jongjong

Voting doesn't work in a low-trust society. You can't trust the custodian of the digital system who tallies the votes. The problem is intractable.

The president, who is ultimately decided by the custodians of the voting system, is not going to order an audit of the voting system which made them president in the first place as that would paradoxically cast doubt on the president's own legitimacy. The incentives are firmly against this.

And look at the primaries; absolutely rigged. Nobody with power is asking for any audit...

All well and good if your lifestyle stays the same... But what if it keeps getting worse?

Some people want the whole pie, some people want a certain sized slice and some people want nothing.

Some will fight to the death trying to get the whole pie.

Some will fight to the death trying to get or keep their slice.

Those who want nothing have nothing to fight for and over time will lose everything to those who want things and who will fight to get what they want.

I'm definitely in the middle camp. I don't want much but if I couldn't get that, my existence would not be worthwhile. There would be nothing to live for except revenge perhaps.

Even in stories about a poor fisherman who is content with his life; he still owns a boat, a net, a shack, has a wife, a couple of kids maybe. Even the poor fisherman is a hypocrite if he says he needs nothing.

The poor fisherman is richer than me in a material way because he was able to get everything he needed fullfilled for a low cost which he could afford... Probably the exact same things as I need but I can't get those same things for that low cost because my place in the world is different. I am literally forbidden by laws, regulations and moral obligations and commitments to obtain those same basic things and those basic rights which the poor fisherman has.

Rich people look at a happy poor fisherman and think "He is happy because he doesn't need material things."

I look at a happy poor fisherman and I think "He is happy because he can afford every material thing that is required for a happy moderate life in his society." And I can't afford the same.

My main concern is that as people lose their jobs and can't find new ones, an increasing number of people may be forced into a life of crime. We need UBI ASAP.

I feel like I've been in a recession economy since the day I entered the workforce 14 years ago. The movement of the stock market has had no effect on my reality. It's like two different universes inhabited by two different sets of people.

IMO, all the narratives we were exposed to around privilege before and after COVID were a cover up of this fact that we have a two-class system which is explicitly creating this condition. The issue is at the system design level and goes far beyond "technology putting people out of a job". The privilege narrative was classic communist-style "accuse your enemy of what you're doing yourself." It was literally the privileged few preemptively accusing the unprivileged masses of being unfairly privileged in order to take control that narrative before it was used on them.

I recall a time when Google was struggling to monetize ads and then something changed and they started becoming profitable. The narrative was about improved targeting.

I think it might have helped a little but I never fully bought this argument. I don't think I've ever bought a product which was advertised to me online and I was using some of these platforms for years. I'm probably a liability to them; using up compute but not clicking on ads or buying anything.

Also when I ran social media ads many years back, I never got any users out of it. It literally seemed like mostly bot traffic back then; I can't imagine how bad the situation would be now with LLMs.

I've seen some ugly OOP codebases, but I've seen some very nice ones too. I haven't seen any nice FP codebase yet besides basic APIs.

There's a reason why 99% of video games are OOP. That level of complexity is just too much for FP.

Correct, technically they pass copies of the state; which gets cloned at every component/module/function boundary. This protects you from 'spooky action at a distance' which is a real problem which can happen when mutable state is shared by different components but FP can introduce other issues related to passing around a lot of state which can become outdated as it traverses the many layers of spaghetti code.

In the newer versions of React with Redux, the components are all pure functions and state is centralized and passed down into the components. IMO it's as close as a codebase can be to pure functional programming whilst still functioning.

Some problems don't require OOP, but most large complex problems do, IMO.

Most complex codebases I've seen which were pure Functional Programming were spaghetti code; unmaintainable.

What I saw every single time was that the project was syncing a huge amount of state in a central place and then passing it through a large number of components and sub-components. The top level component basically had to have full awareness of everything going on inside the system in order to do its job and there were no separation of responsibilities because none of the components had sovereignty over the state they needed to do their job independently. It's just components micro-managing components all the way down.

React with Redux is probably the best FP implementation I've seen thus far but even it is kind of a mess. I have nightmares about Redux Saga. The Redux Saga logo is literally a stylized drawing of entangled spaghetti.

