SolarNet

> And I'd suggest reading my reply to the absurd thermodynamics bit before assuming too much about my thoughts on it!

I mean. My issue is multi-fold. I have an issue with market fundamentalists who treat it like a religion. But I also have an issue with economists who use methods of analysis that aren't empirical.

> It's an existential claim, not a mathematical claim.

This isn't just an issue of philosophy and mathematics in the abstract. Computation is a physical phenomena. The claim of efficiency being made here, even in the weaker version, is not congruent with reality.

It's an existential claim that would be no different than chemists shouting "this chemical reaction will continue forever" (a violation of the second law of thermodynamics).

> I'm just here to point out that the weakened claim is "markets are the best we've got", not anything theoretical nor abstract.

The weaker claim is no different than doctors who once believed in the four humors. It's not technically an incorrect categorization of reality given current knowledge in the field. But it's a piece of general economics knowledge that has no backing in reality, nor is falsifiable, nor provides predictive use.

And every time an economist spouts that sort of nonsense I can't help but remember their field must be primarily pesduo-science. I don't know how they expect me to take them seriously when they are still yelling about four humors and perpetual chemical interactions.

Because existential claims like this one are incongruent with reality. I don't know many times I can emphasize this point, the claim, even the weakest version I have seen, is not physically possible, hence it would require extraordinary evidence. It would upset the entire field of computation if it were true. It stands in opposition to modern pillars of computational reality, no different than claiming one had a perpetual motion machine would physics. Humanity would be like gods if it were true. You can continue to claim it all you want, but it's as misguided as claiming the earth is flat.

> It's more usual to accept a weaker claim: that markets are the most efficient approximation to the perfect algorithm for price discovery

This claim is just as problematic. You may view it as weaker, but algorithmicly speaking it's the same nonsense. Algorithms in similar complexity classes are usually translatable to each other, which is to say they can be framed in terms of each other. You appear to be claiming that markets are the most efficient variant of an algorithmic class. Which is, again, nonsense. It might have some very nice qualities compared to other algorithms within it's class, but to claim it's the most efficient is, again, problematic.

A claim like that would require proof, not just the absence of contradicting evidence.

> Insisting that no better approach is possible is a strong claim; you'll find it in the wild

Ok, but I do believe the poster I was originally disagreeing with is arguing that:

> the market is an emergent behavior. It’s governed by laws beyond our control as surely as the behavior of materials are governed by thermodynamics.

> If the behavior of your markets fails to match the reality of the market, the best you can hope for is to only introduce a small amount of inefficiency. Of course, utopians who ignore the real nature of the market usually find themselves lethally encumbered by deadweight loss

This appears to be a strong claim that nothing can be more efficient than "the market" without introducing inefficiency or "lethal[.]" dead-weight loss.

> markets are what we have, and they're what we should use, with the burden of proof firmly on the inventor of anything new to demonstrate that it has greater efficiency.

This is a fallacious argument against my point.

To begin with, a new algorithm in the same class as markets is likely to have the same or similar efficiency. And it will be the other properties of it that are more interesting.

But the real issue is that the double standard people argue with the efficient market hypothesis (and especially the economic calculation problem) is problematic because it misunderstands computation. You simultaneously claim (in this post) to have the best approximation due to a lack of contradicting evidence, but then also want alternatives to provide proof of beating that physically impossible standard.

My main response though is: just because markets are the best thing we have does not mean we should accept absurd claims about them. Just because solar energy is effectively unlimited, does not make it a perpetual motion machine.

I would argue that reinforces my point rather than weaken it. My point being that the market is an understandable thing becomes more reasonable if it turns out it's not even an intractable problem that we are discussing.

But I also think you are misunderstanding the argument I was replying to in the first place, because a lot of the claims about "the market" are about the second order allocation of resources that markets cause and not (just) the clearing of them. For example market clearing is how we arrive at the price given the buy and sell orders, but the original goal was the efficient allocation of resources. For which markets are obviously not a perfect solution (it's relatively easy to create order books which end up with unfulfilled orders despite money/weight being available to argue for that allocation), even if they are a good approximate solution (via market clearing). The claims about "the market" are market fundamentalism, that the market is the ideal allocation structure, that we can't find a better or even equivalent solution, because that's just how good markets are. That was what I was rejecting. Not market clearing.

