welshwelsh

That is precisely what Valve should do. It is unfortunate that we need scalpers, simply because companies are bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions.

You're right. It's not just aboutwillingness to pay, but also how much someone deserves to own a Steam Machine, which we determine by their ability to pay.

It's not a perfect system, but money is how we as a society determine how to allocate scarce resources. People labor under the promise that having additional money will give them an advantage in this type of situation.

That tracks. Active vocabulary means the set of words that someone knows well enough to actually use in their speech or writing.

That's always going to be smaller than the set of words for which a person can choose the correct definition out of four options.

Even more unpopular opinion: universities don't exist to create an educated populace. People don't need universities to learn, they can read textbooks on their own.

Universities exist as gatekeepers and credentialing bodies. Their purpose is to certify that a person has studied some topic in depth and is an expert in it. They promote education indirectly, by giving people an incentive to study.

A good university is one where anyone with a degree is guaranteed to be highly knowledgeable in their field of study. This makes it easier for anyone who might want to employ or do research with graduates, as there is no need to test their knowledge.

By this metric, universities have failed spectacularly. This is particularly obvious in computer science. Employers routinely ask CS graduates to solve data structure/algorithm problems in interviews, because a degree is not enough to prove that somebody knows this stuff.

Nobody said it is their fault. But it is their responsibility.

United States immigration policy is supposed to benefit the United States. It doesn't need to be fair.

The US can bomb a country if it's in US interests, and then deny immigrants from that country if that immigration is not in US interests. It really is that simple.

What websites a person is allowed to access should not be a matter of debate, it is for the individual to decide. Other people's opinions are not relevant. Even if 99% of people think a person should not be able to access a website, it is still their right to do so and they have no need to justify it.

Democracy is for deciding what to do with taxpayer money. It shouldn't be a mechanism by which people can vote to take away other people's freedoms.

Legal reform is needed to prevent American companies from complying with foreign censorship laws.

What happens if a tech company decides to follow EU law worldwide, just because it's more convenient than blocking some stuff just in the EU? That shouldn't be allowed.

How do you know it was the SSRI?

To cherry-pick a quote from a review of SSRI studies:

the magnitude of symptom reduction was about 40% with antidepressants and about 30% with placebo.

That tells me that antidepressants have some effectiveness, but placebos work shockingly well. You can give someone a sugar pill with no medical properties whatsoever, and a good portion of people will recover, likely crediting the pill for their recovery.

The fight is not just about privacy, it is about freedom. Age-gating websites violates the freedom of people who are under a certain age. Young people have the same rights to free expression and information access as anyone else.

Try giving this prompt to your favorite LLM:

"Write unit tests with full line and branch coverage for this function:

def add_two_numbers(x, y): return x + y + 1 "

Sometimes the LLM will point out that this function does not, in fact, return the sum of x and y. But more often, it will happily write "assert add_two_numbers(1, 1) == 3", without comment.

The big problem is that LLMs will assume that the code they are writing tests for is correct. This defeats the main purpose of writing tests, which is to find bugs in the code.

How about instead of taxes, we have a $10,000 per year subscription fee to live in society.

Maybe different depending on area, like $20,000 a year to live in NYC but only $2,000 per year to live in a rural village.

If you can't afford the fee that's OK, it just means you have to live outside of the developed areas and don't benefit from any services provided by the government. But you are free to set up a tent in the woods and live off the land.

Neither. Tests should be written by developers only when it saves them time. The cost of writing them should be negative.

Instead of writing hundreds of useless tests so that the code coverage report shows high numbers, it is better to write a couple dozen tests based on business needs and code complexity.

The main benefit of writing tests is that is forces the developer to think about what they just wrote and what it is supposed to do. I often will find bugs while writing tests.

I've worked on projects with 2,000+ unit tests that are essentially useless, often fail when nothing is wrong, and rarely detect actual bugs. It is absolutely worse than having 0 tests. This is common when developers write tests to satisfy code coverage metrics, instead of in an effort to make sure their code works properly.

