sandoooo

The criticism is that it is made by and caters to low status people.

It's remarkable how much of the criticism aimed at SV can be summed up as:

# they're 20-something.

# they're white.

# they're male.

# and this is low status.

This is exactly Prisoner's Dilemma and all relevant literature applies. Iterate a few times with a large population and the optimal strategy goes to all sorts of weird places.

So what you're saying is we should build a browser inside the browser sandbox?

A barista is never going to make as much money as a CS major, but not everybody wants to spend all their time coding, and not everybody will be good enough at it to get paid. Lots of people want to be baristas and are capable of getting paid for making coffee, though, and society still needs baristas.

It is terribly verbose in Chinese too. It is verbose because it's straight-up copying the style of ancient books talking about formulas for magic, without trying to optimize for ease of use. A less verbose (but still mostly gramatially correct) version might be like this:

有術曰「曼德博」。先得數曰「寬」，曰「高」。乃行是術曰。

It's an esolang. I don't think it has much practical application over, say, Brainfuck.

I think getting four years of head-start would make up for it a lot. Plus, not everybody is suited to the career focused college degrees and not everybody should be in them.

As a society, a portion of the workforce has to do the plumbing, make the furniture, serve coffee, and do all the jobs that don't require college. The people doing those jobs shouldn't need to spending four of their most productive years not working and accumulating debt. They should just start four years earlier, or get vocational training for a few months to a year.

Instead of college for all, what's needed is an alternative pathway from high school to (optional) industrial training/ apprenticeships to jobs, skipping college altogether for those who don't want/need it. Employers need to be able to hire non-college-graduates without worrying they're getting the dregs of the college system. They should have fine-grained input into getting exactly the sort of skills they want into their workers, and a large portion of this program (for some of the low-req jobs, the entirety) should involve no-strings-attached industry placements to get those employers comfortable with the people they'll be hiring.

I see a parallel between this and the pushback against Electron, and the counter-argument is the same: more choices in software in general is a good thing, and lowering the cost of entry by dropping requirements in accessibility or performance (Electron) gets society more choices in software.

The hypothetical csv-cruncher behaves a lot like a compiler - imagine if we had to make every one of those compatible with screenreaders and 20-year-old hardware running obsolete OSes. Imagine how much shittier everything would be with this additional burden to carry, then multiply it by every component in a typical software stack. This is the cost. It is finite, because everything is finite, but that doesn't stop it from being very large.

So to sum up: regulating this is detrimental to society.

>There's a difference between a one-off command-line utility, and implementing elderly unfriendly software.

Say I released my console utility publicly. Say I make money off of it, one way or another. Am I obliged to make it work for your 90 year old grandma now?

Sure, your grandma probably won't need this particular thing I made, but others might - you never know. But, on the other hand, I'm fairly sure that the significantly larger effort I have to put in would not result in significantly more income for me - this is not a profitable thing to do.

In the end, like almost all other arguments about The Right Thing To Do, this is an argument about resource (re)distribution: am I obliged in some way to distribute my limited time and attention towards the hypothetical 90-year-old grandma? Even if it results in my making less money (or, indeed, turn my profitable side-project into a loss-making one)? Under what circumstances should I be obliged to do this, over and above my economic incentive to serve more profitable - less demanding - customers?

In fate/go there's this meme that the devs are tracking 'greed', i.e. how much people want some rare reward, the idea being your chance of getting something you want from the lootbox system is lower if they think you can tolerate greater spends, because you want it more.

Far as I know that's not the actual case, but if I were to make one of these I'd definitely have both the gambler's fallacy and ML-based greed in there. They would both activate only for about a third of the sessions, so there would be plausible deniability.

Thinking about this more carefully, though: I'm not sure if actually lowering the reward for greed would be a good idea. Seems to me that you would want to reward greed so that it leads to even more greed.