I'm not sure you are really disagreeing. Which is to say I don't see where the not "isn't true" part come from.

Yes classes are closer to the physical reality of modern computer (and that is one reason I prefer C++), but they are still the same construct as a closure and vice-versa. Everything is just implementation details.

Again I grant that languages designed around classes (or really in my opinion, around the physical reality of the device implementing them) are more useful in practice. But from a conceptional abstraction point the post is true.

I think there is some stimulating, contemporary stuff. But I agree it can be difficult to find conveniently. I mostly follow a lot of you-tubers and subreddits that follow this stuff and then use them as a filter for it. But even then it's like something good once a month or two. Though I prefer the contemporary stuff for some reason and can't really give it up, so I am willing to put in that effort.

> It’s governed by laws beyond our control as surely as the behavior of materials are governed by thermodynamics.

It's funny you make this comparison. Because so many of these supposed laws about "the market" violate an effective equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics for information systems: P=/=NP. The claims often made about the transcendent nature of the laws governing "the market" violate the computational properties of reality as we understand it [1]. If "the market" behaved as so many claim then we would have proof of P=NP.

Evolution is also an emergent behavior, of biochemical systems. But we also understand how it functions as an algorithm. So much so we now use it to aid in the design the wing shapes of our planes, the design of new high efficiency radios, and to find new algorithms.

The entire universe is governed by laws beyond our control. That doesn't prevent us from understanding them and bending them to our will. As we have done with ropes and levers, atoms and proteins, so too can we understand and engineer markets.

As it happens markets are likely in a similar class of algorithm as evolution: efficient approximations of NP problems. This is why people use markets as the basis of things like prediction markets, scheduling algorithms, and bin packing.

"The market" is a claim to the "god is in the gaps" no different than intelligent design is. It even does the whole song and dance of elevating an approximation algorithm to some unknowable divine will. An approximation algorithm we already understand and use in engineering everyday.

[1] Make no mistake, bits of information are physically connected to reality, a non-trivial NP algorithm running on human timescales would boil the oceans. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

> For it's era, it had very very high scale for an RTS game

> So the game could only progress at the speed of the slowest player's computer. And SupCom was VERY compute intensive.

It might surprise you to learn that these statements are still true! SupCom:FA (still playable by buying a copy and through the third party FAF launcher; they have even fixed most of the desyncs, it's very stable these days) is probably still the largest scale RTS out there (even planetary annihilation only feels larger). And it still requires a top-tier gaming rig to play.

The reason for this is pretty straightforward, CPUs actually haven't gotten faster for well programmed, cache aware, tight-looped CPU bound operations in the last 15 years. And in fact there are arguments for why something like SupCom:FA would be difficult to make today given the industry's reliance on game engines. And games are still rarely threaded more than SupCom was (e.g. game logic thread, render thread), so until someone can get back to the low level excellence of SupCom:FA and then design and implement a concurrent game logic loop for it that actually parallelizes well, I think it will remain the king of high scale RTS for quite a while.

https://youtu.be/DEhp5eCwgSI?t=3304 (to see why this game is awesome)

I think the first analogy the author made to shenzen io is still a good one for factorio, just a lesser scale. This is engineering without many of the messy unfun parts. No setting up tool-chains, or build tools, or your environment and being totally lost in what to do. The game itself will (usually) not have bugs and it has a clearly defined goal (which can be difficult for things like personal projects if that part of the creativity/drive just isn't there). So even if it is a game that invokes the messy parts of engineering, it does so without actually making them sometimes intractable because it has been designed around those (and in fact is designed to specifically smooth out the curve of difficulty).

