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You can insist something is economically rational all you like but that doesn’t demonstrate it is

Think through the logistics of maintaining power after a sudden transfer of institutional power to an oligarchs where humans come obsolete and are being lined up to be exterminated? Do you think those people just disappear? Do you think jobless, aimless people, or the new poor have historically accepted such reversal of economic standing?

History almost suggests this leads to a complete breakdown of society

Do you think this is gonna be enforced by robots?

Do you know how much power comes from the fact that energy come companies reliant consumption?

Think, do you think of that power they built on goods sold to consumers stays around after the consumers disappear?

Calling this economically rational probably goes hard if you have a rudimentary understanding of second-order effects, and an understanding of economics built on YouTube videos & hot takes online.

Something you learn in most introductory economic classes, is slave labour is less efficient than free salaried workers, an observation that goes as far back Adam smith & Richardo.

It leads to the same thing (but probably better spells it out), but the answer is entry barriers to competition which in the long run translates into less competition in the long run and greater profitability

Either way, he’s a dickhead. He’s clearly throwing around words he doesn’t really understand.

It wouldn’t be economically rational to do this. Nations have a monopoly on violence (policing, military & enforcement of through force) within their own borders, and nations are in competition with one another, even during times of peace.

It does not make sense for anyone nation to start culling people who do not get onboard with some radical social engineering programme. Through the stroke of a pen these companies are under the control of the government.

Say you want to make an even more pessimistic argument, say the oligarchy in one country get control of this monopoly on its violence. That country is still in competition with other countries.

Russia still has nukes, and thanks to their little war, they lack the technological expertise to go to toe to toe with China and the US on AI. Countries wanna mobilise what resources they can to survive this strategic competition and that includes humans.

Say the oligarchs are smart enough to maintain the status quo in foreign policy, and they seek to enslave their entire country. There is no amount of resources in the world that would prevent the amount of disenfranchised people from revolting and over-throwing any such government that didn’t give them a fair social contract, especially one that’s already gone through higher levels of economic development.

I've enjoyed ink displays, but my kindle has been dead for some time and it was always kind of a pain to load stuff on too, most papers would require some kind of zoom as well although I'm sure they're better these days.

I do love an e-ink display, but I just like holding a sheet of paper, and not having to jump through menus to read something especially if I'm actively referring to it and revisiting it. Plus I can use my coloured fineliner on it, whereas the PDF viewer on my iPad crashes sometimes crashes if you look at it funny.

I do it for reading sometimes mostly papers, I just find it a bit easier to read through something without distraction and easier on the eyes. That and it sits on my desk until I actually read it.

> I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment

I say this who is voluntarily returning to university to pursue a different profession after working 10 years as a software engineer. This isn't going to work for 95% of people, people who have dependents children and partners, mortgages.

> mass extermination of those that refuse

I have no words, but you sound like a dickhead.

I mean not too surprising, it's a specialised model that trained on relevant quantitive/qualitative inputs.

LLMs are very general and flexible, by all means they can do well on non-text based specialised problems, but it also does well because their harnesses know how to defer to the right tools a lot of the time, and produces good answers from inspecting the output. Like if you ask Codex/Claude Code to transcribe a videos, it's going to create a script that uses whisper to extract the transcript not manually process the binary. If you ask it for demographic information it'll pull census data and write a script which produces the summary stats and report it back to you (I imagine much of the recent math stuff relied on this).

Sometimes it'll pull a number from its training data but the strength of an LLM is its ability to autonomously seek out the right answer even when it doesn't know the answer initially.

You could definitely use train an LLM to utilise these efficient specialised models, by it may be more cost effective to ask the model to build a special purpose application with a new UI over the top of the efficient specialised model.

Doesn't sound like the liability lies with the library maintainers, sounds up to the government agency to do their due diligence, but also sounds unenforceable as well

My point was that there isn’t some kind of universal generalised way of explaining for these things like economic class, some jobs are just less resilient to certain kinds of change.

It has more to do with the demand for the specific skills. Jobs in Western countries had more demand for workers in the service industry, but had less demand for labourers, as globalisation took place. And here we have less demand for software engineer labour because an alternative is available here to an otherwise expensive hire.

