klodolph

You aren’t promised your money back with interest; that’s what an IRA is. Social Security is a different system which works by different principles. In Social Security, the money you pay goes to the people who are retired, and your retirement is funded by people who work in the future.

Your money --> older generation

Younger generation ---> you

The main thing that makes my description incorrect / incomplete is that baby boomers, such a large cohort, broke the system. This was predicted and so the baby boomers actually did get their money back: they were taxed to fund OASI, which then goes back to fund baby boomers’ retirements, until it runs out.

Baby boomers (only, sort of) <---> massive cushion in the OASI fund

Social Security is funded by the people paying in, plus the money in funds like OASI. Yes, OASI is treasuries, so it’s connected, but the reason OASI exists is to cover the changing demographics as baby boomers retire. It’s not designed to be, long-term, the way the Social Security system works. The idea is that you collect income on the boomers greater than payouts while their cohort is in the workforce, and the pay that money back out when they retire.

Yes, there are reasons why this isn’t working out as planned. But the idea that “Social Security is the biggest driver of spending” is not a cogent argument.

Currently reading: Tracks (re-read) by Erdrich. Just finished: The Bad Beginning by Daniel Handler. Before that, Lolita by Nabokov.

I have a long-ish commute at the moment with some opportunities to read on the train, so I’ve been reading more. Been knocking out some of the books on my shelf.

A stain is a kind of mark :)

Is this happening at any significant rate?

AFAICT this is a fear that some game developers have, that someone will steal their game and run with it, and the stories told are more repeated based on this shared fear than based on realistic scenarios. People repeat it because it’s a good story.

And yes, I’m aware of some situations like 0x10c and the like.

Ok, in order to make money? Let people make some money making shitty copies of my game. I think there are roughly two scenarios here.

Scenario one: they’re competing with my game and stealing my thunder. In this scenario my game wasn’t very good to begin with.

Scenario two: we’re going after different customers. They get the customers who want a cheaper game, I’m getting the customers who want a better game.

I’m sure somebody out there is pointing an LLM at things and getting a $200 average payout or better on $100 in tokens, but if your game is getting copied for $100 in tokens, I’m not sold on the idea that you were going to make money in the first place.

What I think of is all the HD remasters out there which look disastrously worse than the original, at least in my eyes. Why does this happen? Are the best artists working on new games instead? Are remasters pushed out with less care, shorter schedules, and less budget? Maybe some combination… and maybe there are some parallels with quick, mostly unsupervised LLM copies of a game.

From what I’ve seen, most of the flood of LLM-created games aren’t profitable, just like most of the games people make in devlogs. There’s very little thunder to be stolen in the first place.

Ok, so let’s get some data points. Are there games being recreated from devlogs? I’d like to see what the recreations look like.

I have some strong feelings about this particular story (people point LLMs at your devlog)…

- Video devlogs were long a shitty way to make a community (I can explain this one in more detail, but in short, the tradeoff between opportunity cost and video quality is a Pareto curve that is bad at all points on the curve, if your goals include both “make game” and “build community for players with devlogs”, the way out is to drop one of those two requirements, either “make YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channel” replaces “make game”, or you build some other audience for your devlogs)

- Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games

- Most games can’t easily be replicated by LLMs, in short, the people who are good at steering LLMs like that are making their own games.

This is not the first time I heard this story. Sometimes it comes with the lamentation “back in the day people could build communities with devlogs” and no, that was generally not a good way to build communities. It was mostly good streams from YouTubers who were making the game in order to make YouTube content or it was mediocre streams from random devs. Throw in a few people who are famous game devs who choose to stream and get a big audience because they already have a community.

“You’re making one operation cheaper, but making the other one more expensive” is the wrong way around. Say it this way: “You’re making one operation more expensive, but the other one cheaper.”

Worth mentioning is storing the logarithm of the number.

Seen it used in a couple places. Logarithmic depth buffer is one. Yamaha DX7 is another.

The particulars of Rust make this a little more difficult, I think. There’s a certain tension between making your language more concise and adding useful redundancies, and Rust has generally gone to the “concise” side, with some redundancies that can make the tooling a little more painful. Like with imports.

  impl std::fmt::Display for Blah {
  }

If your language makes you qualify your imports (like above) then your LSP can, delightfully, still reliably do certain ops like renaming, even when chunks of your project aren’t parsing. But if you glob import std::fmt, and glob import something else, you are fucked. Display could come from anywhere (maybe from a module that has a parse error at the moment). I really appreciate languages where glob imports (or their equivalent) are either disallowed entirely or where typical code doesn’t use it.

Meanwhile, if you add a new file, there’s this little dance where you say:

  mod mycoolmod;

And then you create mycoolmod.rs. Or you do it the other way around. A little redundancy (the file exists and it is declared), that seems to just create a little friction in the LSP because mycoolmod doesn’t get a working LSP until it’s declared in the parent (you have to create both, and then you get a transient diagnostic that your module is unused for a while yet). A small issue, just another little bit of friction in the tooling of Rust that has nothing to do with the type system.

CLAUDE.md: @AGENTS.md

I think what’s worse is flash lifespan. You can recap, but can you find replacements for failed flash? Can you reimage it with the correct data? Can you even access the flash, which may be buried inside a chip somewhere?

Plastic may get brittle but I think modern plastics do this less than 90s plastics.

