stereolambda

Yeah, GDP with all its flaws is designed around economy based on buying and selling for prices. Interacting with other people. If you can really be rich and somehow do most things automatically without meaningfully hiring anybody (maybe only few people for simple manual labor for peanuts), at this point what is really the value of money? Except for maybe throwing minimal amounts to the masses. I can see the AI maximalist scenario taking us out of the monetary framework back into a medieval or natural economy almost.

For how much I dislike social media, for many such topics what could help is getting into the right Facebook or Discord groups and asking - either local for big cities, specialized topics, or just congregating a lot of people.

I think the thesis would be there's a colossal structural/market failure in software. This because of many degrees of freedom, consumer ignorance, network effects and such. Compare this to physical things. The difference between the absolutely shoddiest couch sellable and the practically best one is tiny, compared to the difference between the worst software you could impose on the market and what could be achieved by competent engineers if we somehow removed the wrong incentives from capital and bureaucracy. With most software most people use, we are near the bottom of this range. I don't know if I fully buy that, even if we completely ignore whether removing these incentives is at all realistic. But would also say there's something there.

Then we can talk about how we all pay the increased cost in energy and materials, and so forth.

It's interesting that there must be a decision behind that, even if it's just appealing to the RLHF judges for some reason. Maybe there's an intention that if you cannot decipher what the chatbot is saying to you, you will have to ask and burn even more tokens.

Naively I would often expect it would talk to me about various niche topics like to a layman, which does occur about some topics an actual normal person would ask.

Yeah, this is such an entertaining exchange of layering being more "inner" and clued in. Reading the Greeks, Nietzsche or even, oh horror of horrors, Marcus Aurelius (if not "more interesting" earlier authors in his tradition) can make people reflect on their lives. All these can lead you astray in interesting ways but at least you are going somewhere, anywhere. There's always salty people who insist you should struggle through respectable academic philosophers instead, lest you are some kind of a prole.

This is kind of analytic (but also continental) mindset really does feel like wannabe math, just without visible correspondence to reality, like can be observed even with basic arithmetic or geometry. Also curiously you cannot really get the same results independently, without being nurtured by people from the circle. If you're shutting down earlier human curiosity about ethics, epistemology, meaning of language etc. and care only about your short lineage, this feels analogous, I don't know, to something like being a lore "scholar" of some franchise considering ponderous questions of how W40K deities relate to each other. And God help you if you bring up anything outside of approved lore or some other parts of human culture.

I think you are reaching for the word "wisdom" (I heard about smart vs. wise a bunch of times) and are tending to define it in a... narrow way. I'd damn prefer to live the live of Plato, Roger Bacon or Isaac Newton: experience the universe in novel, rich ways, contribute a lot to humanity, give up offspring, than be "below average" smart (whatever it would mean) with 7 children.

Of course, by statistics no one of us is Plato or Roger Bacon. I'd agree that a problem with the modern world is an ideology of (objectively) crappy career or climbing some fake institutional hierarchy being a worthy substitute for family. I myself do believe that a family is one of relatively easiest (but still hard and demanding) ways to being happy [1].

I also see a lot of people here overcorrecting and arriving at some strange worldviews.

Some people are childless because of objective circumstances: what are they, damned by God via predestination to unhappiness? In the Catholic world, they have been, esp. in the olden days, a lot of childless priests, monks, nuns. If you want to at the same time value tradition and not reinventing (quoting parent) and "evolutionary DNA survival", you either have to somehow condemn Catholicism and Orthodoxy [2], or start adding some epicycles to your philosophy.

Oh, and on topic: I believe being happy requires working for it. Maybe for "smarter" people their allotted amount of work is higher. Don't know if it's nice to hear, but sounds true to me.

[1] Maybe one lure of career is that people are culturally accepting of life at work being terrible in many ways, while a poorly constructed family (one or more immature people etc.) scares people off pretty fast. Maybe because it's a more total institution and harder to escape.

[2] Which would be the OG Protestant way.

There are people still being born in the world and growing up, you know. Or discovering new interests.

"Rare" may be a low print run of some local's memoirs decades ago, or a book on the local railway, a society of firemen, people sent to a world war etc. Not something that excites the world, but still valuable to historians or people interested in local history. Even the guide to a local cave from 1960s might be printed on bad paper (so many copies perished) and contain some technically obsolete details on the then-state of nature, tourism etc.

