ihumanable

Everyone's pro-democracy until people go "hey maybe allowing a few mega corporations to profit off of addicting everyone to dopamine feeds is actually bad for society."

The biggest con economists ever pulled was to model people as "rational actors" and then generate an entire worldview off of "if everyone acts in their rational self-interest then this works great."

People are almost fundamentally irrational. People are guided by emotion and superstition and a bunch of weird shit that makes it easy for them to get addicted to things that have little to no societal value. If not a government, what force should counter balance that?

I'll choose the one that I can at least vote out.

I think this is Apple's not-so-secret weapon.

Apple is just more willing to invest into a product line and build it out for a longer time before throwing in the towel.

I saw this really fascinating video from NeXT computers the other day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtnX1EJHbC0

It's Steve Jobs talking about their opportunity and it's not hard to see how this strategy is in large part what he executed at Apple. It's about building out the best product you can for the "Professional" class and then also capturing all the market share by people with lots of money that think they need Professional product. Part of that strategy though sorta has to be continued investment, because you can't get a bunch of people to buy $3000 headsets and burn them and not suffer some sort of fallout for that.

When you compare it to how its basically a meme at this point that Google is going to kill anything that isn't an instant success or even stuff that is successful but they just don't want to anymore. Apple is sorta the polar opposite. I have an iPhone 11 in my pocket, released in 2019 this thing still works great and iOS 18 will support it 5 years after purchase.

I don't think the Apple Vision product is particularly compelling right now, but if they keep iterating on it I imagine I'll probably want the Vision Pro 3

Yea, same.

I have literally no desire to hack and fuck around with my personal cell phone, doing so would take away time from the hacking I actually want to do.

I read the part where they said they poured through "hundreds of sentry logs" and immediately was like "no you didn't."

This is not an error that would be difficult to spot in an error aggregator, it would throw some sort of constraint error with a reasonable error message.

If you haven't taken a plunge into Standard ML or OCaml and are interested, I can't suggest this playlist enough https://youtu.be/MUcka_SvhLw?si=rc4ele_0WcjwLFR3

It's such a lovely introduction to Ocaml and programming in general and has a free online textbook. It's a lot of videos but each one is 5-10 minutes so it's very easy to hop in and out.

That assumes that there is no diminishing return on additional hires. If I run a warehouse that generates $100,000/mo with 10 employees being paid $1000/mo and those 10 employees satisfy the needs of the warehouse, I wouldn't hire more for fun.

There is some finite amount of demand that needs to be processed by the warehouse, the fact that I can satisfy that demand with a small number of low paid workers doesn't somehow increase the demand.

It's an interesting question. Employees have to generate more value for the employer than the employer pays the employee, otherwise the employer won't employ the employee, or they will go bankrupt.

So let's say you have someone that's getting the $2000/mo from the government for assistance. Amazon hires them and pays them $1000/mo, the only way this makes sense for Amazon is if they can extract more than $1000/mo of value out of that employee.

I think where the disconnect is in a lot of these conversations is how much value is being extracted.

Let's say an employee earning $1000/mo generates $1500/mo of value for Amazon. Then the fact that the government has to support them to the tune of $1000/mo as well might be acceptable. Amazon gets profit, government (and the tax payers) have to spend $1000/mo less, employee gets enough money to live. Everyone is happy.

Let's say an employee earning $1000/mo generates $5000/mo of value for Amazon. This scenario is a bit harder to accept, why should the tax payers have to subsidize those low wages when Amazon could pay $2000/mo and still make a healthy profit?

The problem is that that figure, "how much value does an employee generate?" is hard to come by. You can get more aggregate figures https://csimarket.com/stocks/AMZN-Revenue-per-Employee.html which tell us that every employee generates on average $326,428 but it is harder to find details on "How much value does an amazon warehouse worker generate?"

