kaibee

> At some point syntax became kind of a vague sense of color on top of the data flow

Thank you for this analogy.

> You'll have to explain that more. Ship builders aren't competing with plumbers.

Sure, on any given year. But the current economic organization of society wasn't born yesterday. On a longer timescale? Absolutely are.

> Well, that's a drop in the bucket. But you could apply this reasoning to any form of luxury goods.

Yes.

> Where do you draw the line? Nice clothes? Fancy watches? Sports cars? Five-star restaurants? Are any of these "the most productive/ROI generating activity for society at large?" Who decides what goods and services are worthy?

The neat thing about market economies is that you don't actually have to draw a line anywhere. You can just reduce income & wealth inequality via taxes and markets will sort it out. If you had taxed capital gains such that Bezos would have had to liquidate 10x - 100x in Amazon stock to buy his yacht, he likely would have settled for a smaller, but still perfectly acceptable yacht, and so on down the wealth ladder.

> You think people are having fewer children because luxury yachts are being built?

Yes I think income/wealth inequality + the amount of labor hours demanded from people to just stay in place is why people are having fewer children.

https://iquilezles.org/articles/ Also recommend this as a resource, immensely useful and full of examples.

> "Consume" labor hours? What does that even mean? Those laborers get paid, and then they spend the money they get. That money is circulating through the economy.

Money isn't stuff. Yes, those craftsmen get paid, but when one of them has something he needs done, some service provided, or some physical resource, he ends up paying more for the labor, because he is competing in the same labor market as everyone else.

Don't you think spending the working time of 4 million labor hours a year, building megayachts, is perhaps not the most productive/ROI generating activity for society at large? You could for example, with ~4 million skilled labor hours a year, build a lot of housing. You could build factories that provide for the needs the people. Hell, you could just give people time-off to, y'know, live and enjoy life (and perhaps, uh, have _children_, which the current system seems to be very efficient at disincentivizing).

Look, its pretty simple. Here's a microcosm example: There is a German ship-builder that exclusively builds luxury yachts. They have ~2,000 highly skilled craftsmen, engineers, etc.

This company only exists because wealth is concentrated enough to support a market for it.

That company consumes about 4 million skilled-labor-hours a year to provide this service.

This means that skilled-labor-hours are more scarce/expensive for _everyone_, because the on any given year, there are only so many skilled-labor hours that exist. These labor hours require about three decades of investment from society to produce (public education/childcare/etc).

Bezos may not buy a super-yacht every year, but as a class, the super rich consume an insane labor hours.

> Citation needed. If you've spent any time dynamical systems, as an example, you'd know that the computer basically only kind of crudely estimates things, and only things that are abstractly near by. You may be able to write down some PDEs or field equations that may describe things at some base level, but even statistical mechanics, which is really what governs a huge amount of what we see and interact with, is just a pretty good approximation. Computers (especially real ones) only generate approximate (to some value of alpha) answers; physics is not reducible to a computer program at all.

You're proving too much. The fact of the matter is that those crude estimations are routinely used to model systems.

I don't know what the future holds, but I know that this pattern is the 'horseless carriage' of developer automation.

No. Obviously the tax would be phased in over a long period of time and for political reasons probably include some recompense to current owners. But what, are we doomed for all time because of decisions made in the past? There will always be a new cohort of people who played by the rules of the current system and oh won't it be unfair to them. What about the people who are suffering because of the current system?

Has the amount of 95%+ reviews games-released increased though? And how much of that is due to the pandemic? Its anecdotal, but the game-dev discord I'm in has had a decent reduction in # of regulars since the tail end of the pandemic 24-25. And ironically, I was one of them until recently. I think people actually just had more time.

Can confirm. Been working on a spaceship colony game still in prototype phase, the code isn't too clean to begin with. Ended up asking the AIs for typed Vector3 in C#, which gave me a starting point.

https://gist.github.com/mrkybe/efa70a9ddcba7b5bfe441dafce13e...

It's been a huge time-saver.

