d--b

People don’t realize the breadth of the impact of the low rates and quantitative easing policies.

This stuff clearly helped navigate the 2008 crisis. But the cost is huge: bubbles everywhere, inequalities through the roof, spiralling government debt.

And while the interest rates have gone up, bank reserves are still nowhere near their pre-2008 levels.

Unfortunately, the way the monetary system works is quite difficult to understand, and is unlikely to ever enter the political debate.

Maybe it’s a New York thing.

Best moment of the process.

It felt awesome because what we had before were books and TV.

We can’t recreate the feeling we had back then, because it was caused by a drastically new experience.

Suddenly I could chat with people on the other side of the planet that I had never met before. Suddenly I had access to an inifinite amount of content without having to browse a physical library or wait for the right radio program to air.

It was a liberation.

But the truth is that content quality was generally low, and it was difficult to search.

There was no wikipedia, no hacker news, most websites were full of ad banners, pyramid schemes, half baked content, keywords designed to optimize SEO. You’d spend literally hours clicking through web rings, just to realize none of the websites in the ring were good.

Connection was slow as fuck, and expensive. Downloading a good quality photo could take 5-10 minutes. And these were minutes you would pay for the price of a phone call.

It was extremely impractical.

The internet has since been through many phases. There was maybe a piracy phase, with Napster and CD burners. Then the start of Google was quite something. The start of facebook was exciting to a lot of people (I am proud to have never joined), and so were the beginnings of Twitter. Now it’s clearly all about video content.

But it’s never stopped being the internet. Every time something new arises, like Second Life, or Youtube, or Discord, it feels fresh again, and then we see the cracks, we feel the pressure or monetization.

My point is that the feeling that OP is after is that feeling of freshness, of optimism, of experiencing something different. People like that don’t realize that what they’re after is not an end goal, it’s a journey.

Even without enshittification, a mature network is never going to keep the dynamics of its early days. Many people criticize HN, Wikipedia, Youtube for not being what they used to be. Even though the content is still there and still good.

It is true to a certain extent that succesfull networks eventually attract bad actors, but imo boredom is the most important factor in the decline of these systems.

I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.

The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.

They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.

God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.

But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.

Still giving me goosebumps

Shouldn't come as a big surprise really.

But I think GP's point is that it could be done in 20 minutes. The A train is a subway, it's nowhere near the speed of the Heathrow Express.

Not sure why somebody thought it was a good idea. There probably was a use case at some point where it seemed smart to allow for things like this. Maybe it’s for CI, but I really can’t think of why.

But I really doubt this could be a bug. I mean why would patch even need to read the commit message if it wasn’t to scan it for diff?

I think this is visible in sports betting markets. Unless all games are rigged, games outcomes are fairly random events, and betting markets are pretty good at assessing the probabilities of a team winning. Same thing happens in finance. Option markets are really good at assessing the probabilities of asset movements.

The thing though is that these markets are only good in predicting recurring events like game results or financial asset movements. They are good _overall_, as in, if you take 100,000 sport games, the bettings odds are going to be overall in line with what actually happens.

Hence some people deduced that crowds with skin in the game were wise in predicting random stuff. And what happened then is that some of them thought this kind of predictive power could apply to any kind of event, and then predictive markets were created, with the idea that crowds could magically come up with odds for anything, and that would be fairly correct. But what works for recurring events don't hold for single events like Maduro's capture or the end of the Iran war. So the odds in these market is only the result of influence and insider information.

The result is that the odds are generally completely off, unless there is insider information. That's kind of what happened in the 2008 financial crisis. The bets there were on loans defaulting. These events are rare enough that it's impossible to assess their probability easily. And so banks relied on rating agencies (influence), to price the odds of these events happening. Rating agencies were wrong on a lot of these bets, meaning all the bets were placed at very very wrong prices, resulting in the crisis we saw.

The weird outcome of it all, is that those prediction markets have become insider information detectors. That's how they caught the guy. Whoever is winning big on these markets is necessarily cheating.

But I guess the main takeaway for me is that society is in such a state that a lot of people actually bet big on these things. Probably a combination of being fed dreams of fortune since childhood and the american dream not delivering. It's all very sad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymarket

15 years ago, Dacia used to make stripped sedans that sold for as cheap as 7.5k euros. It was a wild success. Now, they've pivoted to making modern cars, still on the cheap side, but the cheapest now is a compact car that sells for 13k.

The only reason is that those modern cars have higher margins and there is no competition for cheap cars. So why make cheap cars to kill the market of higher margins ones?

The free market, if it works at all, should produce companies like wheelfront that caters to that share of the population.

I take acetaminophen for fever, and those kind of full-body diffuse ill-feeling.

I take ibuprofen for localized intense pain.

I take aspirin for headaches and sore muscles.

I think next we should ban them from eating butter, and you know, riding mountain bikes. Just protecting them you know.

What about us? Oh us, we're addicted, so... Well, you just can't take that away from us, can you? I mean there would be riots. But the kids, they wouldn't know what they're missing, right?

</sarcasm>

This is such a weird law. I doubt this would be constitutional in France. You can't just pass a law that affects some people but not others. It's against the principle of equality.

> Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Ben Lerner is from that world. Very New York, very arty, very socialite. If I remember correctly one of his books sets place in Marfa, the Art center.

Ben Lerner is not what "normal people" read, nor is New York magazine.

I find the books pretty good, but I think I qualify as one of "them".