kieselguhr_kid

there is truly no domain a software engineer won't underestimate

The Conversation is probably my favorite as well, but I always enjoyed Enemy of the State (1998) a lot. It has the same paranoid vibes as some of his work in the 70s, but with the subtlety replaced with sensational action. He was great in that film as a retired super spook, and his chemistry with Will Smith really elevated it.

It strikes me as incurious to dismiss an entire field of thought because there were errors in a mathematical manuscript, especially when you clearly don't understand the fundamental concepts (I don't mean this as a dig. You just haven't learned them.). Marxism isn't the writings of a long dead guy in England in 1860. It's a living, breathing school of thought that's evolved significantly since then. What you're doing is akin to finding an error in Smith or Ricardo's [edit: unpublished manuscripts, not completed work] work (of which there were many) and using those errors to dismiss all of orthodox economics.

The revolutionary approaches have not succeeded thus far, granted. There is a branch of Marxism about revolution, but what we're talking about here is a description of capitalism. Marxist revolutionary activities have nothing to do with how potent that analysis is.

What you're getting at vis-a-vis highly skilled labor is known in Marxist economics as the labor reduction problem, and it's complicated (enough so that I wouldn't do it justice trying to elaborate the approaches in the time I have to respond). Marx died with it unsolved and it's a matter of discussion to this day. But you're conflating that problem with the concept of socially necessary labor, which is different and actually addresses the problem you posed (in Capital Vol 1, in the difficult early chapters). In order to produce value, the labor must be socially necessary, and the labor of any number of unskilled workers towards a highly complex problem (eg, treating a rare cancer) would not be socially necessary. It doesn't even have to be that complex. I don't have the skills necessary to make a wedding cake, and any attempt I make to do so would be so inept that it wouldn't be socially necessary labor.

Can't speak to the division by zero, but it doesn't come up in any of Marx important work. His mathematical manuscripts don't have any significant relationship to his work on political economy.

It's a lot easier to argue against Marx than against Marxism, just as it's a lot easier to argue against Darwin than evolution. Marxism as a school of thought has evolved quite a bit since Marx, who any non-crank would admit was wrong about a host of things.

Marxism is largely descriptive, and so many people claim that it cannot be falsified. But there are ways you could falsify Marxism: - Capitalism could mediate class conflict out of existence - Capitalism could grow indefinitely without producing business crises - Wages across the world could become roughly equal in terms of purchasing power, regardless of the country, without an economic crisis.

Now, these would have to happen in the actually existing world, and as such I can see the resistance to labeling them as falsifiable. So how would you falsify orthodox economics?

Marx discusses how skill (and factors like machinery, etc) factors into value in Capital vol 1. The idea isn't that any labor on any endeavor creates value at a constant rate across all individuals and all time.

Can you help us out by articulating what you think value is, and how it's derived?

Ok, everyone except the Poles then.

26 million Soviet citizens died saving them too, so by this weird argument shouldn't everyone in Europe leave NATO and embrace communism?

There's no such thing as neutral and you shouldn't treat any journalists as such. I don't know if their viewpoint is relevant here though; the question is about their ability to verify a factual assertion.

> In his introduction to an edition of Metamorphosis, the novelist Adam Thirlwell suggests that we have misunderstood Kafka much as Magarshack said we had misunderstood Chekhov, and that Kafka is much more playful than we have hitherto given him credit for.

When I was 17, I read Kafka for the first time and was put off by what I saw as the dour and oppressive atmosphere. I had the same insight as Thirlwell when I reread him ~10 years later: Kafka's works have a sort of deadpan and absurdist humor to them and shouldn't be treated as seriously as they often are. I wonder how much of that humor is lost in translation.

Without appropriate regulations you're just building more AirBNBs.

A little less flippantly, just adopting this YIMBY line without thinking through regulating the market to ensure houses are for human habitation will not address the underlying issues. It will just line the pockets of real estate developers.

communist party of pugs

This reads more like yellow peril hyperbole than reasoned arguments. The CCP is deeply unpopular in the US, and most US institutions are engaged in a demonization campaign against China.

TikTok is horrible and toxic. It should be banned, or at least tightly age-restricted. But I have seen no evidence they're worse than or a bigger threat than other US-based social media empires, and the proponents of those ideas tend to gesture towards vague communist conspiracies rather than point to observable evidence.

