lkrubner

The author does not claim that Cohen has a "road to Damascus moment" when he arrives at Harvard. Instead, this is the claim:

"This created something of a “road to Damascus” moment for Cohen. It forced him to ask the basic question: what is it that I dislike most about capitalism?"

That is, Cohen needed to take a moment and then ask himself deeper questions about his starting assumptions. That is the claim.

"My best suggestion for overcoming this challenge, when reading A Theory of Justice, is to go into it thinking “this is the book that killed Western Marxism,” and then focus on figuring out how it managed to do so."

I've argued a related point, that if you want to build a successful Communism, in which all property is held by the government, then you have to do that by first embracing liberalism. See "How to build a pragmatic Communism that works intelligently and efficiently":

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-pragmatic-co...

This is absolutely true. Still, sometimes outsourcing can go horribly wrong. I wrote about a shocking, outrageous case here:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/when-outsourcing...

"the whole idea of Stack Overflow is to have answers to general questions, not to everyone's individual question"

But why? I ran a site called WPQuestions.com for 7 years, it was where people paid between $10 to $50 to get fast answers for their WordPress questions. I called it "micro consulting" in that the consultants were answering small questions for small fees. While I get that StackOverflow wanted to be free, I wonder why it didn't commit to being more of a Helpdesk for people in need. Why have general answers, when people have such an urgent need for specific answers to their specific questions? An incredibly wasted opportunity. Even more so, with AI able to answer all of the general questions, the only avenue open to non-AI companies is answering very specific questions that are heavily context dependent.

"The world would be one month in diameter - so that a fleet or army or inter-player message could be dispatched to anywhere in the game in a single turn."

I had a similar idea. Since my game is real-time, rather than turn based, I decided to use time for to indicate travel. There is basically no map. In that sense, it is similar to some sci-fi star games where star travel is mostly handled by "teleporting" from one star to another. Though I use time to indicate that attacking another Kingdom cannot be done instantly.

Thank you for the suggestions about Show HN. Good idea. I'll do a Show HN when it is ready.

Just like respiratory infections, some people get it multiple times, and have to be treated multiple times.

Sad to say, the fecal-oral cycle of infection remains common in the USA, with the most common areas of spread being restaurants although hospitals were sadly guilty of this until recently. And for any gastrointestinal illness in the USA, the single most common cause is Helicobacter pylori. Back in the 1980s and 1990s researchers mostly associated Helicobacter pylori with ulcers, but since then the research has expanded to show it produces a wide range of symptoms. It is a serious illness, even if you never develop an ulcer. And it so contagious that you can get it simply by kissing someone. And it is shockingly prevalent, with more than 20% of the public having it. It is always the first thing that should be checked when someone has weird gastrointestinal issues. The good news is that it is easy to cure: 14 days of antibiotics cures the disease in 96% of patients.

The USA economy is unstoppable. The entire world agrees on this issue, that’s why investors from all over the world are pouring money into American investments and American financial instruments. The USA has the most dynamic and innovative economy in the world, and it has the strongest economic growth of any large economy.

I am working on a strategy game. I call it The Lost Age Of Abundance. A multi-player, real-time war-and-economics game. It is the kind of game that most developers would typically take a turn-based approach to, but I think turn-based games are mostly boring, so in this case it is real-time. My plan is that at least 100 players can play at once, but perhaps I might be able to get that up to 1,000.

There are some unusual things about the game. To win, you have to conquer all of the land. However, no player is ever knocked out of the game. If you lose all of your land, you can simply become a guerrilla leader and engage in guerrilla warfare, in the hopes of turning your situation around. Being a guerrilla leader is difficult, but if all of the guerrilla leaders form an alliance, they might have the strength to reduce the power of whoever is winning at that moment. Every player starts off as a Noble Lord but you can become a Priest or a Communist or an Anarchist. (The Anarchists have a unique way of winning, which does not involve conquest.)

