gameman144

Some people like living in communities that look nice. It seems fair that you can opt-in to those rules by buying in an HOA, and if you do want to park on your lawn, buy elsewhere.

(And I am not a fan of HOAs personally, so I do in fact live elsewhere, but my neighbors house is also an eyesore)

I think this is one of those "works, but not at scale" situations. The law around protected classes is proof of this: if there's a racist business that won't serve you, startups could gain an advantage by serving you. But if every business around you is racist such that a startup couldn't gain a foothold, there's a market failure that regulation was added to address.

If you don't like what telephone companies do, making your own phone company that doesn't inter-operate with the current ones would clearly not go very well.

Likewise, if you don't like the current banks or payment processors, you have a steep hill to climb in that all the operative tissue is built around the current model.

> Still, at that point there is nothing worse than doing what you’re told for the last ninety seconds of your life and making things easy for the death squad

This line was the point that invalidated the thesis for me. There are tons of things that are worse than accepting your death.

Maybe fighting back will cause harm to others. Maybe you will be tortured as punishment. Maybe you are in such pain that you want death altogether.

Death is obviously never a good option, but it doesn't take much imagination to think of far worse ones.

Maybe that is what the parent meant, but that definition really dilutes the idea of responsible vs irresponsible choices to the point of meaninglessness, IMO.

Donating to a food bank lowers the taxpayer burden of paying for food, and American taxes fund cartels, so you're very indirectly funding cartels when you donate to a food bank.

I'm not sure that would influence any reasonable person's actions in any meaningful way, though.

US avocado farmers don't, though (unless I've got the wrong farmers in mind).

But US-farmed avocados are the alternative to cartel-financing avocados. Am I missing something?

I don't think US American avocado farmers are committing war crimes.

> Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?

Honestly, yes. In the case of criminal culpability, it just happens to be the least scary of the available options of who gets to send someone to jail.

For lawmaking, this isn't the case: the work for lawmakers is much more detailed and gameable than a binary question of guilt.

This may show that I'm biased, but the idea of a randomized group of citizens making the law of the land scares the heck out of me. There is a non-trivial amount of nuance and compromise that goes in lawmaking.

Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.

Wasteful R&D is still R&D, the company just presumably doesn't get a return on it.

If the company does get a return, then the R&D wasn't wasteful.

And regardless, the tax code doesn't and shouldn't (IMO) differentiate there, to encourage companies to take risks.

> Literally some people only communicate via one vendor with no interoperability.

Doesn't iMessage fit this bill to a tee? (Where the vendor in question also locks you into the hardware, not just the software?)

Yeah, I agree, but I think that's true all the way up the chain -- just like everything's magic until you know how it works, we may say things "know" information until we understand the deterministic machinery they're using behind the scenes.

Does it though? I feel like there's a whole epistemological debate to be had, but if someone says "My toaster knows when the bread is burning", I don't think it's implying that there's cognition there.

Or as a more direct comparison, with the VW emissions scandal, saying "Cars know when they're being tested" was part of the discussion, but didn't imply intelligence or anything.

I think "know" is just a shorthand term here (though admittedly the fact that we're discussing AI does leave a lot more room for reading into it.)

I think the parent's argument is that wherever in your framework you're calling `doth_match` and then `doeth_thou`, you have a single function that's both deciding and acting. There has to be a function in your program that's responsible for doing both.

I am not sure that the before case maps to the article's premise, and and I think your optimized SIMD version does line up with the recommendations of the article.

For your example loop, the `if` statements are contingent on the data; they can't be pushed up as-is. If your algorithm were something like:

    if (length % 2 == 1) {
      values[i] += 1;
    } else {
      values[i] += 2;
    }

then I think you'd agree that we should hoist that check out above the `for` statement.

In your optimized SIMD version, you've removed the `if` altogether and are doing branchless computations. This seems very much like the platonic ideal of the article, and I'd expect they'd be a big fan!

Whoops, yep you are completely right and I was totally wrong! Bad day for my reading comprehension!

I don't love heavy-handed approaches like this, but it does seem very in line with small government politics.

Essentially, this is saying that the executive can't create regulations that add regulations that limit what businesses can do (which would be relevant when the party in power of the executive changes)

Totally, they have the ability to rein in the executive branch for sure! I think the parent's frustration is very justified (and might even be more valid -- there exists a clear path to not have tariffs imposed by edict, and our representatives just aren't taking it).

The parent isn't objecting to tariffs, as far as I can tell. They're objecting that tariffs, which are a power vested in Congress, are being driven by one man (the President) in the executive branch.

> Children are sponges of information and often their parents and various information outlets don't provide them with enough to satisfy their curiosity

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, though -- a big part of parenting is determining when your kid is old enough for the truth. There is a lot of hard-to-swallow evil in human history, and I think it's fine for parents to shield their kids from some of that curiosity before they're ready.

