tharne

> It's not about what's "right" or what's "allowed". Those are squishy concepts.

This seems to be a very common issue on HN, I've noticed. People are constantly conflating how the world works with how it should work. And, when others point this out, they're immediately accused of endorsing something morally, when really they're just stating a fact about the world, human nature, or geopolitics.

> China should be stopped invading Taiwan.

Exactly who do you think is going to stop them? The citizens of Western nations may sympathize with Taiwan, but that's very different from them being willing to send their sons and daughters to fight and die for someone else's country.

If China decides to invade Taiwan, I don't see anyone realistically trying to stop them militarily. I imagine a bunch of nations will "strongly condemn" their actions, but I would be shocked if the West is even willing to impose economic sanctions in that scenario.

> Evolution will select out poor technology, either at the market stage or at the functional stage.

If evolution could select out poor technology we wouldn't have MS Windows. In fact, it's rather rare for the best solution from a technological standpoint to win out. It has a lot more to do with scale, influence, market share, and making the right deals. Competition only selects for the best in a reasonably healthy market, which we haven't had in the tech space in quite some time.

> Maybe that 10% now becomes responsible for 70+% of consumption and everyone else is fighting for scraps.

Or everyone else starts fighting that 10% once they get tired of scraps.

They've cited and linked their sources. What's the issue?

> Well, this probably why statistics exist.

How are statistics going to answer this question? Statistics are used to measure things. They don't tell you what things you should be measuring.

> The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles.

> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around?

I've wondered about this myself. People keep talking about the trades as a good path in the post-AI world, but I just don't see it. If huge swaths of office workers are suddenly and permanently unemployed, who's going to be hiring all these tradesmen?

If I were unemployed long-term, the one upside is that I would suddenly have the time to a do a lot of the home repairs that I've been hiring contractors to take care of.

The other thing I worry about is the level of violence we're likely to see if a significant chunk of the population is made permanently unemployed. People bring up Universal Basic Income as a potential, but I think that only address a part of the issue. Despite the bluster and complaints you might hear at the office, most want to have the opportunity to earn a living; they want to feel like they're useful to their fellow man and woman. I worry about a world in which large numbers of young people are looking at a future with no job prospects and no real place for them other than to be made comfortable by government money and consumer goods. To me that seems like the perfect recruiting ground for all manner of extremist organizations.

> I just said I’ve never heard anyone say they want to abolish the police, which sounds absurd to me.

Well, now you've heard it. And you're right, it sounds absurd. I wish it were satire, but there are people in positions of power here in the U.S. who think this is good policy.

If someone in power said that they intended to defund this or that government department, most listeners would reasonably infer that the speaker's intention is to get rid of that department. You're accusing people of moving the goalposts when all they're doing is taking the most straightforward, plain language interpretation of the phrase, "defund the police". It was the activists who picked the slogan, not everyone else.

> You could also look at it from the opposite perspective: the military is now too powerful for private ownership of guns to do much and the downsides of having gun ownership now outweigh the nonexistent benefits

Tell that to the Taliban or the Vietnamese. They took on a massively more powerful military, were significantly outgunned, and came out of it in control of their respective countries. If there's anything we can learn from history it's that war is incredibly chaotic and unpredictable, and that anyone making bold and confident predictions is just about guaranteed to have reality prove them wrong.

> I have never in my life heard or read anyone, of any social standing, political affiliation, education or station of life discuss the abolition of police entirely.

It was quite literally a slogan and rallying cry.

This makes sense. If one of your political platforms is to weaken and reduce the police force, then buying a gun is a very logical and practical thing to do.

> The people who wrote this article seem out of touch with the topic they chose to pretend to be experts about?

This is quickly becoming the norm for experts, unfortunately. I keep seeing more an more people with educational expertise in something that they have zero hands-on or practical experience with.

I remember being at a social event once and chatting with someone who was a business professor at any Ivy League university. Making small talk, I asked him which companies he'd worked at, and he told me that he had gone the academic track and started teaching during and after getting his PhD (in exactly what I don't remember). I remember being stunned that students would pay over $60k a year to learn about business from someone who'd never worked for or started a business.