Had Redux + Saga been presented to people as part of React at the time it was introduced, React would probably not have become so popular. Because people would have understood that it creates too much unnecessary baggage which isn't worth it. React was used as a gateway drug to Redux which was itself a gateway drug for Saga! And what I observed in practice is that most React apps are glitchy AF; and those glitches are usually difficult to reproduce and fix, even if you know all the ins and outs of the framework!

But that's the thing; vibe coders are not developers now. I don't see why the marketing equation suddenly changes whenever a human being is confronted with software tooling.

My platform is targeted at non-technical builders.

For years, I'd been trying to market to developers and I was repeatedly told that developers are different. But now, I'm targeting regular people but it's the same thing.

So it seems maybe the marketing difference is not about developers after all.

Something I've come to realize, as a software engineer, is that the work I do now is much more nuanced and complex than before. I used to call myself a 'software developer' but now I call myself a software engineer. If I had to be precise, I would call myself a "logic synthesizer" - Most of my work now involves finding logical contradictions in the spec and finding creative solutions.

A lot of people would be willing to take a significant pay cuts if only they could run their own businesses. But that's not an option for them. This gap isn't accounted for in calculations about economic efficiency. The system removes this option completely. Economists forget that citizens are more producers than they are consumers in terms of how they spend their time.

I tried to do this with my vibe coding platform "Reduce your token costs by x%" and "Lets you easily control exactly who can access what data", "Full detailed usage analytics so you can see how users are accessing data" and "Apps are easier to maintain" but the problem is that EVERY SINGLE vibe coding platform makes similar claims. None actually deliver. So the consumer has been immunized against 'benefits' and especially if they don't recognize the company brand.

So I have to list out technical features as a way to create trust that there are technically capable people behind the product.

But TBH it probably doesn't really work either. Now it's all about social connections as implied in the article. It was already like that before, now it's a different level. Now the importance of nepotism has reached full-blown communism level.

$1 million net worth is massive. You can buy a house in a remote place, invest in companies and live off of the investment perpetually without having to work.

I have nothing against humans becoming multi-planetary but this is a luxurious desire at this point in history. We should solve poverty first. This is the kind of project which you do once there are no more problems to solve on earth.

As I was reading, I thought to myself that if Aaron's last prediction market idea doesn't work out, he would probably go insane. This story paints a clear path of 'descent into madness' in a very realistic way.

He succeeded, however, my take on the ending is that the whole world went crazy and that's why his idea ultimately proved successful.

I thought the story was non-fiction until I got to the point about how the bots attracted real users to Aaron's platform. That part was really stretching it.

I feel like absolutely everything is a PsyOp. I mean look at how many big cities there are around the world, how many millions of people working in office buildings; every single day; thinking, crafting emails, organizing events, coordinating, writing up marketing, creating PowerPoint slides, filling out Excel sheets, writing up reports, writing up project briefs... Millions of brains and machines manipulating information.

I would be surprised if there's anything which is of any interest to any meaningful group of humans which is not a PsyOp.

The problem here is that government regulations don't work. Only punishment works and punishment should be based on number of infringements.

So if some poorly discarded packaging is found in a forest by a government official, they can document it. At the end of the year, the companies involved in the making of the improperly discarded products would be fined some amount proportional to the number of recorded infringements and magnitude of infringements (e.g. total weight) to cover clean up costs pertaining to that particular source of waste.

This has been a theme for me over the past couple of years. I'm noticing the limitations of words and language, including those that come out of my own mouth.

You can choose your words carefully, but it's useless unless your audience knows to look for those nuances.

Sometimes, in group meetings, I've caught myself repeating something twice in a slightly different way to increase the probability that people understood it correctly. But you can't repeat yourself all the time or else people will think something's wrong with you.

So true. NT people are so frustrating!

The scenario which drives me insane is; someone tells me some popular mainstream narrative about why we should do something in a particular way. Essentially just parroting expert consensus on a similar topic. I tell them exactly why this approach wouldn't work in that particular case and they concede to all my points. They fully agree and don't push back on anything.

But then a few minutes later, they're still pushing for the exact same mainstream expert consensus approach and ignoring all my earlier points which they had literally just agreed to. WTF.

