jongjong

Sorry to hear. That is a very young age to get that type of cancer. Must have been incredibly difficult and traumatic.

When my wife was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer earlier this year, she was essentially prepared to die. She didn't even cry once. Her father had died from the same cancer at around the same age as her (early 40s), in the most horrific way imaginable. Her father used to work for the Soviet military in charge of a team of people who worked on propaganda so he was a strong believer in communism and he was devastated by the collapse of the USSR; his entire world had fallen apart. But then bowel cancer finished him off. My wife was in her teens at the time and she said he was extremely angry and not himself for years until he died. The chemo made him extremely sick, destroyed his body, and he had to have a colostomy bag. Years later, after my wife met me, we experienced a lot of hardship together; just one episode of bad luck after another... Like, almost every aspect of our lives which we didn't control. So by the time she got her cancer diagnosis, it's as though she was expecting it.

It turns out that she has a relatively rare genetic condition which increases the probability of bowel cancer by about 10x... These cancers are known to respond very poorly to standard chemo (and likely explains her father's horrible death decades earlier). This is where our luck finally turned though. We got lucky, possibly for the first time since we've been together. Her cancer turned out to be a kind which is highly responsive to immunotherapy. The most recent trial for the relevant class of drugs showed an unprecedented 100% complete response in about 40 patients (Dostarlimab). Moreover, that same class of (very expensive) drugs became available for her exact case, on the subsidized public list in my country, just one month prior to her diagnosis. After her first month of treatment, the tumor had shrunk by like 50% in diameter. Now, 5 months later, there is no evidence of cancer on the MRI.

I feel like the experience has completely changed my wife's perspective of life in a fundamental way. Before this, she lived her entire life expecting that things never get better and all news is bad news. Systems decay, collapse and people die.

These days I often think about the ancient Chinese tale "The old man lost his horse." It's insane how little control we actually have over the most important aspects of our lives and how something terrible (like a tumor which doesn't respond to chemo) can become a positive (but responds extremely well to immunotherapy). Also, it's quite inspiring to think about how people identified this horrible class of the most untreatable cancers in existence and decided to do something about it, and now it seems like they've become the most treatable of all cancers, with the fewest side effects too. It's a testament to the good things innovation can create when people focus on the worst problems, the worst injustices of human existence.

We can never know who won any election because it's physically impossible to count millions of votes accurately. This is an unsolved problem. The risk of double-counting or missing votes is close to 100%.

Anyone who implies that it's possible is lying. People could do an experiment; just try to organize 100 groups of people to count only a few hundred thousand votes. You will get a different number every time you count. At that scale, there are too many moving parts. Too many variables; smudged marks (or overly faint marks) invalidating ballots, ripped ballots, fraudulent ballots, accidents leading to loss of ballots, ballots getting wedged inside machines, identity theft enabling multiple-voting, corrupt officials, corrupt media...

Just try to get 1000 random people to agree on any basic, uncontroversial fact. Impossible. Now convince me it can be done among hundreds of millions.

Whenever they do a re-count, they end up with a different number. They have probably never even once counted votes accurately in the history of any nation.

I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of people don't even rinse off the soap.

>> Where did that wealth come from?

Clearly, the money printers. How else could there be such an enormous gap between those last two bars?

Yes but I'm thinking about just the yield on that last bar.

Given that the Shiller P/E ratio is now 40 (under 3% of the value of the assets), the yield is actually a pretty small fraction of that last bar... but even then, I'm saying one year's yield could exceed the worth of all the others if things continue.

But IMO, it's already the case that the economy is centered around the free money/proceeds received by top 0.1%. This is why we saw all that nonsense with COVID, DEI, Wokeism, etc... This is what happens when a small number of elites decide to spend a bit of 'spare change' on politics and social activism. Imagine how bad it's going to get after that wealth has compounded in 10 years...

With this kind of wealth distribution, there's no point doing any job which services regular people. Everyone should become an informant, bodyguard, lobbyist or propagandist for a rich person. That's going to be the only kind of job that pays in the future.

