pclowes

Do you feel like the cafeteria workers at SpaceX who were paid standard cafeteria wages when they started plus some equity that everybody considered worthless at the time and now makes them multimillionaires feel like they were treated unfairly?

I am struggling to understand where the unfair part is coming from. Nobody is making anybody do anything. Everything is transparent and above board. Everybody in this scenario is willingly working market wages (except for founders and early hires who work below market and take equity for a couple years because they believe in the idea)

People are generally happier when they are not starving to death and capitalism is really good at helping people not starve to death.

Every global economic statistic backs this up

On what? You force the company to break up and liquidate so they can pay taxes?

You force the founder to give up their private property just because it is valuable?

Remember these are not dollar bills in the founders bank account. It is just the company they created is now very valuable. It does not mean it is liquid.

False, you just make something very valuable.

To get people to help you make it you offer to pay them and they willingly exchange their time for that money (or equity if they also think it will be very valuable someday or you have a record of making valuable things in the past)

Who is the person swindled here? Who agreed to something and was deceived? Who was stolen from?

This process is net wealth creation. The wealth is generated, not taken from somebody else.

It is not like the money is in his bank account.

And it’s not like he took the money from somebody else.

He spent a ton of time to create something that he owned the majority of and to make that thing more valuable. He paid other people to help him and they were happy with that exchange. The government also helped them and they were happy with that exchange.

Suddenly, people have assigned a concrete value to the thing via the IPO and it is very valuable.

It’s not like he suddenly has $1 trillion in his account. It’s just the thing that he made and has ownership of is suddenly worth that much.

You can also shave off some IQ points by hitting yourself in the head… not sure _why_ you would do that though.

Nothing crazy just more highly biased opinion pieces masquerading as journalism just on the far left instead of the right. They have a narrative and they pick stories and “facts” to fit it. Just expect better on hacker news.

Honestly we are doing articles from Jacobin on the front page now? Whats next Newsmax and OANN? Some flat-earther blog?

Standardized testing so far is the worst solution, except for all the others.

Sure, wealthy people can pay for standardized testing prep. However, test prep is a much lower barrier than having to pay for exotic experiences abroad to pad admissions essays or connections to gain political exposure so you know the appropriate shibboleths to utter or racial features to highlight.

They are already doing it. They just have a useless degree and if they went onto college, another worthless degree and likely a bunch of debt in order to do it.

Whether or not our programs are rigorous, does not change the reality on the ground or make the actual capabilities of the population different. It’s not like a person with a worthless degree is more capable than a person who dropped out of a worthwhile rigorous program. We just perceive them to be. A rigorous high school program corrects that perception, saving time and money.

I am not saying it is simple. And yes technically the lenders are separate but the incentives align them so the effect is the same as if they weren’t.

As examples:

- loans are given equally for an English major and an electrical engineer. No market force at play here.

- Interest rates are the same as well even though the risk of default is not the same across majors

- Your interest rate remains the same for subsequent years even if you get a 2.0 your first year.

- College tuition rises in lockstep with additional Federal grants and loan programs

Also, I am not saying there isn’t bad or unscrupulous behavior by lenders but the default case is poor money management and a faulty understanding of interest. I think this fault lies with the student, but also the government allowing its lenders and institutions to prey upon their youth as well as allowing high schools to graduate students without this basic understanding.

High Schools don’t support teachers who are confronted by angry parents who are mad that you are ruining their kids chance at an Ivy by giving them a B- in HS algebra (meanwhile the ivies remedial math classes are packed more than ever)

This is a big component of why we have objective grade level standards. They are a strong but imperfect defense against racism at the teacher level.

If I am the teacher and I fail your kid but your kid crushes the blind rigorous and as objective as we can make it standardized test then your lawsuit just got stronger.

The issue is people decided to weaken the standard or call standards themself racist (which IMO is actually racist).

Publicly funded colleges should not be able to loan 6 figures to people who don’t understand interest rates.

I am happy to vote to take their funding away if they want to continue doing that.

In short yes. Top 10% is not genius level. You see the outcome of this all the time at the PhD level. Even top 2% often just does not cut it when trying to do novel research. So many PhD’s get stuck in the post-doc adjunct cycle with never a real shot at tenure.