I'm excited about future applications that strap this onto some relatively simple, logically consistent, non-AI number-crunching program. As a toy example, Scott Alexander trained it to output chess moves in a consistent manner that avoids nonsensical moves, but it can't win against competent human players. If you strap it onto a chessbot during both training and use I'm fairly sure it'll easily beat human grandmasters.

So what you have here is a human compatibility/abstraction layer for programs. What can you do with this strapped to Wolfram Alpha? Or trained with a Github dataset?

Put another way, apparently this does linguistic style /convincingly humanlike writing without being able to reason about cause/effect or basic arithmatics. But we already have programs that does cause/effect and arithmetics, quickly and at 100% accuracy. Now we just need to combine the two.

Until they get demonetized and deplatformed, at least.

On that note, I've always found the continual survival of 4chan rather suspicious.

The total number of billionaires in the US will drop to zero a week before this is passed into law (or maybe one or two, the remaining being people who have decided that ultra-virtue-signalling-slash-conspicuous-consumption is worth 6%/yr and who have nevertheless squirreled away most of their wealth into various nonprofits and the like), and the number of people with assets over $100m will dropped to maybe 5%. Unless they plan to retroactively tax people fleeing before the law passes, I doubt it will generate one-twentieth that amount. A person with asset of $100m will be paying $1m/year under that system. Uprooting yourself from the US is painful, but $1m/year soothes a whole lot of pain. Even more so for billionaires.

If it does become law, though, I fully expect that $50m ceiling to come down year by year as the economic situation worsens until sub-$1m. Or maybe they keep it the same and hyperinflation will meet it on the way up for the same net result.

The context matters. Seen the democrat primary speeches? UBI is on the table. There's people in this thread right now advocating for it. The article is indirectly advocating for it. The whole thing is like advocating we drive 200mph over a bridge that hasn't been built yet.

Can they handle it now? Today? For the whole country? Because the problems are already here and people are advocating UBI so ideally we need those magical robots yesterday.

Concrete. Medicine. Fertilizers. Fuel. Plastic. Electricity. Water. Trucks. Wheat.

Do you have the robots today? Do you see them happening by the time the next government rolls around and UBI becomes a real choice?

As a reminder, suffering the problems of UBI for just a few years without an actual, functional, non-vaporeware solution in place is going to ruin a lot of lives and quite possibly burn down all our existing shit.

>More inefficiency than we already have?

Yes, more than there already is. This is the standard thing that happens whenever there is massive redistribution of anything by government fiat. Stuff gets redistributed arbitrarily, people who need it don't get it, poeple who don't need it get too much of it, stuff is lost via administrative error or outright fraud or political finagling, people being careless with billions of dollars in other people's money because it's not in their KPI, etc.

Note that most things are not literally on fire currently and there is no looting. Those things are not guaranteed.

>In the developed world we already have more stuff and kinds of stuff than most of us need.

Really, now. Do you think we'll be OK if we stop the mass production of fertilizers and concrete for a while? Just a few months until things settle down? How about meds? Those tie up a lot of man-hours and medically trained people to produce, and we could definitely use those people elsewhere (or they could go take long, UBI-piad holidays).

Of course it is already here. I think this is in fact the core problem of Medicare and why costs are going up and up with no end in sight.

In the same vein, all that a UBI / UBH would do is shift around allocation of actually-limited resources while causing inefficiency, waste and accounting headaches for everybody. What's more, you'll be shifting those limited resources away from the most materially productive segment of society - the middle class - and onto the underclass, who is not going to all of a suddenly take over the burden of mass production, since that requires many years of education and training. So what I'm saying is you'll start to get goods shortages too.

The whole system is an intricate jigsaw puzzle with a billion moving pieces. People keep suggesting we fix it by hitting it with a hammer and setting parts of it on fire.

You're right, of course. We're actually faced with a choice between a world where some can defend themselves against injustice, and a world where some can defend themselves against injustice and also I write thinkpieces about how horrible that is on the internet.

It looks like I am going to choose the former, just so you know.

