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vacekj

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Computational Tyranny 12 months ago

Good post, articulates what I've been feeling in regards to rising complexity but stagnating benefits. One point the author gets wrong though, is that it's not a critique of capitalism, but a critique of monopolies. All of the examples they provided are monopolies or oligopolies - utility company, government, big corporations. The government can get away with wasting lives precisely because they have no competition. You cannot subscribe to another tax authority, and therefore give feedback to your current one that it is misbehaving. In a free market, computational tyrrany is still a problem, but it's the company's problem, not the user's, because the user can switch to another provider of state services, electricity, and reduce revenue to the misbehaving company or state.

The only way to resolve these issues is to put a cost on misbehavior, and the only way to put a cost on misbehavior is a free market.

Too many, I believe for the same reasons as Javascript. It's not a bad thing when the target language is simply unfit for developer tooling, but in case of Javascript and Python it's simply the speed. Doing massive AST manipulation in a language that is both slow and unsafe like Javascript just seems like madness, and it's strange that we've been kind of okay with it for the longest time.