joshtbradley

I did this when I was ~22 messing with infra for the first time. A $300 bill in two days when I had $2000 in the bank really stung. I love AWS for many things, but I really wish they made the cost calculations transparent for beginners.

As someone who grew up physically _and_ digitally sheltered, I am grateful for this article. It helped me articulate what I had wanted so badly, to be a kid.

Reading the comments gives me hope that there are still places safe enough and parents brave enough to let their kids run free. I hope to be this parent. And if I’m not, I at least hope I remember how important a digital friend can be for a kid who feels alone.

I’m glad you experienced the CLICK, I did too when GPT-3 released. The comment section was full of snarky, cynical, dismissive remarks with hundreds of likes. It smelled like Reddit but it was HN.

Cynicism is a dangerous instinct that captures many people. It’s easy, it’s rewarding, and it offers the psychological safety of unity. But it’s missing a key component. Hope.

I have no problem with critiques if they are accurate, insightful, and helpful. But cynics don’t think this way. Cynics seek to find the minimum viable argument to destroy anything that threatens change.

Stay awake my friend. Remain hopeful. We are hackers. We believe in the liberating potential of technology. We refuse to succumb to the lazy ignorant masses. We build.

“Only optimists build complex systems.”

Thank you.

Balaji's book "The Network State" doesn't refute Charlie's arguments directly but it does a great job of constructing an optimistic vision for the future. The techno-optimists definitionally don't have a doom-and-gloom view of the future, and I find their perspective useful for rounding out my own.

Nobody has all the answers. Humanity is profoundly and hilariously bad at predicting the future, and every generation has both doomsayers and prophets. Rather than getting caught in the emotional swings of siding with one or the other, I personally have focused on becoming as informed as possible so that I can make my own decisions.

And I was merely refuting the premise of that quote.

Thank you for the truly thoughtful comment. I’m not OP, and I have the polar opposite political/economic opinion. But I come to HN for interesting, intelligent perspectives, and you have provided that. Thank you comrade.

Except that stablecoins are strictly regulated thanks to the GENIUS Act and hopefully the CLARITY Act will provide the same guidelines for crypto as a whole. Gary Gensler did nothing to create regulation. David Sacks is out there doing God’s work.

Strong statement, where is the evidence? The GENIUS Act is quite brilliant in my opinion. It strengthens the dollar by simultaneously creating demand for USD and US Treasuries.

You think the same system that chose to bail out the banks in 08 should be fully responsible for our financial future? I believe a more distributed financial system would provide more stability for all of us. The GENIUS Act establishes some very strong standards that I believe will strengthen the economy, the dollar, and enable more people to enter the financial services industry in a competitively healthy way. A scammer would have a hard time 1:1 backing their stablecoins with bonds and equivalently stable assets.

Would you consider Stripe and PayPal also interested in speculative investment/trading? They seem responsible to me. Also, stablecoins aren’t speculative. Cryptocurrencies absolutely are. But stablecoins are pegged to USD, hence “stable.”

I think you’re right to criticize crypto as a techno-elite project. However I think stablecoins have a legitimate use case for billions of people who don’t have access to good banks, or a stable currency, and can’t afford traditional fees. IMO it’s one of the best things to come out of crypto.

I am not an expert but I don’t believe most countries would allow their citizens to use American banking infrastructure, nor would most American banks accept a foreign account. Stablecoins get around these limitations, while also providing lower fees and higher availability.

I think for the same reason that most people hold cash in a bank account rather than putting all of their money in ETFs/bonds. Convenience, stability, and security.

Consider living in a country with an unstable and fiscally irresponsible government. And having a net worth <$10k. Suddenly being able to hold your money in USD, on an account that cannot be seized, and can be used globally, becomes incredibly attractive.

You don’t need financial literacy, there is no min-buy in like ETFs/bonds, and there is minimal KYC or other identity restrictions. I think this is an incredible boon for the billions of people living in such conditions.

