savanaly

Hey, as long as the deep fried mushrooms are replacing the deep fried chicken wings as an appetizer, that's the sort of progress I'm talking about. It's better the vibes change such that 50% of people start ordering plant based meals 10% more often than that 1% of us go fully vegan, and feels like a lot more likely and possible.

If there's one social transformation I long to see in my life time which seems actually achievable and believable it would be for plant-based eating to become hip and cool, sort of like how smoking or being anti-gay became uncool, among Gen-Z and later. As the article highlights, current sentiment is totally against factory farming, it feels like people just need the right affordances to express that distaste in the marketplace. Right now if you confine yourself to vegan food you're going to get something very bland in the majority of eateries. I think that may be because the previous wave of vegan eaters were doing so for health reasons and so wanted to avoid excess fat and salt. Deep fried, richly seasoned mushrooms on the menu at your local bar and grill soon, god willing!

I feel like the goalposts have been shifted massively in this conversation. The original sentiment was "there's no way to responsibly gamble online", and that's all I was ever responding to.

I can readily believe that to be true, but my point still stands, the person I'm replying to made a really sweeping and incorrect statement.

> the only “responsible” choice is not to gamble online

I don't gamble at all in any form, but I still firmly disagree. Some people enjoy gambling in a way that never hurts them-- I've known countless friends and coworkers who talk about doing a bit of it in Vegas or what have you. You're saying every last one is a degenerate gambler somehow concealing it totally from me? They know they're not going net positive on the experience, usually lose some money, and get some entertainment.

There's a saying about this: abusers give vice a bad name. People should be free to gamble if they want to, and certain checks should be put in place for people who choose to gamble so much it is ruinous to themselves.

I work at Dropbox so definitely drinking the Koolaid on Dash to some extent, but I find myself using it a decent amount to find stuff internally. Cmd + e has become a habitual hotkey when i need to go find something in one of countless internal places just as surely as cmd + space is to open an app. I know there's a lot of competitors to it out there, and none of them are good enough to be transformative yet. I hope it gets faster and better at searching, and multimodal search that works good would indeed be a huge deal.

"The patrolling officer on his beat is the one true dictatorship in America, we can lock a guy up on the humble, lock him up for real, or say fuck it and drink ourselves to death under the expressway and our side partners will cover us, No one - I mean no one - tells us how to waste our shift!"

- Jimmy McNulty on The Wire

I'm with you at heart, but experience says government owned transit works just fine and even great in other countries. What's their secret sauce?

The democracy one (fifth point) is a big ol' stretch, and the healthcare one is debateable, but the other points are well-taken. I have struggled to make the case to my friends and family after visiting China that in a very meaningful sense, and especially for the vulnerable, having more things well connected by public transit and safe to travel on at any time of day or night is freedom. And they have an order of magnitude more of it than the USA does.

>demand is hard to forecast for an individual, almost completely inelastic and often extremely time sensitive

These don't preclude a free market working well. For instance, they're all apt descriptors of me when I find myself needing an Uber home. I'm not completely inelastic, since I could take a series of long bus rides to get home, or walk, but accepting for the sake of argument those aren't life-threatening, the cab companies more or less have me over a barrel. Or do they? We all know what keeps them from charging me more they do, even given the time sensitivity, lack of prediction, or inelasticity. It's competition.

The USA system doesn't work well, and I'm not necessarily saying that free market is the right solution, just pushing back on the notion that just because a good meets those criterion we are forced to throw our hands up and say the free market could never provide that.

As an outsider...his games just look and feel different. They feel like bones-deep art, in a way that even the best of the best games (say, Hades) don't. Since Blow's games are puzzle games they're not even my favorite games! But the effort spent on making them exactly the way he wants them pays off.

> Why bother tracking down thieves when you can just keep jacking up premiums? It's not like customers have a choice.

Insurance companies compete viciously with each other on price. Have you not seen their ads? If one could offer significantly cheaper insurance through some mechanism like that they definitely would.