We all speak from experience, I’ve had shitty bosses and had shitty workplaces. By all means we should validate the shit people go through, but it doesn’t provide an explanation of the underlying forces

Definitely keep experimenting

I guess also, what’s happening in the top right is cool but I think as a user you’re preoccupied on figuring out how to view the other content it’s difficult to appreciate and I imagine that’s where you put a lot of effort

> I'd like the visuals to do most of the talking

If you’re aiming for a more curated experience, it might be worth limiting content that is likely to confuse the user for what the intended experience is meant to be. Many users have preconceived ideas of how some parts of the UI behave & which might get in the way to delivering the experience you’re trying to deliver.

I think this is really cool website and love this topic

But I think you might want to test this page on smaller screens, just very limited screen real estate for the content of interest, the top right half lots of padding, the scrollable content basically has 1/3 of the available screen space, the left hand side kind of has another 1/3

Look your website your vision, I get it and I respect your trying something different with the UI but if your goal here is to communicate your ideas, as a reader I'd appreciate having more screen space for the content, when I clicked on the link to see this specific post I'm just not interested in your other posts (or at least until I've read the one I went out of my way to read).

FWIW, I'm using a macbook air right now.

During the transitionary period between WW2 and 2000 we saw massive unemployment in many typical blue collar jobs in the western developed world, yet women weren't impacted to the same degree, why is that?

Is it because women through out the 1960s-2000s had a seat at the table, which men didn't?

Obviously not, they often faced workplace discrimination and their choice of job was limited to what was socially acceptable for a woman to work in and often those were jobs men weren't interested in the 1940-1960s, but they were working in what we now call the service industry and they didn't experience the displacement which came with global trade at the same rate men did.

> Capital/labor in strict sense, sure, but there is also material support, or a “seat at the table”. A decision maker (in service to Capital).

This just is not an informative framing here for why software engineers are more impacted than doctors

> The division is power—-be it Capital or knowledge or labor.

This simply isn't informative, the blog post is clearly focusing on a definite industry and your fixating on a general class (which the impacts are not being felt equally across).

We're not talking about capital/labour share, we're talking about which professions are destabilised by technological innovation which are not.

Clearly there is a useful distinction to make here, as clearly some jobs are disportionately robust to technological innovation. Clearly doctors and lawyers have not expected the same amount of replacement as software engineer. Maybe blue or white collar does quite capture it but captial and labour framing provides no explanation for any heterogeneous effects on different trades within the labour force.

Possibly, but I was between classes and really caffeinated lol

A lot of what makes Canva stand out comes from its IP coupled to their ecosystem/product (templates, assets and stock photography), its otherwise a pretty simple tool with basic functionality (but with good UX) compared with more professional software like photoshop or illustrator, or Figma. I'm sure you can built an open source equivalent in terms of software, but I don't think it's really possible for open source to produce a true replacement or alternative.

THAT ASIDE, it might be worth focusing on UX. This looks vibe coded, maybe it isn't.

- The UI is broken in a few places (the tools text in the shapes menu)

- Consider prioritising more important tools based on available space in the ui, the header is a bit cluttered.

- Some of the tool menus are awkward to use, like in Canva those are in a side bar and when they open the have panels that don't disappear when their parent looses focus. Probably worth making sure you're not using their exact icons as well as these look pretty similar.

- Your add page button is creating an awkward scroll which you could probably limit by exposing add page in a way that didn't do that. Maybe remove the add page button below the canvas, as you already have an add page button in the bottom left, you should have more vertical space for the design as a result.

- You've got several different export sharing options in the header side by side. Might be worth collapsing that into a menu to minimise clutter. Both tools like canva and more professional tools layout their UIs like this. By all means do don't it just because they are, but there is some rational here why they would.

- There are two places in the header that talk about the save state on the left and the right (one saying saved, the other saying saved in the browser). Consider having consolidating that.

- do you really want to place the copy "Sign up to keep it forever" next to the sign up button? do you have any reason this is likely to stand out from the rest of the UI features there? I reckon if not get rid of it. Or if it's that important get rid of anything competiting for its attention which right now is a lot of things.

- you have a ellipses for a menu with a ton of options, in most software this is aligned to the left. If you've removed other things frmo the the head it may make sense to break that up in submenus so those pieces of functionality is more discoverable.

