saghm

If you wanted to base the entirety of the world economy on baseball cards, I'd say that you're crazy. The fact that you put company names on them instead and don't make them physical cards doesn't make it less crazy.

This just sounds like nonsense to me. Why would it be "more valuable" to have a piece of paper with the name of a company on it that makes more money on it than a company that made less money if it never translates to actually getting money from having it? You might as well be describing baseball cards, because someone else will want to pay more for a card that has a player who does really well even though they don't get anything from having it. That might be reasonable for collectors, but it's a pretty clearly insane basis for such a huge portion of our economic activity.

I can't tell if you're being condescending intentionally or not, but I'm not sure how you could get the impression that I don't understand what "buyback" means. Obviously it comes from the company; otherwise it's just a regular stock sale that doesn't need any additional descriptor.

The issue to me is that the division between "money companies get from selling their shares" and "money companies get from selling their products" is artificial; whether it gets taxed differently is a procedural issue, not something that inherently defines what "value" is. When the value of something is only from selling it again in the future, it's inherently only valuable as long as there's someone else to pass it onto to sell it again later. Sticking the company in the middle of passing it along doesn't magically change whether it's sensible or not. That's what I mean by "effectively a Ponzi scheme", even if it's not strictly one in the definitional sense. The same arguments for why a Ponzi scheme is undesirable apply.

> We have three branches of government for a reason, its up to the judicial to decide what cases will or won't be tried, and they should be basing that on evidence alone.

The judicial branch does not decide who to prosecute. They're supposed to ensure that the law is applied consistently, but prosecutorial discretion is entirely up to the DoJ and at least nominally is part of the executive branch (for federal crimes). They also don't directly decide whether someone is convicted in most cases; a judge can throw out a meritless case or in rare cases vacate a jury verdict, but the jury verdict itself is outside of any of the three branches by design.

In any case though, this is isn't super relevant to my comment you replied to. The parent comment claimed that the debate about the law was purely theater, and I argued that it might not be because someone could get prosecuted for it if the law isn't on the books. Whether the DoJ should try to prosecute someone for something is not the same as whether they will try to. The DoJ has tended to operate in a somewhat removed way from the whims of the president in the aftermath of Watergate, but that's a precedent that's been pretty clearly been eroded in recent years. That doesn't mean political prosecutions will be successful, but using legalism as a way of trying to enforce one's political agenda is not a new phenomenon; the Bush administration had lawyers write up opinions justifying their use of "enhanced interrogation" because being able to couch one's actions in legal terms is one of many ways to try to build support (or mitigate opposition) to them. Having laws that say something is not allowed has at least some effect even when people try to get away with violating them, even if it's only in the form of soft pressure.

> The cash for Ponzi schemes comes from other investors, which they receive in exchange for issuing more securities and use to fund investors who want to cash out.

If the value of something is only "someone else will pay for it, and then later they will sell it", that to me is effectively the same as a Ponzi scheme. There's no inherent value in the actual thing being bought and sold other than the buying and selling of it. Maybe calling them "Pokemon cards for companies" would be a better way of describing why I find it nonsensical to claim there's any real link between the company and the stock unit when buybacks are the only way to make money off them.

I guess this is where politics comes into it, because in general I don't really like the idea of a capital gains tax at a much lower rate than income in the first place.

I'd argue that if the only value of something is that you can sell it later, that is a weird. At best, it's like a collectible card or something, and at worst, it's just a Ponzi scheme.

I don't understand how "the value of this is that someone will buy it back from you later" to be different from a Ponzi scheme.

I see it as a Ponzi scheme when people argue that they're a replacement for dividends. You're describing them as if dividends are an assumption, in which case they're perfectly reasonable.

> The value is only from what other people are willing to pay for it?

Somehow every time I try to make this argument about stock buybacks, some people vigorously defend them as not just somehow a glorified Ponzi scheme.

I guess that depends, do you think that an administration would be willing to prosecute its predecessors for doing it if it were against the law? Maybe you don't because of mutually assured destruction, but lately there's been a lot more appetite for prosecuting people in the other party (with some charges being extremely trumped up, if you'll pardon the pun), so I don't know that this is a given anymore.

Huh, I went back to look at the announcement of halting development on Fleet, and they went back and updated it six months after the fact to announce the rebrand. It never occurred to me to go back and look.

Fair enough. I was reacting more to the "organizational hell" part and didn't focus as much on the "layers" part.

Kind of surprised not to find any instance of the string "jevon" in either the article or the comments here already. Even with the assumption that AI decreases the amount of work needed for writing software (which people may disagree on of course), Jevon's paradox seems like it would still apply; maybe making more stuff feasible more easily just means management has higher expectations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> Im not sure I even like calling it bureaucracy. It’s a process, yes. But we’re not talking many layers of abstract organizational hell, here. Were talking a fairly direct process of documenting what you are doing and how you are going to do it well enough that others working and depending on the project can understand it, coordinate with it, and have a reasonable degree of confidence that it won’t cause undue problems.

Bureaucracy doesn't definitionally mean Kafkaesque. It's popular to hate on it, but good or neutral bureaucracy does exist.

I got a text from a political party recently (not one of the major ones, just trying to get me to put in a vote for the same candidate that a third party nominated as well, after I had already mailed in my ballot) that said to send STOP to stop receiving messages or SKIP to "opt out entirely". I still have no clue what the distinction is supposed to be between those.

> So the engineers came up with a power-user shortcut… and since the Shift was a natural counterpart in the Caps Lock world, it could also do the same here!

> The solution: you could hold Shift and press the arrow/numeric key to quickly reverse its current mode.

