MarkPNeyer

I’ve worked with Mike at theattitudecoach.net. He’s not a career coach but he’s been very effective at helping me advance my career but helping me improve my functioning in all aspects of life.

This seems so much like humans that it makes me think lots of people are learning math with an ML-like approach instead of… whatever the heck people like engineers and mathematicians are doing.

Did a quick ctrl-f for 'bitcoin' here in the comments.

Finding nothing. Just have to add: Lightning Network payments are ~free, ~instant, and as bearer instruments the merchants aren't responsible for fraud.

This is a result of capitalism with unlimited credit-based money supply.

Modern interment businesses rely on the equation CAC < LTV, that is, “is the cost of acquiring a customer less than the lifetime value?” If so, they’ll spend money on advertising and this support an attention-based feed.

The fact that advertising now leads to increased revenues, which can be used as a basis for credit, completes the feedback loop.

With money creation coming from credit, interest rates can be unreasonably low. Bond yields, even for dismal companies, have been ludicrously low by historical standards. Advertising being a tool to turn money into revenue streams, anything that produces an emotional response will be monetized to the extreme.

A company can raise case by borrowing at essentially zero cost, use this cash to buy ads, and increase the demand for attention.

With fixed money supply, the interest rates wouldn’t get nearly so low. That would reduce demand for advertising because the cost of borrowing the money to acquire a user might exceed the LTV of the user.

Same.

It took working at a social media company on ad ranking to make the thing stick; I saw how much effort is going into putting stuff in front of my brain that is sorted in terms of the likelihood that I will react to it.

Here’s a story about the FBI stealing $80 million after lying to a judge:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beve...

Or we need money they can’t be created via debt.

Issuing debt to buy back shares is a strategy that works great when interest rates are very very low.

But when the money supply is scarce, only so much leverage can exist, so issuing debt to buy shares would be far far riskier.

Private ownership of businesses, so long term consequences fall on someone with the authority to steer them right.

Why do you care if you harm the company long term? It’s not like you are tied to it’s performance forever. When equity and labor markets are liquid, why wouldn’t you make decisions that help you now, and cause long term hurt something you have no long term stake in? If you don’t, your peers will.

What if your belief is that “the US administration” is an inertial beaucracy that carries on regardless of who gets elected?

Obama ran on ending wars in Iraq and afghanistan, and then he got in and those options disappeared. Trump did similarly.

So what would it look like if the US had been run for decades primarily by unelected agencies, and the us media served them, not whoever happened to get elected?

Basically all of history was powerful people lying to everyone and mass media helping them do it.

For some reason people think the world is different today.

One more thing I’d add; for the love of all that is holy make sure the tests run lightning quick.

What you want to do is first reduce the cost and risk of making changes, to a close to zero as possible.

Then, come up with a broad system design that defines higher levels of abstraction. Your goal is not to redesign the system from scratch but to specify the existing hierarchies which are currently implicit in the code. Are there different modules that naturally emerge? Ok, what are they?

Once you have a sense of what the destination will look like, make tiny changes to get just one module done. Move in little bits at a time, to build up evidence that things can work.

The way to change a culture is to set such a strong positive example that people naturally went to follow. Telling other people their work sucks is not that example, but first pitching in to speed up development cycles can make everyone happy.

And lastly you have at least some responsibility to inform management of the risk they aren’t aware of. Things will go much better for you if you tell your manager that the codebase was built in a way that makes future changes expensive and risky, and this is fine for where the business was but at some point it makes sense to invest in shifting the development velocity/risk curve of the business.

Exactly. They want it both ways. If you are algorithmically boosting some views and deleting others, now it’s your speech and you should be liable.

You can do both of these things in El Salvador right now.

The lightning network is, yes.

The kings who stole money from their nobles soon found themselves surrounded by nobles who were all suddenly impoverished, and bordered by newly wealthy neighboring countries whose banking sectors and suddenly and inexplicably took off. See, for example, the fail of Spain and subsequent rise of the Dutch.

