wwweston

Seems like it hits limits really fast — management/legibility gets difficult without groups and layers and performance doesn’t seem to scale well.

Demand for Proton services is probably up.

what’s the story integrating R code into larger software systems (say, a saas product)?

I’m sure part of Python’s success is sheer mindshare momentum from being a common computing denominator, but I’d guess the integration story is part of the margins. Your back end may well already be in python or have interop, reducing stack investment and systems tax.

> I'm NOT trying to maintain my old 2002 Honda Civic

My 2004 Pontiac Vibe is the newest car I've owned -- drove a few GM cars and one Nissan into 200-300kmi territory before that. Saved me tens of thousands of dollars and got me where I needed to go.

Suppose that's consistent with me typing this on an old upgraded MBP.

> Apple's era of easily (or even hot) swappable parts.

This. It existed. The laptops still commanded enthusiasm, felt great, capable, and solid without being too heavy, and had swappable RAM and disk. Keyboard and battery swap were screwdriver set DIYs. Heck, the old Pismos had hot swappable battery and drive bays.

I'm still frequently using a MacBook Pro 11,3. Only lets you swap the drive but that by itself is a great point of flexibility.

The M series does amazing things which have their own merits, but the particular set of tradeoffs aren't inevitable.

The "sacrifices must be made" idea apparently sacrifices recall of other possibilities first.

How.

How do we determine when something is true or disinformation? That's what good faith pro-social and pro-truth people ask. They talk process, principles, and reasons.

Exercising editorial control over publications and an information networks that you own or manage is also free speech.

As is engaging in discussion about it with people who own or manage them.

Disinformation exists. Most people rely on quality information, and on social institutions that work to determine truth.

Scare quoting disinformation is for nihilists. Is that where you're aiming?

Personally, I respect reluctance to protest. Protest is situationally effective and sometimes necessary, but holds a dramatically outsized place in public imagination. So much of effective politics happens elsewhere.

The core of politics is building coalitions of cooperation that can sustain and grow themselves, ideally around habits of ongoing participation and policy goals that have wide benefits.

That means you have to start by developing habits. You are a political organization of one. What habits of schedule and focus will sustain that? How will you widen them into an organization of two, of six, of twelve, and more?

> I've debated it, but I think I'm a bit too eccentric to be a good politician.

There may be an example or two of people who many would find eccentric who are currently holding elected office. You never know.

> I am also afraid it would turn me evil.

The key is making sure that you don't ever place yourself outside relationships of accountability. As long as you can think of recent conversations where you've engaged in reflective give and take with a personal or public critic that you have sustained relationships with, chances are pretty good you're OK.

Reading _First Principles_ by Thomas Ricks a few years ago was an eye opener -- the founding fathers and national civic culture definitely drew deeply from enlightenment thinking and further back classical civics and philosophy.

Towards the end of his book, Ricks notes the populist / religious backlash to enlightenment thinking that was already underway by the early 19th century.

It's strange to realize the post WWII America most of us have lived may really be exceptional, and how many either don't understand how big a part the liberal order has played in making America great since FDR, or have a different vision of greatness that requires tearing much of what we've enjoyed down.

> Voters don’t take campaign platforms at face value

Huh. That sounds like validation of my original point that the Democratic Party has been "prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds", so dkjaudyeqooe's suggestion that candidates/officeholders should do that seems ... idempotent at best.

Maybe people should pay attention to what candidates campaign on and the policy they enact instead of going off vibes and trigger phrases.

Certainly that would give candidates and officeholders more electoral incentives to produce policy that serves voters.

Wikipedia will cite and often broadly source. Wikipedia has an auditable decision trail for content conflicts.

It behaves more like an accountable mediator of authority.

Perhaps LLMs offering those (among other) features would be reasonably matched in a authorativity comparison.

> fully exploited by Republicans in a media system that is largely theirs

Sounds like one answer to my question about why people don't recognize it when Democratic politicians do prioritize "housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds."

Composition fallacy much?

I was a CA voter in 2020. The focus I saw from candidates and citizens alike were things like democracy, rule of law, housing costs/policy, and police reform. Prop 16 was a footnote, not a focus, which is probably one of the reasons it lost (alongside the fact that its language made it difficult to tell if it was allowing for civil protections or tearing them down).

And democratic domestic policy focus since has been pretty clear: economic stimulus, infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and various kinds of working class relief. Pretty standard "promote the general welfare" stuff, sometimes joined with efforts to protect "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (even for people who look or love differently). That's what you'd expect from classic liberals who still believe in enlightenment values and ideals. Or even just anyone who wants those things for themselves and realizes that to guarantee it to anyone, you have to support it for everyone.

This was definitely all over the 2024 democratic platform.

