hibikir

There's entire books on developmental economics which explain how states create institutions that might appear to be rules based, but are ultimately just negotiation and favor. They get more money from developed countries and investors that don't look to deep, but ultimately the rate of growth is quite bad, because investing money in that kind of environment just has a poor rate of return.

All well described, with experimental numbers and everything, for countries in Africa and Latin America. Little did people realize that no, you can also apply this to developed countries when they suffer sufficient degradation.

You have to read the article: 2.9 includes interchange fees, 0.6 does not. It's a really bad headline

Which makes perfect sense for face to face QR payments, as that's a very low risk payment system, in a situation with minimal fraud. Therefore, you go through a system with minimal fees. Moving far away from the expensive payment systems makes perfect sense there.

But this article's headline is already lying to you, because when you look at the table, yous ee that Stripe and Braintree include the interchange fee, and Adyen won't.

See how the Stripe percentage there does cover the entire interchange fee already. In many an online store, your median interchange fee, which is set 100% by what card the customer is using, is probably going to be over 2%. So 0.6% + interchange fee might even be cheaper than Adyen.

So the real argument IMO is whether it really makes sense for the US to keep bribing customers with points and cash back to keep people using expensive credit cards, vs the regulation in other places that limit fees, and removes most credit card bonuses, other than paying at end of month. But that's up to congress.

I worked on some of the very best funded plant research out there. When it comes down to it, there's enough variation caused by confounding factors, and it takes so long to capture more data, that almost everything anyone tries cannot be called a success or a failure for years, because the individual measurements for one small plot of land somewhere just don't mean anything. Once you do an entire experiment for a season, which takes months, and you grab the little noisy data you have, and turn it into real rows, we were down to very little.

You can do more tests on smaller things, like checking if some protein will kill some cells of a pest, but making sure a plant produces it enough that it actually does something significant to the real, live pests, that it's not toxic, and it doesn't harm the plant's yield massively (as it's now spending time producing your pesticide) is still going to take years. We might be able to fold proteins, but the kind of things we'd need to really simulate plant biology well enough to not need years of failures are still very far away.

And it's far worse in medicine, as with plants at least nobody has ethical concerns if they fail and die, and nobody needs to get consent from a corn seed. Getting to 50 actual data points from many medical studies is already a lot of effort. And imagine when it's a long term study, and you need to follow patients for 30 years, as theym move, or die, or decide to stop participating, or who knows what.

I suspect that a lot about what we call being very intelligent is ultimately out-remembering people around us. I think of all the times in my software career when I did something that others considered very high performance, it either came down to either having more energy than others at tackling a problem they thought was more trouble than it was worth, or just bringing back random knowledge from previous jobs or self study, and being able to apply it to the problem at hand.

I don't think I've had a truly original idea in my life. Combine A + B, when it's rare for people to know A and B at the same time. So from that perspective, what LLMs are doing is basically the same thing. Sometimes I am faster than the LLM because my context might be better organized, but it typically needs just a hint from me to steer itself correctly. It claims something is a memory leak, but smelling a rat, I suggest it to double check the garbage collection statistics too, at which point it's clear it's no leak, but a tuning error, at which point the LLM is better at tuning than me, because it has more energy than I do.

Maybe there's true brilliance out there, when something doesn't come out of combining data and building hypothesis until you get really lucky. My experience is not comprehensive. But I look around me, and it sure seems I've not been lucky enough to see it. Even the shiniest people I've worked with, which most of the audience here would recognize, have never shown me that they can go past this.

It just changes the baseline. Maybe weight stops being an easy discriminator, but we go back to clothes, styling and make up quality. The lookism still exists even among the prettiest, as we can see in the eating disorders and other issues among people in Hollywood. Many of the prettiest women on the big screen see themselves as on the edge of not getting any more work.

At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms. It's the typical outcome in the vast majority of autocracies. It's all over development economics literature, based on purely empirical studies. There's little reason to believe that the US is somehow an outlier. Weaken trust in the system, go from a system of laws to a system of deals, and watch growth go away, with all the unrest that brings.

A pity that so many people in SV only read what flatters them.

It gets worse when you are not a solo dev, and there's sufficient variety on people's setups. Oops, someone updated a version, and then built things for just their processor, and now I am stuck in a 20 minute compilation loop because some bad pin. Debugging Nix problems like those makes me think that old Gentoo Linux back in 2005 was easy and user friendly.

The actual savings are minimal at best, as demand for cars is all about peak, and how the peak travels typically in similar directions. You see this in trains. In downtown SF, you will find trains parked near the stadium all day, because there is no,practical use for them 9p% of the day. Most of the fleet is idle most of the day, and it would not be any better if it's a self driving car. You'd have a much better chance if trips were random, but they absolutely aren't.

