

Sorry to bring you the bad news, but your lifetime is (likely) finite and each brush stroke takes away a bit of that precious finite time.

In contrast, while digitally reproduced crap is also fundamentally finite, it can be replicated gazillion upon gazillion times more without any effort or sacrifice.

This is the so-called zero-marginal cost of (re)production [1]. Some people think its a blessing, some people think its a curse.

With AI algorithms it gets even worse. You don't only have infinite copies of the original, you also have infinite variations of the original.

Interesting times.

[1] https://books.google.nl/books/about/The_Zero_Marginal_Cost_S...

The GIS in Godot vision talk a bit unlucky, but amazing food for thought nevertheless. The combinatorial repurposing of open source platforms, apps, libraries etc for use cases beyond what they designed for is one of the most fascinating possibilities opening up with FOSS. It is helped alot if people adopt open standards for data exchange.

There seems to be currency with debunking tulipmania but reading this [1] it seems people play more with the semantics, i.e., what kind of market behavior do you admit into the "manic class" as opposed to the "rational calculation class".

Expecting others to enter a bubble and trading accordingly can be a perfectly rational calculation following observations of behaviors in a given market context.

[1] https://theconversation.com/tulip-mania-the-classic-story-of...

almost completely

strange but true, scarcity comes in different sizes. Is the infinity of NFT's the same as that of paintings? How many types of infinite junk are there? Or is this infinite itself?

Would be cool to have some sort of well defined "bubble-mania-meter" but it is unfortunately quite subjective.

The role of scarcity is something interesting to consider as input. Scarcity (perceived or actual) is more natural with tulips or anything that is a tangible, real object.

NFT's tortured way of creating "digital scarcity" sets them, imho, apart from other bubbles. Given how much of modern life revolves around digital they are probably the forerunner of much worse to come.

More economic title: "Holy wars are coordination problems".

As an uncanny cosmic coincidence would have it, today is an anniversary of the Third Council of Constantinople, counted as the Sixth Ecumenical Council [1] by the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches, as well as by certain other Western Churches. The Council met in 680-681 AD and condemned, wait for it: monoenergism and monothelitism as heretical.

Coordination problems are not even "problems". They are the stuff of Homo Sapiens social life. The underlying reality, to the extent it exists at all, is but an excuse to engage in enthusiastic formation of competing clans.

If people can engage in passionate discussion (all the way to actual destructive war) over "monoenergism" they can also do so about Python 2 versus 3 or any other harebrained perpetual holy war in tech.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Council_of_Constantinopl...

Pretty much the blueprint for any and all bubbles.

There might be a sense in which bubbles are getting more ridiculous over time (e.g., NFT) but it would be hard to prove it in any objective sense.

There are so many moving parts, indices and measurements in economics, anybody sufficiently familiar with the data landscape can "prove" any (typically political) point they want by selectively focusing on some timeseries or another.

This is not to say there is no objective economic reality, but meaningful comparisons over time and across different economies seem very hard. Thats why "economically you never had it so good" can coexist with outer despair.

And this before we account for the non-accounting of externalities and the variable long term sustainability of different lifestyles (the wealth transfer from future generations).

We have so thoroughly lost the art of oral information transmission it is hard to even have a gut feeling as to how it may have worked over generations.

For example did people distinguish "fact from fiction" as they were passing along stories (in some way we would recognize today)?

I somehow doubt that "fact checking" had to wait for Thucydides (in the Hellenic world) [1] as it seems like an important survival attribute, but how did they signal that the story coming up should be taken at face value or with a grain of salt?

[1] Herodotus has been criticized for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus

An immutable blockchain record would seem to be appropriate? I will let you come up with a suitable name for such a chain (and the corresponding coin).

There is tiny problem with this theory. Namely Santorini is (and by all accounts always was) a tiny island. Contrast with:

"for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,' there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together" [1]

Whatever the definition of "Libya and Asia" implied here, its kinda hard to reconcile. Like by a factor between 100x - 1000x :-)

Who knows what kind of convolution of themes, imaginary and real, spanning time and space may have been folded together in these enigmatic passages.

Which leads to the broader question, what fraction of puzzles we inherited from these very early patchy historical artifacts we'll we ever be able to resolve?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis

SV ideals? Besides the fake techo-optimism peddled to provide techies an excuse to join the party, there is but one "ideal".

It would be a rouse for all the rice and we dont want that

Oversized SUV's littering urban landscapes (taking effectively twice the space of a small electric car) are the tangible evidence of how society grows not just unsustainable and unequal, but aggressive and in-your-face.

I don't think there is any other period where the front "face" of a car aimed to create such an ugly, intimidating impression (i am huge and i will tear you apart).

Their popularity speaks volumes about the true psychological state of a good fraction of moneyed society.

While wealth display is always a thing, the manner in which it is done is not preordained, it provides insights into the state of society.

Once car manufacturers realized the larger and scarier the better selling the trajectory was locked.

Nope. Its the other way around. A human could not do it, but a machine can. Or at least it can fake that it can. And the trend seems to be to put the burden on the victim to prove the wrongdoing.

The AI bros who celebrate this development probably think the benefit they will extract by committing this on others exceeds the negatives of others committing it on them.

Good luck.