gampleman

Doesn't this just prove the OP's point? The government gets as much money from the top 0.1% as it does from the bottom 50% means that it is getting a lot of their money from the wealthy.

Above we are counting them. This about ~10000 people total, most of them abroad. We are not counting military since these are civil servants, but neither are we counting military today.

The article doesn't also quite give the numbers to say how effective they actually were. By modern standards the amount of people actually governing the empire was tiny. For instance the colonial office (the bit in London that administered the colonies centrally) had 14 staff in 1816, and grew to about 25 by 1850 [1]. The total colonial service including most overseas posts (except India and a few others) was about 1000 people by 1900, the Indian civil service was never more than ~1200. This over an empire of ~450 million subjects.

By contrast today's Civil service is about 550,000 governing a population of 69 million [3]. Of course it must be pointed out that todays government does more things for better or worse, so it's not saying they did the same with a few orders of magnitude fewer people. But still, seems pretty effective to me.

[1]: Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830: "At the Colonial Office in 1816, there was a tiny establishment of 14: the Secretary of State, Earl Bathurst, his Under Secretary, Henry Goulburn, MP, the Permanent Secretary, a librarian, a translator and nine clerks. According to Goulburn, 'several' of the clerks were employed on slavery-law enforcement duties all the time. The enforcement of the antislavery law seems to have had priority over any other policy objective."

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Service

[3]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-service-stati...

Except this tends to only get really "interesting" at the top. That's because the middle layers can call on their peers or even on their superiors in times of crisis. Hence peasant rebellions basically never succeed, since their aristocrats will simply apply to the king or to their peers to help them crush it.

But the king has no superiors and even his peers are not quite as much available, so the politicking at that level gets much less stable.

Generally speaking countries that have tried to do something about their abysmal birth rates (Hungary, Czechia, etc) by putting in substantial economic incentives (i.e. 4 years of maternity, free accomodation, etc), have found that it moved the needle very little and certainly there can't be much talk of reversing the trend.

Also, I believe that our culture of over-parenting (and therefore many of the associated costs) is a _consequence_ of having fewer children, not the cause. If you put all your reproductive eggs in one basket, you are motivated to overprotect them. That makes a culture of (at least from a historical perspective) insane parenting demands that simply don't scale.

The problem with the "richer countries have fewer kids" correlation is that it implies causation, but I think it's more sensible to say it the other way: "having fewer kids makes you richer" (at least temporarily, before the demographic collapse makes you poor again, but that will likely not be your problem).

Jury duty is a bit of an example of that working in practice. Generally speaking (at least in my jurisdiction) in theory you can't refuse jury duty just because you don't want to do it. However, in practice the system does allow a large array of excuses (as concessions to practicality I suppose) that you may take, and generally the burden of proof for those excuses is pretty light.

For instance you could be excused based on your employer sending a letter that it would be inconvenient to their business if they lost you, etc.

So in practice, you can probably wiggle out of it if you simply don't want to do it, by finding a suitable excuse.

Another system where random service is still commonly used is military draft. That seems significantly more hardened against dodging (since the cost on the individual of going with it is drastically higher).

So generally, it seems that where current societies do use random sampling to select people for service, there is always an element of compulsion, but how "hard" it really is varies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector - this is actually pretty interesting.

This is clearly written from a western Christian view. It should be noted for completeness that the Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Septuagint (in Greek speaking churches in the original, in others with suitable translations thereof; in English I like https://www.amazon.co.uk/Orthodox-Study-Bible-OE-Some-NKJV/d...).

I’d be curious to know if this difference in scriptural base also contributed to the great schism?

As an aside I've also made a Voronoi puzzle game: https://code.gampleman.eu/equilibrium/equilibrium.html

An obvious example is if my product has an SDK and I'd like my customers to be able to script my product via their LLMs then I want to make my docs as AI-friendly as possible, since if their LLM picks my product's SDK rather than the competition, I make $$$.

Memorizing stuff is good for understanding. Of course memorizing without understanding doesn't really help, which is what a lot of student last-minute "cramming" boils down to. But without concrete and memorized knowledge, any abstract reasoning skills become quickly impossible.

Anyone know where to put the policy file on MacOS? And can you do this even on a corporate machine?

Cerebras capacity was pretty much entirely bought out at some point. We needed it and couldn't get it.

