eucyclos

"fuck you money" meets "money's getting shallow and weak"

By Jove you're right. To the avatar store!

>we do this socially too

There's a school of thought that the reason so many autistic founders succeed is that they're unable to interpret this kind of programming. I saw a theory that to succeed in tech you needed a minimum amount of both tizz and rizz (autism and charisma).

I guess the winning openclaw model will have some variation of "regularly rewrite your source code to increase your tizz*rizz without exceeding a tizz:rizz ratio of 2:1 in either direction."

I suspect it's a left vs right issue because the right is the cheerleader of the military industrial complex, which is only justified by protecting oil interests. If oil becomes a curiosity useful for making certain consumer products and little else, the military industrial complex is oversized by any metric, hence the right is against that.

Or to oversimplify even more: it's the Bush dynasty's fault.

That's probably why it's best to stay small. If you've gotten permits for 10kw project in a backyard or on a Walmart roof, you'll probably have a leg up when you start playing at a scale that brings out the nimbys.

>Should the model consider that more people consider one or the other to suck?

If it's teaching how to avoid logical fallacies, which includes appeals to the majority, the answer is an obvious 'no'.

True, but if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves, it's also worth remembering that most accounts of those regimes weren't written by the victors of a war that saw the other sides slavery practices as justification for said war.

Rental versus outright purchase is a weird transition. I have this idea for a faction in a post apocalyptic setting that started out as a libertarian community that idealized a society with zero slavery but found it constantly hiding in arrangements like the one you describe, so they made it very explicit and transactional instead: every member of the community is a central bank, and the currency takes the form of small clay discs with a number and a thumbprint. Anyone can mint their own money, but anyone can redeem money for hours of slave labor with the issuing party. And of course there are rules limiting what slaves can be compelled to do, like no minting more hours and no demanding a specific slave.

For some reason this concept is very sticky to me. I actually think it could work as a low tech monetary regime in a grid down scenario.

Maybe I should have said naturally rather than well. It's true that if privacy is your focus you can implement a Blockchain that achieves it, but at it's core Blockchain is a ledger of transactions that anyone can audit- privacy is not a natural outcome of that technology.

Which IMHO is a positive - no private transactions means corruption gets much harder, and that's always been a core selling point of the technology to me.

My Esperanto teacher told me 'there are always a lot of marriages after Esperanto conventions '. It makes sense it would be the primary shared language of some couples

I'd heard of this movie before and had to check it out - the scene I watched where he was speaking to who I assume is the female lead sounded like an American and an Italian both speaking perfectly passable Esperanto. If I were to nitpick his i's were a little soft - Esperanto i's are canonically pronounced ee - but Esperanto was made to accommodate lots of different accents without losing comprehensibility and it did that here. I actually found his Esperanto easier to follow than the girl's, but that's probably because I learned Esperanto from people speaking it with Canadian accents.

I thought Ben Goertzel had a good take on it: "someone made hands for a brain that doesn't exist yet"

Anonymity is the one thing cryptocurrency does not do well. It's much harder to sieze but much easier to trace.

I don't think the packaging is supposed to be alive at the time of usage.

Pressure cooking in small batches is the diy standard, I've had good results with a standard insta-pot

Bandcamp does ok without ignoring what the artists want. I think the biggest issue with buying directly from the musician isn't the price but the friction of purchasing online

Fascinating. I'm reminded of the 'conservation of ninjutsu' trope. We've known for a while that birth rates fall as education rates increase, but this almost suggests there's a 'conservation of iq' principle at a population level- you can have growing population or iq, but not both!

I am fascinated by the reverse Flynn effect - do you have a favorite theory to explain it?

Clearly Ireland does more than suggest it. If you think it's such a bad idea, maybe you can explain what salient factor is so different between the glorious past and the present quagmire.

Officially no, though bond purchases are the most common thing central banks do with cash. Unofficially though, new currency is mostly worth anything at all because it's backed by the 'full faith and credit ' of the hosting country. Faith and credit to accept it as payment for future debts to the country, ie taxes.

I think the argument is that governments don't fund public goods through taxes but through issuing currency, while taxes guarantee a demand for currency and prevent its devaluation. Hence the 'function' of taxes really is to 'destroy' money to prevent oversupply.

Not sure I disagree, though of course that's not how the system works formally.

Apres moi, le deluge.

never, ever is quite strong wording when you're in an arms race with 14 year olds who want to gain illicit access to something digital. I know everyone's a digital native these days and real life isn't a 90s hacker movie, but 'rarely' already seems like a pretty high bar given how ingenious a 14 year old deprived of their preferred entertainment can get.

I heard that in Japan, it's common for condo developers who want to buy out smaller buildings to compensate the owners with an equal amount of floorspace in the new building - not sure how common that practice actually is, but what a way to align incentives!

The majority of great works created by the ruling classes of Athens or London at the height of both cultures ascendency is a major counterexample. Maybe we just had bad luck as to today's ruling class.

I think the old theory of the planes of existence has a lot of utility here - if you substitute "the dimensionality at which you're analyzing your dataset" for the hermetic concept of "planes of existence" you get essentially the same thing, at least in lower dimensions like one (matter) or two (energy). Mind, specifically a human mind, would be a four dimensional under the old system, which feels about right. No idea how you'd set up an experiment to test that theory though. It may be completely impossible because experiments only work when they work in all contexts and only matter is ever the same regardless of context.

This is all true, but I think the issue is upstream of where you're pointing - democracy declines when the goal becomes to win rather than to serve the constituents. Parties are a way to win and they also reinforce the idea that winning is the goal.

I'm not sure as to solutions but I don't think they're impossible - something like an inoculation of the entire political class against the memeset that prioritizes winning over serving the constituents. Then if an unofficial party tries to seize power in a system that officially disallows them, the majority is already primed to respond in an organized way.

Well, I usually reconstruct what TFA is about in Hacker News from what readers are saying about it and I can report that it works almost as well for a lot less effort!

I jest, but on a serious note, a leading theological text would probably have the same ambiguity as to its meaning even if everyone had access to the original text. Knowing what everyone thinks something means isn't better than knowing what it means... but scientifically, they're indistinguishable!

Having seen student politics with and without parties - my student union had them, my engineering society banned them - I'm convinced that it's not bad voters that ruin democracies but political parties. Parties need to simplify their messages to get buy in, and promote a 'team first' over 'issues first' mentality in their members. They're anathema to principles of honest debate and compromise.

On the one hand, I agree and wish more people would pay for useful code. Hell, I wish I would be more willing to pay for useful code. It's irrational how unwilling many people, including myself, are to pay for things like that.

On the other hand, you wouldn't download a car...