ItsMonkk

It might help as someone who believes they have aphantasia that the steps that I do in my head to list out the steps to go somewhere is identical to the steps I would list out to tell someone how to code something up. If you were to ask me for landmarks like stores that I would pass I would be able to do so, but I wouldn't be thinking of what they look like while listing them out just as I wouldn't be thinking of text while coding.

It's less instructions and more a full understanding of the structure at play.

I think the hybrid approach here might work well. Allow self-driving cars, but limit their speed to one in which they are very clearly safe, maybe something like 10 to 20 mph currently. This would cause most people most of the time to use mass transit, and if the last mile(or first, getting to the train station) of their trip required it they could opt for it.

Matches my thoughts, in particular I want to discuss the following quote:

> It can’t be that you want your org to run without numbers. And it can’t be that you eschew quantitative goals forever!

Metrics are used by experts to enhance their ability to reason about a system. You should use metrics, you should not rely on metrics. Metrics don't mean anything onto themselves. Given the depth that the author is thinking through problems with them it seems very likely that he is using metrics in this manner. But once that intuition of how the team is doing has been accomplished, they have done their job.

The issue in this article is less that it describes a good system, but more that without those actual insights and ability to tweak them as Goodhart comes into play, giving out this system in the form of this article is harmful to anyone who tries to use it who isn't an expert already. Anyone who does not understand how to manage a team and build software who is using metrics to decide what to do without attempting to learn the underlying dynamics is focusing on the wrong thing.

Side note: I'm really curious how often he puts out tasks with an essential complexity of 0 with a high accidental complexity. I'd imagine in any decent team that should be a decent number of tasks. In the ones that track metrics sloppily, a majority of them.

While you can apply zero shot learning and get the answer to a new math problem, you are only apply the learning to significant depth after a fine-tuning session - sleep.

This is not happening at the same time by pure chance. Once the Fed turned off the free money, all of the negative profit companies need to adapt or die.

> but that's a solvable problem

This requires explanation. If they staff the moderation in-house, costs will rise significantly and there is no chance they can ever profit. The people with the time, expertise and patience necessary to mod will know of alternatives. Mods are niche niche.

But the bigger issue that you allude to for reddit here is that they aren't pulling off the band-aid in one go. Once the apps die, they still need to kill old reddit and RES, they still need to end NSFW. Each time they do this the federated clones will be stronger, and each time more and more will jump ship.

Japanese housing policy has what seems like an inefficient system of knocking down any buildings older than some age when sold, with wood being 22 years, reinforced concrete being 47 years.

But it has three really great side effects

1. Because they always need to be building, they never run into this problem of losing institutional knowledge to keep building. 2. Buildings are periodically refreshed up to code for things like Earthquakes. 3. Because housing is never seen as an investment they don't get the NIMBY problem.

Software has zero marginal costs and infinite supplies, and therefore the free market would only ever give it a price of zero. The reason that it does not is because of the government interfering.

Economics is very clear on this. You tax negative externalities and subsidize positive externalities. Discovering new open source software is a positive externality. Subsidize it.

Personal private models that are not controlled by a company or governmental entity are a human right?

And this goes beyond games. Imagine what education looks like when the AI is able to model how the child views the world, and how to get the child to view the world so that they can answer some goal that has been set, and what problems and contexts will best motivate them to reach that goal in the quickest time.

It's really not. Economics is very simple at its core. You tax negative externalities and subsidize positive externalities. The discovery of new information is a positive externality. It should be subsidized.

Anything that has infinite supply and zero marginal costs, as Nobel Prize winning economist Samuelson argues when he was looking at the context through lighthouses[0], should be free to all. By using copyright to make it a monopoly and allowing the extraction of monopoly rents you are drastically reducing the value and reach of the thing that was discovered. Copyright is a hack and this hack is now fundamentally breaking. Instead of trying to save the hack, we need a full rewrite. If winding back the duration of copyright is correct, the best winding back is zero.

As we are a remix culture where idea A and idea B combine to create idea C, we drastically reduce the innovation in our economy through reduced discoveries. This failure ends up with large monopoly holders consolidating into bigger and bigger entities in order to right some of this failure, but that only makes the monopoly extraction worse.