Excellent observation. But I believe your proposed solutions could be strengthened. Improving “leverage literacy” may be a first step, but the fundamental mismatch in velocity will continue expanding the gap between technology and social institutions.

The question then becomes, how do we increase the velocity of social institutions to keep pace with technology? Balaji’s blockchain native societies come to mind. The comment in the thread about needing philosophical roots in engineering is interesting too. Curious what you think.

That’s not my argument. I’m saying wolves are dangerous, and as a human, I don’t want to have to worry about wolves when I’m hiking Yellowstone. Call me selfish but I’d rather be alive than feel good that the forest is back to its natural state.

Fair point. Except for “don’t even serve as much of a purpose as wild wolves.” I’d argue dogs, bees, and let’s say cars, all serve an enormous purpose to humanity. The pros/cons of replenishing an ecosystem is a good framework to analyze this through. I am selfishly an advocate for humanity, and safer forests with more wild game for hunting seems like a bigger pro to me. Of course, I could be disastrously wrong. But we don’t know yet.

Also collapsed the elk population from 18,000 to 2,000 and they’re worried the bison will eat the trees… I understand nature is incredibly complex and intelligent, and I’m curious what the end effect will be. But from an anthropocentric perspective, this is silly. When will the first human death occur?

He's very clearly stating that trusting AI to a few hands was an old, naiive idea that they have evolved from. Which establishes their need to keep evolving as the technology matures.

There is a lot to criticize about OpenAI and Sama, but this isn't it.

He explicitly stated progress is logarithmic.

> 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it.

First, it requires exponential investment because

> 1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it.

Incremental improvements in intelligence require exponentially more resources. Only once that step is achieved can costs be reduced.

Second, intelligence is not the same as education. Education is specialized, intelligence is general. Every modern convenience around you is the result of intelligence.

I'm not arguing for degrowth, nor am I discrediting the work of science. I'm observing humanity has failed to have a constructive conversation around climate change, leading to the necessity of solutions like this.

I have no idea what the solution is, I've already admitted it's complex. But it's frightening that the conversation immediately devolves into assumptions about one's stance, and immediate disagreement with that stance. Even on a website like HN. That's a big problem, no?

I’m not convinced that managed solutions are the solution. I say this as a professional web developer with a range of clients. Webflow tends to fall apart with complexity. It creates the illusion of simplicity. For example, a designer will update a component, not understanding the underlying CSS classes, and end up breaking every other components relying on that class. Even worse, trying to do anything sufficiently complex, like embedding a third party form, becomes a mess of copy pasted JS embeds. And forget global components, the edge cases make them virtually unusable.

On the other end of the spectrum are headless solutions with your pick of framework, let’s say Contentful + Next.js. While far less flexible for a non-developer, the outcome is a rock solid, repeatable, maintainable template. You can democratize editing much more reliably. Although, yes, you need a dev for every customization.

Different solutions for different scales I suppose. I’d love to see the marriage of these two approaches. Something that gives the greatest experience to both editors and developers. I’m trying to tackle this problem in my free time, but it is a massive problem. The more I work on it, the more I recognize why it hasn’t been solved. And admittedly, WP has done a decent job of solving it with its massive ecosystem. There is a need for innovation, but it’s a shame to see the baby being tossed out with the bathwater.

I find it tragic that it’s easier for scientists to perform miracles than it is for humanity to care for the planet.

I understand the issue is complex, fraught with incentive, and has disparity between the developed and undeveloped world. But if the outcome is a clear collective benefit, why don’t we do it?

More practically. What will it take to create a world where humanity can align to help ourselves?

Author here, that's an apt analogy. Perhaps it helps to understand where I was coming from; I had never written a line of LISP and was struggling to fully grasp the power that Paul Graham had hinted at. So I started at the beginning, and although it was just the brim of the rabbit hole it certainly opened my eyes. And I hope it can help other beginners open their eyes as well.

I plan to fall down the LISP rabbit hole one day, and continue this series in full detail.

Author here, thank you for pointing this out! I was a LISP beginner when I wrote this, I'll certainly update this.