- Your commment functionality requires sign up to use, keeping it there may help lead to signs ups, but if you're designing this as an open source tool, maybe you're less interested in growth hacking, it might make sense to remove it from the header as well when the user isn't signed in (at the same time keeping it there signals to people weighing up your product that that feature exists.

- you have 2 layers of headers, is it worth utilising horitonzal space for some of your buttons and put them in the right hand side?

Hopefully you can feed the above back into your agent on a loop lol.

twists and revelations are just unhelpful especially when someone is trying build a mental model, but I do think there's probably some overlap in pacing and I'll pieces together into a complicated model has some overlap with story telling, because there's definitely bad educational writing which is a slog to get through because they front load a lot of stuff without application.

I do find it kind of annoying when someone has a set of side characters they are trying convey the information through. Like it's cute the first few times you see it but after a while it's grating.

I do think some people for whatever reason also have no issue with the front loaded info dumps, maybe they are looking for a specific piece of information they want to pull not sure. I prefer something a bit structured while having the ability to zoom out and look for the piece later on.

Not everyone consumes information the same, so I don't know there's really a objective best way.

> LLMs have made this problem extremely worse. Imagine how'd you'd explain what an MCP is in a couple words and technically, then try to look it up. There's phone books worth of pages and text that never end up getting to the point

Also this, but I think this might be a result of models of poorly designed benchmarks and training that led to claude reading like an inner monologue and an exhaustive noncommittal statement being certain on very few things, leading a ton of unnecessary prefaces.

> No lol

It's suggestion not a instruction, and It's a certainly a more useful suggestion than a bunch of people make demands of google and the US govt that will never be realised.

> We can do that again. It would piss off a lot of platform owners

Fair, stuff is more locked down now and stuff is harder to crawl. But if we're entering intervention then you may as well entertain idea's closer to what has been political feasible in the past, like requiring google to provide metered API access to this archived data to train competitors, like how AT&T also was required to license UNIX patents to others looking to build software on its systems. Its closer inline to what anti trusts in the past have accomplished.

The problem with nationalising google and making it free is, operating google for free just isn't feasible. Google provides a free service because it elevates their paid services and users on it provides value to their other services. Even with a feature freeze google still crawls the web and collects information to improve its results which has an on going marginal cost. Say it happens, you nationalise Google Search. how long till the elected officals who just see the on going costs (and not costs avoided) starts complaining about how much keeping it operation costs? The political economy isn't feasible either.

If you want to improve search, I think its best to start with addressing entry barriers, which in this case is massive fixed costs.

I really enjoyed "Thinking Fast and Slow", unfortunately it may not be Daniel Kahneman best work, and unfortunately a victim of the reproducibility crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow#Replic...

None of Kahneman's work was affected but some of the work he uses as examples absolute were. It's not all bad but there are parts that should probably be removed or prefaced to new readers especially since Kahneman accepted (RIP) the some of the criticism, that or some spiritual success without those warts

> A hypothetical US gov't, benevolent and markedly less corrupt than the current one

If we’re pretending this is taking place in another reality what are we hoping to learn from this hypothetical?

> with the express intent to return Google Search to 2010 levels of efficacy and to remove all LLM functions from both its frontend and backend

It would be simpler for the US govt to build such a search engine like that today as google was a lot simpler back then, however it wouldn’t work because the internet has changed as much as Google has.

If the goal is to make the internet search better via intervention it might be simpler to force Google to share relevant patents for free with competitors and new market entrants, and doesn’t require a benevolent government to work either.

Even without that kagi exists and it’s fine

Yeah I don't expect most youtubers to understand that, and much of the guidelines may seem to insist upon themselves without understanding the underlying motivation for the whole approach.

It does sound like youtube will be requiring experiments to pass some sort of similarity test before they can be run as an experiment.

I think it'll be interesting to see how it goes.

It's possible I've spent too much time looking at town planning where nothing is really ever measured and when numbers are produced it is it some insane

Like claiming townhouses not facing out into the street somehow produces X $ in mental health costs due to "lack of inclusion" and the footnote links to a study where non-english speaking communities in Australia were having real health costs due to lack of access to translation services. Which is something that passes for "evidence based" planning. Doing experiments in social sciences is a lot harder tho.

