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olsonjeffery

222 karma · joined December 19, 2009

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olsonjeffery··on Texas poised to get own stock exchange – with less red tape than NYSE or Nasdaq
Fort Sumter. You want to let Texas have nukes?
olsonjeffery··on Texas poised to get own stock exchange – with less red tape than NYSE or Nasdaq
race to the bottom.
olsonjeffery··on Texas poised to get own stock exchange – with less red tape than NYSE or Nasdaq
Winning what? At raising maternal mortality? At childhood asthma? At poisoning groundwater?

What is Texas winning at?

olsonjeffery··on The Shadow of Tiananmen Falls on Hong Kong
Are you familiar with Georgia’s “Cop City”? This sort of thing does and has happened in the United States, and recently.

> Carr obtained indictments against 61 people, alleging violations of the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, over ongoing efforts to halt construction of Cop City. Indicted activists, including a protest observer, face steep penalties of up to 20 years in prison. Three bail fund organizers face additional money laundering charges, and five people also face state domestic terrorism charges. [0]

Is it ok because the prosecutor isn’t seeking life sentences? Do you contend that the activists are being treated fairly as one expects in a democratic society that values rule of law? Is it acceptable because America is 66% less repressive than China and against a narrower range of views (like socialism/communism, see Debs et al)? Have you really even interrogated your positions?

[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/rico-and-domestic-terr...

olsonjeffery··on The Shadow of Tiananmen Falls on Hong Kong
> were they charged and convicted with subversion, treason, or anything like a felony? Because that's what happen in HK.

Not yet. But it’s obtuse bordering on disingenuous to claim this isn’t on the table, given rhetoric from politicians (current and former). Or is eliminationist rhetoric and political repression okay as long as it isn’t done the way China does it?

Also, are you familiar what how the anti-Cop City protest movement has been treated in Georgia?

Honestly I want to know if you’re speaking from ignorance or malice.

olsonjeffery··on CEOs could easily be replaced with AI, experts argue
This is so bleak, and the reason these bromides against CEOs appear is because this system of global capitalism is intent on commoditizing everything; even a CEO’s skill set.

Some people (either CEOs themselves or temporarily embarrassed wage workers) will bristle at this because it’s written from the perspective of warning/mocking CEOs who so readily automate-away workforces.

But an honest accounting would recognize that these automation processes have been happening for many decades, now. And maybe the CEO is diminished, but that’s besides the point that all of this just serves to accumulate wealth to the capital class, who’ve almost become sovereign (when Bezos, Musk, Andreeson et al can conduct independent foreign diplomacy or get a dedicated seat in the UNSC, I will be happy to revise this).

Everything is up for grabs, and if a board of ancient mummies can enslave a populace with an AI as well as with a flesh-and-blood C-suite, then they will. Because of the pressures to optimize and deliver more value that undergird our current society!

On the upside: an LLM probably lies less than a human CEO.

olsonjeffery··on Twitch removes every member of its Safety Advisory Council
“just putting the facts out there” while stating a truism devoid of context is not a constructive contribution.

You make no comments on the impact of this choice beyond the nominal cost savings. Or does your lack of comment signal your perspective?

What even is your point?

olsonjeffery··on The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?
Please expand on the tension between the competing passages of “We have the technology to pause the worst effects..” and “It’s far from a complete solution”.
olsonjeffery··on The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?
The phrase “since the dawn of humanity” is doing a lot of work in this comment. On a long enough timeline, the “world has ended” multiple times. This isn’t doomerism, it’s a pragmatic view from a biologist’s perspective.

Also as others pointed out, you misinterpret or misrepresent the interviewee’s words by placing “the end of the world” alongside TFA’s as though a thoughtful discussion with domain experts (in biology) is the same as the ravings of apocalyptic cranks.

Do you have an argument besides the ad hominem directed at “these people among us”?

olsonjeffery··on [dead]
I thought this article (a polemic and critical reflection on New Atheism) would be interest to the HN community.