> you are doing something quite unnatural

It is equally unnatural to form kana in your head when thinking about how to say something! Or, it’s unnatural to think about whether a verb is godan or ichidan when speaking, it’s unnatural to think about what particles are, etc.

You get an explanation for a concept and you internalize it. The explanation is a framework for you to internalize the concept, and once the concept is internalized, you no longer need it. The explanations are still useful, like romaji is still useful. None of the explanations are necessary, some are useful.

Maybe you get a few different partially wrong explanations of what the “wa” particle means before you internalize it. You’re not getting damaged by those explanations, they’re Wittgenstein’s ladder. (Well, maybe you got some bad explanations, but even the good explanations are wrong.)

You throw a bunch of different explanations at different students, combine it with practice and lots of examples, and eventually it sticks.

> which in this example is not actually even the same consonant

By that standard, the “t” in “butter” is not the same consonant as the “t” in “tap” (try it!)

People are really good at understanding and learning phonology and can really internalize it and understand it on an intuitive level, even if they can’t explain the rules for it. If you’re a native English speaker, you accept that there’s a “t” in “butter” and a “t” in “tap” even though they are not the same sounds (phones). That’s because they are the same phonemes.

Romaji is an effective way of writing down Japanese phonemes.

I don’t want to be argumentative here, but,

- “Need to” is a very different criterion from “is useful”, and “visually split” is, well, kind of unexpected to me!

- The comparison to native Japanese speakers seems especially irrelevant here,

- You’re not using your native orthography here, you’re using romaji, I don’t think it’s anyone’s native orthography.

- You probably want to use the Romaji heavily anyway, because that’s how most people will use computers.

When you’re learning a language you naturally multiple approaches to understanding a single topic. You’ll see a word written, you’ll hear it. You’ll hear a sentence and then someone will give you an explanation of the grammar, and you’ll compare that with your notes. It’s multimodal and all of these different modes are useful.

Like how romaji is useful for understanding conjugations. Obviously not necessary, just useful.

I have trouble comprehending the idea that this is only interesting in a theoretical sense but not all that useful to a learner. Could you give me something additional here? I’m not trying to be a dick here but my first reaction is “that’s just nuts” and I want to know what I’m missing.

The pair is something of a simplification, and romaji makes certain things in the language more obvious. Like the good old mat-u -> mat-anai, mat-imasu, mat-eru. Added the hyphen to make it clearer, but this hyphen splits a kana neatly in half. The stem is “mat” but you can’t write the stem using kana (in some sense of the word ‘stem’, maybe that’s not the correct word and there’s a different word for it, I’m not a linguist).

I’m not trying to say you should avoid kana, just that there is some amount of intuition you can develop with romaji that does not work in kana.

If you want to learn pronunciation you should be listening to audio.

Sure, maybe don’t force people to learn kana first. But Hepburn is kind of the worst of all worlds, it is just a waste of time to learn Hepburn.

> Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.

I think the exception is people using the JSL textbooks :) there is a reasonable defense to using JSL. But you’re right. I think it’s indefensible to teach Hepburn to people interested in learning Japanese.

Well-put

I think this comment could be written in a way that was less combative and more clear.

I’m interested to hear what file manager you’re using.

> Don't close your mind to new knowledge and it might just get interested!

Please be respectful in these conversations—I’m interested in hearing more about this, but the comments you’ve been making are emotionally charged and insulting.

I’m interested to hear what file manager you’re using because it sounds like you’d hate Explorer, Nautilus, and Thunar too. Sorry for repeating the question—but I’m not going to accuse you of “conveniently ignoring” the question. Accusing someone of conveniently ignoring a question is, I don’t know, at best just rude. Don’t do that.

I know that there are things that Finder is not good at, that’s fine by me. What baffles me is the comparison with Windows Explorer, and that’s why I responded, and that’s the context for my comments. If you have a comparison with a specific other file manager in mind I’d like to hear it. For my use cases, I am often sorting through large quantities of media files, so I value things like column view and Quicklook.

(Copy without extension is enter, command-C. Full path 95% of the time, I am pasting into the Terminal, and so I drag it in, and the terminal automatically escapes it.)

To be honest, a lot of these seem to have the shape, “I want to be able to press button A to do action X,” but for the Finder, you have to press button B instead. I was hoping for something a little more interesting.

Things like, “In a Real Pro file manager, you can double-tap C to copy a filename, but in Finder, you have to press command-C.” Do you see why I’m a little disappointed by this list?

I’m interested to hear what file manager you’re using because it sounds like you’d hate Explorer, Nautilus, and Thunar too.

What do you like about the other file managers over the Finder?

Finder has column view and quicklook. If there’s something that I’m missing out on from, say, Explorer or Thunar or whatever, I’d love to hear it. Whenever I have to sort through a lot of files on Linux or Windows, I get a better experience by exporting a SMB share and sorting on a Mac.

The only file managers that I’ve used that felt competitive with the Mac are tools like Midnight Commander (or the original Norton version).

As a Mac user since the 1980s, I feel feel like Finder is easily best in class, even after ten or fifteen years of design. I would describe Windows Explorer as “embarrassingly bad” in comparison, despite having a good hold on the shortcuts.

I honestly think it is a matter of what you like rather than what is good or bad.

> Try it yourself, use a big model like Opus or Sol to implement everything by first making a plan using plan mode.

When I do this, I can have it use cheap subagents with models like Luna to read the relevant files.