lkrubner

In late 1945 the exchange rate was 360 yen to 1 dollar. If that was good in 1945 then it should be good in 2026 because nothing ever changes.

The Iliad was written after the classical era of Bronze Age Egypt, so no classical age mummy could be buried with the Iliad because it didn't exist yet.

No, it is exactly the same thing. The tax on cassettes raised money that was given to artists.

Nothing you said is true. The fact that you didn't name a single person is an example of the style of reasoning that has increasingly shaped USA discourse over the last 60 years. If you don't have specifics then you are simply giving into the trend towards distrust. Since 1960 every institution in the USA has been made more transparent and more directly democratic and yet this has done nothing to increase trust in those institutions. The distrust comes first and the distrust does not reference anything in reality. If Americans are more worried about corruption when corruption is decreasing then something is going on in the minds of Americans which does not have a correspondence with any external reality. Likewise, Americans are increasingly convinced that crime is increasing when every statistic we have shows that the crime wave lasted from 1960 to 1990 and has been in decline since 1990. Again, that Americans are more worried about crime when crime is decreasing shows that the concern about crime is being driven by something other than crime. The distrust comes first. The distrust shapes people's perception, separate from facts. The distrust shapes people's narratives, in opposition to the facts.

The problem is more general. Trust in American institutions peaked in the 1950s. Starting in the 1960s, Americans began to slowly withdraw from institutions, and also distrust them. Robert Putnam covers this in his book "Bowling Alone." Americans stopped going to the local meetings of their local town government, and Americans became more suspicious of local decisions. Americans became less interested in local news and more interested in national news (partly that was the shift in news-consumption-habits away from the local paper and towards national television). Americans slowly became more likely to believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. During the 1970s, Americans demanded more democracy from their institutions, and many reforms were passed, including the Sunshine Laws, that were passed in almost all 50 states, making government more transparent, yet Americans became less trusting despite the greater transparency. Also during the 1970s, Americans demanded that the inner workings of Congress be made more democratic, and so the committee chairmen were stripped of their powers and each committee became purer in its democracy, which caused more procedural motions, which slowed down the actual work, which caused Americans to trust Congress less. Barbara Sinclair wrote a famous book (at least it was famous within the world of political science) called "Unorthodox Lawmaking" which tracks the breakdown of the normal lawmaking processes of Congress during the period from 1970 to 2015. All of these trends were mild from 1960 to 2000 and then they accelerated after 2000. Americans became less trusting of church, government, charity, the police, the teachers, the newspapers, the Fed, the CIA, the FBI, the unions, the Boy Scouts, and Americans became more divided over the military. There was an increase in general paranoia. The current frenzy over AI is part of the longer trend.

From what I can tell, all of America's institutions were reformed during the era after 1970 and yet Americans became less trustful of those same institutions. It is likely that some of the reforms had negative side effects, especially the attempt to make the committees inside of Congress more pure in their democracy, thereby making them less effective.

“Ireland offers long-term grants for artists” is how this would have been written 50 years ago.

The idea is not new, only the rhetoric.

Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection -- this totally makes sense if you assume they believe that the future of human connection is with an AI friend.

That https://character.ai is so enormously popular with people who are under the age of 25 suggests that this is the future. And Meta is certainly looking at https://character.ai with great interest, but also with concern. https://character.ai represents a threat to Meta.

Years ago, when Meta felt that Instagram was a threat, they bought Instagram.

If they don't think they can buy https://character.ai then they need to develop their own version of it.

I don't think this is a great article, as I think it focuses too much on the Washington Post, but there are some issues that will have to be addressed in American democracy.

National democracy is built on top of local democracy, in the sense of local self-rule -- if local democracy is dying then national democracy will tend to die, but if local democracy is thriving, national democracy is largely guaranteed.

About local democracy:

1. Local city government is now less accountable because of the death of local newspapers. The public must have some idea what politicians are doing, but without local newspapers there is no one to report what is happening at the local level.

2. This is related to people (since the 1960s) losing interest in local government. When I was a child my parents both served in the local government, I remember being 7 years old and getting taken to meetings where the room was packed. But when I was 42 I drove my mom to a town meeting and I was shocked to see that the room was empty, literally, there was not a single citizen who had come out for the meeting that evening. The only people in the room were the politicians (all of whom were volunteers, as it was an unpaid position -- they were civically minded citizens).