The impression I get is that they liked how my arguments sounded superficially and felt that other people in the meeting also agreed but they didn't actually understand any of it! It's like they only absorbed it in a very superficial way; just enough to allow them to rephrase it or to add a few supporting points but somehow they really didn't actually understand the essence of the argument.

This kind of situation reminds me of the wordcel vs shape rotator discussion from a few years back. NT people are like wordcels.

Tariffs are a moral and economic necessity. Every country should have some kind of tariff on foreign goods and services to offset regulatory asymmetries.

It's not fair that an entire industry in one country is wiped out and replaced by that of a foreign industry with fewer regulations (and thus lower operational costs and higher margins)... It's bad not only from the business and opportunities perspective, but also from an environmental perspective as the damage is merely relocated to a different country with fewer regulations.

Tariffs help to protect local industry which adheres to local laws. It provides a mechanism for the government to offset the business harms of the regulations it introduces whilst also blocking regulatory arbitrage loopholes which it would otherwise create.

It's pretty straight forward; if the government introduces some environmental regulation which increases production costs by 10% for local producers, but foreign producers don't have to adhere to this regulation, then that just wiped out 10% profit margin from all local producers... If they were only just profitable before, now with the new regulation, their margins are now negative. To stay profitable, the local producer would have to increase the price of their products but this would cause sales to collapse as they will no longer have the cheapest product on the market. They may have the most cost-efficient process among all the local environmentally-friendly alternatives, but they can't compete against the foreign environmentally-harmful alternatives.

And this is extremely harmful in the current financial system which has a tendency to eliminate people's surplus income. Without significant surplus income, the consumer is forced to buy the cheapest product available. Even if the quality is lower and even if it's not their first preference. The entire banking system is predicated on the idea of sucking out every dollar of surplus income out of the economy.

This creates the race-to-the-bottom environment which keeps eroding quality of goods and services; the consumer is forced to accept increasingly low quality goods over time. Price becomes the only metric which matters and this ensures that businesses can never afford to adhere to any ethical frameworks.

Of course tariffs don't work instantly, it can take decades for them to take effect. You can't revive a local industry overnight after it has been killed off. Also, there has to be confidence that the tariffs will remain in place in the foreseeable future. People aren't going to start businesses if they fear that the tariffs which protect them might disappear after the next election.

I think for well defined problems, it does a really good job, but if you're starting from scratch and don't know what to ask, it can take you on a wild goose chase in an extremely sub-optimal direction and it never backtracks from that bad design.

Architectural problems are particularly difficult for it. There are many moving parts and many ways to implement so if you want certain properties like scalability and idempotent operations, then you need to have a very clear idea what to prompt.

The other day I used Claude to improve my Rendezvous hashing (with skeleton/tree) library and it managed to solve the problem. It's a pretty small library but it used up over 50k tokens and several hours to implement the optimization and it did a good job ultimately but I had written a lot of tests for it so it's not like it was implementing from scratch.

At one point it spend at least 15 minutes trying to change the code to make a test case pass to save a few meaningless percentage points of performance... After seeing it struggle with this, I stopped it and told it that it should just increase the timeout of the test case by a few milliseconds. Any engineer would have done this but Claude didn't want to take that initiative. Instead, it was starting to over-engineer the solution just to dogmatically meet that test case instead of accepting the negligible loss of performance.

The root problem here is that I have no voice and have no real friends to join forces with. I literally have zero power to change the system. Wealth inequality puts my interests at odds with those who benefit from the current system.

At my level as a software engineer, it's impossible to make friends because everyone is trying to back-stab each other constantly. It's extremely low trust.

You can't change the laws of your country when you're so alone that you can't even trust colleagues you see every day.

I had a co-founder/friend (past tense) whose background was in HR and he wanted to build a tool to help software devs find jobs and he was telling me that referrals is the best way to get a job... I had to explain to him how cut-throat the competition is with engineers... They're not going to give referrals for people they only met online. I mean, inside the company, some colleagues are trying to sabotage or slander each other over a promotion. Not friend material.