The discoverer should be subsidized for the discovery of that information but it should immediately go to the public domain. How you work out what that works out to is just as abstract as what Spotify works out what each play costs. This is no doubt monstrously complex to figure out the dollar number what some discovery is worth, but it is the economically correct path. Copyright isn't.

[0]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph

I've made the analogy before that there are tasks that are like walking, and tasks that are like weightlifting.

If you give someone a task of a marathon, someone could complete it in 2 hours and another person 6-12 hours, but they both finish. If you give someone the task of lifting 500 pounds, it will never get done by most people.

Accidental complexity leads to more accidental complexity. When small errors early on build exponentially, you need to find those that can do so with minimal mistakes.

The GP of this discussion talks about 10 devs where each dev is working on more than one microservice. I've seen a lot worse.

If I could pick one thing to talk about when it comes to microservices it would be the name. Micro implies microscope, implies there should be millions to billions of them.

If we could switch to the term two-pizza-services as your comment implies where their main point is in working around Conway's Law, I would feel a lot better about them.

Indeed.

And often even when you look at the legends, there is a large chance they would not succeed in a standard office. For instance Wozniak begged HP to put him on the computer team, they wouldn't do it. Despite the fact that in his off time he was achieving more than the team they had assembled.

Carmack dropped out of college. He would be ignored by HR today. We know what he is capable of - he's a legend. And yet in his Meta keynotes he continually talks about working on a problem one day a week and by the next week the environment that he left it was worse than before he improved it. Quest was getting worse faster than he could fix it.

How many 10x developers are put in 0.1x environments and just look normal?

What this is going to allow is a way to flatten org-mode, which will massively expand the amount of people willing to use it. Put anything you wish into your own data collection, and you can instantly pull it up with a prompt. That service would then allow anonymized queries of other peoples data.

If we don't get AGI, the LLM that are starting now and don't have fresh data from people's queries won't be able to get going. The internet will quickly become stale. This will be sped up by the spam that the LLM will be used to create.

Walking through this scenario I don't see anyway for this not to end in a network effect monopoly where one or two services wins.

This is not how it works. There is really no such thing as a passive investment. Passive is really the world's simplest active investors. All they do is ask, did you give me money? Then I buy. Did you ask for money? Then I sell.

This is important because in your example of only 10 actually active investors remaining, the net flow of the passive investors will dominate the market.

If the net flow is positive, stocks will trend to infinity and the firm will continually issue more stock. This is what AMC is doing already. If net flows are negative, stocks will trend to zero, and likely the firm will either have money and go private, or be in debt and go under.

Indeed.

And it's clear through this lens that if the Fed's goal was actually to have a stable currency, they would grow the money supply through this method. Under a helicopter money scenario, the intended inflation/counter-deflation would happen nearly instantly, they could get the exact amount required, and we would move on with our lives.

Right now we have lagging indicators for lagging indicators that are lagged through the Cantillion effect. Of course it's an absolute impossibility to get it correct! No wonder we get booms and busts!

Deflation is bad, it causes rent-seeking through hoarding money. But inflation is bad, it causes rent-seeking through hoarding assets. The goal needs to be against rent-seeking, against zero sum behavior. The only way to accomplish that is steady prices.

Using metrics as knowledge instead of applying them for understanding is just another case of cargo-culting.

> essential market

A market that relies on government granted monopoly is not a market.

> buying a physical book you are not paying just for the paper and the printing process

But it should. Books should only be priced the cost of the paper and ink.

The very first Nobel winner Paul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. If it is in the best interest to have lighthouses, or firemen, or media, they should fund the creation themselves and everyone should be able to enjoy the results.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson

[1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph

Yep, here's[0] Hal Finney describing how rentier-ism was built into the network that he worked out just as it was released.

[0]: https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January...

The very first Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel winner Paul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. Therefore you should find other ways to fund lighthouses, and by extension, all media and software.

If an economic loss is currently occurring, that means that, if copyright is abolished, an economic gain will accrue. Where that economic gain is captured is therefore the core focus. What we want to occur is for society and the author to share in this increased economic gain, what we don't want is for monopolistic rent-seekers to grab all of this value for themselves.