Yeah, but isn't text to image kinda the perfect tool for creating certain UI? The point of an icon is to compress/transform some idea/action/whatever into an image that communicates exactly what it does/what it represents. And often the thing you want an icon for isn't some concrete concept you can represent with 5 lines, but a label that language has converged on to describe a broad but fuzzy category of stuff.

Like, if you have an eCommerce store and you want an icon for mops, doesn't it kinda make sense to take your top 100 selling mops and blend them together into an icon?

Yeah, some of the bigger numbers were a problem, so we switched to using a horizontally scaling db cluster so that we could cover all of the (useful) numbers. When we encounter a new number, it gets routed to the appropriate db where the results of the function are cached after being calculated. We're thinking of spinning it off as an API service actually if there's any interest.

Eh it kinda makes sense.

You want to boost domestic production but you also don't want to stifle domestic adoption.

So if you implement both tariffs and subsidies, consumers can still pay the market price but will buy up all domestic production first.

This sounds correct to me? But I haven't given really thought about it deeply yet.

> What about vague requirements or cases with multiple potential paths or cases where some technical choices might have important business consequences that shareholders might need to know about?

If the cost of developing the software is 0, you can just build both.

6-17, the time to actually raise them.

It ain't like just because the kid 7 you can leave them at home while both parents go to work.

> So while you may see this as a valid reason/excuse for yourself not to have kids, it doesn't explain broader fertility declines.

C'mon you have the whole answer right here.

Its a prisoners dilemma. People aren't stupid. For any one individual, it makes sense to wait and defer having kids until they're more economically secure. They know that. So what happens when _everyone_ is under that same incentive structure? Well, some people eventually pull the trigger and just yolo it, if they _really_ wanted kids. They probably aren't as economically secure as they wanted to be, but make the personal sacrifices to do it anyway. But you probably also have a lot of people/couples who are depressed that they didn't reach the position they expected to and depressed people generally don't want to have kids.

> Yes, kids are expensive. But countries like Korea and Singapore are pouring money into incentives and still seeing fertility drop to record lows.

This is what you're missing. They are not.

When the Titanic hit the iceberg, you could have gone from 0 people bailing water on the ship with buckets to the whole complement of crew and passengers (if you had enough buckets). You could talk about how there's now thousands of gallons of water being bailed out of the ship per minute. Without the context of the actual cause it would sure sound like a lot of water, like a meaningful attempt. But the Titanic would still sink.

In the last 100 years, we went requiring 1 income to support a household to 2 incomes to support a household. Everyone acted rationally, but its a very large scale prisoner's dilemma. Women wanted economic freedom and the economy was happy for more labor. There was no accounting for the labor women had already been doing. And so dual income households, at every level, pushed up the prices of everything that can't come out of factory in China. Even at the scale of ~300k individual incomes, a second person bringing in 100k-200k makes a noticeable difference, right? So for 99% of the population, dual income for some # of years, just til we buy our first house, just need a new car, well you get used to the standard of living dual income provides... and houses are more expensive now... jobs less secure... and you'd have to see online what you'd be missing out on...

Well, we took the "slack" out of the system and sold it. Without really being aware of its value.

And now governments, like those of Korea and Singapore, are trying to buy it back, but they haven't _really_ grappled with the scale of debt that was incurred, because it wasn't on any balance sheet.

> Godless evolution suggests randomness produced all of it overtime.

Nope. Randomness _and_ a selection function. Natural selection, ie: surviving to create the next generation.

> Yet, that's never worked in anything we've built.

It works completely fine in things we've built. We don't have the processing power to simulate something on the scale of computational complexity happening a small tide pond though. But you can see 'evolution by natural selection' in a rule set as simple as Game of Life.

> Even our GA's required laws, an environment, a computer, software, and fine-tuning. Pre-existing or by intelligent design (human inventors). Without these, it produced no results.