3. Local democracy worked best when families stayed in one town for generations, and so had a long-term commitment to the health of the town. But the modern life-style, even for the middle class who are the most likely to serve in government, involves buying a starter home in one town, then a bigger home for a family (in another town), then a retirement home, possibly in another state. Most families now assume they will only be in a given town for 10 or 20 years, so their focus tends to be on minimal taxes, rather than long-term investments in the town.

4. For local government, possible solutions include abolishing local democracy and making the positions appointed (most roles are already appointed, of course) from the state level, or making the towns much larger (a large percentage of a given state) or limiting voting to those who pass some test, or who demonstrate citizenship by volunteering some time, or by having frequent elections to a staggered city council (as frequent voting tends to reward the few citizens who are highly active).

Anyone who thinks these moves are anti-democratic should remember that local government elections tend to only get 15% to 20% participation rates, so most of the public has already voluntarily disenfranchised itself.

Any democracy will automatically be the democracy of those who show up. There is no democracy for the truly apathetic. But local and regional self-rule can remain strong so long as citizens who are active in civic affairs can continue to exercise rule at the local level, without being blocked those who are non-active.

There remains a controversy whether "democracy" means "the right to vote" or "a population engaged in self-government." That is, does "democracy" refer to "self expression via voting" or does it refer to actual government arising from the local population? Those who feel that "democracy" means "self expression" tend to think of themselves as consumers rather than citizens, they see themselves as buying government services (with taxes) rather than the producers of government. But local self-rule does not survive for long in areas where people see themselves mostly as consumers of government services. Local self-rule survives thanks to the civically minded citizens who are willing to volunteer their time to creating governance.

They went from $559.36 to $132 a month on Hetzner, and they seem happy about the performance. This matches my own experience as well, I have been stunned regarding Hetzner and how cheap it can be.

Why do volunteer firefighters rush into a burning building to try to save children from some family they have never met before? Every day we afforded examples of people sacrificing their personal interests for the benefit of others.

But also, biologists usually use a definition of "altruism" that does not include close kin. Richard Dawkins was explicit about this in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene." Helping someone you are directly related to is not considered altruism.

I tried to read this, but it's just gibberish. I cannot figure out what you are trying to say. Obviously Putin leads the international right-wing movement. This is well known. I have to assume you have some deep emotional commitment to being contrarian. You are attempting to jump through a lot of mental hoops to transform Putin into a Communist. You will, I hope, understand that most of us don't want to twist ourselves into a mental and emotional pretzel to end up with your deeply contrarian position. "Leftwing" and "rightwing" are always situational terms that depend, in any era, on a prevailing consensus, therefore there is no point trying to twist the meaning of the words, except in cases where you can point to a specific contradiction between the conventional label and some actual policy, and even then, most of the contradictions should taken as wry ironies, as we all know the old adage, "Politics makes strange bedfellows."

You are making up your own, personal definition of genocide. But "genocide" has a specific definition under international law, and it is a crime of intent. Israel clearly had no intent to permanently remove the people of Gaza, since Israel was happy to sign a ceasefire as soon as they could get their hostages back. Everything else that occurred is just ordinary war. Without the intent to permanently erase a culture or a people, it cannot be genocide under the law, since the intent is missing.

There is the separate issue of war crimes. Some commanders in the IDF may not have shown due caution towards civilians. That will eventually be adjudicated in the courts. But that is a separate charge and has nothing to do with genocide.

I remain baffled why some people want to take the various charges that could be made against Israel and conflate all of the charges with the charge of genocide. The charge of genocide has become deeply attractive to a large number of people, even when other charges would be easier to prove and have more evidence to support them. But for some reason "war crime" is not as attractive as "genocide" and so supporters of the people of Gaza have developed an emotional commitment to fighting for the charge which they cannot possibly prove, because events have undermined their narrative.

In late 2021, Ed Zitron wrote (on Twitter) that the future of all work was "work from home" and that no one would ever work in an office again. I responded:

"In the past, most companies have had processes geared towards office work. Covid-19 has forced these companies to re-gear their processes to handle external workers. Now that the companies have invested in these changed processes, they are finding it easier to outsource work to Brazil or India. Here in New York City, I am seeing an uptick in outsourcing. The work that remains in the USA will likely continue to be office-based because the work that can be done 100% remotely will likely go over seas."

He responded:

"Pee pee poo poo aaaaaaaaaaa peeeeee peeeeee poop poop poop."