Just out of sympathy cause I think there's a legitimate root to the religious point. Your epistemology comes across as extremely weak, with believing LLMs over scholars, and discriminating which scholars are legitimate based on agreeing with your beliefs. It would pay to at least familiarize yourself with the arguments of the other side, suspending in your mind the whole partisan angle.

Honestly I don't think anyone actually powerful nowadays cares one bit about "PIE" religions. What could be happening is some revisionism relying on conveniently selective standards of rigor to bury other scholars. As this is a field famously relying on unclear and very messily transmitted evidence; and these kinds of problems are a very weak point of the humanities overall. But I don't follow this debate at all, so don't have a formed opinion.

What most takes seem to miss is that hardly anyone these days reads just because it's an easy way to fight boredom and pass some time. It's not 1920s. There's lots of less demanding and very much available ways for that, short-form video being the extreme. So if you're reading books at all, there's some ideological (or cultural, for the lack of a better word) reasons about broadening your mind, caring for your attention, or social participation.

This leads me to thinking that a bigger proportion of readers would care who wrote the works, than predicted by naive thinking. Certainly more compared to video. I'm not negating that some would not: mainly ones who have a very specific taste and just want lots of that.

The author's name (or the book being famous) is a huge factor in selecting what to read, both for prestige and selection reasons (by which I mean selecting something that has a chance of being good). Beyond that, it has been a hellscape for matching the "worthy" authors with readers since... I don't know, the industrial revolution? For the 1800s already there are heaps of writers no one has heard about. The institutions and publishing houses meant to select famous authors is not something I would lament the death of. Though it will exist if only because many people read for social proof.

I would be interested about the arguments against reading self-published books. I know they are extremely likely to be bad, but I'm curious if there's something deeper beyond this statistical argument.

You can try to find out or estimate how many copies there were. If there are tens of thousands, it may make you feel less bad about tossing them. If people want them, they can find them and it's not necessarily your responsibility. For many books the world's need for them really diminished in relation to what has been mass-printed at one time: popular fiction like airport books, self-help type etc.

Second hand bookstores often buy. You can offer your books to them. Some they won't want, but might accept as a donation along with those that have monetary value to them. In reality, they have similar constraints of space and expected time to when someone will purchase (which could be years for even semi-known books). People have this romantic view about books, but if you want to hold any kind of personal library and don't have a freaking villa, you have to learn to be pragmatic. Even if you don't have a lot of books, get ones that you would read.

A large chunk of people turn off/change the station on anything they don't like, which may be because of even slight unfamiliarity. I remember myself being this way when very young. Even today playlist radios sometimes have popular tracks in the format that I really hate, and this can also cause me to switch. This is even worse if that track is sure to be played 10+ times a day...

Anyway, this unfamiliarity switching is presumably a big deal for profit. Also, if you switch to a station and you're not hooked, this is also a problem: and a for-profit radio will irritate new listeners anyway with ads. There's a cycle in my local area (in Europe) of radio stations that were a little more adventurous, even formed with staff leaving from somewhere else. They end up again and again folding or even bought out by the same boring format radio they had left. Presumably, advertisers don't like them based on the stats etc.

People are right that this is an old problem by now. In 1990s-2000s that soulless commercialism of old media even contributed to popularity of the internet, when ironically that was the alternative place.

And now for quite some time we have people presenting avoiding challenging the user in slightest beneficial ways as some sort of moral argument. So to be clear, I also think this dynamic is bad.

When some closed models are "retired", interestingly we might not even be able to extract all their tells. We'd be limited to people writing about them on forums (where they don't often specify version, and there's a lot of memes and confirmation bias) and I don't know, doing some statistical Bayesian guessing that given the likelihood it's FooGPT 10.5, maybe we should update our beliefs about its characteristics etc.

Sorry but this is some tunnel vision. School cheating was a thing in pre-capitalist societies, because of prestige given by education or just laziness of getting it over with. In a command economy, you can also be pushed for results because of military competition or something like that.

The main alternative to capital is politics. Not saying it's always worse, but then you have to convince people in power to care about the things you care about: such as working in a particular way. Marx himself thought utopian artisanal socialists, building Phalanstères etc. to be basically benevolent idiots. Is intellectual work a value of itself? I myself may be convinced, but voting majorities, political leaders? Not guaranteed.

