schmidtleonard

Can all the king's agents and all the king's men stop Teams from frequent silent failures to deliver a short message in Year of the Lord 2026?

Yeah, but the "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are" parts of the economy do tend to exponentially run away until a big enough shitshow incinerates enough capital to reset the clock.

Pool's closed.

As opposed to posting on HN complaining about reddit, which is where the real money's at? Nah, this shit was dank enough to make it into popular culture. We have:

1. The shamelessness absurdity of using "market is up" to deflect from a pedo scandal

2. The fact that the market said "nope" and tanked immediately after Bondi tried to lean on it

I've heard a few traders refer to it as "The Bondi Top" -- she really top-ticked it to perfection. We all wish she hadn't.

This is a story of other careers having salaries pushed down relative to inflating essentials and the resulting economic surplus being squeezed into asset portfolios. It's a story of rich people getting paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are and soaking up more than 100% of economic growth for the last 50 years. Not a story of software engineers working for a living and getting what would have been a blue-collar salary for it.

arguments against mercantilism

It has been funny to watch the rise of "China is beating us" rhetoric against the steady backdrop of "mercantilism is obsolete/bad" dogma, because the elephant in the room is that China has been running a textbook mercantilist playbook.

Overinflated relative to the wet dreams of the ownership class.

The open source tooling got quantization support 3 years ago! It was a lesser type of quantization, but more than enough to prove that the savings just go to bigger models.

Hey, that's not fair! It's also used for degenerate gambling.

more nuance

Not enough to diffuse liability. 15 years ago when recommender algorithms were the new hotness, I saw every single group of students introduced to the idea immediately grasp the implication that the endgame would involve pandering to base instincts. If someone didn't understand this, it's because

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

Also, if I was a corporate simp conspiring to destroy Linux, this is exactly the type of stupid hill I would try to bait the open source community into dying on. If they add a stupid compliance feature that everyone bypasses in practice, there isn't much I can do, but if they insist on openly flaunting the law I can go to war.

I think people are mature enough to be able to read past a headline

What trainwreck of misconceptions could possibly compel an otherwise reasonable person to believe something so ridiculous?

Messaging is attention-weighted. It always has been, but the exploitation of this fact has been on the rise and in 2026 everyone should know it and internalize the consequences: if you signal boost statement A and bury nuance B, you are promoting statement A, flat out, completely independent of what B brings to the table.

"Convicted fraudster pardons convicted fraudster therefore you can trust convicted fraudster."

Wild!

It's interesting that both the USA and China found that the prosperity maximum happened when capitalism was kept in line with a firm hand, even though China approached from the left and the USA approached from the right and later departed back to the right.

Exactly, it's the Lex Fridman gambit: a reputation for asking safe questions to powerful people tends to snowball because "safe, popular interview platform" is something they are all looking to self-promote on.

If you want to see the mask slip, watch Lex's interview with Zelensky.

Is there anything in Georgia not named Peachtree?

Brains turn off if you say Voldemort's name out loud. These ideas need to be rediscovered and rebranded.

TechnologyConnections debunked the Phoebus Cartel a while ago.

tl;dw incandescent bulbs can be made more efficient and brighter by running them hotter, but this reduces the lifetime. The obvious Nash Equilibrium involves increasingly hot/bright/efficient bulbs and as much lying about lifetime as a typical consumer would accept, which is a lot. The idea behind the Phoebus Cartel was to force honesty on the dimension where it was most likely to disappear. You are free to disapprove of this and reject bulb lifetime policing, but if so you support the "everybody lies" alternative. Pick your poison.

WWII revisionism is back in fashion these days, even in spaces that historically would have been only mildly to the right of center.

Death of the author.

The point pixl97 was making was that they believed anti-anti-fascist described the Flock CEO.

If Flock's reputation spoke for itself, their CEO wouldn't have to play these kind of legal games.

The big social media businesses deserve a Teddy Roosevelt character swooping in and busting their trusts, forcing them to play ball with others even if it destroys their moats. Boo hoo! Good riddance. World's tiniest violin.

This is a popular position across the aisle. Here's hoping the next guy can't be bought, or at least asks for more than a $400M tacky gold ballroom!

The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998

The problem is not solved and the techniques they use to deal with it run directly contrary to maximizing compute, because that's not historically something they have remotely cared about.

I can't believe parallel processing is still this big of a dumpster fire in python 20 years after multi-core became the rule rather than the exception.

Do they really still not have a good mechanism to toss a flag on a for loop to capture embarrassing parallelism easily?

The trouble with thinking in terms of blocs is that they don't solve the foundational economic problem: who is the sin-eater who is trusted and willing to run the deficits so that everyone else can run surpluses? Without a clear answer, you just have the same question repeated within and between blocs, so the same beggar-thy-neighbor incentives that exist without blocs exist within and between blocs, so the fighting continues within and between blocs until the question is answered. Blocs don't solve the problem at all.

The interwar era between WWI and WWII is most instructive for what a multipolar currency world looks like. The Pound Sterling still mostly worked before WWI and the Dollar rose in the wake of WWII.

The absence of a currency hegemon caused "Kindleberger problems," named after the economist who described them, and will cause them again. The big issue is that everyone wants to pump exports to pump their real economy, they can't all succeed because the world is a closed system, so they fight. First with tariffs, eventually with guns.

These Kindleberger Problems will get worse until the US gets its shit back together or China assumes the throne. Note that assuming the throne will destroy the export sector that they love so much (Triffin Dilemma), so not only are they not ready today, they don't even clearly want to be ready. Much like the US between WWI and WWII.

Buckle up, because the tariff wars, Great Depression, the economic driving force for the imperialism of Imperial Japan, and other awful things that you've heard of before all fall in the category of "Kindleberger Problems," are all downstream of not having a global currency hegemon, and are likely to rhyme with what comes next.

He probably means the civil war.

I'd like to point out that the South was only a fan of States Rights exactly insofar as they let them do slavery. The millisecond it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves, they suddenly weren't the same principled supporters of devolving and federating power. Funny how that works.