One person's "ingenious" is another's "confusing due to lack of clarity". If I hit some keys that weren't numlock and they caused my numpad to behave differently than the mode I expected, I would not think "oh wow that's so clever", I would be confused about what happened and probably not understand how to use that mechanism from observing the surprising behavior.

I had always remembered them, but it wasn't until a year or so ago that my brother casually remarked to me that in Beyblade lore (which is a thing I wasn't even aware existed), apparently Moses canonically used a Beyblade to part the Red Sea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsfJJpwXTXw

I don't have a good explanation for why this would be interesting to anyone, but the idea of Beyblades retconning the Bible is so absurd that I still have trouble not laughing every time I'm reminded of it.

No, I'm honestly more confused about you to a degree much more than how my comment was interpreted. Over time, the responses to my comment seem to have stabilized closer to what I'd expect, but as far as I can tell you seem to be saying one thing and doing another, so it's hard for me to feel like I'm understanding where you're coming from on any level.

> Many of the improvements and refreshed design were "backported" into the traditional IDEs.

Okay, but what stops any of that for happening for any of the new things since then? To me, a large part of the appeal of Fleet was that it wasn't the entire IDE; adding a new skin to something that feels much too heavyweight for me does not resolve the fundamental problems I had with it.

My favorite feature is the built-in distinction between what's mutable and what's immutable in my history. I can freely modify any commits I make locally without issue, since no one else would be able to depend on them, but if I push something or fetch it from a coworker, I have the safety of not needing to be careful when doing the equivalent of an amend or rebase because it will fail with an error telling me to use a flag to bypass the immutability protection if that's what I actually want.

Not having to stage changes in lieu of them automatically getting picked up was a bit of a learning curve for me, but now that I've gotten used to it I like it a lot better and I don't think I could go back. The equivalent of the reflog pretty much always has my changes in it if I accidentally lose them without manually saving due to the snapshotting, and I have no need for a stash because commits and branches are essentially just recording a checkpoint rather than being things that feel "heavyweight".

As an added bonus, dealing with conflicts is a lot less annoying because each commit records its conflicts separately, so fixing them doesn't require doing a stateful pipeline of changes in a big rebase; I can just do them piecemeal, in any order I want, and even just check out other stuff and work on them before coming back later if I feel like it.

I was "that guy" who would sometimes have coworkers come for help with git problems (https://xkcd.com/1597/ alt text). I've forgotten most of that knowledge (and all of that muscle memory) and didn't have to learn nearly as much to replace it with the ability to do a lot more with a lot fewer mistakes.

I didn't even realize those were recent! The first time I tried to look for how to use worktrees in jj, they were already available

They also started developing Fleet several years back and made a few alpha releases, only to shutter it before it ever was ever fully released for reasons that essentially seemed to boil down to "we want to focus on our core IDEs instead, which didn't really explain what changed. I was interested in Fleet, so at this point I can't help but be skeptical of anything new they've done since then because it's not clear to me why the same logic for discontinuing Fleet couldn't apply to pretty much anything else.

I don't think I have the same understanding of what the word "transparency" means. To me, transparency means "show me what you're doing", not "change what you're doing based on what I tell you". If Meta is truly not doing anything with their algorithm to intentionally favor one side, I don't understand why you're claiming that this would lead to them needing to change the bias.

I'm completely confused about your analogy to song shuffling. I disagree with your characterization that permuting a list randomly isn't "truly random" in the way that selecting an item from a list randomly is, but even ignoring that, I'm completely unable to figure out what you think the equivalent of that is for an LLM.

That seems completely unrelated to what I was responding to and what my response was. All I said was that the one specific rationale in the parent comment seemed flimsy to me; I didn't claim anything about other potential rationales.

Part of their schtick is wearing those costumes right? So you don't even know who's performing. The only song of theirs that I know is a collab with a different singer and has a guitar part from Niles Rodgers, so while they probably do have some impact on the music, it's not clear to me how one would be able to tell this hasn't always been the case.

This logic would work just as well to ban all mentions of automatic transmission because some people complain that they lost their love of driving once they stopped driving manual. If the complaints are annoying and low-effort, you could just ban the complaints.

Yeah, even when the choice itself might be exempt from critique, stating one thing and then doing another surely isn't. Misleading posturing which can't be proven to be dishonesty but is impossible to differentiate from it seems surprisingly common for reasons I can't wrap my head around.

This happened years ago with the V programming language making a bunch of claims about the existing feature set that were not accurate and future roadmap that did not at all reflect how things went down, and it was all very bizarre and seemingly avoidable if the developer were truly committed to communicating better.

Another development process this reminds me of is the development by modders to port Oblivion to the Skyrim engine. After maybe a decade, the developers made a huge deal at the end of 2024 that they were going to finally release by the end of 2025 and made a lot of noise about it, but by the fall when no more details had been announced, someone asked in Discord about it and the lead developer directly said that it was not going to happen, with an announcement that it was "delayed" to 2026 not getting made until after people posted screenshots of this. We're now in October of 2026 and it's not clear it will be out this year, but trying to give feedback on the communication gets construed shouted down with exhortations to "let them cook". As far as I can tell, a large number of people seem to think that a suggestion that it's fine for the developers to just not keep announcing when things will be done so that they can take as much time as they want without confusing people is synonymous with telling them they need to release immediately.

One big company says things should be secret, another says that things should be transparent, and your conclusion is that both are equivalent and therefore any attempt for transparency is meaningless. I don't buy that logic. A party being biased doesn't mean that its stance on every issue is automatically wrong; at the very least, it's possible as an individual to have a mutual interest with a company.

Usually people who don't want to discuss things don't go out of their way to keep commenting