History has shown us that a lot of “intellectual movements” loved by technologists et al have gone nowhere or otherwise been a joke:

- Rationalism: Styling itself as a rigorous way to interrogate reality to chart the best path forward (nurtured by the lesswrong community), its crowning achievement was Roko’s Basilisk, a hilarious “doomsday scenario” that only holds true if you happen to have a VERY specific set of beliefs about AGI and what its motive would be (ie the priors you must hold to believe RB are de facto religious)

Effective Altruism: Same as above, but (supposedly) tied to material pursuit of improving life for humanity as a whole; in practice, another rich tech brat playground and favored mindset of at least one multi-billion dollar fraud; also EA-motivated actors haven’t made a dent in any measurable global indicator of health/happiness, so what is all that money going for? Could it be think tanks?

And New Atheism: just a stalking horse for evopsych sex pests and neocons in academia (see the support for the war on terror, obsession with “western values” ,positions on campus protest post 10/7, etc… the article covers it well)

Putting this together: I think that “our community” isn’t very good at philosophy and the “lifestyles” we endorse end being the positions of culture-war conservatives (ie transphobia on the basis of “scientific reality”) or economic libertarians and white supremecist freaks like Moldbug.

I’d also like to be able to say I’m against ideology, but really I’m not. You can probably guess my perspective by what I devalue in my comment above. We are all reflections of our effect on the world, and I think the effect of the three “movements” above has been negative.

olsonjeffery··on Another US state repeals law that protected ISPs from municipal competition
Sorry your society has poor controls on public service. Sounds like a problem with the constitution; too bad it makes you sound like a crank.
olsonjeffery··on WebAssembly: A promising technology that is quietly being enshitified
I don't think there's any guarantee that browser vendors will continue to support WASI 0.1 indefinitely; Once multiple versions of the standard are in play, codebase supporting them simultaneously explode in size. None of this gets into the likelihood that, once WASI hits 1.0, the prior versions very well could be "retired".

And keep in mind that the perspective of the author is that things will only get worse from hereon, with regard to WASM.

olsonjeffery··on WebAssembly: A promising technology that is quietly being enshitified
Thanks for the feedback.

I was wrong about debug vs release; It's the difference between 4.0MB & 893KB on a ~500 LOC rust codebase (per cloc).

I want to observe that your suggestions don't undermine or refute my point about problems that WASM adoption faces. This serves to underline that the developer experience needs work. Opinions may differ on how much. Also that "developer experience" runs on multiple axes of concern (bin size, perf, accessibility, utility of language, etc).

olsonjeffery··on WebAssembly: A promising technology that is quietly being enshitified
My direct experience with wasm32-unknown-uknown contradicts your own. I am building a yew on nightly, moving between release or debug affects nothing.
olsonjeffery··on WebAssembly: A promising technology that is quietly being enshitified
It's hard because, a lot of this stuff (async WASM, effect-driven WASM, GC in WASM, etc) is all driven by the desire to push these concerns out of wasm bytecodes, because it explodes the binary's size.

I have a pretty trivial webapp written in Yew and I stopped working on it once I saw that the wasm artifacts were weighing at 4MB (uncompressed) for relatively little functionality. THIS is what is driving the next round of "work" on WASM: to wring more functionality out of a system (WASI 0.1) designed as a drop-in replacement for emscripten output. As an aside on this point, the author is waaaay in front of their skies with basically all of their critiques around ByteCode Alliance; A lot of innuendo to basically serve a rhetorical point that isn't really true (WASI 0.1 is "good enough"). It has drawbacks! That's what the iterations on the protocol are exploring!

And this tech is cool and all, but right now a reasonably-vanilla typescript react app w/ a modern bundler (ie including stuff like router, redux, oidc, etc) is beating the breaks off of a similar app in Rust or C#/Blazor in terms of bin size. And there's no perf or API-surface argument that overcomes this. And it has chilling effect on developers when they reach for this tech.

olsonjeffery··on Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
Capitalism and atomized market actors have subsumed the feudal patronage arrangements of the ancien regime.