So it all hinges on how much value Amazon extracts from the worker. If it's $50/mo then I don't think anyone is picking up their pitchforks. If it's $4000/mo and they've decided that they can squeeze their workforce because the tax payer will pick up the slack and they can pocket the difference, then pitchforks come out.

Apparently I type underscore with a chord on my right hand, pinky on right-shift and middle-finger up to underscore. I never noticed before your comment.

Alignment in the realm of AGI is not about getting everyone to agree. It's about whether or not the AGI is aligned to the goal you've given it. The paperclip AGI example is often used, you tell the AGI "Optimize the production of paperclips" and the AGI started blending people to extract iron from their blood to produce more paperclips.

Humans are used to ordering around other humans who would bring common sense and laziness to the table and probably not grind up humans to produce a few more paperclips.

Alignment is about getting the AGI to be aligned with the owners, ignoring it means potentially putting more and more power into the hands of a box that you aren't quite sure is going to do the thing you want it to do. Alignment in the context of AGIs was always about ensuring the owners could control the AGIs not that the AGIs could solve philosophy and get all of humanity to agree.

Well if we are going to use Occam's razor about symptoms, I think we should apply it to the overall situation as well.

Either Sysco is engaged in a conspiracy to poison us all with sugar packets for no apparent benefit. Or the much more logical conclusion that a person put a pack of sugar into their tea, it didn't sweeten it as much as they thought it should, they then convinced themself it wasn't sugar at all and when tasting it their belief that it wouldn't be sweet biased their observation.

I have always found it amusing how much of our modern economic system looks something like this.

- What if everyone shared and cooperated and got along?

- Well then someone that wanted to take advantage of people would come along and make a big mess of it!

- Well what's your proposal then, should we stop those people, outlaw their greed and avarice?

- Hmm... no I think we should reward it and build our entire system around getting greed to produce useful outcomes.

- Ok, so we've been doing that for a while and the people that would have taken advantage of the commons have privatized the commons, taken full advantage of that, purchased the government, and essentially rule over us while we all fight for crumbs...

- But you've got an iPhone, so it's basically working great

Another thing to think about that is also sad and just sorta becomes part of the background noise of existing in society is exploitation. If you ignore the emotionally charged connotations around the term and focus on its meaning

> make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource).

Capital is in the business of exploiting Labor. It is the only thing that makes sense in our economic system. For anyone doing labor for $X for a company that then sells it to a customer for $Y it must hold that X < Y or else the company will fail. The arrangement most people operate under, myself included, is one where you are willingly underselling yourself. The trade off that most people point to is that the people are willing to do this because the stability of getting $X all the time regardless of this weeks / months / years sales is worth foregoing $Y, essentially you are buying stability with the difference. Although the recent rash of layoffs for companies, regardless of how well they are doing, does offer a counterpoint to that theory.

Not the original poster, but debt can allow you to shift transactions to periods that are most advantageous to you.

Here's an example. Let's say that you as a high wealth individual have some stock. The stock has a value of $10M but you can only realize that value through the sale of the stock.

If you sell the stock right now you have to sell it for the price the market will buy it at and you have to pay taxes on the profit, either income taxes if you've not had the stock for long or capital gains taxes if you've held it for the requisite period.

It is in your interest to optimize your sale so that you pay the least amount in taxes and get the best price per share. You'd love to be able to hold your stock until you can do that, but you need money now. In comes debt.

Someone will probably happily issue you some debt that you can use today as money. You can collateralize that debt with your $10M in paper value and get a nice interest rate.

So you take out $1M in debt and enjoy life and at the end you have to pay back, to keep the math easy, $1.1M. This debt cost you $100k but if by taking on that debt you can sell when the stock price is higher or convert income tax (37%) into capital gains (20%) then the $100k could easily buy you much more than $100k.

In our example if the stock price were the same but all you did was hold the asset long enough to convert it from short term to long term then instead of paying $10M * 37% = $3.7M in taxes, you'd pay $10M * 20% = $2M in taxes. That's a savings of $1.7M on your tax bill.