Some interesting features here:

- sum types/ADTs have been long missing from database data modeling and this is welcome change. It's not entirely clear to me how the migration strategy here will work with things like removing a variant, etc.

- first class enforced RLS - this seems like a fantastic way to ensure safety/security guarantees. Secure by construction is always preferable to bolt-on security controls.

- composability with a strong module system. I think this will work well in ensuring large schemas can evolve over time. I wonder if there will be package manager in the future.

Probability of success and merit are different things.

For instance if you know for a fact that you have been fired due to your race (perhaps you were outright told this is the case), but have no evidence (you weren't recording and there were no witnesses), your case has merit (it really did happen), but unless you get lucky and some evidence appears in discovery your odds of success are miniscule.

I'd argue that in such a case preventing such a person from seeking justice would be wrong, since they were really victims and diserve redress.

I wonder if a very small tax for RTO (perhaps with exemptions for manual jobs) would do the trick?

I think it would help with making companies handle that externality.

As I pointed out elsewhere, the problem is that these parental controls don't work. It's a matter of incentive: at the moment, it's in the interest of providers to help subvert the filters. Device makers also don't have the strongest incentives to make the filters great, since that would presumably lead to less engagement from large market segments.

One of the explicit goals of age verification laws is to throw the legal responsibility of preventing access from minors onto the providers, thereby inverting the incentives.

The blockers generally don’t work (I’ve tried). A big part of the problem is that it is in the interest of the providers to subvert them. The main benefit of age verification is changing that responsibility by making it the business of providers to ensure it works, not consumers.

You can make the same argument with alcohol: surely it’s sufficient that parents supervise their children not to drink. But it’s prove to be more effective to distribute that responsibility to the providers as well.

What an exceptionally bad faith way to put this whole thing. A five year old watching hours of the most depraved porn available is harmful to that child. Even if you disagree with that statement, you surely must acknowledge that it is an entirely reasonable opinion to hold and one our societies have generally held to this sort of thing for ages.

I also acknowledge that there is a reasonable debate to be had if the disadvantages to adults and businesses from imposing these rules are worth the harms prevented.

There is also a reasonable debate to be had about the merits of various technical and legal schemes being implemented to achieve these goals.

But this take is neither of those. For one, surveillance isn't the number one harm being prevented (even though, a number of legal codes attempt to make this the case).

As has been pointed out previously, there absolutely can be age verification that is without surveillance. The fact that these solutions aren't always legally mandated and therefore age verification can be used to increase surveillance is a reasonable thing to attempt to amend to the implementations of these laws.

I think this is really the only serious alternative.

As in: most popular modern board games combine both luck and skill. That would imply that like the parent, most people enjoy games that combine both rather than being purely skill xor luck based.

We're rather used to the idea of progress in most areas of human endeavor. It's fairly absurd to believe rolling back the last 200 years of progress would lead to measurably better outcomes is absurd in fields like medicine, industry, science, history, technology, cuisine, transportation, ...

That it seems to be that case in education seems to me to qualify for the label of surprising.

Plenty of places have relatively high teacher pay, relative high staffing (for instance 1 teacher + 1 assistant per 25 children is standard here - not quite 1/10 but pretty close). The educational outcomes are bad and getting worse.

This is basically why the classical education movement exists. The fact that you can have remarkably better results using thousand(s) year old teaching methods/ideas than using 'modern' educational approaches is actually rather surprising.

> But I seem to be in a minority

Given the design of nearly all popular modern board games, that seems very unlikely.

I do agentic Elm development every day (it's my job). I feel like what you describe was a problem with models perhaps two years ago. Today's models don't seem to struggle with it at all and in fact do seem to benefit from what the author describes.

No. Large co I work at everyone is like running at least 3 concurrent Claude sessions all day every day. Talking to friends in other companies it seems the same.

Big difference between professional deployments and personal ones.

I don't know if it will help fixing it, but it might help drivers avoid them more easily if they're painted in bright colors, which still sounds like a plus. Nobody wants to drive into a massive pothole at full speed unaware or try to dangerously dodge at the last moment.

Actually I think this is one of the more tragic outcomes of the LLM revolution: it was already hard to get funding for ergonomic advances in programming before. Funding a new PL ecosystem or major library was no mean feat. Despite that, there were a number of promising advances that could have significantly raised the level of abstraction.

However, LLMs destroy this economic incentive utterly. It now seems most productive to code in fairly low level TypeScript and let the machines spew tons of garbage code for you.