The laws/environment/computer are the equivalent of having a universe with physical laws. If you want to claim that god created the universe and tuned the constants of the universe, well, maybe. Or maybe every possible universe exists and we're just not around in the ones that don't lead to conscious life, in the same way that Game of Life universe is too simple/constrained to evolve conscious life on the scales we can simulate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHb07ynsPgo

Yes, but sometimes asking dumb questions is the first step to asking smart questions. And OP's investigation does raise some questions to me at least.

1. Give a model a context with some # of actually random numbers and then ask it to generate the next random number. How random is that number? Repeat N times, graph the results, is there anything interesting about the results?

2. I remember reading about how brains/etc are kinda edge-balanced chaotic systems. So if a model is bad at outputting random numbers (ie: needs a very high temperature for the experiment from step 1 to produce a good distribution of random numbers) What if anything does that tell us about the model?

3. Can we add a training step/fine-tuning step that makes the model better at the experiment from step #2? What effect does that have on its benchmarks?

I'm not an ML researcher, so maybe this is still nonsense.

> It wasn't "their customers" that brigaded.

This is a silly idea. Who else would care enough or know about it?

Not OP but hobby gamedev here:

Yes, but that's why ~~good~~ fun enemy AI for games is both an art and a science.

My approach is that the path from the pathfinding algorithm is just a known good solution. The path the agent gets back from the algorithm doesn't have to be just a list of Vector3's for the window centers. It could get back a list of each window quad instead, and then aim for a random point in the next quad shifted by the distance between the two quads. You can also do some raycasts from each agent occasionally to do local-avoidance-type behavior (which you'll likely have to do anyway so that enemies spread out a bit and avoid non-static geometry).

Imagine this: instead of the search engine space being 90% focused on ads and 10% on providing a good search experience, you could have one that is focused on finding the thing you're looking for.

I'd hope the consumer experience ends up improving.

> Lightning is still better than USB C in terms of physical connector design (Lightning puts the male part on the more easily replaced cable side).

Yeah, basically just repeating what luma said but you have this backwards. USB-C does have the female part on the cable side. Its just also enclosed in a metal cover for protection.

It could happen entirely accidentally.

"Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London, so ignore hits for DEADBEEF from anywhere else outside some Nx safety factor of the driving distance from that hit, because it has to be a false positive."

or

"Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London and again at 11:05am in London. Our cloud costs are high, so we're only going to store the most recent picture DEADBEEF, and only record the violation from 11:00am and 11:05am."

I guess these examples sound kind of contrived to me, but how long do you retain this kinda data for? 30 days? 60 days? A year?

Well, partially its that for all of Apple's faults, this is one thing that they're neurotic about. But the xbox controller comparison isn't really good because controllers have moving parts. An iPhone, except for the side-buttons, doesn't.

> It's the same lie as EVs claiming to be "green" in places where fossil fuel sources dominate electricity production.

This is just anti-ev propaganda.

First, its kind of a chicken-egg situation:

'its not worth going green for the power grid, all the cars are still ICE' 'oh its not worth building EV cars, the power grid is dirty anyway'.

Second, there are lifecycle analyses that show that even if your powergrid is entirely fossil fuels, EVs are still a win. This is because powerplants are really efficient in ways that a car engine can't be because of scale/weight. iirc the only exception was if your power-grid was still like 50%+ coal?

> But it has nothing to do with the claim that "denying claims increases profits", which is simply not true.

Well, it's kind of transparently true. If the worst-case scenario is that you need to return some premiums, then you should always deny enough claims that you're always returning some amount money, as you should always hit your profit cap. The second reason issue is that an approved claim has Opex costs. The platonic ideal of an insurance company in the current system is one that collects (# of patients * annual premium), and approves 0 claims. If you don't approve any claims, you'll have the lowest possible Opex costs, because there's no processing to do, no fraud to check for, no follow up visits that might take you below the profit cap, etc.

> The perversion of what constitutes "insurance" in the US medical industry is the fault of our legal system and tax code

The ACA's public option was killed by a Senator who had a lot Health Insurance industry backing and support.

Don't necessarily count Intel out.