I don't know if he was taking drugs or what. I find his persona on Twitter to be baffling.

It's not invisible, because some people can see it. It is illegible because the leadership of a large company won't know how to interpret it. This particular usage of "illegible" has been around for awhile, but is probably best known from the book, "Seeing Like A State":

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D2HZXB4/

"Ordinary people—who watched their rent, groceries, and gas bills skyrocket—saw a profession more invested in protecting Democratic policy narratives than in telling the truth. The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust."

This post is ridiculously partisan. The head of the Fed was Republican, the majority of the Fed has always been Republican, the money-printing response to the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020 when the President was a Republican, the majority of all economists are Republican, but somehow this writer blames this on Democrats? The result is a self-inflicted torching of trust.

England was the first nation to escape from famine. A national market began to take shape shortly after the civil war, and the national market transformed traditional famine into a question of high prices. Jethro Tull began his experiments in 1701, and Charles Townsend began taking notes about fertilizer shortly afterwards, and when the public became aware of their work, the Agricultural Revolution began, and then, shortly afterwards, the Industrial Revolution. But obviously, most of the world continued to experience famine into the 1900s.

I have read that before the Industrial Revolution, most people faced famine for about 10% of their lives. And while, historically, that would have probably been concentrated into a few bad years during their lifetime (months of starvation, during a few bad years), if we were to generalize that and make it a rule, it would work out to 3 days a month.

There is some evidence that there are health benefits that are specific to the fasting mode. This has mostly been studied in the context of chemotherapy, where fasting can protect against some of the side-effects of chemotherapy:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5870384/

Most of this has only been studied in animals, not humans, but in animals the results were clear:

"Fasting before chemotherapy (CT) was shown to protect healthy cells from treatment toxicity by reducing the expression of some oncogenes, such as RAS and the AKT signaling pathway [2]. This reduction is mediated by the decrease of circulating insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) and glucose. In addition, starvation and calorie restriction activate other oncogenes in cancer cells, induce autophagy, and decrease cellular growth rates while increasing sensitivity to antimitotic drugs [2]."

If we assume that we have been shaped by millions of years of frequent famine, then our evolution has been shaped by famine. It is possible that our immune system simply makes the assumption that we will soon face famine, and therefore some important tasks, such as extreme autophagy, are normally postponed till the famine arrives. However, in the modern era the famine never arrives, and so we may have to induce it by artificial means.

I have experimented with very long fasts. My longest fast ever was in September of 2015 when I managed to go 12 straight days on nothing but water.

Obviously, any health benefits from that incident might have been psychosomatic, since I was expecting health benefits. But all the same, I did find some of the health benefits to be shocking and completely unexpected. Since at least 1995, and possibly 1990, I had a mole on my skin on my left arm. I wasn't worried about it, so I simply ignored it. I had it on my arm at least 20 years, maybe 25 years. I recall one morning in November of 2015 when I was in my kitchen, making breakfast, and I reached over to pour myself some coffee, and of course my arm was in my field of vision, and after a moment of thinking something was different, it occurred to me that the mole was gone. It had been there at least 20 years, and then it disappeared, at some point during the weeks after I had done the 12 day fast. I don't know when it disappeared, it just slowly faded away at some point between September and November. There was no remaining sign of it on my arm.

Again, that might have been purely psychosomatic, but it was interesting.

Surprising they don’t mention Fernand Braudel:

https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Cen...

The Annales journal was established in 1929 and shaped the context of everything that Christopher Hill did:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school

Braudel is the most famous of the historians from this school. His book “The Structures Of Everyday Life” established historiography on the basis of what ordinary people did in their ordinary lives: what they ate, what they wore, how they worked. And Braudel was building upon ideas already established by the founders of the Annales school. But this enormously influential group of historians were a constant source of inspiration to Christopher Hill, and I think shaped the way he wrote The World Turned Upside Down.

I recommend both Hill and Braudel, both pillars of my intellectual life.

Sadly, these tweaks don't address any of the more obvious oddities that people have with proportional representation in the legislature. While such a system won't necessarily end up with Dutch levels of weirdness, it is still possible:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-does-proportional-repre...

If intelligence was always the correct answer then it would have developed much faster than it did.

