saimiam

What does saving face as a collective mean, in your estimation?

When Americans apologise to non-Americans for the behaviour of American tourists abroad, is that collective face saving?

How does a “diverse enough” media diet give someone the “same experience”? Maybe you’re picking and choosing media to reinforce your inner biases?

What, in your estimation, is the difference between saving face in China versus keeping-up-with-the-Joneses in America?

How is the existence of a PR/spin industry, the fact that many Americans live way beyond their means, or the proliferation of influencers whose job is to show a specific story not evidence of a society that values appearances and will do a lot to protect face?

The demand for Internet was an economic event where the efficiencies it afforded - quick, low cost communication, scale etc - made it attractive.

Other countries had invented the Internet (France, I believe) but it went nowhere.

Other comms technologies have been invented - Iridium satellites e.g. - but they died. Even distributed Internet based systems like Ipfs have the technology but not the adoption.

Technology is a part of the story but the success and spread of the US backed Internet is an economic story.

That the Internet has balkanised into walled gardens is downstream problem of successful products getting shittified until someone steps in a creates an alternative.

Nowhere did I say that economics = greed is good capitalism.

Economics is fundamentally a study of how human and human society processes self interest.

It tries to find broad patterns in how we process self interest and then supports or subverts those patterns. To build on your example, capitalism reinforces self-interest while communism tries to regulate self interest. Both are economic theories.

Two countries on Dell’s supply chain not wanting to fight against each other is an example of weighing self interest and deciding that participating in a global supply chain is worth more than fighting a war.

obsolete sci-fi

Well, living in an AGI world was sci-fi until arguably, we found ourselves in one post 2022.

If it were all BS, how do you explain success stories like the Internet and the notion that countries on Dell’s supply chain won’t go to war with each other?

Fundamentally, economics is the belief that humans have self-interests and act on them.

Economics is obviously not 100% right - it’s not a physical science - but more often than not, you can see it in action.

Economics is closer to weather science - we can make certain inferences and predictions which can be wrong but the basic working theory is broadly correct, imho.

7 - what if bots want to fcuk humans?

You’re probably right that many jobs can eventually be done by AI but not on day 1. Between Day 1 of the brave new AI world and Day N, humans will be in the loop doing stuff that other humans will try to automate away ad nauseam. On Day N+1, there’ll be yet another HN question asking what exactly humans will be doing in the Braver Newer AI World.

1. AI weights managers - people whose job is to optimize model weights to yield highly specific outcomes

2. Agentic tourism - maybe you’ll be able to send your AI agent/robot to visit a place before you decide if it worth your time and investment

3. Vehicular trains on highways where vehicles going to similar destinations coordinate and move as a unit. There’ll be people optimising roads for this. E.g., exit lanes on highways are designed for a handful of cars to exit safely at a time. What if vehicular trains can be thousands of vehicles long like those going to Burning Man?

4. Hallucination historians - people whose job is to document how AI errors have led to changes in the course of history

5. Animal linguistics - people whose can finally study the correlations between how human and animal languages deliver the same information

6. People designing puzzles and challenges to keep AI engaged during routine maintenance

7. S3x workers who specialise in servicing AI bots

8. Cryptographers whose job if to encode content using non mathematical methods because math base cryptography has become a solved problem

9. Interior designers who specialise in humanised decor because everything else is now handled by AI

10. Lawyers who fight cases on AI’s right to participate in the world as equals of biologics

On the iPhone at least, following your instructions, I got anything from ‘feel’ to ‘fell’ to ‘grok’ to ‘felt’.

Is it possible that your keyboard’s particular dictionary knows the words you’re more likely to use and adjusts for it?

Edit - Also got ‘grill’. Notice how the -t in felt and -I- in grill are not near path to L.

fine. Place a log on your own property - equivalent of posting a prompt on your own blog - then leave the gate open (equivalent of posting on the internet) only to have someone drive over that log uninvited and blame you for it.

Is writing a prompt in your blog any different from laying a hunting trap on your own property and catching someone's pet? Are you liable for the pet wandering on your property?

Shouldn’t that extra population in a limited amount of land lead to more demand and better outcomes for rail and roads?

Say I loosen the bolts of your car tires which causes a crash, that’s malware.

Say I lay a log on a road which you can clearly see and avoid but choose to drive over and crash your car, that’s prompt injection.