The fact that he left the NYT because it wasn't letting him be partisan enough cracked me up so hard.

I mean this out of genuine curiosity, not as criticism: did she consider telling claude code to look for any duplicate functionality and remove it? Or even edit CLAUDE.md to tell it to check for duplicates after major refactors and remove them? I use CC every day at the moment and I would expect these sorts of instructions to work extremely well, especially in what appears to be relatively small codebase.

This is a great article; not the first time Asterisk has published an article that has important implications for the growth of poorer countries, the other one I recall being the provocatively titled "Want Growth? Kill Small Businesses" [0]. I think this topic of what approaches will let Africa grow quickly over the next century is among the most important for world prosperity and peace we can be discussing.

[0] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/want-growth-kill-small-bus...

Counterpoint: that the kind of exercise most people engage in with a goal of weight loss isn't going to work, but the kind of dieting would do might work, is perfectly reasonably expressed with the phrase "You can't outrun a bad diet". I'm aware a more pedantic and literal reading gives lie to the phrase, but that is true of almost every single English true statement ever written.

I built apps for a long, long time without Tailwind, just using CSS, sometimes Sass. And I still do at work because our build system doesn't support Tailwind compiler. But for all my side projects, of which there's a few, I use Tailwind. It's just so much easier. I don't see how this experience is compatible with a Emperor's no clothes situation.

>Doesn't this miss the point with Tailwind and why we have Tailwind in the first place?

Not for me. Say I have a new app and I want it to have a left nav. I could write my own styles with tailwind or...I could just put a .menu on there and gets all the sensible defaults for padding, spacing, font size, background colors, etc.

But having done that, I'll still want to edit the specific padding, spacing, fonts, and background color of the menu to suit my needs. Plus there's...the whole rest of the site, not all of which is made up of DaisyUI components. So I will be wanting Tailwind for all that for the regular reasons one wants Tailwind.

Did he say Pascal drew that conclusion and remove it with an edit or something? As it's written now it seems like you're correcting him for something he didn't post.

Also, they paint the whole room for $2.41! When you add that critical detail the analogy comes into focus.

People aren't excited about AI coding because it's so much better than human coders. They're excited because it's within spitting distance while rounding down to free.

I see Georgism and LVT brought up on HN fairly frequently, at least a few times a year. It's a niche economic outlook and set of policy recommendations that many in HN seem to be intrigued by. As someone else pointed out, that definitionally makes it HN material.

Isn't this a case of the market modeling it very well though? It's very undesirable to live somewhere, so wages offered are elevated. The posts aren't filled though, because the wages aren't elevated enough. Occasionally someone who really doesn't mind living out there does come along and take the elevated wages, but mostly the posts go empty. The market is revealing that there's no coincidence of wants [0], and correctly allocating fewer people to the posts. If by "reality" we mean a world where these posts are filled despite costing more to fill than they're worth to someone then yes, markets aren't modeling reality well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence_of_wants

I would agree, but that's beside the point I was making.

You might be right, but it's certainly not a "duh". Consumer surplus exists in addition to producer surplus.

But the designs literally go from bad to good once people know how to use them. Unlike war, which is bad whether people are used to it or not. If you're insisting the hamburger design is bad for some other reason rather than people not knowing how to use it, it's the same mistake the designers made in the first place when they insisted it was good despite people not knowing how to use it.

>I don't think open models will come to the rescue either. Mass market will want to use the best models with the least friction. The moment you have to do more than go to a website and start prompting, 90% of mass market is out.

I interpret this as you saying that we need saving from the eventual predations of the shopping AI agent industry on helpless consumers. Honest question, why won't competition come to the rescue? Any number of startups hungry for customers will be competing to provide the best version of the product that they can afford to provide, and will eventually settle into some fair equilibrium, absent the government picking some kind of winner or imposing binding price controls.

It's true that Uber used to offer outrageously good prices to acquire users, and nowadays charges what some people consider outrageously high prices ($80 to get me to the airport??). But a closer look at the economics of the situation reveals that the prices that rideshare services have settled on are the pretty-much-sane ones, accounting for the market value of the driver's time and uber's cost to develop and maintain the app. Why wouldn't the end result of the AI shopping agent market be the same?

