HN user

pqtyw

677 karma
Posts8
Comments459
View on HN

It's actually quite rare to find someone who says I will help the poor, but only if my neighbour also pays, otherwise they can get fucked

You are seeing all of this in a very, very black and white way. It's about how much the average person is willing (or forced to) to contribute in either system especially when you try to scale it up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Libertarianism is an utopian ideology not particularly different to Communism in the sense that both are incompatible with human nature.

I mean there is simply no empirical evidence this approach scales beyond small high trust (usually homogeneous) communities. Tragedy of the commons is a thing.

your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor

That's extremely reductive... and you are making this way too personal than it should be ; )

IMHO this would make more sense if provided as part of a larger "platform" like Langfuse/Langsmith/etc. Otherwise you just end with a dozen SaaS products for highly specific use cases which might not scale that well.

Realistically do you also need to have this live with a fancy? i.e. a custom solution maybe even Jupiter notebooks initially might be sufficient. It's not like 100k messages is a very large dataset. It's not trivial to make a generic solution that fits every use cases (besides of basic customer chatbots) to get actual value for more agentic products.

I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor.

Or people have a tendence to perceive a system where everyone is required to pay their "fair share" as more just and are more willing to (often begrudgingly) participate in it. If the system was fully voluntary the average contribution would be significantly lower that it is now. Also a significant proportion might feel they benefit from this system more than they pay into it (or are risk averse and prefer having the safety net even if they contribute more than they benefit)

decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure

Well I'm generally vaguely incentivized to help the poor and develop infrastructure. Would I be willing to voluntary give up 40% of my income to do that rather than a significantly lower proportion? No, of course not. When it comes to infrastructure I'd be willing to pay very little or nothing at all if I know my neighbour isn't contributing anything. I don't think the average person would behave particularly differently than me.

have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor

I never said that wasn't the case but historically that "some" was never sufficient. On average people are rational and selfish to a larger extent than they are altruistic.

taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people

Well the whole concept of an organized society falls apart if individuals can personally freely chose which laws to obey and which taxes to pay. You have to have a balance based on a reasonable consensus, otherwise you end up with totalitarianism or anarchy (and in that case the people who have the means and resources to do that will establish alternative power structures and will end up subjugating those who do not AND also outcompete those how have the means but are unwilling to do the same).

Well off people do not allocate capital in a way that's socially or economically (on a national level) optimal. So the government has to do that for them (even if those who the majority of taxes personally benefit less from that than if they were allowed to keep that money).

I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. After all there are hardly any personal incentives for individuals to invest into infrastructure, education or healthcare of people who can't afford it and plenty of other areas even if that's what allowed them to accumulate a significant proportion of not the overwhelming majority of their wealth over the long term.

Well that would apply to a lot of thing governments spend money on. I think the idea is that governments are better at allocating capital in certain cases (obviously one might disagree with that) than the people/companies who generate the most tax revenue. I mean on an individual level even if solar batteries are profitable people who have sufficient disposable income might chose to invest it into the US stock market (if it still offers better returns) amongst other things than into something that benefits the Australian economy or society.

Unfortunately we don't really have any premodern (i.e. operating under the same constraints) atheistic societies to compare against.

Maybe its just human nature to try and rationalize the world around them? (using whatever framework they have a available)

Well in Islam the story is different and they consider the canonical New Testament gospels not very accurate.

Then you have all the ancient texts here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Non-canonical_(apocryph... which were likely written very early and often conflict quite strongly with then New Testament narratives. We can assume that this is just an only very small sample of all the stories floating around.

Even the official gospels don't all match on all the details despite retelling the same story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source) since they are all included that would indicate a few hundred years later nobody really knew which story was true or not.

. I more dispute that there was actually a person named Romulus who was in almost any way related to the stories told about him or the founding of Rome.

You and many Romans. I mean we have Cicero's letters where he's saying that all the legends about Rome's founding are probably nonsense because nobody has any real records.

There wasn't the modern notion of history or historical accuracy at play

Polybius and Thucydides might feel sad about you saying that.

They happen to have created the whole concept of analytical history. It's like saying that engineers in ~1800 didn't have a notion of how steam engines worked. I mean the invented the whole concept in the first place (however primitive their early methods were.

Even Herodotus often goes to great effort trying to separate fact from fiction even if understandably now always succeeding) although that would indicate what sort of poor sources historians had to work with when researching the earlier periods. It's a bit like if modern 19th century historians had to work without having any access to books and newspapers or other extended written material with their main source being the great-grandchildren of the people who actually lived then and the memories they passed down in addition to maybe some legal contracts, obscure religious texts and chronological lists (and if they wanted to go 5-10 generations further its even much worse). That doesn't mean they (largely) weren't doing their best.

Romans began rewriting their history and erasing their past. Which is exactly what we are talking about right now.

I'm not sure that's true. Of course some some details might have been purposefully (or not) ignored or twisted. While obviously Christian scholars were quite picky on which pagan texts to preserve or not (due to various reasons) there is not a lot reason to believe that generally they did their best to copy them faithfully. Of course we are talking about a highly literate society with a strong tradition of analytical history (which was very unique by pre-medieval standards at least).