Maybe it's too easy to do experiments in Software and like you said

> Sometimes it feels a bit like we're sitting around so focused on measuring whether guests prefer one dish or the other and arguing over which experiment is best, that we don't notice a forest fire is blazing outside

I do think they're a useful tool but I see what you're saying.

Part of me feel some of that is risk aversion, but also maybe some of its process dependence when you have a number that provides strong certainty on a number of things, and because there's that feedback loop they get drawn to the things that cause the number go up. Similar to how people become dependent on LLMs to get stuff done or affirm if they did the right thing, and when they're in a space that's harder to measure they don't know to judge if they've done a good job or not.

I'm spending less time working on software, as I decided to get an econ degree, specifically econometrics, so I do spent a lot of time trying to think how to better measure stuff specifically in public policy, so I might be bias lol

But I do get what you're saying, hope things are well for you

Hey Jordan hope you're doing well.

> In my experience working in software, empiricism is the only thing valued anymore. Intuition and thoughtfulness is out the window because it's not scientific enough.

With things like A/B testing, its not entirely an objective as you need to make assumptions which can be difficult to measure (although typically randomisation solves a lot of them), but you can only measure what you've decide to measure (which isn't random), so you don't know when you're in a local max. So IMO intuition and thoughtfulness is necessary. Sometimes product managers don't listen to data scientists when they say you can't measure Y with X, or the research design violates the required assumptions to make a causal claims (like reverse causality or controlling on a post treatment effect, e.g. employment as control when measuring income after hospitalisation (the treatment)). I think the worse offences I've seen have been from marketing teams.

But proper research design does require intuition and thoughtfulness, because statistical models require thought, like other forms of supervised learning.

I've seen both

- PMs use questionable experiments to justify shipping something.

- PMs dismiss experiments when it was a null result and shipped anyways.

In either case I don't think the methodology is the cause of problems here, although I think shipping with a null result is justifiable if it's a larger unit of work (provided its not a regression).

Sometimes things that have heterogenous effects get measured as a homogenous effect, Like say:

- Your primary user base is X1 and X2 is a larger consumer base but makes up a small portion of your user base.

- Your experiment does poorly with X1, but say there was an increase in user base X2.

- However because X1 dominates the user base and your signups (because say you target ads to X1 over X2), no one drills into the effects on these different user bases, the result gets discarded as it seems to be a bad outcome.

There's valuable information in the experiment outcome but without thought and attention you can miss it.

> Google recently started doing all of these on anonymous searches with a modal overlay and a big bright blue "Continue" primary button that takes you to a login screen, while a "don't sign in" button appears as far less noticeable text above it.

I mean that sucks, but IMO with their market share, the way Google chrome is inclined to develop their product is very different to firms in more competitive spaces.

Perhaps A/B Tests, allows google to optimise the things they are incentivised to pursue, but in the hands of smaller firms with different incentives are willing to tweak things to be more appealing to users when they have far less market power, which I think is probably more the issue in the case of Google.

I just don't think this is a universal problem with the methodology

> I strongly believe A/B testing users without their knowledge and enthusiastic consent is unethical

Look I get it feels weird but in practice most A/B tests are stuff like “does this copy change if ppl use this feature”.

The reasons they don’t is the same reason RCTs for new drugs don’t tell patients either. You end up with selection bias.

> If you don't have enough confidence in your changes to make them carte blanche, then don't make them at all

This is a bit hyperbolic, empirics is something that should be used more by decision makers not just for their own sake but for people who don’t understand why they are making them, especially in government (although It’s harder because finding cases where it’s appropriate is hard).

An A/B test isn’t just about what’s better, it’s about understanding all other things being equal how does one change to X affect Y. Which is information that can be used to inform the design of yet to be build features.

A lot of ppl have bad takes on what makes a product better, and they would otherwise have a greater say in the product design. Some product managers are just really stupid and are there due to nepotism so it’s an external equaliser and allowing the thoughtful ones to have more of a say.

> Users don't want their shit changing all the time.

Yep that’s why you don’t ask them.

I get if you have a specific flow that your use to. It would annoying for me too if that changed (as I’m pretty stubborn don’t like ppl making changes on my behalf), but that doesn’t mean it’s an objective better experience for all users or users who have yet to be familiar with the apps process.