Isn't the answer kind of obvious - much more weight of the developers in comparison to the random people from open source community. Also timing: Mastodon and ActivityPub appeared in the tail end/transitional period when there was still some common public square mindset (at least among random people not radicalized in any way), and tech inclined people had protocols vs. centrally managed platforms in relatively fresh memory. So in the mid-2010s you'd get all sorts of people flocking to the promise of free internet.

When Bluesky was taking traction, the cultural expectation among its audience was already for the platform to heavily shape the narrative. Paradoxically, AFAIK the Bluesky devs themselves are pretty serious about it being an open standard, though I'm basing this on what I heard. So I mostly believe people that the echo chambering you mention is structured in a way that it's technically not centralized. Though in practice, it's way easier to amplify left wing messages on closed websites like YouTube, Facebook, X (I'm basing this on algorithmic recommendations I'm getting and experience of people I know) than the other way around on Bluesky. But this is just the weight distribution of the audience.

Even then non-left supervised Mastodon ecosystem is something of a deep cut. I mean you're right it exists and now I recall hearing about some drama years ago, but not a part of the front and center info about them, for any common person. So I'm not fully buying the contrast you're trying to build here.

Honest question: why doesn't the dumb TV crowd use old TVs (dunno, 10+ years old) as a replacement? Does image quality difference feel so dramatic? Maybe I don't care about this enough. To me the DVD fidelity was not earth-shattering but fine in practice. I do go to the cinema and see new TVs in stores, so it's not like I haven't seen better, just isn't worth a huge premium for me.

Other things I can think about is reliability of the screen (like dead pixels), and your family if not clued in may think you present as "poor".

To me these look like professional writing, and I've seen worse LLM'isms. I am with some people in that I don't usually want to read pieces where GenAI was involved. But this is one of the cases where I wouldn't want the remedy to be a life of constant purity tests and suspicion. There has been enough of that in contemporary culture. I want to trust people and let them be by default. I mean, I don't want writers to specifically memorize current LLM'isms in order to avoid them: or worse, to prompt an LLM to strip them. I believe from experience than GenAI texts have secondary bad characteristics, mainly being bland in style and thought, and often going nowhere, like mandatory student papers. This should be enough to bury or criticize them on merits more often than not.

I do see myself treating slightly broken grammar, typos as a slightly positive signal in writing in the recent years. I also see that this is messed up - I'd like to respect someone in kind if they put care in writing - and easy to fake if anybody wants to, with an LLM. If you do strongly suspect GenAI writing, I mean it's fair if a sincere opinion, but I'm tired of having those as top comments with a whole response tree. Ironically contributing to that now.

I think classic liminal esthetic would also include empty swimming pools, resorts etc. It doesn't need to be barren or cheap, could be relatively luxurious, but needs to be late Modernist as a base - i.e. mass produced and devoid of conscious symbolism or ornamentation.

With time I am starting to think that "decades" are defined with around 10 year delay. When you are inside them or a little later, you see too much of nuance and are too much in your everyday concerns away from the culture. For example, to the common young consumer today the 1980s may be about synth and maybe hair metal in music, where it was infinitely more happening. They also probably have an exaggerated view of importance of tech for an average person back then. The 1960s are often seen through the culture of teens to maybe 30 year olds, while also there was much separate adult culture and concerns.

By now, I think people have well formed esthetic of 1990s and truth be told even 2000s (roughly around it being an electro, futuristic, MP3 players, Windows XP era). One can also more or less predict how 2010s will be about stereotypical hipster culture and the bronze age[1] of social media, maybe with some mixture of increasing culture wars. Though because we're still fighting them, they may be harder to estheticize.

I have my own views and am far from the cheap trick of accusing others of nostalgia, or the fallacy that culture never declines. But to discuss value, we have to have criteria. To me, being pluralistic, rich and free is probably more important than distinctiveness. Living in a cool decade is far lower in my list of priorities than having a good life and accomplishing things. Not saying which times I'd favor. Anyway, always by living later at least we can be wiser, however sad prize it may be.

[1] Evoking more dirt and less shine than the golden age, but still some mercenary glamor.