I have been working, for months, on the economics, which are very complex and I think very interesting. All prices start off randomized (within certain bands) so there are no "good units" or "bad units" only those that are under priced or over priced. There is an economic cycle that runs once every 60 seconds. It takes all purchases and turns the money spent into inflation. Specifically, the percentage of total world GDP that was spent on a particular product is the inflation rate, so if all of the players collectively spent 2% of their income buying swords, so 2% of total world GDP was spent on swords, then the price of swords goes up 2% for that minute. In this way, with players buying what is under-priced and thus driving up prices, the prices are pushed to their rational levels. Also, the inflation rate tells you something important about what other players are doing. If you notice the price of horses is going up at an alarming rate, it means one (or more) of the players is spending heavily to build a large cavalry force. The economics are entirely deterministic, based on the activity of the players, there are no random events. There are no randomly generated earthquakes or floods or NPC invasions. Every change arises from the actions of the players.

I was originally going to give the game the historical setting of the Chinese Warring States period, but then I decided to go with more of a fantasy theme. But there is nothing overtly fantasy in the game, it's simply that there are many myths, which the peasants might genuinely believe, that explain how the Empire Of Abundance was transformed into the Ruined Lands. The peasants are looking for some leader who can restore the Lost Age Of Abundance. The peasants (NPCs) will switch their loyalty to whoever they think can win. Occasionally some peasant will become a True Believer, in which case their loyalty is fixed for the rest of the game. That means even if their chosen leader is defeated and becomes a guerrilla leader, the peasant will remain loyal to them, and secretly send them small amounts of money, to help them recover.

If your peasants think you are doing a terrible job with the economy, they will emigrate to the lands of one of your enemies. You can seal the border, to stop the emigration, but the peasants treat this as tantamount to putting them in prison, so their morale will plunge. If their morale gets low enough, they will switch their loyalty away from you and to any nearby guerrilla leader.

There are 3 games in this game:

1. the military game

2. the economics game

3. the spy game

The military game and the economics game are entirely deterministic. At no point does the software "roll the dice". Combat is as deterministic as in the game of chess.

The spy game does use probability. If you torture a peasant then there is an 80% chance they will tell you the true. If you are wondering if one of your peasants has become a True Believer for one of your opponents, you can torture the peasant to get them to confess. There is an 80% chance that whatever they tell you is the truth.

I have almost zero graphics for this game, so I think it will only appeal to a limited set of people who are interested in a game with a very dynamic economics system. The point of view is basically that of a ruler sitting on their throne in their capitol -- they only hear the reports brought to them by messengers. They cannot see the economy, they can only read the reports and graphs given to them by their court scribes. Likewise, with battles. In that sense, the whole game is a bit abstract, but I hope it will appeal to some niche that wants something complex.

This strategy amounts to building a RAG for your company. I have a friend who is CTO at a startup and he is doing exactly this. He has uploaded every document he can to Anthropic/Claude, using their service which allows easy construction of RAGs. He has uploaded thousands of documents. And now he can ask it questions like, "Which will increase profits more, hiring another engineer, or hiring another sales person?"

I think we will see more of this. There are some big privacy concerns, but "an internal RAG for every business" will probably find some customers.

Your comment doesn't make any sense. If you want an analogy similar to the USA versus the EU, but involving boats, then you should say: "We just ran a beautiful experiment using the Titanic and the Californian: one sunk and one didn't. And what was the difference in their policy? One ran into an iceberg and one did not. Therefore, we can conclude that ships should not run into icebergs."

We could also include that the Californian was wise to stop moving at night when it knew that icebergs were near.

The last few years have disproven this idea that we need to stop with debt spending. We just conducted a beautiful experiment: since 2020 the USA has had more deficit spending, more economic growth, and less inflation, than the EU, which has had less deficit spending, less growth, and more inflation.

A government without debt would be like a business without debt: obviously wasting good opportunities, instead of pursuing them aggressively.