I remember being a kid and watching cartoons, being frustrated that they never actually killed the bad guys. It was probably better for my development, though, that I wasn't exposed to the level of violence that would have satisfied my curiosity at that young age.

> the "art" is to be able to mate that animal.

I'm assuming (hoping?) that this was supposed to be "tame"? If not, I've got some questions about Bruce Lee.

> If you’re asking if it would incentivize us to be more careful when introducing additional interactive functionality on a page, and how that functionality impacted performance and page speed, I expect it would.

Not quite, I wasn't trying to make a bigger point about is/ought dynamics here, I was more curious specifically about the Google Maps example and other instances like it from a technical perspective.

Currently on the web, it's very easy to design a web page where you only pay for what you use -- if I start up a feature, it loads the script that runs that feature; if I don't start it up, it never loads.

It sounds like in the model proposed above where all scripts are loaded on page-load, I as a user face a clearly worse experience either by A.) losing useful features such as Street View, or B.) paying to load the scripts for those features even when I don't use them.

> Hard to take him seriously when he doesn't himself pay more tax

Why? Advocating for a change doesn't imply that you need to act like that change has been made already.

For instance, I am a huge advocate for building out more sidewalks in my city. I don't currently walk everywhere, though, because the sidewalks today aren't suitable for that -- the change needs to be made first.

Likewise, I could donate all my spare money to the city to fund sidewalks, but this goes against my visceral sense of fairness: I am advocating for my local government to build sidewalks, not saying that sidewalks should be built by any means necessary and that I'm willing to foot the bill alone.

Wouldn't this make users pay for every possible feature they could ever use on a given site? For instance, in Google Maps I might use Street View 1% of the time, and the script for it is pretty bulky. In your ideal world, would I have to preload the Street View handling scripts whenever I loaded up Google Maps at all?

For me, I think it's the act of control and creation -- I can put the things I like together and try new thing and experiment with techniques or ingredients, whereas ordering from a restaurant I'll only be seeing the end results from someone else's experimentation or experience.

I don't dislike restaurants, to be clear -- I love a dinner out. It just scratches a different itch than cooking a meal at home.

> Sure, at first you will want an AI agent to draft emails that you review and approve before sending. But later you will get bored of approving AI drafts and want another agent to review them automatically.

This doesn't seem to me like an obvious next step. I would definitely want my reviewing step to be as simple as possible, but removing yourself from the loop entirely is a qualitatively different thing.

As an analogue, I like to cook dinner but I am only an okay cook -- I like my recipes to be as simple as possible, and I'm fine with using premade spice mixes and such. Now the simplest recipe is zero steps: I order food from a restaurant, but I don't enjoy that as much because it is (similar to having AI approve and send your emails without you) a qualitatively different experience.

> When the topic at hand is one group wanting to exercise power over another group, there can never be a resolution.

I actually agree here, but only insofar as a resolution needs to be the ideal for both parties: a resolution could totally be rules and doctrine that both sides find partially objectionable, but the best feasible option.

I do want to point out that your point about one group exercising power over another is almost always where these disagreements arise: each party thinks that they've identified an unjust exertion of power that should be prevented.

> There is no “both sides” here

If there's ever a disagreement or debate about anything, then there are literally always two sides.

You might disagree that the thing that the other side is prioritizing is as important (e.g. the lives of fetuses vs. the right to bodily autonomy for women), or that the thing the other side believes is even right (e.g. people who believe in racial hierarchies and other literally racist ideologies), but that doesn't detract from the fact that two sides do, in reality, exist.

In my experience, it's way more effective determining the thing that the other side cares about, then finding common ground if that's something that you also care about -- from there, it's a lot easier to make the case that while both priorities are good, your priorities might be more justifiable.

Shutting down the other side by saying their viewpoint is invalid has been productive for me literally zero times in my life.

(On the topic, this was a thing that Pope Francis was exceptionally good at: he actually listened to the concerns of people and spoke with them where they were at, even those who he vehemently disagreed with).

Oh totally, don't get me wrong, I hate the majority of ads (playing the "guess what this ad is even for" game reveals just how terrible most ads are.)

The nuance for me is that sometimes (mostly online) I see ads for a tool or game or product that just shows it in action, and while 95% of the time I still don't want it, there's the small fraction of the time where I think "Hey that actually looks nice" (and I'm fine with the other 95% that just show me the product).

Commercials for insurance are basically always terrible though; if you're advertising anything besides rates, coverage, or service, then what does it have to do with your product?

I'd be happy to give an example I gave below: rake hands.

I hate the step after raking where you have to use the rake and one hand to carry the leaves to the bin. There was an ad for "rake hands" where you just hold a small hand-formed rake in each hand and scoop them both.

Twenty bucks, vastly improved yardwork experience, and I would have literally never thought to look for something like that.