The other thing to keep in mind is that like many of the zachtronics games this one is not directly programming. The spatial orientation puzzles and 2d layout and organization of the factory is distinctly different from most programming. I would compare it to trying a language like Lisp or Haskell when has only used languages like C, C#, and Java. It's a totally different take on the concept of symbolic computation (re: programming). And it is one unlike any programming language you will have ever used. So if you enjoy the experience of learning new paradigms, and viewing classic computational ideas from the perspectives of those new paradigms, factorio might be fun for that.

Hopefully that's helpful.

I was going to comment Twitter != legislature.

But uhm, fuck us right?

I mean, in theory third party payment processors still take a cut. I don't think it's a dollar on a 7 dollar payment. But it's also not marginal.

The credit card companies themselves charge 3.00%+0.10 at the reasonable maximum (or roughly $0.31). That is still not even counting the payment processor's fees (which pay the credit card company's fees for you).

I mean the "7 dollar price" is all artificial anyway, it doesn't really cost Epic anything to make the product of those 7 dollars (it's economic rent extracted from the intellectual property they maintain). Either way Epic is making more money on this move even if the whole extra dollar is fees.

> they're not a monopoly

As is well known with anti-trust lawsuits that depends on how one defines market.

As is less known, anti-trust lawsuits don't actually require monopolies.

> Or more simply, why not make it a member method to begin with?

You may not be the author/maintainer of that class.

> Why not just make your Extension an other class that would be inherited?

Because now I have a down casting issue (especially when talking about non-heap "objects"). Which means implementing and forwarding dozens of methods, and/or sloppy bug-prone (when some other developer puts variables on the class without noticing) implicit casts.

> I wish the article included some real-world practical example of when that would be useful

The classic one is interface helpers. Methods which smooth out the usage of an interface but are not relevant to the implementation of it. Yes one can put those methods on the interface's definition. But this allows separating where the interface is declared (some header some where) and where the code for it is defined (some code file), potentially across libraries (e.g. a header only "library" of interfaces, and a utility library of methods for making it nice to use). Notably this also avoids some frustrating header shenanigans and allows writing interface helpers against concrete types to come up with a more natural library organization.

The next one is it much easier to write "literate programming" style code in C++ (which is nice because they often make types "disappear" in their usage, and many argue provide more readable code as a consequence). A problem many developers currently solve with operator overload (see `<<` for the C++ standard printing library). This also makes it way way easier for such literate programming to be extensible (believe me I wrote the templates for extensible literate programming once, it's insanely painful).

Also, depending on how these implement templates, they might be a much more appreciated method of adding optional class methods to templates by making the method a compile error to call in the first place ("missing method") rather than a substitution failure error ("<massive call stack>").

How? Gravity will make all such changes impossible to measure except at galactic scales.

Again any "new space" doesn't stick around where it was created. The atomic forces, chemical forces, and gravity maintain the system distances we are used to.

> (the conspiracy theories around that alone have been absurd, despite all its excellent health programs for the developing world)

I mean, super science mega charity is going to have worse conspiracy theories. It's going to be the Gates foundation stuff mixed with the LHC stuff.

Like he's opening a portal to hell to mine energy from or something. No wait that's DOOM.

> You'll have to find a way to make them agree with it. If you forcibly take money from people then you're just an angry mob.

Not really. They use the "mob"'s roads and banks to make their business work and store their wealth. They use the "mob's" courts and police to protect themselves and their property. We live in a society, if your worry is that they are too powerful for them to participate in that society (e.g. because their power would let them hide their wealth away), then that just makes the ridiculousness of their wealth all the more apparent.

This is addressed:

> To run a computer cooler than that would require a heat pump, which means adding additional energy to the system than what is needed for our computation.

Because this expansion is so infinitesimal on that scale as to be negligible. It's about 7%/Gyr, or a billion years for an unbound structure's "space" to grow by 7%. Or about 70 picometers (10^-12) per meter every year. Or in other words, about a water molecule per meter every four years.

At that rate nearly every other force (from chemical bonds to gravity) prevent anything but the largest cosmological structures (like galaxies) from being effected. They simply continue with their system as they always have, and the extra space shows up as distance between galaxies.