I am not yet sure of this, but I think a land value tax would accomplish this goal. One would then discover some method to find the weight for each artist or piece of software through a market means that might only be an approximation and take from the land value tax revenue and distribute it to artists and other creators. I think a decent way to find this value is through a revenue neutral(or slightly negative) opt-in sortition process in which, when you go to use an artists work, you are entered into an auction wherein the 50% who bid more than the median value get to use the work at the median price, and the 50% who bid less do not get to use the work, but receive their bid in cash. This is surely not the full system, but it is just me working out how we can move forward from such an unjust system like copyright.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson

[1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph

Yep, 'speed runs' are all about optimizing whatever you can optimize and are mostly single-player.

The only real distinction between single-player games and multiplayer games in this manor is that in single-player games players can choose the 'category' they are currently playing, whereas in multiplayer it is chosen for them. This let's them pick the categories with environments that are most fun optimized which is where the hilarity comes.

This reminds me a lot of the Conflict vs Mistake framing[0] which is expanded on by his Tragedy of Legible Technique article[1]. It also reminds me a lot of the Steve Jobs Product vs Marketing clip[2].

> When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she's trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.

It seems to me like the issue is actually in rent-seeking, where the more rent-seeking you have available, the more the marginal mistake person converts into a conflict person. In a world of perfect competition there would be no room for conflicts, and only once you have freely available rents does the land-grabbing phase begin. When your rules are written by the conflicters, for the conflicters benefit, it's already to late. They'll certainly never compromise on the simple correct path.

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/

[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

Paul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. Therefore you should find other ways to fund lighthouses, and by extension, all media and software.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson

[1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph

I think it might be better if instead of trying to redefine libraries and frameworks we instead used the terms impure application(frameworks) and pure application(libraries). That would make it evident as to which libraries are actually tainted with impure work and need to be redefined as impure.

When you extend this pure/impure idea all the way throughout the computing eco-system, it quickly becomes apparent that something went wrong a long time ago, and every-time, instead of untangling the mess that is pure and impure into their own buckets, we find a way to run a framework in a framework.

What is an Operating System? What is a container? What is k8s? What is a Programming Language? What is a browser? What is a website? What is next?

It appears that we are heading into a recession as we speak.

What are law makers doing right now to prepare for the possible effects of this recession? What are we doing to predict which parts of the financial system will collapse? What are we doing to prepare if CO-VID mutates into a deadly strain? We've known for 30 years that the climate will change, have we done anything to prepare for the consequences of that?

Why must we always need to react and pass TARP or PPP within a week time-frame or the entire economy crumbles?

Huxley's Island is his counter-point to the world of BNW. In it they take drugs for enlightenment. He creates a society inspired by Confucian meditation as well as through the economic lens of Henry George. Henry George advocated for a UBI(what he called citizen's dividend) funded through the taxation of land values.

I think this alpha and beta framing is a useful one. I just watched the John Carmack keynote where he is talking about the Oculus operating system, and in it he is seething that the team around him is not valuing simple and piling complexity and its resulting slowness. In a world where only the people who were truly interested in innovation were working with him, I expect that the accidental complexity would be minimized, and the efficiency of his work would go through the roof even more than it has. Trying to make everyone as productive as possible turns out to have large negative effects on those who are as driven for innovation and those people are so productive that this is a net loss long term.

Sure, but this is an opt-in versus opt-out process. If you are with your friends or family, you will opt-in and share that stuff. If you are with your co-workers? Just as right now they don't get a webcam view on Teams(for my team at least), they are getting audio.

There are great experiences to be had within VR worlds, but I can't yet see the transition to any working environment that can't be done without VR.

Is this going to end up into a single model, where its trained on text and images and audio and videos and 3d models, and it can do anything to anything depending on what you ask of it? Feels like the cross-training would help yield stronger results.

There's a realization you come to short after you understand what you described as an easy transition to a much better community - the transition from grid streets is much simpler than the transition from suburban streets. All of the suburbs filled with stroad connected cul-de-sac developments might be nearly permanently disfigured that aren't worth the costs to retrofit.