When these products operate in competitive markets and not some winner takes all market these are often about improving users experience.

If this was something more high stakes like a medial trial I’d get it, but for stuff like filling out a document or watching a piece of media. The stakes for most SASS app are really low.

In most cases the A and the B in an A/B test really should otherwise mostly identical, but one thing is different.

If almost everything is different, it’s hard to learn for next time what exactly what led to a change in which ever dependent variable your observating.

LVT is a good reform to do, but if the goal is to improve housing affordability through supply it's quite an indirect measure and occur at a glacial pace without proper planning reform.

Many areas where people want to live and where homes should be built, can sometimes have a large portion of home owners like Mosman, Bondi, Croydon or Woollahra in Sydney. A tax on the unimproved value of land just doesn't get home building started here if no one is a renter (I recall increases in rent were tied to LVT in Progress and Poverty). And if its based on valuations the valuations will again be distorted by planning controls.

If you upzone these areas for towers, the moment the first person takes the gazillion dollar offer from a developer suddenly homes get built, and suddenly everyone else want to exit. And besides if you have LV Tax their land value will got up because their land will have fewer development limitations, higher demand, etc, etc.

Georgism is cool, land tax is cool, but it's not a silver bullet.

If your goal is to make homes more affordable, reforms like the ones they did in Auckland (loosening planning controls) is the way to go. https://onefinaleffort.com/auckland

Similar thing is taking place in Austin Texas right now as well. https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2026/0...

If your goal is to redistribute wealth Georgism is not a bad option, but again planning controls (zoning, Floor space, height limits, heritage controls, parking minimums, upper setbacks, excessive lower setbacks) can suppress the true size of the tax base.

It really doesn't have much to do with planning or zoning, I imagine it predates that. A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.

Zoning and planning distorts land values so georgism alone won't solve land use problems. E.g. Demand for land with fewer property rights (such as single family zoning, or a heritage restriction) will be lower than the site next to it that allowed building a 200 floor residential tower. In turn its land value will be lower.

It might still yield a high rent tho, but maybe not more than a new well maintained apartment.

> As is common in political shenanigans, the draft bill has a euphemistic label ('algorithmic opt-out') - what it actually does is allow unspecified bureaucrats such as the Minister for Communications to designate any individual piece of content as 'harmful' and have it banished from the internet.

Not a fan of the paternalistic/nanny state attitude of the current government or that ministers track record, but isn't this two separate things which they intend to do?

That's just not how that works, how much consumers will pay is a binding constraint. Apple isn't subsiding their phone with developer fees and distributing their below marginal cost. Apple is almost certainly charging well above its marginal costs and is already charging the revenue maximising price, it's not willingly leaving money on the table.

Not entirely how you've made formed this connection but respectively it sounds like you've confused several things here.

RE: On agents taking up your time

One thing I've begun to notice is that LLMs list of a bunch of interesting stuff and raise all these thing you consider but often sometimes you just want a more focused response, so these scatter responses kind of lead you to being overwhelmed and losing focus on what you really wanted to do. At least I've started noticing this.

Like I'd ask about some statical approach taken in a paper and suddenly i'm being bombard with all these potential pivots and things I really need to consider, I kind of just want to consider 1 thing at a time and come to things once I fixed the immediate issue. Sure I have no doubt these other pieces of information are useful but it's just not the most useful information I need right now.

This is less of a problem with coding agents more so putting learning related questions to an LLM, like is the method covered in this paper, yes no? instead I get an exhaustive but overwhelming and indirect response that contains part of the answer. I just wanted to know if it was worth my time going through the paper but now I'm being bombarded told all this tangential information, which is unclear to me if I need to consider right at this moment, it's really distracting.

Maybe this is something others adapted to but i've resorted speaking past it saying, "this is the question please stay on topic" or literally "one thing at a time please" and then it narrows in, but they really stretch your attention thin if you're not more aggressive with keeping them on topic. The smarter models are better, and if you use max compute it does a better job.

I think they can definitely be helpful for learning, but you got play an active role, you can't just consume what it says like content.

Oh… I assumed it was a further expansion of the ideas that with into ggplot as they all look like ggplot charts and ideas were identical

I wish I could edit my original comment to add this correction.