jsbg

yes, that is what deflation is

> it doesn’t matter which came first

imo it does matter and is the difference between cringe (sometimes intentional) and not

by that logic people would not buy TVs or memory cards

> Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

If you bet on growth/new features but your current and future customer base are going out of business or downsizing and you have to switch to more of a survival strategy.

maybe your parents aren't old enough to remember how much of the population could expect to die in wars before nuclear weapons (i.e. mutually assured destruction) existed

Seeing $499 VHS players in 1989 really puts in perspective all the keynesian deflation fear mongering.

Printing money is not the same thing as creating value.

It's the other way around. Money is finite and the curiosity we want to satisfy is infinite.

it might be profitable but they figure they can make it more profitable; there has been a lot of inflation in the last few years and every other video subscription service has been hiking up their pricing recently

This is excellent advice that unfortunately seems to get lost in a lot of Haskell teachings. I learned Haskell in school but until I had to use it professionally I would have never been able to wrap my head around effect systems. I still think that part of Haskell is unfortunate as it can get in the way of getting things done if you're not an expert, but being able to separate pure functions from effectful ones is a massive advantage.

In the US, trademarks have to be enforced to remain valid.

https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/trademarks/enfo...

"a failure to enforce a trademark by monitoring the mark for misuses will result in a weakening of the mark and loss of distinctiveness, which can lead to a loss of the trademark"

Why don't we send tardigrades and other extremophiles into space to colonize possible life-sustaining planets and moons?

A government is by definition a monopoly. No company can become large enough to be like a government unless it has government backing. E.g. Walmart was feared to be becoming a monopoly by running smaller shops out of business and yet Amazon was still able to compete. Eventually someone else will outcompete both, as long as the government doesn't step in to protect them.

> The point of a free market in practice is to ensure that sale values are correlated with, and reasonably close to, production costs.

No, the point of a free market is to let the price system do its thing, and prices have nothing to do with production costs as long as they are higher. If prices appear to move in unison and that actually happens to be because of collusion, in a free market a new competitor could undercut the cartel. That's assuming that the cartel members themselves don't break the collusion, which they have every incentive to.

The long-term impact of collusion on prices is limited compared with e.g. money printing and other sources of inflation.

> other things whose value is not representable in our modern value system

What things? Are they more important than child mortality?

I would like to hear about what makes them bullshitters. I've had and seen really good results in terms of high productivity and low bug count on teams that followed the SOLID principles described in Robert Martin's Clean Architecture as well as Kent Beck's "make it work, make it right, make it fast." I've also universally observed the opposite results on teams that didn't.

> There is no single canonical suite of best practices.

There kind of is, though. Most software engineering books argue for the same things, from the Mythical Man Month to Clean Architecture.

> Different languages have their opinions on how you should organise your code

In general best practices are discussed in a language-agnostic manner.

Thanks. This is the first instance of a respected software engineer arguing in favor of this style that I have read (contrast with Dave Thomas, Kent Beck, Bob Martin, etc.)!

> // 1. Every 'if' statement has a matching 'else' (exception: simple error

> // checks for a client API call)

> // 2. Things that may seem obvious are commented explicitly

Honest question: Why invent "safety" practices and ignore every documented software engineering best practice? 2,000 line long modules and 200-line methods with 3-4 if-levels are considered harmful. Comments that say what the code does instead of specifying why are similarly not useful and likely to go out of date with the actual code. Gratuitous use of `nil`. These are just surface-level observations without getting into coupling, SRP, etc.

They're presumably referring to people e.g. taking selfies with bison.

> The FDA, like other regulatory agencies, exists for a reason: to help prevent people from being ripped off, or worse, by snake oil salesmen.

This is obviously false given the existing supplements business. The idea that we have a way to prevent people from being ripped off is naive. But even so, the "reason" for the FDA doesn't change its incentive structure: allowing a drug that kills a few people will reflect badly on it, while disallowing a drug that would have saved millions of lives likely would have little consequence for the decision makers.

Exactly. In school I couldn't understand the Heine-Borel theorem and a professor actually got annoyed at me asking about it even though it was just one time. When ChatGPT was first released one of the first things I did was ask it to explain it to me. Even the 3.0 model was pretty good at it!

Mathematics and Its History (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4419-6053-5) is a really fun book for someone who already knows some university-level math and is just curious.

You may also enjoy Proofs from THE BOOK (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-57265-8).

why are the results of a study with a limited reach preferable to the results of an actual universal real world event?

a chai latte doesn't contain coffee; a chai latte with an espresso shot added to it is referred to as a dirty chai

I don't think that will stop scammers!

did you read the article? the law would be broad enough to require privacy-invading age verification systems for search engines

the "blogger" is a well-known professor of law specializing in telecommunications issues

Basic economics say that given a certain price, you get a certain demand. And if the price rises, then demand goes down. Consumers don't blindly pay more for things when their prices go up.