Quite similar to Romulus

The claim that some specific historian might have invented him out of thin air is far fetched and not really substantiated. Much more likely that the legend evolved over many generations and became a mishmash of fact and fiction over hundreds of years before someone actually wrote it down. Based on other similar cases it's highly likely that there were many competing traditions by Livy's time. So yes, he did very likely tried to reconcile them and picked how to synthesize the narrative but it's hard to imagine he could have actually invented it because there were plenty of people and other historians who could have called him out on it.

I think the point is that Muslim accounts of the same events are sometimes very different to those of (Nicaean)Christians.

Also we do know there were many competing narratives describing the life of Christ just a few hundred years after he died. After the Church become more established scholars spent a lot of time and effort trying to determine which ones were "accurate" or not and suppressing the other narratives. It's not like anyone can verify it they got it right or not, though.

Usually the arguments are not about whether a major historical figure like Christ or Mohamed etc. existed but the exact context and accounts of their lives, beliefs and actions. Also both of these men live in literate societies yet just a few hundred years after the deaths the facts already were very blurry and uncertain. Hypothetical Moses on the other hand lived in an illiterate society and history wasn't written down for 500+ (if not quite a bit more) years, even if there is a grain of truth in them (i.e. some sort of migration or interaction between Canaan and Egypt - which is not at all far fetched) the actual details might have become 99% fictional after being passed down orally through dozens of generations.

The idea that some random historian or politician simply convinced everyone his fiction story

Not on purpose, it's just that without written history it's very easy for stories to drift very far from the historical facts. There might haven been a Roman king Romulus who did something important (then again he might have been created over time by merging several figures - i.e. it's more likely that he was named after the city and not the other way around).

We actually have real documented historical cases of this process occurring, the whole genre of Germanic heroic legends. They include various historical figures like Theodoric, Attila the Hun and others but the actual facts were mostly corrupted beyond recognition. Also this process took 500-800 years and developed in environment in which existing historical written sources on the same events did exist (even if they weren't directly accessible to most).

Interestingly we have surviving Hittite letters complaining about the Achaeans causing some trouble in the vicinity of Troy along with a guy whose name sounds very similar to Priam (although he actually seems to have been on the Greek side). And we somewhat confidently know that Troy had a king named Alexander (Alakasandu) which happens to be the Greek name of Paris (of course there were probably many Trojan kings carrying that name over the years).

Of course that doesn't mean much, the Iliad is a mishmash of different historical events from different periods (based on the descriptions of weapons, armour, political systems, cities etc.). There is probably a massive accuracy gap between oral history like the Iliad and written one (including the Hebrew bible).

As a left-leaning forum

Even if true it's almost entirely orthogonal.

The "right" is usually only against government control, intervention and surveillance until they get into power. Then they double down on them. Also right wing parties/groups are generally better at controlling and silencing internal opposition (since they are lot better shutting up and falling in line when push comes to shove regardless of their personal beliefs). So they are usually a lot more effective at imposing these things.

Well everyone pays the same for oil (unless there are export/import control and adjusted by transportation costs) worldwide.

So americans will be paying 2x as well its just that some of that money will stay in the country instead of going to the middle easter or US (which happens to be the largest supplier of oil to the EU)

Back in 2025 EU imported ~15% from the gulf. China was over 40% and Japan at 95%...

is laughable

Exactly, that's why it was obvious he was speaking implicitly.

And well... EU will have to clean up others mess that they sprayed all over Europe anyway.

Apple's proposal was only for photos being uploaded to iCloud and not local ones.

IIRC weren't there some thoughts that they'd switch iCloud to E2E but add local scanning on upload (compare to what it currently when Apple, Google, etc. freely scan all your cloud photos anyway). That didn't seem like a terrible deal on paper.

Well it's privacy from private companies. The government still needs to see everything you do just in case. Its not like you have anything to do hide? Do you?

Due to lack of transparency. The way the EU is structured makes it way easier for national governments to push policies under the radar and avoid any type of responsibility by deflecting any backlash to the EU (due to fundamental flaws in how it's functioning).

That's not the point. Voters generally can't vote for their preferred EU policies because they come bundled with internal policies which are obviously much more important for voters.

It's a bit like with replacing senators in the US with state governors (except actually worse since US is way more centralized and local and federal parties are much more aligned).

If voters actually voted for council representatives directly they could actually influence it in meaningful ways. Now e.g. in Germany a CDU voter won't suddenly switch to AFD or Greens just because they prefer their stance on Chat Control (or whatever else).

Straw man... voters in parliamentary democracies generally are fully aware of whom the prime minister is going to be if the party wins.

Nobody really knows or cares who is going to be appointed to the commission since domestic issues always completely over shadow it.

So far seems like none of those use cases have generated meaningful income streams? The consumer/non-developer market is mostly dominated by OpenAI and Google anyway...

Because Microsoft managed to sell it to a huge number of companies, not directly because people are using it. Hardly anyone is paying for Grok.