The nodes have been calculated and modeled, the gains round to zero. What you get instead is higher demand for moving around in cars, because it's now cheaper and less annoying. Lower prices increase demand, therefore more congestion, not less. This component obliterates said minor savings from earlier in any reasonable model.

There's significant trouble with routing, delays, and reliability: A self driving car does nothing naturally different that a cheaper Taxi, and you can see the lack of popularity of the carpooling offerings Lyft and Uber had.

Ultimately the argument against lower congestion is even easier. Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion. Now Timmy can go to his activities by himself, so mom goes elsewhere. Again, when we make something cheaper, we increase demand.

It's not a matter of the size of the country, but the density of the metro areas: See Spain, a low density country with high density cities. The US' high suburb, low density metro design is the one thing ruining transit

Public transit is at its most useful and effective connecting dense, walkable locations. That's why it's so great in the world's best cities. The problem is a metro like DFW doesn't have the density to have said good public transit. If anything, many American cities have more bus lines and light rail lines than they would if you asked an European transit authority to decide where to build.

Density first, very good transit second. Or at the very least, wait for zoning and incentive decisions that will bring infill to those locations in less than 5 years. But we sure aren't doing that.

Have you seen how it debugs? It's trial and error. As the most reasonable hypothesis fail, new data is found, and it keeps iterating. It's not a human intelligence, but if it has an issue, it's not some mysterious creativity anima in the heart of man.

I have seen it produce tentative genetics for experiments, just like a scientist does. Then the data comes in and it can evaluate the data from the experiment just as well. One just had to give it a lab budget.

I suspect that you have not read enough them. Ask someone in China (which yes, still has a capita owning class) if the proles were better off 50 years ago or now. The only real probes we have now in the west is that we have failed at housing, precisely because instead of growth, we have made many choices to increase returns for old people, and insufficient taxes for real estate.

You are comparing to the almighty, not to the kind of financial advisor most people would find while looking at random. Between those with very high AUM fees, those selling bad vehicles that they get kickbacks for and such, people are basically getting robbed already.

It's not that one cannot get very specific, technical advice that helps, but someone without much financial literacy cannot tell someone doing honest work for a reasonable price from easy to find scammers with a marketing budget. The AI isn't going to get everything right, and it's not going to be easy to send good, proding questions to double check things without sufficient financial literacy, but that boring baseline is miles ahead of what most people get, as it's not trying to deceive you professionally, at least for now.

Yes, and that's from supposed professionals too, not just crazy youtubers or tiktok channels. My neighborhood has enough old people that Edward Jones reps come over to try to manage your money. So I get to ask them questions, and see they are basically offering to rip me off. And that's in the US: You should see the investment recommendations people in Spain get when they talk to supposed advisors in real banks. Search for the Preferential shares scandal, where banks had scripts teaching how to lie to people to sell a product that would prop up the bank while having great chances of wiping out the buyer's savings.

There was pushback if you look at per-team attendance situations, but there's more than enough people living in the US making a ton of money that can easily afford the crazy prices. It did lower how many people from some big football nations decide to follow their team around. Not just due to the prices, but the travel distances. Just consider the practical logistics for, say, Spain's run. 2 games in Atlanta (Cabo verde and Saudi Arabia), then go play Uruguay in Guadalajara, then Austria in SoFi/L.A, then Portugal in the Dallas metro, back to SoFi for Belgium, again to Arlington for France, and New Jersey for Argentina: That's a lot of travel and hotel changing, because there's no reasonable way to go to a game and come back in the same day.

For all the problems in Qatar's world cup, a fan could watch two games a day, live,because the stadiums were that close. The 2026 bid maximized distances about as much as one could, vs, say, at least limit it all to the west coast, which would still be a lot by normal standards, bout would mean fewer huge metros where you could dip your toe in and ask for a ton of money, as there'd be very few games there.

And again, we are talking a team that won, and was among the favorites to win from day 1, just not being able to fill 1/3rd of the stadium, or anything close.

A strange take, as the Lucasarts multi-character games, like Dott and Maniac Mansion at least try to push you forward and have reasonable hints. KQ6 has fewer nonsensical dead-man-walking situations (you should see how much worse earlier installments were), but it still has them. Oops, the game is unfinishable now, because of an item you don't have, and it's not even hinted that you need, or you could have obtained earlier!