Antitrust is kind of a nebulous smell test (I'll know shit when I smell it kinda thing), and from before the internet era, so I don't think the distinction exists. It's more about how consumers end up interacting with the market due to the actions of the companies being prosecuted/regulated.

The issue in this case would be that Amazon is manipulating the markets involved by effectively being the market. If FooCorp was a minor player in the market, didn't buy up competing marketplaces, and was clear about it's brand as a seller of Foo products that would be fine (think Costco and Kirkland Signature branded products). The issue with Amazon is that it is half of all eCommerce, buys up competing marketplaces to shutter them, it is hellishly difficult to determine what is an Amazon sold product and a marketplace sold product on their site, and their brand is as a marketplace.

Yea, requiring consulting fees from big companies is definitely the way to go.

Some open source guy wants to pick your brain: Sure lets get lunch and split it.

Some small single digit founder start-up wants to talk abut your work: Ok sure, pay for my lunch lets talk about how I can help you change the world.

Freaking Microsoft wants to talk: That'll be 1k an hour plus expenses (also get a limo and a nice dinner).

The humility of engineering should stop at the boundary between people who want to change the world and those who just want to profit off of you.

I feel like this is a misapplication of that philosophy.

Though my first exposure to (serious) exception handling was through the common lisp signal/restart system. So I view software has layers and the communication of errors up and down those layers. Rust for example provides this through Result types and either composing or implementing error types.

My point being that the parsing of a record of a service discovery system should crash just that parser process. Not the whole system of processes, the manager of those parser processes should note (log) that the parser crashed on a record and then ignore it (probably as part of a broader refresh system I would imagine). That would be the correct way to handle errors up and down because the point of a process is to do a computation and communicate through reliable channels. Crashing can be a reliable way to communicate (it is communication of an unreliable state, but the point of letting it crash is that the resulting crash can be seen as a reliable communication) and the manager of the parsing process should have had a case for it that wasn't just crash.

> I think you're reading it wrong. It doesn't grant immunity for perjury committed while testifying under immunity, which is a completely reasonable exception. Without it, a guilty criminal would have no incentive not to give false testimony portraying his guilty friends as innocent.

I think you are misunderstanding my point because you are not arguing against it here. And the link you provided supports my point. My point was that truthful statements made by her under 18 U.S.C. § 6002 could still be used to prosecute her, it is not blanket immunity. And the link details how courts don't believe prosecuting past perjury using compelled truthful statements violate the fifth amendment, even though some of the justices expressed "discomfort" with that.

> That's your opinion, but the Supreme Court's opinion differs:

Sure, but the supreme court is also apparently fine with secret wiretapping courts and torture. The supreme court is a political branch of government it's not like their interpretation of the constitution is inherently right, it just happens to be the law of the land.

You are confusing legal with moral.

Read 18 U.S.C. § 6002 it does not grant blanket immunity. If I testify truthfully and reveal perjury in the past I can be tried for that perjury now.

Again, this violates the 5th amendment.

> However, I would argue that such a super-Turing machine is logically impossible.

I mean we are discussing it so it's certainly logically possible.

> In principle continuous values cannot be physically manifested with certainty or arbitrary precision regardless of what world we are in.

Why would they need to be physically manifestable? Again how can you make assertions about what parts of physicality are maintained by the machine that is computing physicality? How can you make assertions about the world containing our own?

> Positing such a super-Turing machine is like saying "I have a square circle in my pocket".

Except it isn't. It's more like "I launched my square circle beyond the observable universe". If it was in my pocket I could take it out and show it to you.

Positing a "super-Turing" machine is pointless because it isn't testable. But it is possible. I feel like that distinction is important which is why I commented. Which is much how I feel about super-determinism in general, sure it's possible, but how do we test it? It's pointless because whether not it exists doesn't change anything. The issue of the discrete values is an interesting facet of that, one that might lead to something testable, like those "is the universe a hologram" experiments. Establishing what would be required of such a system is useful, but it doesn't dismiss it out of hand.