The problem isn't that people don't like the policy and values they'd get from the Democratic Party and its candidates. It's that they're increasingly mislead about what the difference is. As evidenced by the polling on relative policy popularity last fall:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/22/trump-har...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/tru...

https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50802-harris-vs-t...

Here's some quotes from the 2024 D platform:

"[We] made record investments in public safety, putting more police officers on the beat; today, violent crime is at its lowest in 50 years"

"Democrats provided funding for communities to hire more police."

"since day one, President Biden has been working to make sure police officers have the tools they need to protect their communities, including more police officers on the street. We need to fund the police"

"Democrats passed and President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, with the largest ever federal investment infighting and preventing crime, reducing violence, and investing in public safety. That funding enabled cities and states to invest more than $14 billion in public safety and violence prevention, putting more police officers on the beat for accountable community policing."

https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...

Why is it that when looking for examples of what some are doing wrong, you're casting back over 5 years to an activist slogan that even then was treated as a poor expression rather than "lapped it up"?

It's almost like what you're here to do is actually reinforce the unproductive association rather than point the direction to a better way.

You want to talk about what's "bewildering"? What's bewildering is that your apparent confidence (or deliberately mislead?) confusing very online cheer-squad discourse from some corners over stated positions of most officeholders or candidates.

One could charitably assume that it's because you have some acquaintances or media follows who represent themselves or others as you've described and you've accidentally made parasocial promotion into an unfortunate wider partisan caricature. One could also warily assume you're an operative who is here to actively reinforce the associations you were ostensibly fighting against. Perhaps uncharitable, but hardly implausible these days.

The majority of liberal politicians are classic liberals who spend their campaign and policy time as you said you wanted, and it seems you haven't noticed.

"pronoun" doesn't appear in that 2024 D platform document. Also can't find it in a CBS news summary [1] of the Harris campaign. You know what does show up, though? Housing issues. Actual working class tax cut proposals. Child tax credits (pretty pro birth, very pro parent).

And those are what I think about when I think about liberal officeholders and candidates. Because that's what I see them talking about when I follow them and what's discussed in the media coverage I follow.

Where are you directing your attention?

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-platform-policy-p...

Refocusing on outcomes is a good start.

Getting voting constituencies to do so is a big lift.

And that might be easier than getting people to look at places where ideological assumptions about production dynamics need examination (including the obvious shortcomings of the hope that a laissez faire market will naturally solve housing supply problems).

Seriously, we have a Haagen-bot[0] problem ("the robot that eats ice cream so you don't have to") widespread across the field where people are trying to figure out how they can get their piece of the new ML world.

Part of it is that people aren't thinking about what's actually scarce. Let alone what a world more optimized for people might be like.

> I don't want to support automating something away that people enjoy doing, is produced in abundance, and is very low cost to obtain already.

Quoted for truth.

[0] https://www.savagechickens.com/2024/04/haagen-bot.html "the robot that eats ice cream so you don't have to"

That's pretty much where liberal politicians end up targeting most of their policymaking and even a sizable portion of their campaign platform (as demonstrated in the Harris platform).

Yet "tangled up in social issues" remains a popular misconception. Why?

"Young people" or other age limits are a dramatically distinctive case because the considerations involved are universal, cross-cutting and temporary. Age-based standards can't be used to create systematic outgroups. They bind and protect everyone equally in the ultimate and most practical sense because (a) everyone grows into enfranchisement (b) no one has it until they do. Which gives everyone an equal stake in what the specific age limit is too.

Contrast that with sex, religion, ethnicity, origin, asset ownership etc and the real question is why anyone would accept that they're truly comparable.

Citizenship may be the only truly stickier corner case. Largely because international relations will sometimes produce reasons to limit it more tightly or extend it more freely by broad categories such as national origin. But even here (a) most countries recognize that is often only one of several important judgements in a wise process (b) it's possible to review the equitability of citizenship qualifications: can they be met by anyone by way of objective assessment of investment in society and respect for acceptable participation?

It could be structured to reward living authors, mechanical licensing has worked this way.

But even if it wasn't -- even if couldn't be -- you could use it to fund all kinds of public goods which would benefit living authors. Maybe even a basic income if it turns out to be successful enough.

It's a different pro-social bargain than direct compensation for the fruits of labor, but at least it's still a bidirectional one.

This is one of the reasons there should simply be a big tax on AI profits, assuming they come to pass: they literally require uncompensated training on the sum of human intellectual effort. There is no AI without standing on the shoulders of both giants and thousands of everyday authors.

If you're just giving the result back to humanity, OK, there's a case for it being a fair trade, though there's still the question of how to handle the disruption of long tradition of valuing & compensating labor.

If you're using it to win capitalism, 50% tax seems starting stakes. Sure, lots of expertise and resources go into the data processing to produce a model that can talk to you, but without the data, the processing doesn't matter (and without the model, we could still do this collectively).