Thimbleweed park is, if anything, on the easy side of the genre. Not quite as easy as Loom, but it's still on the easy side, and with a built in hint system. Day of the Tentacle's main problem is dependence of US culture. Just like the old "monkey wrench" thing in Monkey Island 2, using an actual monkey as a wrench. Still, in DoTT, you get in-game dialogue that will basically teach you some of it, although it doesn't work quite as well.

The complaint would make more sense if it was limited to Zak McCraken, as that one really s quite tough and random.

Because the workers are also shareholders, and shareholders like money either way. Some of their business units were becoming extremely uncompetitive. So they ship a bunch of the manufacturing away to subsidiaries where you are not really a member of the coop: You aren't getting shares if you are in many of those other subsidiaries. They still managed to build a class system anyway. If you work at their retailers, you aren't the same as if you work at their Basque factories.

As for workers that were part of the coop in uncompetitive jobs, they moved them around as they could, but ultimately no amount of union or coop-like behavior is going to help if you are getting outcompeted.

A lot of people think it's all wine and roses when you get more worker input, but then you realize quite a few of the warts come straight from having a bunch of people with different amounts of power, and you still have power differentials even if everyone votes.

It's not that much better in plant breeding: You'll find hundreds upon hundreds of supposedly better varieties tried, and 5 years later, you are lucky to get 1 good one that one would consider commercializing. And that's after years of testing changes in smaller settings. We just don't have models that are predictive enough without planting, and waiting for plants to grow takes time.

Only if you can reasonably separate LLM from non LLM code, which is in no way a solved problem. Even if one agrees with their priorities 100%, it's just asking for non-automated enforcement. It's difficult to execute, and either lead to completely arbitrary enforcement, or a lot of resources being spent in exchange for this freedom you mention. It's just a very hard practical line to try to draw.

And let's be real, most of the costs LLMs incur on hosting providers have little to so ln who makes commits. A popular project than bans LLMs from contributing, but is used often by LLMs that are using the project as a library is indistinguishable from one that allows LLM contributors.

So from a practical perspective, it's a head scratcher

A lot of the product misses come from large product teams where nobody owns anything, and where there's minimal internal goal alignment. I know that, at work, what I am incentivized to do has nothing to do with what I consider the most important work I could do.... and I also know that the maze I would have to cross to be allowed to do the better work is just not worth it.

The smaller the org, the better the chances of having only reasonable levels of misalignment... but without taking on high risk, it's just better pat to work on a large, worse org. Frustrating.

The war by itself is a far less interesting affair than how it happened, and what made the country be OK with fighting. For that you need to start at the end of the previous dictatorship, and cover the entire 2nd republic. Then the war starts making sense.

So I'd read The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, by Stanley Payne. He was a journalist in Spain through the entire period, so most of what he does is provide a first hand account. He never claims to try to be impartial, but he's pretty nouanced, as he knew a lot of the players personally.

But a lot of "proven" talent with a huge price tag is also no good, really achieved what they did elsewhere due to sheer luck/help from a product that couldn't go wrong, and will drag you into a hole with their comp. I have seen this over and over again: Big pedigree, top of the line personality, zero results.

Everyone thinks they are hiring the star, not the fraudster, or just the lucky one. That's how we end up with overpaid execs.

I have lived in organizations where under 1% of messages were made on public channels. The experience of finding information in slack, or even knowing if there's a private channel where all of this is discussed, but where nobody invited you to, is not one I wish on anyone.

Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.

Without realizing it, you are coming close to the economics definition of relative scarcity. If we went by uour definition, basically nothing is scarce, ever, because it's possible to provide it, but the prices are set in a way that is completely unrelated to the cost of production + risk related margin. Instead prices resemble what would be an auction. And it all only works out because demand is elastic, so there are prices that people refuse to pay, because for their use case, they'd lose money.

Housing, collectors items, access to the time of a top of the line doctor... all relatively scarce. And You'd be laughed out pf most rooms if you claimed those things aren't scarce.

It's like a couple of languages I know where there's still one real owner, and there's no real review, and PRs are unlikely to be merged, even with review: They might be open source, but it's more a source visible thing, because you are never going to get a change in, and the language will change directions at the creator's lone whim. The best you can get at times is "I didn't like your PR, so I implemented the feature you tried to add completely different". Typical community killers.

Those came with spiral bound manuals, as they were that tjick, attempting to explain at least some of D&D 2nd edition, even when the full rules were out pf scope

What I find weird about this is that JohnC has been saying for decades that large mergers are pretty bad for both companies. You spend 2,3 years in limbo, figuring out what in the world to do with the other large organization. When Stripe makes acquisitions it's historically been small companies, doing things Stripe isn't doing. It's the kind of situation where pc is unlikely to speak publicly here, but I sure would love to understand what the plan is, if just as a shareholder.