I guess my issue is that your arguments don't fully embrace the theory so they are bit like trying to disprove the existence of a different god using the holy book of your own god. There are valid reasons to disagree with superdeterminism, but arguing from the lens of physicality misses the issue at hand.

Secret politically motivated court systems.

Using a method which has been called incompatible with basic human rights (by the EU), has been labeled as torture (by the UN), and compared to the governmental processes of countries like North Korea, China, and Iran (by various reporters).

Also notably the immunity they granted her would not have protected her from various other legal troubles. The law in question (which then implies use of coercive incarceration) is a violation of the 5th amendment protections of self incrimination.

I don't really care if those break down.

But that assertion is based on a set of assumptions that come back to information theory and hence computability.

You are right that in modern information theory exact precision on a continuum is physically impossible (for others: as we continue to subdevide the precision we require more bits of information, which has known physical limits).

But what I think the other posters was getting at is that if the universe runs on a machine that is not bound by those rules, say rules where arbitrary precision on a continuum can be stored as a value (which again violates physicality as we know it but such a machine is "outside" the universe so physicality is moot already), then that is possible.

Which is to say the universe is a machine which can compute things a Turing machine can't (a Turing machine can compute everything that can be computed that we are aware of, ergo if the universe can compute things it can't then the assertion being made - albeit somewhat clumsily - is that the universe doesn't follow the asserts we know).

> $529bn would just not work.

If the fine structure's purpose is to prevent companies from doing extremely illegal things. Then it seems to work just fine. Facebook would be unable to repeat this mistake.

It's not like there are such things as corporate death sentences in much of the world. So there does need to be a mechanism to ensure that a company that repeatedly flagrantly violates the law is stopped from doing so eventually. Excessive fines are a way to do that, to make it so economically non-viable that it is avoided.

Now again, one can argue whether this violation is worthy of that. But on the face of it there is no reason why feasibility of payment is necessary for deciding the amount of a fine.

Capitalism has problems with pricing external costs to society. The more common example being things like pollution and climate change (something ironically that Australia is particularity bad at). The price for privacy violations here might be a bit high, but it is an externality worth pricing. The amount of money the government will need to spend fighting identity theft in response to this is just the first order effect. Economic damage from both the identity theft and loss of trust. Mental health damage done from the identity theft and leaked data being used. According to the article the government of Australia prices that at 1,700,000 per person. Which actually sounds like a reasonable amount once one considers paying police to track down thieves, prosecution, jail time, the potential for social services to have to help that person while their life is put back together, and so on.

It's the multiplication that screwed them here. That's the part that might not track quite correctly.

I think the parent comment was more likely referring to using these devices for personal privacy. For example can a criminal steal my personal information in my phone vs. can the government spy on me. Where the government might spend a million dollars to do this process to read the phone of a terrorist, but a criminal probably wouldn't to steal my personal information off of a phone or USB drive.

Except that the reference in question would have caused a lifetime error in rust which would have required the developrs to explictly acknowledge the choice they were making, likely by changing a bunch of types.

Yes you could still do it in rust, but any reviwer of the code would say "why in the world are you doing it this way" because it would be forced into a complex cross call monstrosity.

I think you missed the point. The valley used to be (still is actually) a windswept burning desert half the year. Which is part of what makes its 60's self comparable to Detroit.

> I actually just mean DARPA

NASA is the obvious next example. They pay for a lot of esoteric stuff that once made they don't actually end up needing - but having paid the startup costs - end up contributing to other fields.

I think FEMA also does similar things though at a much less parallel (but a higher volume).

Most of the "regulate and promote an industry" (a dumb idea for structuring them but I digress) agencies also do this. The NRC for example does a lot of research on storing and recycling nuclear waste, but also on new nuclear technologies.

And other military agencies aren't worth leaving out. The army core of engineers pushes a lot of contractors to deliver unique solutions that end up getting resold, see the concrete barriers in Iraq.