But even that analogy is wrong, since a business has to make money to pay its debts, so a business does face some ultimate limit on how much debt it can take on. By contrast, the USA faces no such limit. We can always print as much money as we need to pay any debt. So long as we're willing to deal with the inflation, we can print as much money as we need.

But realistically, with birth rates falling, the government will have to engage in more and more stimulus spending as time goes by. We used to be able to rely on population growth to be the real engine of the economy, but we no longer have that. So to keep the economy going in the future, we will have to rely on immigration and deficit spending. And there, too, the EU offers an important counter-point: the USA has had a much easier time integrating immigrants, in part because of our deficit spending. By contrast, the EU is seeing how difficult it is to integrate immigrants in a climate of austerity. The EU is close to stalling, in that it needs immigrants to prop up economic growth but it is not printing enough money to put the immigrants to work -- a stall which could lead to a vicious downward cycle. Meanwhile the USA has pulled in millions of immigrants and also printed enough money to put them to work, resulting in strong economic growth.

And obviously, if you expect workers to find a collective solution to their problems then you should also expect parents to find a collective solution to their problems.

"And who is, in the end, the parent usually taking children to school and picking them up, and dashing over to pick them up if they get sick or injured?"

While this is true, this has done more to hurt women than the RTO policy. I grew up in New Jersey. When I was 5 years old I started Kindergarten. The first day of school my father walked with me, to show me where the school was. After that I was on my own. And all of the 5 year olds in my neighborhood were also on their own. We were expected to have enough maturity to get ourselves to school, and we did, everyday. We generally walked together, all the 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 year olds. School was exactly 1 kilometer from my house.

If you're looking for something that puts an undue burden on modern women, it's the modern practice that children cannot get to school on their own. They (the children) still somehow manage to get to school on their own in rural areas and in most countries: most of Europe, all of Latin America, Africa, nearly all of Asia.

We should be clear about where the real burdens are coming from. If we could get back to a situation where children could get to school on their own, the situation would be easier for women.

To be a currency, you need inflation. Otherwise you have an asset. We can see this from European history: before 1492 it was common to hoard gold as if it was gems, rubies, sapphires. It had limited use as a currency, and only at the highest levels of the economy, never at local levels -- it was traded among the very wealthy, the same as assets might be traded among the very wealthy. Only after 1492, when gold and silver started to pour in from the New World, did gold and silver become useful as everyday currencies. The French historian, Fernand Braudel, spoke of the "the price revolution of the 1500s" because inflation managed to average 1% a year for the whole century, which was likely the longest and largest sustained inflation in history up till that time. It was that inflation that gave birth to the modern world, and gave us a world of currencies and wage-work. Because crypto lacks inflation, it cannot be used as a currency. It will remain an asset.

I worry that these scientists are focused on the 21st Century simply because many people will only care about this if it happens during our lifetimes. But if we care about our great-grandchildren, we should also be worried about the 22nd Century, and the possibility that the Gulf Stream will collapse before the year 2200 is great.

This applies to startups. I give good advice to the CEO. The CEO often ignores my advice, and so the startup is destroyed. The startup would have done better if we had followed my advice. I documented a case here:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/startups-should-...

Another case here:

https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...

I struggle with the question, "How do I manage upwards? How do I gain influence over the CEO?"

Often the problem is that there is a group of people who tell the CEO exactly what the CEO wants to hear. Some of these people are manipulative con artists, but others are folks who sincerely agree with the CEO.

So then the question becomes, "When multiple people give the CEO advice, how does the CEO know that my advice is the correct advice?"

The problems are well-illustrated in the article linked above. Does Alice have foibles? Does that make her unable to follow advice? Likewise with the CEO. Would the startup even be having so many problems if the CEO was more talented? If the CEO was smart enough to know that my advice was the correct advice then would the company be in trouble at all? Wouldn't the CEO have already foreseen and forestalled the problem from existing?

Possibly off topic:

"Look up the source" in 2024 is a symptom of a wider problem. Ruby was innovative in the 1990s but it is starting to fall behind the times.