Is the argument being made here, "Everybody's doing it"? God help us.

> The environmental argument is frivolous as long as people fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to the office. Why is this as special domain?

I keep seeing arguments like this. They sound like a bit like a form of nihilsm. Do you really think we shouldn't worry about risks to the environment simply because we're all hypocrites on that front in one way or another? I get the frustration and have been guilty of using this type of argument myself in the past, but refusing to discuss a problem because the people raising the concern are imperfect human beings doesn't seem like a tenable position.

> Think how many normies have come online since then that have only ever used a smartphone. Sadly the average computer literacy of those times are gone.

I remember a few years ago, being shocked to see that over 50% of applicants for a software engineering role applied directly from their smartphones. So it's not even just normies who see their phone as "the computer".

> The salary they pay is double the median for car mechanics. You still think that's not paying enough?

It's not up to me to decide if a given employer does or does not pay enough. If people don't want to work for your company, then you're not paying enough relative to your expectations around the job. That's not anyone's opinion, it's just how prices work.

The only rule the Chinese play by is, "It's only immoral if you get caught".

> Why should they?

Because bashing all things American while ignoring the threat posed by China is part of Europe's cultural DNA.

Anytime a company says it "can't" fill positions, it's because they're not paying enough, they're unwilling to train, or both. One those few things in life that really is that simple.

> That’s a big assertion that needs evidence.

It really doesn't. It's well a well-established fact that heavy regulations favor larger enterprises over smaller ones.

> I know this is silly but the biggest thing that’s driving me away from it is how god awfully blurry it looks on my 1440p screen :/

Not silly at all. User experience is important. If you're going to spend as much time in a tool as most programmers do in their editors, it should look and feel nice.

It's nice to see Zed's collaboration features discussed in their blog. The collaboration features are really what makes Zed such an interesting project and product. I was worried they'd gone full AI hype train. There's so much opportunity to improve digital collaboration tools.

Without any accompanying action taking place, there is no trend. There's just cheap tawk. The only meaningful metric in this conversation is the very one you dismiss, the number of people that actually move.

I know nuance takes the fun out of most online discussions, but there's a qualitative difference between a bunch of college kids downloading mp3's on a torrent site and a $500 billion company who's goal among other things is to become the primary access point to all things digital.

> The ideas seem fairly clear to me.

>> My brain is exploding of complexity every time

So very clear :)

I'm starting to think ADHD is isn't a disorder at all. It's like obesity, if something afflicts 2% of the population, it's an individual disorder or issue. If it afflicts 20%+ of the population, it's either a systems/societal issue, or even more likely, a common personality trait that just happens to be very undesirable at this particular moment in time.

> I also pay with cash for privacy, and to use my privilege to constantly demand it as an option so the unbanked who cannot advocate for themselves can still participate in society.

Good for you! I so wish more people would think and act this way. Most people don't realize that in a world without cash, government and large businesses can shutdown your entire with the push of a button without any sort of due process.

I very rarely find myself being sincerely jealous of others, but man does your life sound amazing.

> Why isn't it more popular if it's so good? Because popularity and merit are not the same thing.

Yes! To add to that, the question itself is wrong. We should be asking, how is OCaml able to be so good without being popular? People get the whole thing backward.

The popular languages are typically popular first, then get good later as a result of that popularity. They have to work, they have to be good, they're too big to fail.

This is what happened with Java. It was marketed like crazy at first and only later got refined in terms of tooling and the JVM itself. The R programming language was a mess for data wrangling, but once it was popular, people built things like the tidyverse or the data.table library. The Python ecosystem was disaster with all different testing packages, build tools, and ways to create and manage virtual environments, until the relatively recent arrival of uv, more than three decades after the creation of Python itself. And then there's javascript that's had more money, blood, sweat, and tears poured into it to be improved in one way or another because that's what practically anything running in a browser is using.