disqard

You sparked a thought / mental model:

The US ruling class periodically senses "blood in the water", and sets things up for a "feeding frenzy" (money and/or power), where a small, well-connected elite engorge themselves on hapless victims.

Iraq and Afghanistan provided such opportunities during my lifetime, and before that, it was the Vietnam war, and history has plenty more examples farther back.

In this most recent feeding frenzy, it appears to me, that the victims are some important (maybe critical) parts of the US itself. A sort of auto-cannibalism, if you will.

Yeah, Kevin Munger's book skillfully dissects what he calls "The YouTube Apparatus" [0]

The creators aren't really tuning their output based on consumer feedback, they're actually optimizing for the platform's metrics, so it's the (algorithmic) machine incentivizing humans to essentially feed it money.

[0] https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-mrbea...

> I thought it would bring people together, but instead, it's used to find and create new ways in which we can group and hate each other.

As McLuhan wrote, "The Medium is the Message". AFAICT, the medium known as "the web" is (paradoxically) not about interconnection, but its core property is fragmentation.

This intrinsic nature is turbocharged via algorithmic per-user "engagement optimization".

I'm with you -- that much yearly income is more than enough to retire on, after one year.

Yes, one can argue that the world is (today) set up such that these numbers aren't huge, to which my response would be that today's world is badly mis-calibrated along the axis of income inequality.

> But no. Trump, ever the "stable genius," prefers cozying up to dictators.

Part of me is convinced Putin has enough dirt to sink even this "Teflon Don", which necessitates him acquiescing to whatever the puppet-master demands.

What looks like "cozying up" might very well be "time to pay your dues".

At the same time, his IDGAF attitude is one of his key strengths, so maybe there really is nothing anyone could possibly divulge that would "hurt" him.

Brilliant! Thanks for sharing.

This is... genius, or parody? I can't tell.

"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome"

Perhaps ironic, but I feel compelled to point out that:

"That said,"

...is a bog-standard ChatGPT-esque way to begin one's "summarize and wrap up" paragraph :D

This looks amazingly useful!

Thank You For Making And Sharing!

Correct, though my perception is that it's a distant Nth-place player behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.

Your take is radically empathetic, and we have seen (e.g. with Tony Hsieh) how it all unraveled.

I wonder if Shitter is a big factor in this spiral. Jaron Lanier pointed this out in Nov 2022 [1].

Unfortunately, if so, we have a worst-case scenario of "getting high on your own supply", and nobody can cut him off (or stage an "intervention").

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...

Well-played!!

You forgot to capitalize the "h" in "he" in your last sentence.

Only one mention of David Cope on HN. Oh well, at least somebody remembers...

I had the same thought as you -- glad to see I'm not the only one.

> inter-continental power transmission cables

That's like saying "what we need is to improve mass public transit" -- no Vulture Capitalist would bite at that!

You have to pitch a solo-vehicle-in-a-tunnel or some such crazy idea, so that everybody knows you're a "visionary".

Having worked at a Big Tech for 5+ years now, I'd disagree.

Not only do you work for ACME corp., your team's manager (and their manager, all the way up to the director) need to do what the C-Suite thinks will make Wall St. happy, to raise the stock price. All work planning must justify why this and not something else.

You almost certainly cannot pretend that your team is like an independent startup/lab embedded within Acme.

If you've always shunned big companies thus far, your intuition has not led you astray.

Edit, to add that you do interact with your team, so if that is good, you can be insulated from the rest of Acme in that particular dimension (which is a big component of one's experience of working for any employer).

I use Claude 3.5 Sonnet for coding assistance (and pay $20/month for the "professional" plan).

I recommend it!

Thank you. Keep calling them out!

I was debating with someone else on here that the "base layer" is "men with guns" [1]

They responded that the base layer is "money".

I have to concede that the behavior of Tech bosses is easier to explain using the money model.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42938656

Maybe it's a case of:

"When people show you who they are, believe them"

married to:

"Corporations are people"

i.e., they are a business, and if you ascribe (even notional) respectability to them, you're being naive.

Yup, I'm going to dogpile on this:

> favorable environment for innovation

I may be wrong, but all indications are that this is a sort of "past glory".

I've not personally visited Shenzhen, but every online account (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toizHWGD-rE) shows that they are making everything there -- the "Designed in California, Made in China" is a tenuous situation, and not guaranteed to last.

Like how DeepSeek was a wake-up moment, there are several more waiting to happen.

Again, this is my very much "secondhand" perspective, but I think the GP's assertion is on borrowed time.

Did you compare it to tesseract?

If it's superior (esp. for scans with text flowing around image boxes), and if you do end up packaging it up for brew, know that there's at least one developer who will benefit from your work (for a side-project, but that goes without saying).

Thanks in advance!

Meta: This has been up for 7 hours now and it's encouraging to see that it hasn't automatically been flagged.

Edit: looks like I'm late to the party -- it was (predictably) flagged, and (thankfully) unflagged after protests.

Fair point. "How to control the men with guns" occupies the minds of billionaires. A lot.

> Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...

Yes, it is not "turtles all the way down" (or code/processes/law).

The "base layer" has always been "men with guns".

If you fail to cooperate, an armed security guard will take your badge and escort you to the build exit.

If that security guard does not cooperate, another man with a gun can always be found.

Thank You so much for making time to write that up! Deeply appreciated.

It's fascinating how this "turn-taking protocol" has emerged in this space -- as a (possibly weird) analogy, different countries don't always use the same electrical voltage or plug/socket form-factor.

Yet, the `role` and `content` attrib in json appears to be pretty much a de facto standard now.

Whoa! You broke my brain a bit there (but your posts often do, in a Good way!)

Would you be so kind as to ELI5 what you did in that index.js?

I've used ollama to run models locally, but I'm still stuck in chat-land.

Of course, if a blog post is in the works, I'll just wait for that :)

> ...finding programming that works for you

I see what you did there :D