Those of us who are old enough to remember the euphoria that greeted the release of Ruby on Rails in 2004 are mostly surprised to see Ruby's current, limited market share. There was a moment when it seemed like Ruby was going to sweep the whole world of software. But that didn't happen. The mutability that made Ruby so fun also makes it difficult to maintain Ruby codebases over the long-term.

For awhile Ruby seemed relevant in fields beyond Web development, such as devops. I recall 12 years ago a startup tried to recruit me, they were going to revolutionize devops by building automations for Chef. But the metaprogramming in Ruby made it less than ideal for devops work. That startup failed. In most places I now work, a combination of Ansible and Terraform dominate, save where the company uses the constellation of tools surrounding Kubernetes to manage everything. The places that use Chef have been using Chef for 15 years, no new company chooses Chef today.

There was a stretch after 2004 when Ruby was trying to break into new areas. GTK bindings for Ruby were developed and some people experimented with desktop Ruby. But that never took off.

Many of us who loved the metaprogramming in Ruby, but wanted a better structure for that metaprogramming, moved on to other languages such as Clojure.

Some of us loved Ruby because it allowed easier polymorphism than Java did -- after all, you could use higher order functions to produce functions, but without having all the ceremony of building a Factory. But folks who just wanted the polymorphism of functions returning functions eventually moved to NodeJS.

Ruby always felt fluid and magical in a way that made it seem vaguely unsuitable for data science, and eventually Python came to dominate data science.

The Ruby community witnessed the conflict between Rails and Merb, and their eventual union, and eventually Rails became a comfortable framework for quickly generating an API. But for anything that needs high levels of write throughput, no one would chose Ruby, and so other languages have taken some of the market share.

Even on the Web, some big companies (Twitter, AirBnB) either gave up on it completely, or now only use it for templating the frontend, or offering an API to support the frontend. For backend processing, many companies have moved away from it.

In short, Ruby has been losing market share for awhile. In some fields, such as devops, where it used to be competitive, it has almost completely disappeared. It survives only in Web development, and only because of Rails.

None of this can be very inspiring for Ruby developers.

Sadly, this article does not answer the question of why such a concentration of brilliance developed at Göttingen. If we wanted to build a new Göttingen, how would we do it? What factors allowed Göttingen to exist? For most of a century, Germany was leading in most scientific and academic fields, but what allowed this? When we think of the Golden Age of physics we are thinking of a cultural event that had its center in Germany, but why? And why has Germany been so dull and flat ever since? Clearly, building a liberal democracy is not enough to ensure such a cultural event. Much of Germany was liberal but non-democratic during its golden age, as other places were, but what made Germany special at this time?

I agree. VMs rely on old technologies, and are reliable in that way. By contrast, the move to Docker then necessitated additional technologies, such as Kubernetes, and Kubernetes brought an avalanche of new technologies to help manage Docker/Kubernetes. I am wary of any technology that in theory should make things simpler but in fact draws you down a path that requires you to learn a dozen new technologies. The Docker/Kubernetes path also drove up costs, especially the cost associated with the time needed to set up the devops correctly. Anything that takes time costs money. When I was at Averon the CEO insisted on absolutely perfect reliability and therefore flawless devops, so we hired a great devops guy to help us get setup, but he needed several weeks to set everything up, and his hourly rate was expensive. We could have just "push some code to a server" and we would have saved $40,000. When I consult with early stage startups, and they worry about the cost of devops, I point out that we can start simply, by pushing some code to a server, as if this was still 2001, and we can proceed slowly and incrementally from there. While Docker/Kubernetes offers infinite scalability, I warn entrepreneurs that their first concern should be keeping things simple and therefore low cost. And then the next step is to introduce VMs, and then use something like Packer to enable the VMs to be uses as AMIs and so allow the devops to develop to the point of using Terraform -- but all of that can wait till the product actually gains some traction.

About this:

    To: CBF at MIT-AI, EAK at MIT-AI, ED at MIT-AI, MOON ay MIT-AI

Does anyone know if this is literally how they wrote email addresses in 1976? Instead of using the @ symbol they typed the word "at"?

