thefaux

I don't know how to do that is a great answer that I wish people would give more often.

> Most corporate leaders are expecting and even demanding that their employees use AI tools to get their work done.

Imagine for a second that I am an aspiring monopolist. Wouldn't a great way to achieve this be to make people believe that I am their agent, when I am really their adversary? Would I really offer them in good faith a tool that they could use to compete against me? Or would I try to get them to accept a trojan horse that destroys their profits from within. Once, I have siphoned enough profit to significantly damage the business, I can come in, borrow money to buy the company that I basically destroyed and then sell off the parts to an ignorant buyer who doesn't realize who badly I have wounded this once good business, or I just write off the loss for tax purposes.

Widespread gambling is one of the most visible symptoms of a corrupted society. A society that chooses to make gambling frictionless is a society that has given up on pursuing higher virtue. There are no significant positive externalities and it is functionally just a wealth redistribution to the people who have no problem hurting bystanders to make a bigger problem for itself. Gambling does not just impact individual gamblers. People who gamble their resources away must then either rely on friends, family or the state to get by. We all pay for this directly or indirectly.

And the societal value is...it's fun? Even that I push back on because gambling interferes with your relationship with the event. Once you place a bet, you are literally invested in the outcome. On the one hand, yes, of course this enhances the felt outcome of victory if your bet pays off. On the other, it closes you off to enjoying whatever happens on its own terms. The home team often loses so you need to find away to enjoy the experience even if the outcome isn't what you hoped for. This allows you to actually appreciate the players on both sides and enjoy the competition for what it always actually is: an exhibition of human skill, enjoyable on its own terms (or not, if you aren't interested in that particular skill).

Gambling also brings the worst kind of people into your community. Both producers and consumers. The gamblers do not actually value the event and the operators want to distract you from the event and turn you into a gambler. I have written off the nba, which I used to greatly enjoy, because of the faustian bargain they have made with the sports gambling companies.

Famously, Billy Bean said "his (stuff) doesn't work in the playoffs." This is because top end talent still generally wins championships. The regular season is a slog and you can do very well by always beating the teams you should beat. But in the playoffs when everyone is giving maximum focus and effort, the talent gap is much more important than in the regular season. In basketball, I think of teams like this year's Cavaliers or the Budenholzer era Hawks. These teams won a lot of regular season games, but never felt like a legitimate threat to win the championship.

I listened to a podcast interview with one of the cofounders of zed. One of the revealing things is that he went on and on about how important latency was and how they had to do their own rendering because of the problems they ran into with electron. He also admits that he never used vim, which already has imperceptible latency relative to the terminal emulator, which has already largely solved the text rendering problem.

I understand that there are advantages to being a native app from their perspective, but for me, it is even better for my editor to be integrated into my terminal editor. And because they built it the opposite way though, they have to also build a terminal emulator into their editor.

There is a real cost to building zed this way. If they were an embedded terminal app, they would get full terminal support for free and would not have to implement 2d text rendering. They could even have made a bundled package with an oss terminal emulator like kitty. Then they could have focused strictly on their editing features and value adds. Every engineer hour spent fixing bugs/adding features to the rendering framework is an hour that could have been spent on value adds.

Personally, there is no way that latency itself can be that value add for me because I use neovim and don't use any language plugins so every keystroke already renders instantly. Clearly then you can do everything zed does in a terminal app within at worst tens of milliseconds of latency.

Of course their target market uses vscode and not vim and either doesn't know or care that you do not need to write your own rendering engine to make a low latency, featureful text editor. I am admittedly very much not the target consumer for zed though.

Or perhaps people mature, take stock in what actually matters to them rather than what is being forced onto them by the economy. If being left behind means I have real relationships with real humans in the real world, I'm good with that.

If I walk across the desert and find a house on an oasis and the owner offers me water on the condition that I first put a chain on my ankle that is tethered to the property, do I really have the option to say no?

I see coyotes hunting gophers all the time in the big city I live in. I have never seen one rooting around in a garbage can.