This is how people with assets can use debt as a tool.

> no one is coerced

How do you square that up though with the power differential in employer / employee relations? The employee has to work or be destitute. That gives employers a tremendous amount of power in any contract negotiation.

Coercion doesn't have to be a gun to your head. Every person in the workforce is under a pretty coercive force which is that without gainful employment you are going to go without housing, medicine, transportation, etc. Without any collusion on the part of the employers, the market works to select those employers who can create the contract conditions most favorable to profit production. We shouldn't be surprised that "favorable to profit production" and "disadvantaging the worker" are often closely aligned, every company would like to pay as little as possible for their input and get as much profit as possible out of their outputs. Labor, or Human Resource, as corporations like to call it, is an input and so there's a tremendous systemic pressure to craft contracts in the way that will get the maximum profit out of every employee.

Sure the employee didn't have to sign that unfair employment contract, they could have elected to sign one of hundreds of unfair employment contracts. The fact that they have a large variety of unfair contracts to select from doesn't on its own increase the fairness of the contract. The "collective force" of "you need money to operate in society" means that all workers are coerced to sign "the best deal they can get" which doesn't mean it's going to be a good deal or a fair deal for the worker, just the best that the market has.

On my phone the website looks essentially identical to how it looks on my desktop browser.

Does it look different on yours. It's just a plaintext website with white text on a black background and it's fast to load and easy to read for me. What's wrong with it?

It's also interesting to consider the things that we are making that are destined to decline and die. They aren't agentless pieces of the environment, a company with $3,000,000,000,000 does not go quiet into the night.

If you are on the path towards decline and you have a lot of money, you can then go buy a lot of power, and then you can make the ramp you are declining down point in a different direction.

So besides the bagholders, it feels like there's very few mechanisms for society to protect itself from massive companies that faced with pressure to grow or die decide to use their money and influence in ways that are net-negative to society.

In the commit you linked this function is only ever called once and seems to just capture that a connection was initialized from a clientId to a hostname https://github.com/robbie-cahill/tunnelmole-service/blob/c58...

So your answer to "where did this complexity come from?" is to invent an even more complex celestial being that just did it.

Creationists can't see the forest for the trees.

I'm confused, if the dishwasher takes 4 hours and the cleaners clean for 5 hours, why do the guests have to start the dishwasher?

Maybe try googling the very easy to google for "Hammerspoon" and the guide would literally just be the comment you are replying to.

Same for me, some of the images load in slowly, but this is mostly a blank page for me.

Lots of abstractions have an escape hatch down to the lower level, you can put assembly in your C code, most ORMs have some way to just run a query, etc.

I think the question I have is, what benefit does this provide? Let's say we could wave a magic wand and you can operate at any layer of abstraction. Is this beneficial in some way? The article is about leaky abstractions and states

> One reason the law of leaky abstractions is problematic is that it means that abstractions do not really simplify our lives as much as they were meant to.

I think I'm just struggling to understand how this would help with that.

PHP provided an answer to the "::"

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/592322/php-expects-t-paa...

T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM which of course is Hebrew for "Double Colon"

I also find it difficult to say no, I like helping people. I have found a strategy though that is just like saying no but without saying the word.

I just tell people when it can be done without me shuffling my priorities around (or whatever shuffling makes sense in my head and doesn’t stress me out). Perhaps I’m lucky, but 95% of the time the person asking doesn’t care. People are really keen to “get things taken care of” but “I spoke to this person and then said they could get it by next Tuesday” often ticks that box just fine.

In that last 5% when someone doesn’t like the timeline I’ve provided for them, I just let them know what’s ahead of them in my work queue. 95% of the time after that they realize that they are talking to the wrong person if they want to cut in line. That last 5% of the 5% when someone really wants to press the issue, I just suggest we get a manager to help decide what the priorities should be.