The founding of the US is absolutely a remarkable achievement. A group of colonies successfully broke from global imperial power to successfully establish a society heavily influenced by the best enlightenment thinking and classical civil philosophy. It's really something. Looking at some populist reactionary movements that happened in the early 19th century, one wonders if the outcome could have been as good as the US constitution even 30 years later.

That said:

* it existed in a historic and cultural context of states that had already made significant movements in that direction -- it was a big leap, but it wasn't simple 0-1. More like a 0.4 with a lot of the relevant ideals and institutions (elections, representation, courts, legislative bodies, executive authority, rule of law , etc) fairly well developed and demonstrated in various ways pulled together into a coherent 0.75 and woven in with enlightenment ideals as expressed in documents like the declaration of independence.

* There is at least a partial linear dependence between civil rights and democracy. The franchise relationship is where it's strongest. Democracy is effective, principled, & honored ballot access. Without any effective franchise what you have instead is an opinion poll. And mere fractional access to the franchise walks elections & representation down from "1" -- it is literally the coefficient you have to multiple a "1" democracy by in order to arrive at its effective democratic nature.

That's just the start, though. It's a bit like that old Churchill/Shaw/Twain/whoever story where Clever Guy™ is having a conversation with a woman:

    “Would you sleep with a stranger if he paid you £1,000,000?” 

    “Yes.” 

    “And if he paid you £5?”

    “£5? What do you think I am?”

    “We’ve already established that, now we're just haggling over the price.”

Ha-ha! A country without a universal franchise has already established that some people don't get a democratic say, it's just haggling over who those people are. And that means it can haggle over whether you get to be one of those people. And even eventually over whether anyone gets to be one of those people, over whether it is democratic at all.

This generalizes to other rights. In order to have them guaranteed to anyone, they must be guaranteed to everyone. It's why constitutional guarantees tend to be features of constitutional representative democracies since the enlightenment, imperfect leap though the US is.

The big question is if the US (among others) can finish climbing the ladder when the political headwinds seem to be against "guaranteed to everyone."

Probably not coincidentally, 2016 was the year that I decided I was done with front-end after about decade of focus.

Full franchise democracy in the US is arguably younger than living memory. So are a lot of things we take for granted as civil rights (and some of powers that be seem determined to roll those back).

But even assuming the premise, it’s not hard to see how generations who’ve enjoyed a privilege might be more likely to take it for granted than societies that have more recently gained it, and are within living memory of fascism in power (or in neighboring states).

The fundamental confusion here may be the misconception that pro-people pro-liberty or pro-progress means anti-state. Or that the new people are anti-state in any way that means well for most people.

It seems entirely consistent that the people most alarmed about law enforcement and intelligence being handed over figures who are indicating they don’t intend to use it in a principled manner are critics who’ve seen how even less extreme more accountable people have used these roles poorly. The new team seems headed in a direction that might make poor past iterations look principled.

“Burn it all down” is good cover for people who want to selectively burn things down for their benefit (but not their things).

Or foreign influence agents. What more resource efficient way to weaken a competing state than foment rebellion and attacks from within.

There seems to be a class of decent mantras / heuristics like this:

* Good at a first approximation for directing your own agency (conscientious effort definitely improves chances of success, there are few reasons not to engage it other than "your ladder is on the wrong wall" situations).

* Much poorer as a general model of the world, especially one that should be socialized.

This is probably the fundamental attribution error in play -- "my situation is a twist of circumstance but their situation is a reflection of poor character and choices that need to be policed."

The Golden Rule is an ages-old part of this conversation because it helps people confront this common bias. Imagine your situations are reversed, how would you want things done? Do that.

> Angela Merkel was known to text during parliamentary sessions, sometimes with multiple phones, with colleagues about the ongoing debate.

Legislative / collective council discussion has probably always had some sort of quieter back channel discussion. The low tech solution might be a whispered conversation, or might be conducted via pages/runners when decorum puts moving around the room out of reach.

Mobile devices mean you can use technology instead of runners.

> I think that majority prefer "algorithms" to serve them information

This possibility was the theme of the (most?) recent video essay on the YouTube Technology Connections channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA

There's definitely something to the appeal of algorithmic feeds, I suspect there's a fundamental neurological mechanism* in play which encourages us to scan somewhere for novel appearances / developments, same as seeing what's in the garden or on the market or who is present at the oasis etc etc.

But there's probably more to be said for consciously directing attention.

(*There's a certain d-word that probably has a genuine neurochemical meaning when not laden by a lot of popular baggage as it's entered colloquial use that I am intentionally not using because at this point I'd suspect it encourages misunderstanding more than helps, but I'm willing to believe it's related.)