Neither China nor Russia strike me as the main forces eroding US democracy (or whatever passes for democracy here), and the interference goes both ways. The idea that TikTok could drive the erosion of democratic processes in the US strikes me as silly, especially considering domestic forces like militarization and economic stagnation.

I'm actually all for a TikTok ban as long as we also ban other social media. I think it's all toxic. But the excessive focus on TikTok is just yellow peril/red scare nonsense in pursuit of a new cold war.

Setting aside the far more malevolent impact of American power, China has no way to use my data to oppress me. The US does, and routinely uses social media data against its own citizens and people abroad.

Someone help me understand why I should care more about the Chinese government having my data than my own. My own government actually has power over me.

Claiming that Allende was destroying democracy is totally ahistorical.

I'm not sure training these models on code and documentation will make that much of a difference. These models struggle significantly with subtlety, relevance, and correctness. It also doesn't have a theory of its own knowledge or confidence, and so tends to "hallucinate" and put out confidently-worded nonsense. Especially for complex and nuanced topics.

A big part of my job in software is having a very sharpened grasp of my ignorance, the ability to weigh a variety of tradeoffs, and the ability to convey my confidence of my abilities and my team's abilities. I'm not sure this is possible for this generation of AI.

Your last question hints at another question we also need to explore: do or will humans apply the same level of scrutiny to automatic outputs than they do to human ones? I find we tend to treat them as more authoritative. Are we more likely to unthinkingly accept mistakes by a machine?

As a brief aside, I wonder if we'll see increasing rates of accidents as the rate of AI drivers rises. I think it's hard to think about those effects in a vacuum - they have fewer injury accidents _now_, but will they if they go from making up a trivial percent of traffic to 10%? 25%?

When I was new, I saw one of my more experienced colleagues ask a few questions that together saved the company more than $1 mil each year. ChatGPT might be a threat to automate some low-level tasks or help eliminate bugs, but it is nowhere near ready to evaluate the context of a system, understand its history, or think* through the consequences of a major business decision.

* or think at all, in any meaningful way.

This kind of thing is technically illegal, but happens all the time. We should definitely expect to see lots of tactics that are technically illegal as companies fight back against this unionization push. But it does mean giving up direct control of their warehouse operations, which strikes me as unlikely, at least with only one shop having unionized so far.

I'm a nonexpert and don't have time to develop expertise, even lay expertise, in this field. What I want to see before I get excited about fusion iss a practical application of the technology. I'd like to see it power something real: a factory, a server farm, or some other energy intensive facility.

Hopefully this is an important first step, but this seems like an extraordinarily hard problem. Often, scaling these technologies is the most challenging part of implementing them.

Have you worked with a reputable outside auditor? You don't just provide numbers and illustrate your methodology for obtaining them, you have to essentially reconstruct your entire revenue and finance system with them, provide ongoing random samplings, demonstrate the consistency of any calculations, and many, many other steps that I don't have time to illustrate. Companies couldn't just provide a false number, they'd have to construct a parallel revenue and finance system with false data. Do some companies still cheat and get away with it even after audits? Of course. But it's a major deterrent to this kind of behavior and a reputable auditor would have caught many of FTX's illegal activities much earlier.

Some version of this would make sense to me.

The idea behind the lack of regulation is that the impact is contained to the investors. It's obvious that in sufficiently large cases, that's not true. If these actors are able to do damage to entire sectors, they should have to do some minimum stuff: keep track of their money, have board meetings, submit to audits, etc.

Yes, but the total lack of corporate governance that contributed to it is totally legal, and could have possibly prevented the fraud and theft.

There are likely other charges that they could face. I don't think this rises to the level of embezzlement (although IANAL), but the missing customer deposits, lack of strict segregation between Alameda and FTX, and the use of company assets for personal loans and purchases will probably lead to indictments.

I don't know if it will happen, but a potentially good outcome here would be some regulation on the business practices of sufficiently large private companies in order to ensure they meet some basic level of corporate governance. Maybe they don't need the same level of scrutiny publicly traded companies have, but establishing minimum standards of conduct would help avert crises like this that can spread across entire sectors.

If you aren't born rich, breaking out of the working class, even the top tier of it, requires significant effort and enormous luck. It's usually time and effort wasted in pursuit of something no one should want. However, if you dream of sitting atop the pyramid but you weren't born there, you better get on that grind.