That is fine. Nothing to feel bad about. But also we don’t want our top 10% but not 2% to waste eight plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Again, this is all dedicated on the high school diploma being actually hard and valuable. Associates degree replace undergrads, undergrad replace masters, etc.

No, the people giving degrees that say a person can do basic math when the person can’t do math should not be able to give out degrees anymore.

Similarly, the person with the credential that says they can do basic math that cannot do basic math should not have the credential.

Yes. You can’t put equity before excellence or you erode both. Passing students to avoid “disparate impact” to me is highly ignorant and often deeply racist.

Additionally any college grad that:

1. Takes out six figures of loans for a degree in a field with no hope of commensurate income

2. Pays minimum payments below interest

3. Whines on social media that after X years of not even covering the interest payment they now owe more than ever

Should:

1. Lose both their college and HS degrees. They clearly dont understand HS math.

2. Their college’s accreditation should be investigated

3. Same with their HS

That’s my point. It is only so expensive because it is a gate to earning money. The concept that everybody should go to college and the Federal Pell grants and funding to that effect is what causes college to be expensive.

So now we pay twice. Once with our tax dollars for a high school system that does not appropriately stratify students. And then again with insane amounts of debt that cannot be discharged even in bankruptcy to teach remedial algebra to adults that have no interest in learning it.

We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate.

Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness.

90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest to actually go deep or learn anything. Socratic style seminars are silent. Deep critique or wrestling with a topic only if pandering or grade related. Humanities watered down to irrelevance compared to STEM which has to keep some rigor or the bridges collapse and lights dont turn on. Academia is inflated by, wasted on, and ruined by them. They would be much better served by a high school diploma that wasn’t meaningless

I think 13th grade is a stretch. It seems more like they are charging mid six figures to teach grades 6 through 10.

Yes, but with an LLM can also say drop those links into a markdown file then use research agents to identify and stack rank the ones that are most relevant to this criteria. Add summaries and rationale for the ranking to the markdown etc.

This is a common flow for me and works with other skills such “as find recent PR’s in our code base that are related to this research topic”

Also yes, I don't care about the LLM and I am just using it to get what I want because that is what LLMs are for.

I find it extremely useful. So much so that I am annoyed when I have to use it in a handicapped fashion such as on the phone.

It makes me wonder why like 90% of the apps on my phone exist. I just want everything to be markdown files, skills, MCPs/API and then a nice TUI or voice to text.

I ask them for sources. It’s just a more efficient vector based search for most of my google search replacement use cases.

Doesn’t classic search literally already do everything you fear LLM’s will?

My thought here is that there are many. They have proven to be commodities in most use cases.

As soon as one gets annoying, expensive, advertiser heavy etc. you just rip it out and replace it with the other one. AFAICT there is zero lock-in or moat. I often am able to switch models in one click or command. This is why all the LLM providers are desperate for a product layer/comprehensive tool set.

Sure maybe they all end up that way, but there’s plenty of reasons corporate customers will want private LLM usage that is not skewed towards advertising. I am happy to pay for that.

Also, open source models are a bulwark against another search style ad Monopoly.

I understand why they are doing this. My Google search usage is easily down 50%+. I doubt I am unique here.

While there are times where I want pure search (Kagi, Old Google) I mostly use LLMs to search now and have them provide me links for source data.

When I do use LLMs as a search engine I always want it integrated into my AI workflows with access to tools and scripts etc. I never want to have a conversation with a website that is geared towards advertising me products.

I am not saying that there isn’t inequality. I am also not saying that infinite inequality is good.

I am saying it would be better to be poor now than poor in 1980 even though the inequality is higher now.

I am saying that inequality by itself is not an especially meaningful measure.

I am saying that recently, 2019 through 2024, low wage income has risen in the US faster than high wage income.

https://www.epi.org/publication/strong-wage-growth-for-low-w...

Then why are global living standards rising rapidly?

I also don’t think inequality is intrinsically bad. Depending on type and timeframe it may even be good. Especially if the inequality is increasing while everyone is also doing better than they previously were. (note that internal US inequality is actually shrinking)

A 10% increase on a larger base will produce more inequality than a 20% increase on a smaller base. However, I don’t think the smaller base person would prefer neither of them get an increase.

Almost every global graph tells the opposite story. There are far fewer people in poverty. There are much better average outcomes on basically every metric you can imagine. Almost all directly attributed to global commerce