Yeah, they changed the default colorscheme in neovim at some point in the last year or so. I have an extremely minimal config and don't even use syntax highlighting or tab completions but I could not get it to render the way it used to. I wasted at least 30 minutes on this for absolutely no good reason. So I git bisected, made my own build (which took maybe 10-15 minutes) and will likely never upgrade neovim again.

Yes and these numbers are kind of meaningless approximations beyond the order of magnitude anyway.

Wow, you seem to have taken my comment personally.

Dismissing psychoanalysis in one sentence is a lazy power move that elevates the author by putting down others, much like your comment. I picked that example in part because I find it interesting and personally helpful in a way that things like cbt are not (and believe it or not, I'm not a moron). And also I know that rationalists hate psychoanalysis in part because it refuses to elevate pure rationality above all other forms of knowledge. It is thus threatening to the current order and must be insulted and diminished. If it had no power or validity, there would be no reason to attack it anyway.

Your response is exactly in the spirit I was critiquing. You pointed out one thing, which I did not lead with, but provided as an example and added another arrogant and vacuous dismissal of my criticism.

But perhaps this is only evident to me because I have actually read a good bit of Jung and wrestled with it instead of relying on some authority to tell me that it is dumb and wrong. Read Answer to Job and come back to me and tell me with a straight face that Scott Alexander is an intellect on par with Carl Jung. Even Freud for all of his problems, had deep insights about the human condition that most people still don't grasp.

Hacker news is the only online space I participate in regularly. But I also wonder if my life might be better if I cut it out too.

The really troubling news buried in this to me was the appointment of Dana White to the meta board of directors. Like seriously what purpose does he serve but to appease the new administration?

> Their imaginations were definitely encourage by exponentialism, but in fact all they knew was that when the went from smallish to largish networks following the architectural diagram above, the performance got much better. So the inherent reasoning was that if more made things better then more more would make things more better. Alas for them it appears that this is probably not the case.

I recommend reading Richard Hamming's "The Art of Science and Engineering." Early in the book he presents a simple model of knowledge growth that always leads to an s-curve. The trouble is that on the left, an s-curve looks exponential. We still don't know where we are on the curve with any of the technologies. It is very possible we've already passed the exponential growth phase with some of these technologies. If so, we will need new technologies to move forward to the next s curve.

Why would Jevon's paradox not apply to human labor?

I am not sure what I expect for software developers besides that the nature if the work will change but it is still too early to say exactly how. We certainly cannot extrapolate linearly or exponentially from the past few years.

Most of the articles I've read about formal methods feel like lead gen for consultants. That's fine but feels obnoxious when they implicitly act as though they have reached formal methods induced enlightenment that you can too if you buy a pack of trainings for your employees/coworkers or hire me as an employee to fix your bad (irresponsibly dangerous even!) programming habits.

Get back to me when the formal methods actually generate high quality code that cannot deviate from the spec.

At this point in time in most US employment sectors, I believe employers have the upper hand over employees and are squeezing them. Under a different set of laws and courts, the balance could shift the other way. But we have seen a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy and from the young to the old over the last 40 years and the labor market in part reflects the inequality that wealth transfer creatwd.

There is a certain style of libertarian writing, and I include the author as well as the mercatus center posse as often using this syle, that I find quite off putting. It often feels like the primary purpose of most of their writing is to show how they are smarter than everyone else. This manifests in a writing style that is extremely confident and declarative which is an effective mask for the hollowness and one sidedness of their ideas.

I'll cherry pick just one example from this article. The author in one sentence dismisses the entire field of psychoanalysis. Yet I can't help but notice that his entire blog sure looks like he is unconsciously carrying out his own psychoanalysis in public. You can also see it in the grievances against the medical profession where he has to use his blog to guard against feelings of inadequacy because he didn't get into a top medical school or residency. But he gets to play it both ways because the fact that he writes these outrageously long, fluff filled pieces, that draw a large following he can then use as proof that he is actually in fact smarter than the people who previously rejected him.