Look at that last bar; consider just the annual yield or interest payment on that wealth; soon, it's going to be more than all other bars combined. If people understood the situation, they would all stop working and start making lists of who these people are and work for them. That's the only logical (legal) thing to do. Every other job or career is a waste of time.

Actually my current machine is 5.5 GHZ with 28 cores but core count only really matters if you have a lot of parallel workloads. Most of my CPUs are idle the vast majority of the time. Raspberry Pi 5's 2.4GHz Quad core doesn't seem so far behind when you consider the physical size difference.

I remember programming ATMEL ATMEGA8s and being amazed as how much I could do with them, so to me, the fact that devices of that size can approach even half the clock speed of a cutting-edge computer, and have multiple cores, is mind-blowing.

This is true but I don't see that alternative approaches prevent an owner class from developing. It just creates a different kind of owner; a more politically-oriented one, with an incentive to manipulate the political system to their benefit to increase their stake in it. People then strive to become stakeholders of the state itself. I don't think that's a better form of ownership.

I'd rather capitalists be distracted pursuing land ownership rather than pursuing ownership over the machinery of ultimate power and control.

If you remove tangible forms of ownership, people will try to claim ownership over intangible things instead, like state power.

The idea of investing my hard earned money to build on land I don't own sounds incredibly foolish. You're completely at the mercy of the counter-party. You don't own it, they own you!

It's kind of insane how the higher end Raspberry PIs are almost as powerful as my PC tower. The price is quite low and developer friendly too. Really great products. The lower end products are awesome too.

It's one of the few products I look at with awe and which makes me feel good about the tech industry.

I managed to build a WiFi temperature sensor (which can be substituted with any analog sensor) which streams its data to a web platform (I also built), encrypted over HTTPS (with CA certificate verification), using a $10 Raspberry PI Pico W; built in a single weekend. I can connect it to my phone's WiFi hotspot from anywhere and stream data to my web platform where it displays a realtime chart. $10.

Maybe, but at least they're not depleting my access to opportunities like platform rents do! In the old days, I could still find opportunities in my social circles to earn money to cover the rents because they still had money.

Platform rents are worse because they extract wealth by centralizing awareness, centralizing opportunities and literally shrinking the pie whilst concentrating wealth for those in the middle. They prevent me from finding opportunities which would allow me to pay the rents which they extract from me and my social circle! My social circle has no money so I can't rely on them! Only way to make money is a bs bureaucratic job working for a monopolist.

It's worse, satanically worse! Mark my words, with the current approach we will be forced to go either UBI route or start charging people proportionally to their incomes using universal digital ID to check. And the 'AI taking jobs' narrative is already in place to provide a phony justification!

Opportunities are depleted systematically from the periphery. "I make my own luck" is bullshit when when the entire system is working 24/7 to ensure you don't get any! The average elite ignores more life-changing opportunities in their inbox, every minute, than I'm exposed to in a lifetime!

Literally, elite rent-seekers took all the money and now there is no more to take! The system is now trying to saddle people will useless debts! Getting them to spend it all on their useless junk (pointless gender studies university degrees, ads for their marketing/lead acquisition startups, fake magic internet money, junk bought on credit cards...)! And then forcing them into bankruptcy for a few years, move onto someone else, then when that first person's bankruptcy period is over, repeat!!! They do the same thing with shell companies; saddle them with debt, funnel the money to the beneficiary company, let the shell default on its debt, then repeat. This is the backbone of the modern economy. It's utterly insane! The system is completely broken!

This article is clearly about Geoism; its traditional interpretation. In its essence, Geoism should be about rents, not about land specifically. Of course they couldn't have known about tech platform monopolies back then, but they are very much about rent extraction and a far greater concern than land is nowadays. I feel like such articles are a distraction and would lead to even bigger problems. Essentially prepping to dispossess middle class land owners who are the last bastion of decentralization.

It's absurd in this day and age to be discussing land rent-seeking when the cause of most of our modern problems is platform rent-seeking. Frustrating how people twist everything good into something bad; of course there was no talk of Geoism when land rents were the main problem and main mechanism of rent extraction; only now that elites have found a different way to extract rents, now it's OK to discuss the (now) lesser evil of land rent-seeking and distract away from the new variant of the problem.