I agree with the emphasis on networking. At the risk of sounding like I am doing an advertisement, last month I gave away 5 free tickets to graduates of Fullstack Academy to come to my event, and one of those people found a part-time connection to a startup via the event. I'll do the same again, if you're in New York City, I offer 5 free tickets. Reach me at lawrence@krubner.com. Mention this Hacker News post. We will have entrepreneurs at this month's event who are hiring. Come join us. Details:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/april-28-the-inf...

Here in the USA we currently have a regime that is focused on destroying all forms of American power: they are destroying our economic power, they are destroying our cultural power, they are destroying our military power. They are destroying the idea called "America." They have gone to war against each of our traditions and values. Some critics ascribe this to rational motives, such critics claim that the goal here is to make Trump wealthier, or to make Elon Musk wealthier, or to make all rich people wealthier. But I think it is a form of psychological denial to want to believe that Trump or Musk have rational motivations. It is more accurate to see this as an expression of the primitive impulses that rule them. There is no rational calculation in what they do, only rage, and a desire to destroy. Fighting against them is honorable, virtuous, and moral.

Nate Silver has shifted his politics very far to the right. That's simply a fact. He used to do reports on polling in which his math was straightforward and very reasonable, and back around 2016 he gave the public a good education about what probability actually meant -- in particular, he performed a real service by reminding people that "a 66% chance of winning" does not mean a person is going to win, it actually means one-third of the time they will lose. But nowadays Nate Silver argues on Twitter in favor of whatever Peter Thiel is doing, even as Peter Thiel endorses a completely illegal coup aimed at destroying the USA.

"But what does this mean for frontline engineering managers? Is the new normal just about writing more code and doing less of the other things that peacetime managers would normally do?"

"Should they be able to do code reviews? Yes."

There is no standard answer here. At many companies it is the Head Of Product who also oversees the tech team. They may not know how to write code, and will not know how to do code reviews. Some project managers lead engineering teams without knowing how to code. That's especially true outside of the tech industry.

For anyone interested in specific numbers, I interviewed Eric Garside about his experience scaling Freshly from 3 engineers to almost 80 engineers, see here:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/eric-garside-as-...

I also surveyed several of the CTOs who I know in New York City, about team size and scale and responsibilities, they gave their answers here:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-ctos...

Decentralization is not the answer. Centralization is the answer.

What we are seeing is clearly an act of malice. We need to be honest about that. Trying to obfuscate what we are seeing helps no one. We should use plain English and talk in a straightforward way about what is happening.

We can rebuild the government. We will eventually rebuild the government. All of these agencies will eventually be rebuilt. It might take 20 years, but eventually the USA will get back to where it was in late 2024, in terms of state capacity. But the damage being done right now almost guarantees a "Lost Generation" that has to spend its life rebuilding what we had, rather than moving into the future.

The success of Bluesky has been driven, in part, by the sophistication of their system for blocking. I know this is the main thing that draws me in. There are many people who, on a volunteer basis, build block lists that I can subscribe to. I've subscribed to many of these, more than 20, to block Nazis, scammers, MAGA, crypto bots, Russian trolls, fans of Elon Musk, racists, various political causes, and more. I've been planning to start my own list to block libertarians and anarchists. I hear other people complain about the bots on Bluesky, but I've seen very few bots on Bluesky, presumably because I subscribe to so many block lists. And I keep telling people: you can make all of the bots disappear, just subscribe to more block lists. And it's these block lists that have turned Bluesky into the most pleasant social media experience I've ever had.

If people cared about decentralization then we would not have seen the consolidation that we've seen. That's true even for technologies who pitch decentralization as a core feature, as we saw with cryptocurrencies -- the original argument was that cryptocurrencies allowed a decentralization of finance, but then we saw a handful of platforms centralize the trades, and most people who bought cryptocurrencies were pleased to have this convenience.

From moxie.org:

"Given the history of why web1 became web2, what seems strange to me about web3 is that technologies like ethereum have been built with many of the same implicit trappings as web1. To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around… platforms. Again. People who will run servers for you, and iterate on the new functionality that emerges. Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan."

They also make this point:

"I think this is very similar to the situation with email. I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway."

For a variety of reasons, people have not felt that it is worthwhile to fight for decentralization.

Preferences change before behavior changes, especially where network effects are strong. Preference has to become strongly negative before you'll see the change in behavior. But then the change can happen fast. A social network can suffer the social equivalent of a "Minsky moment." Or as Hemingway said, they can go broke two ways, first slowly, then suddenly.