> if you consider that the economy almost stopped for two years straight

It wasn’t Covid that did this. It was government mandates in response to Covid. Printing money let everyone who supported these government actions ignore all of the tradeoffs involved and obfuscate what, under hard money, would be a direct comparison.

What you are arguing for is a kind of financial authoritarianism. You are using words like “driver’s seat” and “pilot” to describe an intense amount of power in the hands of unelected persons. Financial authoritarianism can be used to pay for other kinds of authoritarianism like lockdowns, concentration camps, or a war spanning multiple decades and the entire globe. The First World War would have ended much sooner if the belligerents were unable to steal the wealth of their populace by printing money. The arguments you are making, that recessions need money printing - those arguments were going to be made by government-funded academics who obviously have an incentive to argue that governments should not be constrained in their budgets.

Hard money makes the cost of government action immediate and legible. Hard money puts constraints on what the government can do without taking money directly from people who feel the cost immediately. This is why authoritarians really don’t want hard money.

We can apply this same notion of thinking to ideas like “mark neyer” or “the neyer family”. This closes the loop, though - who I am is both an idea and a substrate for ideas, at the same time.

There are numerous mathematical measures of complexity.

Do you think people believe “tic tac toe is simpler than chess” because of cultural conditioning?

All of these strategies make sense given the financial environment we live in, with a money supply that constantly increases via debt creation. There’s something like an arms race for attention. The combination of this arms race and unlimited financing means we have production costs for for one hour of entertainment in the tens of even hundreds of millions.

I think good art comes from individuals with fantastic visions; but since no individual can fund things at the scale to compete in the attentional arms race, we are left with endless bland re-hashes since these compete on existing brands and thus are lower risk.

The little red hen is clearly a tool used to control other people.

The story could easily have been written by venture capitalists, trying to convince potential employers to sign on to risky entrepreneurial ventures in exchange for a share in the future rewards.

And obviously, animals don’t form cross species coalitions to manufacture baked goods. So it’s Better for us to disregard the story entirely.

There were bombings almost every day in the US in the 1970’s.

“Clarify your requirements” is really good advice here.

How much do you care about: - climate - schools - transportation - proximity to a big city - red state / blue state / purple state - time zone Etc etc etc.

Be more specific in thinking about the details of what you want, along as many dimensions as possible.

Governments are just mafias with better PR.

How do 7 and 4 work together?

If the reward for staking is fixe at 5%, what keeps the issuance rate from being net positive?

> I'm less concerned about the current state of the code, and far more concerned with how easily I can change the state of the code without incident.

This is great, it’s the most concise definition of clean code I can think of: how easily can I change the code in ways that the system as a whole changes only in ways I intended.

You are providing an excellent example of the fact that in a business context, good code means “successfully meeting business objectives at acceptable cost”

But there is another context in which we might evaluate code, something like, “how far the code is from ideal, where ideal is the state the code would end up in if we could push a magic button to refactor the entire codebase, for free, to perform identical functionality and reduce both operational risk and the cost of future development”

Or, more succinctly: how clean is the codebase? Clean code has a cost, and sometimes it isn’t worth paying. That one off bash script that runs once every few months perhaps isn’t worth tidying up. I think the author is really asking about clean codebases.

Totally feel you on the desire to help your parents take better care of themselves. Both my parents are much further along the aging process than they ought to be; my dad is 67 and in a memory unit. My mom is in bad shape as well.

The main thing I’ve found from trying to help them be healthier: trying to change other people is generally a recipe for increasing your own stress without accomplishing much else.

Instead of trying to change them, I’ve been focusing on trying to enjoy what time I have left with them. It’s bittersweet for sure, but I’m finding that knowing where this is all going accentuates the sweetness of being able to love my parents while they are still around.

Best of luck to you and yours.

Computerized societies are still limited by their resources. We are all seeing now the effects of a society that thinks it can print money without ruining its money supply.

Faster transportation technology can lower the cost of moving. If you can travel 600mph reliably and cheaply, you can move 200 miles from your job and still enjoy a 20 minute commute. Families could relocate to a shared community without people changing jobs.