They probably did it on purpose so that the professors would sue Anthropic later and make a lot of money.

How about all the copyright MIT licensed open source software? When does it become discovered that they were scraped for training without authorization and without giving attribution?

I avoid participating in any market unless I have to, these days.

Crypto is a scam within a scam. It was created to act as a 'good cop' to the 'bad cop' which is the mainstream system. But they are two sides of the same scam. Same kind of game of Republican vs Democrat. Everywhere you turn, there is a scammer waiting to take your money.

What sucks about these situations is that middle managers want arbitrary things. Their imagination is tainted by existing inefficient processes and systems; they cannot see past these flawed abstractions. So when you ask them what they want, they say stuff like "faster horses" and then spend months debating the color and genders of the horses and what shape the carriage should be... The person who wants to sell them a "car" has no hope.

This is why I think communism would make sense in our current reality. If everyone got paid the same, then it would be fairer than what we have now where everyone gets paid a random amount with no correlation with skill or effort.

Capitalism made sense with small companies where each individual had more or less direct exposure to the markets. One bad employee would drag down the company. You couldn't hide or manipulate your way to the top if you weren't good at creating value and skilled people could actually start their own companies and compete. Now with huge corporations which own the economy, the markets don't work to begin with, and also, people within the big corporations are rewarded randomly at best or worse; in a counter-productive manner.

This inefficiency is highly destructive because of how the system compounds wealth. You end up with random people with zero value-creation skills and zero vision having millions or billions of dollars and deciding everyone else's lives.

It's quite amazing technology. I wonder how they managed to make ink which dries fast on paper but doesn't dry and clog up the print head.

I doubt you can prevent this using laws. In unequal societies where the politics is controlled by the majority, laws tend to make things worse, not better. Americans are already beginning to find out what happens when the political system becomes controlled by people who hate the country. This is a reality which France (and especially colonies) have been operating under for quite some time.

These big tech companies aren't meritocratic at any level from hiring to promotion. It's all nepotism and funny business going on behind the scenes.

One time I interviewed for a job at a big tech company during COVID/woke era and I had selected a dropdown option under 'Ethnicity' in the application form saying that I was from a "Caribbean ethnic group" which is technically true and I flew through all the interview stages and technical tests until the final interview where I had to meet with the CTO which they said was just a formality... They had dangled the biggest salary package of my life; it was like 2 times what I normally get... But then the CTO didn't show up; I spoke to some senior dev instead; conversation was not technical and I think I was quite pleasant so I don't think I did anything wrong there but I didn't get a job offer.

Unfortunately, the drop-down did not allow me to specify 'White Caribbean ethnic group" - Technically I'm a descendant of white settlers who settled the Caribbeans 500 years ago. My guess is they were not a big fan of the white variety of ethnic Carribbeans.

What about if the worker crashes whilst in the middle of copying over some rows from a number of large Excel spreadsheets? Then when you restart, you need a way to derive the ID from file name + tab name + unique row identifier (for example) because your v4 UUID which you used to identify each row would have been lost in the crash... Generating a v4 UUID for each row can cause duplicates in such scenarios. If your ID for each row is deterministic and chosen based on data which uniquely identifies each row, you don't have this problem.

In some cases, you can solve the problem by clearing rows based on timestamps or tracking the last copied input row but these are often unreliable. There's usually a bit of overlapping data left over from a previous run which you have to re-process and for those you want the IDs to clash.

You obviously haven't lived in a country where labor strikes are a frequent occurrence. They block the roads for weeks, sometimes months at a time and products disappear from the shelves. Often, the police do nothing. This is where everything is heading. That's reality when most of the population is dissatisfied.

> And most of the world is not zero-sum...

That is a strange thing to say, especially now.

Clearly, there is a reason Von Neumann spent so much time on this 'zero-sum' formulation of the problem, specifically in economics. Clearly he must have believed this was representative to a significant extent, especially given his interest in pragmatic problems.

It would make no sense for an intelligent person to work on an economics problem which doesn't model reality.