One is way worse than the other.

won’t work

A datacenter (earthbound or space) itself is a fantastical idea until a mix of events and inventions made it feasible to build them to sell compute.

Sounds to some extent like advertising and marketing in a market like India which is still predominantly offline and driven by visibility.

Not just undergrads. Even folks who believe in astrology or numerology depend on finding patterns in unrelated events to explain human behaviours.

The comment you were replying to was about school kids, not foreign students in post secondary programs looking for work/immigrant visas.

Also, foreign students enrolling in American colleges are (a) here as a result of decades of conscious policy choices (b) provide a not insignificant portion of the operating budget of many institutions (c) would go elsewhere if America wasn’t an option - so you aren’t really gaining much by keeping them out.

Source: former F1 visa masters student here

What would this new system look like that doesn’t involve the trade offs between having cabs on demand if you need them and having a walkable city if you don’t that the person you replied to spoke about?

Uber and friends have indeed democratised giving rides to people - though where I am, a few rich people have bought numerous cars and have daily wagers driving them finding fares via Uber - but at the cost of far more cabs on the road.

Others, notably motorbikes and scooter ride aggregators have emerged to replicate Uber. These motorbike cabs are even harder to regulate than cabs.

Uber, imo, has broken the equilibrium that existed before.

I blame apps and products like WhatsApp and Nextdoor. We've created these online means of connection (and conflict) which allows us to communicate without having to actually meet anyone in person.

Absent these forced meetings, parents barely know their neighbors and consequently, their kids barely know anyone even two doors down.

FD - I pay Insta to advertise a product for parents.

The results of above mentioned advertising have been great. I get inbound enquiries, parents get their curiosity about the usefulness of what I offer whetted. I don’t understand how the ad was unhelpful to the parent and me.

other parts of the stack

As a web developer, you’re the like the guy standing with a clipboard outside a fancy club checking if people requesting entry are allowed or not. Basically, level 1 security.

If someone is not on the list, your job is to default to declining them access, not granting them access assuming level 2 security will handle them at a deeper layer.

It’s possible that the teams you work with expect fuzzy behaviour from the website but that’s a choice, not a practice.

If you’re good at something, never do it for free…or something.

Let OP make his “hire me and I’ll tell you why your AI first approach is bunk” market.

After reading your comment, I was reminded of my first and last visit to a zen meditation center where we had to meditate by staring at a wall sitting on some sort special cushion designed for this sort of meditation.

I think your parallel is spot on!

It’s such a shock to the system to realise that “unprincipled enemy” referenced here is the US.

The trouble is that no one has a cogent definition of creativity. Without that, how would you even know whether you are being creative or not?

Or is it like "I'll know it when it see it" smut?

Now if agents do get so good that no human review is required, you wouldn’t bother with the library in the first place.

The comment you responded to is (presumably) talking about the transition phase where LLMs can help implement but not fully deliver a feature and need human oversight.

If there are reasonably good devs in low CoL areas who can coax a new feature or bug fix for an open source project out of an LLM for $50, i think it’s worth trialling as a business model.

certainly found elsewhere

I agree that if someone discovered the artist elsewhere, Apple has weaker standing in claiming a huge commission. But if they found an artist elsewhere, they would also know that they can support that artist elsewhere and not through the iOS app. If the patron found them through the patreon iOS app and use the app to consume the artist's content, then clearly the patron has indicated that they prefer the iOS experience.

If a user almost exclusively uses the Patreon ios app to consume the artist’s content and likes to live inside the ios ecosystem for frictionless payments using the card on file/privacy/UX/whatever, then I feel apple should get to set the terms of engagement.

If you were a chain store in a high end mall where customers cars were all parked for free by valets, mall staff knew their names, and generally made them feel special, you’d not balk at a higher commission to be paid to mall for access to their customers, right? Airports come to mind for this.

I believe apple lets you set whatever price you want on their store, just not tell customers that they could get a lower price elsewhere/on the vendor’s website (I don’t follow App Store policies very closely so my info is probably out of date).

Looks like they took Peter Thiel’s animosity towards competition too literally by blocking BYD from the US market. Without competition, they had no incentive to innovate since they were selling into the wealthiest market in the world for their product, the US.

No innovation made them stagnate. Being blocked from the US made BYD innovate.

I can think of birthdays when even the most diehard asker turns into a guesser - they would never go out of their way and ask to be coddled on their birthday but still don't mind bit of a fuss being made on their behalf.