I have some similar chips on my shoulder so I quickly recognize these patterns of behaviors in others. And perhaps I am misinterpreting him, but every single time I read one of his posts I am left with the main takeaway being that I am supposed to be impressed by his intelligence.

Other red flags in this piece include the references to the stupidity of the average person (again in implicit contrast to his penetrating intellect) as well as the lazy generalizations and vacuous statements about amorphous concepts such as wokeness along with the bizarre suggestion that wokeness somehow conquered most priesthoods even though the counterexamples are far, far too long to list. I'll leave it with one though: actual priests in the US can hardly be said to be woke even though their own sacred texts are far more aligned with progressive economics than consumer capitalism.

If you haven't read it, you might like Emily Witt's recent book Health & Safety. She writes about her experiences raving in Brooklyn (and Berlin) from roughly 2015 to present day and many of the changes that have occurred (as well as dropping in her own personal story which may or may not be interesting to you).

Weird proprietary languages _can_ also be much better for a particular task than anything else and can thus be smart business. Someone who will dismiss something they don't know on the grounds that is weird and proprietary is not someone I'd want to work with. But of course if this is how a lot of people think then there may be no choice but for most people to try and stick with the tried and true.

I hear you and this is such a lazy argument against IRV. Do they really lack the imagination to understand why this is a feature, not a bug in IRV?

IRV, though imperfect, is so clearly superior to one candidate voting if the goal is a responsive democracy. Unfortunately, there are many people who don't want that. IRV closes a loophole for extreme candidates (I have a strong suspicion that the 2016 djt campaign would have been thwarted by IRV had the gop primary used it). It also allows partially aligned challengers to pressure incumbents without dividing the electorate. This would likely be better for the challenger and the incumbent. Consider this past election where Jill Stein was demonized as a spoiler, which she potentially was, but would not have been in ranked choice. I bet there are a lot of voters who would have rather voted for Jill Stein but instead cast their vote for a candidate whom they thought could win (including candidates who received what should have been Jill Stein votes and thus lost important information about what matters to their voters). This is bad for everyone except those who don't believe in responsive democracy and largely rewards career politicians, political consultants and lobbyists.

He sat in the White House watching the violence unfold on fox news for hours egging the protestors on on twitter while leaving Mike Pence to be hung while he very likely could have stopped the violence with a few tweets. Instead, he waited until it was clear that they already failed. We all saw it live on tv and Jack Smith's investigation brought out the details. Unfortunately, he was not permitted by the supreme court to provide his evidence.

I don't think it does unless you assume that San Francisco roadways are on aggregate dramatically safer or more dangerous than other places.

It bums me out that we live in the world of Hogwarts rather than the world of Earthsea. Even though they are accessible to children, the depth of these books is so far beyond most contemporary culture while also beautifully stirring the imagination.

This is troubling to me from a free speech perspective. I am no fan of porn -- and I definitely don't think children should have easy access to it -- but what worries me is the expansion of the definition of porn to suit political purposes. And more generally accepting this kind of censorship begins paving the road to more aggressive censorship elsewhere.

If you disagree with your neighbor, the goal should be able to learn to live with them in disagreement or persuade them over to your viewpoint without coercion or manipulation. Right now there are several movements across the political spectrum as well as the corporate sector to use the government to suppress speech they perceive as threatening. This should be troubling for all of us even when used for things that we might nominally view as good (such as preventing children from accessing porn).

Love how you describe your kid as not a nerd and then mention he bikes and goes to circus school :)

You really don't think that reactionary conservatism is not a factor too? Clearly the left has problems with excessive purity demands (just like the right) but I can't accept institutional failure as solely the fault of one side.

There are many things in life that have immense personal value and zero value to nearly everyone else. This creates a lot of misunderstanding and incentive misalignment.

I don't know about that. I feel like the cat is out of the bag with cannabis and that it actually has the net effect of making the population more docile and accepting of the status quo which is good for power (individual experiences may vary of course).

Right, and rural people are in touch with everyone don't live in a bubble either...

I don't think that this level of isolation is good for most people though obviously I will not speak for you. I am a part of several in person communities that cannot be replaced by fast internet.