Surely it will also free people up to apply their intelligence (or stupidity) towards other things.

It's concerning because there is already way too much 'intelligence' in this society and most of it is used to propagate falsehoods, irrationality and to manipulate others in counter-productive ways. I hope AI educates people and doesn't merely steer them down deeper into their echo-chambers. That said, I also really hope that AI doesn't just bring everyone into alignment and agreement about ideas which aren't true. There are significant threats with both extremes.

No it doesn't. People can still protest, block roads, boycott etc... If they get UBI/UHI, they will have more time to engage politically too (in a productive way).

Interesting! That said, these examples appear to be crafted in a special way to cause the collision. In a practical scenario with normal usage, I suspect it would be essentially impossible. Sure, it can be a problem in some niche scenarios with a determined attacker but a collision would just mean that the user is not able to create the resource (the system would falsely indicate that the resource already exists); but that's not too bad. At worst, it would reveal the existence of a resource with a specific UUID, but could the attacker have achieved the collision if they didn't know the target UUID already? It doesn't seem like a viable attack given how little information it gives you.

How do you obtain a phone number or a mail address? Almost impossible. And most paper mail gets read by someone's assistant and never passed through.

The people who hoard ALL the opportunities are incapable of allocating them efficiently due to complete saturation of their bandwidth. Literally, if you are someone who are in a position to provide opportunities, you are saturated and unreachable.

These people turn down more life-changing opportunities in an hour than I get in a lifetime. And when I say 'turn down', I mean 'ignore'; because these people don't even have the time to say 'No' to an opportunity I would kill for! They don't even have the time to click on the email or perhaps even read the subject line!

I believe so, because it seems like many other people are able to launch startups. Surely it means that some kinds of communication mechanisms are working for them right? They likely have more money/connections to people with more money than I do.

If none of the communication mechanisms work for you, how can you set up a meeting with an investor to raise money, for example? These people don't like cold intros and security risks means that they are harder to meet in person than ever before. It's also harder to network your way to a warm introduction because most of the people who know investors are themselves wealthy and also don't want to talk to you for safety risks reasons.

For me, things look completely different now than they did 5 years ago; it's like I have been shadow-banned from the entire internet and society.

I can't do anything in this society. My skills are mis-allocated, my time wasted. I'm just waiting for retirement. It's horrible. And I'm extremely ambitious; worked nights and weekends for 15 years straight.

The worst part about inequality is that it creates communication barriers which create total deprivation of opportunities. These days, I can't communicate with anyone who might have any opportunities for me. If a person is a good match for my skills and might be a source of opportunities for me, I simply cannot email them, cannot call them, cannot connect to them on any platform. It feels like there are AI bots working behind the scenes maintaining filter bubbles air-tight.

On the other side, literally all the emails I receive, all my social network connections are spam. Like completely irrelevant, generic spam sent by a bot, but not even tailored to me; just generic template 'Dear sir'; my name is not even mentioned.

UUIDv7 is not that useful. I'm still using mostly UUIDv4 and UUIDv5.

I'm leaning increasingly heavily on v5 for its determinism which is extremely important for IDs. I would sacrifice every other property to get determinism.

You can't have idempotency without determinism and you can't get reliability without idempotency.

Once you factor in failure and retry scenarios under concurrency, you often need ID determinism. In the rare cases I don't want determinism, I prefer to go all-in on randomness. I prefer my IDs to be well spread out; it scales better, more predictable, less of a security liability (prefer not to have all data clustered in the same place)...

Both UUIDv4 and UUIDv5 outputs are uniformly distributed. IMO this is a desirable property which is well worth a bit of additional compute. v7 feels like an optimization hack, and it comes at a cost.

If you want to get the performance benefits of v7 with the determinism of v5, then you need to have essentially two IDs; the id (v7) and an idempotency key (which is essentially like a second ID you have to maintain; e.g. UUIDv5)... In the end, maintaining a UUIDv7 ID + idempotency key is less performant than just having a single UUIDv5 id which does both jobs for no extra effort... Not to mention, less maintainable and more complicated to use.