I realize this was before DNS was invented, so I am not surprised by the lack of TLD.

I discovered his real identity (what he actually did at the company) here:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/when-outsourcing...

“Writing helps you organize your thoughts more clearly”

I actually rely on email for this. I'm grateful to work with a project manager who does not mind me writing her 20 emails a day, some of which she does not actually need to read. But some of of it is relevant to her, and it helps me keep focused when I can then follow up and discuss things with her.

If it's true that the company had no backups of their production database, then the engineer was nearly blameless. The CTO should have been fired. If there was no CTO, then the Board Of Directors should have asked the CEO why they felt they were competent to run a software company without a CTO. If the CEO was technical enough to take responsibility for technical decisions, then the CEO should have been fired or severely reprimanded.

If a software company is making money, but developers develop against the production database, and there are no backups, then its the leadership that is at fault. The leadership deserves severe criticism.

If you want to develop a personal brand in some area, such as entrepreneurship, then you need to run a blog focused on that issue.

At the risk of exaggerating, “my whole life” blogs are for young people and for people who don’t care about building an audience. LiveJournal was for teenagers.

The more specific the blog, the more you are able to develop an audience for that niche.

By contrast, a blog that contains everything in your life will only appeal to your friends.

There is a deceptive almost exception: people who are funny. They seem to break the rule. They seem able to talk about whatever they want, and they still have an audience. But in that case, they actually have a niche: humor. Everything they write is funny, so people who like humor read it all.

But unless you are reliably funny, stick to narrow topics.

You misread what I wrote. Art can be independently invented by different groups of Homo sapiens, but the ability to create art probably arose at a particular point in our evolution.

The distance between the known examples of early art also further pushes back the date when humans became capable of art. Unless you believe that people from Indonesia painted this art 51,000 years ago and then migrated to Europe, and thus brought art to Europe via migration, then instead you would have to believe that the artists who eventually arose in Europe and Indonesia had a common ancestor who was capable of art. If we have art in Indonesia at 51,000 years ago, and art in Europe about 35,000 years ago, and if the last common ancestor of those 2 populations lived 100,000 years ago (hypothetically) then you'd have to believe that humans have been capable of this kind of art for at least 100,000 years.

But anyone who needs to see these publications can reach them through libraries. One of the reasons why Elsevier can charge so much is that their customers have been institutions.

I'm not sure where you are reading but both layman and scientists commonly use the word "human" to refer to the genus "homo". To look at just one example, Ian Tattersall called one of his books "Extinct Humans" and it is a look at the history of the genus homo:

https://www.amazon.com/Extinct-Humans-Ian-Tattersall/dp/0813...

""Legal online speech made up most of the removed content from posts on Facebook and YouTube in France, Germany, and Sweden,""

This whole article is idiotic. It can be re-phased as: "Meta and Alphabet don't want to hire large compliance teams, so they simply accept every request as valid." The companies have the option to push back, but they prefer not to, because they don't want to be bothered. And if a take-down request is not challenged, then we don't actually know if the courts would have found the speech illegal or not. If the courts frequently upheld the speech, then the regulations would naturally shrink in scope. But if the courts instead agreed that the speech violated the law, then the speech actually was illegal. But establishing the exact boundary between legal and illegal is something that can only be done if the companies, or some free-speech CSA, are willing to take some of these cases to court.

The criticism here is similar to the one made against content hosting companies who take down any content flagged by a DMCA request, even when the entity making the DMCA request is not the copyright holder. When the content hosting companies demonstrate cowardice regarding DMCA, then the DMCA can become a tool of abuse, but some of the criticism regarding the situation around the DMCA should be aimed at the cowardice of the companies.

It's worth repeating, too, Meta and Alphabet always have the option to leave the EU market if they find the regulations in the EU market to be overly burdensome. But if they stay in the EU market, then they'll have to abide by EU regulations.