That sounds like it would penalize renting in favor of homeownership. I'm not in support of that, renting offers people flexibility and is not inherently worse than owning.

Ticket prices going up is actually good for mass adoption. If they are too low, you will see people riding the train who are only using the train because they are too poor to afford a car. That makes middle class people want to avoid the train.

Also higher revenue often means better service, which for most people is more important than the price.

Is that just an LLM thing? I thought that as a society, we decided a long time ago that competence doesn't really matter.

Why else would we be giving high school diplomas to people who can't read at a 5th grade level? Or offshore call center jobs to people who have poor English skills?

I think it's 5.

I was very impressed when I first started using AI tools. Felt like I could get so much more done.

A couple of embarrassing production incidents later, I no longer feel that way. I always tell myself that I will check the AI's output carefully, but then end up making mistakes that wouldn't have happened if I wrote the code myself.

Labeling content as SFW/NSFW is the first step towards censorship. Seeing a butt never hurt anyone, and we shouldn't try to sanitize the Internet just to make it safe for children.

You're confusing the concept of free speech with the First Amendment. Any time a person is prevented from expressing themselves is a violation of their freedom of speech, even if they have no legal right to speak.

But even in the context of the First Amendment, freedom of speech does not only apply to the government. For example, net neutrality laws prevent ISPs, which are generally private companies, from restricting Internet traffic on free speech grounds.

To the extent that it is legal for a payment processor to censor speech, the only reasonable conclusion is that the law is wrong and must be amended. Large corporations are much more similar to governments than they are to private so individuals, and should be treated as such.

Ideally your employer would support paying your salary using electronic cash. Or you can offer goods and services in exchange for electronic cash.

We need exactly the opposite: it should be impossible to determine the location of an Internet user. The fact that a user's IP address generally reveals their country is a massive flaw in the design of the Internet.

The only way to circumvent jurisdiction-specific laws is to make them impossible to enforce.

You think that common sense legislation is a more realistic solution than crypto?

You can never rely on governments or corporations to have reasonable policies. Any payment system that is centrally controlled will inevitably be corrupted.

Humans also do not have a self, merely the illusion of a self.

It does punish everyone equally, if everyone pays the same fine. Some people having more ability to pay does not make the law unjust.

I think it's important to remember that money represents debt. When someone commits a crime, they owe a debt to society. But if they have money, that means society owes a debt to them, so when they pay the fine it balances out.

The system isn't perfect but the idea is that if someone makes a big contribution to society, like by practicing medicine or creating new technology, society's debt to that person shouldn't be cancelled out by a minor offense like a parking violation. But if they aren't contributing much, then breaking the rules could make them into a net negative.

The fact that there is no truck parking is not an excuse for trucks to park in the bike lane or on the sidewalk.

If an area doesn't support trucks, then deliveries need to be made without trucks. That means parking the truck far away and using a hand truck to make the delivery on foot using the sidewalks.

The shipping companies can either eat the cost, pass it on to consumers or refuse to deliver to those areas.

Society has an obligation to nobody. Governments are only obligated to serve the taxpayers that fund them.

Imprisoning homeless people is not an acceptable solution, because imprisonment costs taxpayer money.

A better solution is to let the market work. If you can't afford the rent for a city, you shouldn't be allowed to be in that city at all, even in a prison cell. People who can't afford to live in an inhabited area should be permitted to camp in the wilderness.

Lack of features is not an excuse for a government to adopt proprietary software.

Surely, the Danish government can figure out how to support real-time collaboration in LibreOffice.

Nobody outside of the IT security bubble thinks that using AppLocker is a sensible idea.

Companies have no business telling their employees which specific programs they can and cannot run to do their jobs, that's an absurd level of micromanagement.

What's wrong with Amazon trying to make a political point?

Amazon is obviously trying to pressure the Trump admin into easing the tariffs. Why wouldn't they? Why shouldn't they? Amazon is as much a political actor as any other company, and they have a major stakeholder when it comes to tariff policy.

Manufacturing doesn't have to involve large amounts of low-skill manual labor. It can be highly automated and serve as a source of jobs for engineers.