What's a better world, one where some people has the means to defend themselves against injustice, or one where nobody does but at least we're all equal?

Let's say we have machines that will produce an unlimited quantity of any good that is currently on the market today. We put one in every house, since that machine can also produce copies of itself. Does this mean nobody have to work?

You still need doctors. You still need police. You still need yoga instructors. Plumbers. Somebody to fix your internet. And the need to pay those people means you will still need to find a way to earn money. Plus, land is still expensive because physics, and now that people can afford to pay more, landlords will charge more. Want higher density? Zoning is also not free. Nor are architects and builders.

All that happens is that goods are excluded from the economic system, but the system will keep going. The prices for still-limited services will simply go up to the point where you will still need to work 40 hour weeks to afford them.

Have you done the math, though? Consider the not so extreme nonhypothetical of how many Zuks it would take to make Medicare/Social Security solvent.

The only way to make an amount of extra taxmonies actually worth getting up for is to tax the middle class. Alas, economics is not a zero-sum game, some people have invest their wealth to actually produce stuff to make it all work, and this mostly comes from the wealth of the middle class.

On a tangent on giving medical subsidy to the poor: this likely gets lumped into Medicare, yes? And Medicare is close to insolvency. The only way to prop it up is, of ocurse, taxpayer dollars.

The difference between goods and services is in the elasticity of supply. Double the demand for iphones? Apple will have it sorted in six months. Double demand for doctors? First be prepared for expensive doctors for the next ten years. Those doctors will get paid more, but there are only eight hours in a workday, so they treat the same number of patients. New doctors take a long time to train and have to contend with predicting economic conditions several years into the future. Net result: transfer of wealth from tax payers to doctors, little economic gain, worse average doctoring experience.

Tax payers including those with expertise in setting up production of goods. Who could have used the marginal money to set up new businesses and produce physical stuff. Opportunity cost is high, as always.

Everybody is focused on the superrich, it's a convenient target. But how many Zuckerbergean fortunes does it take to balance the books on medicare? What's to stop him from migrating to the EU if it saves a few billion dollars?

The real extractable money is in the middle class, whose wealth passes through government-controlled bank accounts. Of course, when the time comes the lefties will be all "well actually anyone making above 80k is superrich - have you seen the homeless lately? CYP!"

>They are advocating basic healthcare and education, not exactly consumer services.

You could either give them the money directly, in which case it'll go to consumer services. Or you can subsidize their healthcare, in which case they will use the money they save on consumer services. The difference is that the government has a long track record of inefficiency and waste when it comes to subsidies.

Notice that it is basically impossible to extract a significant amount of additional wealth from the 0.1%. It is both well-defended (politically and legally) and tied up in complicated structures that are difficult to liquidate by force. Notice also that the middle class have no such protections.

I'm assuming by wealth tax you mean some sort of magical system where Zuckerberg is forced to pay off your student loans. However what will actually happen is the wholesale liquidation of the middle class to fill the twin bottomless pits of medicare and social security, while the billionares skip the country and/or hide behind arcane tax rules, and the Valley they leave behind gets turned into a jobs program for the homeless.

The other fundamental problem with giving a big additional slice of the national wealth to the poor is that they will spend it on consumer services (not goods, which are cheap), for which they have great pent-up demand. And then it'll be gone. At which point you no longer have a middle class to extract from.

What exactly is a body suppose to do with this revelatory revelation?

Wallow, maybe? Is wallowing being suggested here? Maybe with a side of anger at the unjustness of it all?

If only somebody would pay me a living wage for my great wallowing ability...

On the other hand, this suggests there are low-hanging fruit in those areas.

The trick is to find one that will produce money for you as a researcher/investor even if it's an unpopular opinion (i.e. not reliant on investment / cooperation from mainstream players).

Suggestions?

Related, what's the best way to short cancel-culture-heavy endeavors? Seems like it predicts a much higher chance of failure in the long term.