I think they might be getting a lot of traffic due to this post. It was loading for me right before I submitted this, but it's not now.

Full text in case it goes down again:

    We are joining a lawsuit will challenge the President's unchecked authority to impose tariffs. We will not stand idly by while our livelihoods--and the livelihoods of thousands of small business owners and contractors in the US, along with the customers whose pursuit of happiness we hold dear--are treated like pawns in a political game.

    Like many tabletop publishers (import code 9504.90.6000*), we started print runs of products before the President took office, and now we face an unprecedented $14.50 tariff tax for every $10 we spent on manufacturing with our trusted long-term partner in China. For Stonemaier Games alone (a US based company in which all 8 employees are US citizens), that amounts to upcoming tariff payments of nearly $1.5 million.

    If the tariffs are damaging your business as well, please contact me at jamey@stonemaier.com and I will connect you with the law firm. There is no cost to join the lawsuit.

    I try to lead with compassion and empathy, so legal action is very low on my list of ways to handle difficult situations. But with this new norm of a 145% tariff imposed by the President on all exports from China to the US--including products that have been in the manufacturing process for months--we are compelled to take action.

    Of course, this isn't the only action we're taking, as we have 200,000 units of reprints and 50,000 units of Vantage (plus 57,000 other Vantage accessories) ready to ship out of Shenzhen in a few weeks. Here's what else we're doing in regards to these fully manufactured products:

        We're selling to other countries: Around 35% of our annual sales are to distributors, retailers, and consumers outside of the US. We ship directly from China to those distributors and fulfillment centers, so the tariffs will not impact our prices in those regions.
        We're storing the US quantities in China: For now, we will pay for warehousing in China store most of the US-bound products in the hopes that the tariffs will decrease by the time we need that inventory to replenish our supply in the US.
        We're sending out-of-stock US quantities to the US: Finspan is out of stock in the US, so we are proceeding to send the restock as scheduled. We will eat most of the tariff cost (which more than doubles our costs) to minimize the impact on distributors, retailers, and consumers.
        We're sending direct-sale Vantage to the US: I've spent too long trying to make this game affordable that I'm not going to let one person with unchecked power get in the way of me serving my customers. The tariffs may have a slight impact on the US price, but the plan is to largely keep our direct price the same and give customers the option to cover the tariff cost at checkout. The plan to release Vantage to US distribution and retail may need a delay--the lack of margins there have a bigger impact on a new game than on reprints.

    Again, these strategies are focused on products we have already manufactured, as the tariffs did not carve out a grace period for such products. We are fortunate to have a buffer at Stonemaier Games to weather this storm, and my heart goes out to the many other small businesses--in the US and beyond--who invested their resources in products that they can no longer afford to bring into the US.

    *There is an article circulating that states incorrectly that tariffs on tabletop games are only 20%. The (unfortunately) correct number is 145%.

>And it keeps being pushed on customers because it's beneficial for corporations: customers will fruitlessly navigate chat support rather than realizing they should give up and call

Businesses tend to thrive when consumers choose to keep using them, not when they don't. How does users fruitlessly navigating chat support serve that end?

How is this not a good thing for everyone involved? Or am I wrong for reading the comment in a tone that I perceived to be critical?

The thing is that inserting AI into the code reviewer side doesn't make too much sense. Unless they have a different AI doing the reviewing than the one that helped to write it, there won't be anything left to say at that stage. The AI was already involved in writing it and as they mention in the article there's points in the writing-with-AI process where the AI editor will try to catch bugs, educate the developer, and so forth. If the reviewing AI can catch further bugs that's just proof the writing AI needs to be tightened up, not that there's a role for a reviewing AI.

The commentary given above is invalid if due to the preferences of the human developers or just weird protocol in their working relationship they end up with different AI's in the two instances. But I think in the long term equilibrium this point applies.