Your mileage may vary though, I’ve been pretty fortunate to work at places that expect a lot but also don’t expect the impossible. I’ve definitely gotten the “can’t we find some way to get it done by X” I have taken to just responding “not unless you’d like me to work outside of our working hours.” It sorta flips the tables, I’m not saying “no” but I’m making very explicit the shitty thing they want me to do and I’m requiring them to take the affirmative action of saying “yes, I want you to work outside of working hours.”

I wouldn’t stay somewhere where that happened frequently, but being able to say that is a luxury many people don’t have. In any case, maybe you will find some success with these strategies, I’ve found them to be pretty effective and they seemed to be received much better than just saying “no” and it has the nice side effect of you looking reasonable and organized.

This process is called pejoration (sometimes pejorativization).

It is a fascinating linguistic phenomenon, but it makes sense if you think about it. People start using technical terms as a pejorative, so those technical terms over time become less professional, so professions introduce new terms, and the cycle continues.

Another fascinating thing is that pejoration can be cyclic, sometimes enough terms are introduced to replace a term that eventually the original pejorative term becomes innocuous or even becomes endearing.

"Dickens" went through a pejoration cycle when it was used to replace the word "devil." There was a time when saying "what the Dickens" would be quite rude, but now would be seen as old fashioned to the point of being charming in some circles.

AI causes the supply and demand to change by creating additional supply of pieces through increased productivity.

It's cold comfort to someone getting fired to tell them "If demand had also increased 10 fold you wouldn't have to sleep on the street."

The actual living human being who has had their livelihood destroyed probably isn't any less scared of their fate because you cleverly tut at them and go, "In actuality the AI didn't do anything bad to you, it just created a glut of supply and the market demand didn't keep up."

The history of corporate personhood entering into the American legal system is absolutely bonkers. This whole article is worth a read, but I'll pull out the short version too https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corpora...

How did this idea enter the legal system? This is the work of a few men.

Justice Stephen J. Field was angry about the case Santa Clara County v Souther Pacific Railroad. He was incensed because the court refused to answer the question of whether or not corporations were people.

> When the Court issued its decision on this second case, the justices expressly declined to decide if corporations were people. The dispute could be, and was, resolved on other grounds, prompting an angry rebuke from one justice, Stephen J. Field, who castigated his colleagues for failing to address “the important constitutional questions involved.” “At the present day, nearly all great enterprises are conducted by corporations,” he wrote, and they deserved to know if they had equal rights too.

The mechanism that decisions were communicated in the 1880s was to publish official volumes of decisions. J.C. Bancroft Davis acted as the court reporter for the volume containing this case and wrote up an inaccurate summary of the case.

> The reporter in the 1880s was J. C. Bancroft Davis, whose wildly inaccurate summary of the Southern Pacific case said that the Court had ruled that “corporations are persons within … the Fourteenth Amendment.” Whether his summary was an error or something more nefarious—Davis had once been the president of the Newburgh and New York Railway company—will likely never be known.

Justic Field seized upon the incorrect summary and would inject his preferred reality into an unrelated case.

> Field nonetheless saw Davis’s erroneous summary as an opportunity. A few years later, in an opinion in an unrelated case, Field wrote that “corporations are persons within the meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment. “It was so held in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,” explained Field, who knew very well that the Court had done no such thing.

It is that completely made up precedent that then became the foundation for legal corporate personhood.

Behold a capitalist "utopia" where maybe if you are lucky your community might throw you a scrap of healthcare once a year https://www.fredericknewspost.com/news/economy_and_business/...

The terror is because companies want to maximize profits and a great way to do that is to minimize costs.

If you have a team of X people producing Y pieces, and now X people can produce 10Y pieces, everything is fine as long as the demand for pieces keeps up. But if your company really only needs Y pieces or really any amount less than 10Y then the easiest thing for a company to do is go, "We don't really need X people, let's fire some"

Getting fired, in America at least, means loss of healthcare, income, and if it persists long enough housing. Most people are terrified of being homeless, broke, and without access to medicine.