Okay, maybe partly my fault for using too broad strokes. The fridge example already suggests Midcentury prosperity and civilized employment contracts.

If we're talking deep 1800s, this becomes more complex. As a factory worker, you may not have time and money to buy or own much of anything substantial. But you do have to buy clothes and such. Putting aside extreme examples like isolated company towns, you probably aren't on any long term contract. Why would they give you that, you live in a big city with dozens of factories and tens of thousands of people desperate for work. I'd say this is midway between Uber and how we imagine industrial employment today. If you don't come, they just don't pay you, and if they get mildly annoyed, they can fire you for any reason any time. From what I gather, you would negotiate with the floormaster some very much unpaid time to do a very specific thing, being very careful not to appear "lazy" or disobedient. People did become sick and sometimes returned to work afterwards.

This is based on from I remember from reading contemporary fiction and historiography on the period. But if you think an unmarried worker bought their clothing by some other means, please enlighten us.

I'll reply in good faith in case anyone else reads and wonders: if you had a working day, you would eat at your employer's. You could also well be the person doing the shopping for them and yourself for the day. For most of the period when the servants were common, people did not or rarely had fridges. There were different contraptions for keeping the food cool.

You'd buy your meals in diners instead of buying food to cook, if you were someone non-wealthy working in a factory or an office. You probably wouldn't be buying that much outside of this: for cigarettes, newspapers etc. there were newstands you could shop at while running to work. For big purchases, I imagine you would get a day off. Buying a fridge would be a major event, for example. But also one I'd expect people to be married for already.

Besides, if we go back far enough, upperish middle class people would hire servants. The original 101 Dalmatians film comes to mind.

There is no guarantee your kids will want to support you, or, to be morbid but realistic, even survive you.

This looks weird in the context, because the grandparent comment's argument was purely interest-based? You probably mean there's a propensity for tragedy of the commons.

Regardless I'd argue gaming may be the one media category left (after the recent decade's value decline) where piracy remains to seem like more hassle than buying a copy^W license. I would also guess it is more concentrated on a few popular titles compared to music or films. Nowadays I hear more of people collecting games on Steam, to never play them, than of legitimate pirates.

Entertaining to think that "that's too difficult to read for us nowadays" and "look at these unacceptable things" already sound pretty much like some poor Medieval literates who got their hands on Ovid or Lucretius, while under the rule of king Theodoric or something.

I don't have to say I don't question that we are very civilized and powerful.

> I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).

You are meant to "own the means of production" not in an actual, but more ideal sense. Owning a farm or workshop to the exclusion of other people makes you petit bourgeois and this is bad. Communism promotes collective farms. AFAIK Poland was the only European Eastern Bloc country to tolerate small private farms, as a concession to obstinate peasants after the death of Stalin.

Promoting small individual farms is a more Georgist, populist capitalist or possibly strictly conservative policy. Not speaking to its economic sense though.

I would see it as moving the baseline, which Europe and (more historically) UK was for many people in civil rights area. If we just say that authoritarian countries are still worse, this partly implies that what Western countries are doing is becoming acceptable, as long as it is still "better" or "less bad".

The important point is, if the erosion of civil liberties continues, these governments are losing their high ground. They must stop.

As in the Cold War, I would give an allowance for the West to still be preferable (modulo strict rights record) if they actually muster some sort of power to confront tyranny. But if the rulers only want cheap rhetoric wins, no.

While you you're making good points, this shows that engineers and industry intentionally make work more complex than necessary in order to justify higher prices for labor. This is not so uncommon in today's economy, especially white collar and regulated work that most people don't understand, but worth thinking about regardless.

To be fair, it's hard to imagine economy and civilization crashing hard enough to force us to be more efficient. But who knows.

Functional programming languages (OCaml, Clojure, Haskell), are supposed to be somewhat like this.

The actual hard question is probably making even 10% of such wisdom and good intentions survive when the program is bombarded by contributor patches, or people taking Jira tickets. TFA talks about it in the context of strategy and tactics.

Organizationally enforcing strategy would be the issue. And also that the people most interested in making rules for others in an organization may not be the ones best qualified to program. And automatic tools (linters) by necessity focus on very surface level, local stuff.

That's how you get the argument for the small teams productivity camp.