Would you say that you love this current system, but hate the outcomes?

olsonjeffery··on The Essence of Compiling with Continuations (1993) [pdf]
I work on an open source system-f level lambda calculus named System R (https://github.com/olsonjeffery/system_r).

I’m interested in this because I’m writing this LC dialect as a deliberate, extensible IR with a targeted “bottom-dialect” (a System F, if you will) that can be translated to any number of lower representations.

My goal is use it as an extensible dialect that can be built up to any arbitrarily complex dialect of LC (Calculus of Constructions, Algebraic Effects, etc). Those “higher dialects” themselves can be targets for some “front end” language that’s palatable to end-programmers.

There’s a lot of thoughtful insights here in this paper, namely the idea of “combining steps” to optimize/remove IRs. This also corresponds to the same practices in eg Koka (which goes straight to C or wasm/js; heck maybe they cite this paper?)

I personally reflect on this because I think an extensible IR is just a stop-gap to an optimized process, allowing you to “grow” the language semantics you want, but ultimately you’ll have to rewrite bc of perf. This happened with rustc, as well.

Thanks for sharing!

olsonjeffery··on Dozens of deaths reveal risks of injecting sedatives into police detainees
Do they have as many excuses as Americans do when it comes to talking about why America has legitimate problems with policing and violence?
olsonjeffery··on My Free Speech Means You Have to Shut Up
The author is an experienced federal litagator and former AUSA. He writes frequently on first ammendment topics, which are of great interest and import to the USA'ian Hacker News community.

If you don't like his opinions, let's hear your arguments.

olsonjeffery··on Welcome to Wikifunctions
it’s eminently workable. it’s every “modern” package system, but at the finest absolute level of granularity.
olsonjeffery··on Statement on AP Psychology and Florida
Are you malicious or just ignorant? This is a terrible proposal (it’s not even a plan, just a hack).

Should schools open up a supplemental essay so that applying students can share how they had to subvert the curriculum and then beg the college to accept their AP credits?

olsonjeffery··on Statement on AP Psychology and Florida
This is a wonderful straw man you’ve constructed! Do you think if you believe in it enough, it will actually become true?
olsonjeffery··on Welcome to Wikifunctions
https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/05876...
olsonjeffery··on Data brokers selling license plate location and analytics data
US Constitution worship on HN has to be, for me, one of the great disappointments for a community that regards its intelligence so highly.

The constitution is a piece of paper; it’s not internally consistent and not even rational.

olsonjeffery··on Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare
To all the HN users bent out of shape about this outcome (not even mentioning the numerous, actual KF users that are active in this discussion): this is the system you built. One where government largely stays out of the way of private businesses, leaving those businesses to fend for themselves when faced with entirely normal, popular, and historically recurrent calls for some, or any, kind of justice.

This is the world you wanted. This is the reaping you have sowed. Enjoy it!

olsonjeffery··on Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare
The presumption of innocence doesn’t apply here. Not sorry that that bothers you so much.
olsonjeffery··on Price of FSD will rise to $15k in North America on September 5th
Reasonable skepticism based on the facts presented.
olsonjeffery··on W4 plans to monetize the Godot engine using Red Hat’s open-source playbook
It’s more nuanced than that. The TechCrunch piece elides a lot of context.

None of the OSS frameworks do anything better than what Godot does. A core dev sitting on a special fork they share with devs who have signed NDAs is not scalable.

Source: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...

olsonjeffery··on Miami advances plan to move homeless onto island
What a ridiculous argument tactic (“since you can’t reckon with the totality of a system according to my arbitrary standard you can’t critique it”).

Furthermore, complaining about the use of “you Americans” is childish tone policing and something one does when they are unable to address the merits of an argument. Maybe if you had an actual argument you could think up something else to share, rather than attempts to stymie discussion because it appears to make you uncomfortable.

Lastly, you brought up nationalism. From my vantage point (as another American) it looks like you’re just trying to shut down debate instead of face the reality of the outcomes we Americans have engineered for our most vulnerable populations.

olsonjeffery··on We don't do that here (2017)
Your inability to articulate a meaningful response is all about you, not me.
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