Just to give an idea of my experience with referrals (and low-trust environment) as a software engineer; I only provided a referral for 'ex-colleagues/friends' twice in my career; first time was a guy who didn't have a job who was in open source and I had known online and spoke regularly for 2 years; they literally lied to my boss and backstabbed me and didn't even join the company... I didn't do any referrals after that... For years... But eventually I met another engineer who was very good and a nice guy and I thought "this guy is smart and friendly and he explicitly asked me for a referral" so I gave his details to my employer... But he got cold feet and although he didn't slander me to my boss with salacious lies, his cold feet made me look bad. So that's it, I don't do referrals anymore.

There is a lot more hustling and bravado.

It feels like people don't value knowledge as they used to.

It's really hard to avoid mistakes when everyone is subtly covering them up. It feels like a lack of care and I find it demotivating.

I think because engineers are afraid for their job, they are under more pressure to talk a big game. Also under more pressure to deliver short term visible results. Bad combo.

I've been hoping for this for my entire software engineering career but it never came.

It's messed up. Sometimes it feels like everything in the universe is aligned to ensure that skilled software engineers lead horrible lives full of anguish, frustration and powerlessness.

It feels like the economic system creates incentives which go against efficiency. So then it makes sense that software engineers would be most impacted.

There's a weird duality to our job; it's supposed to be about automation and efficiency but in reality, engineers who make the most money are those who create unnecessary complexity because it creates better lock-in and thus gives them more leverage in negotiations. And the tech monopolies they work for never seem to run out of money no matter how much enshittification occurs as a result.

Same perverse incentive for open source projects; engineers who lead projects that are full of bugs can charge more consulting fees and sell more enterprise licenses to work around the issues.

And engineers are often forced to use shitty tools by their employers so we're always stuck between a rock and a hard place with limited control over our output... Which we are blamed for when things go wrong but never given credit for when we pull heroic feats because those achievements are often overshadowed by missed deadlines resulting from being forced to use shitty software.

Adoption and quality are orthogonal, unfortunately.

Worst part is that nobody listens to us. Business people with money only listen to engineers who have money; who are mostly merchants of complexity. Engineers who care about efficiency have no voice in this market.

It's part of it but you need good systems thinking in order to write good tests. The kind of thinking which requires years of software engineering experience to acquire.

Also the architecture really matters now because a poor architecture will lead to more weird edge cases and require more exotic tests to plug all the holes.

> performance work that used to require a person or team that had a rare set of skills can be done by anyone who can type a few sentences

This idea is the reason why software will keep getting slower and less reliable. Because it's wrong and yet people believe it.

Not only do people believe this, even if they didn't, they would still have the problem that most people (including many engineers) are bad at telling who is a good software engineer.

So this means that code will get worse and worse; less performant, less reliable, less secure.

It will be impossible to fix because nobody would know what the problems are let alone identify who is able to solve those problems.

I don't know how bad it has to get before people understand we have to rebuild everything from scratch on much more rigid guardrails.

The essence of the problem is that the LLM does exactly what you tell it. In the hands of a skilled engineer who understands the project, this is a superpower. In the hands of a junior, this is dangerous... Because it will do things that are insecure; it doesn't push back on a user request; it just goes ahead and tries to make it work, even if it's a bad idea and the problem is best solved in a different way.

Yeah I think a bad prompt can create an output which is meaningless. I had such experience reviewing a software architecture diagram generated by Claude.

Worse, I noticed that people in an office environment themselves have adopted a more speculative, communication style.

In the past, people remembered what was said and would draw attention to discrepancies. I could trust what people said.

Nowadays it's like; someone can say one thing one day and the opposite the next day (through convoluted language) and nobody bats an eyelash. Or sometimes someone will agree with me but then what they say immediately after reveals that they didn't understand the essence of my point at all. I didn't notice these things 5 years ago.

I guess this is what AI researchers refer to as 'model collapse' - it seems to affect people too though...

Yes. 100%, the idea that we are all equal under the law is a joke.

And the worst part is that it looks that way from the perspective of the people at the top. You only understand that it's not the case if you are not among the privileged few.

So your point about "We have no idea of his mental state" is highly pertinent. I also would emphasize that he was a highly rational guy and his mental state was likely a rational consequence of his environment.