2,488 karma · joined October 18, 2010
> There is no such company in the world, and if there was, it would almost certainly be an illegal monopoly.
Funny wording, it's like saying "nothing bad as happening, but if there was, it would be illegal." My original point is that yes, there is bad stuff happening, there are many monopolies, but no one is doing much about it.
Those that argue we're no better off than we were 200 years ago are pretty unpersuasive these days.
I'm more worried about the next 200 years though. It took several thousand years of civilization to create the industrial revolution, and that was quickly followed by the information revolution. Both dramatically improved quality of life.
But what if this is the end of the exponential? What if Moore's law is dead, and breakthrough technologies like quantum computers or new propulsion systems aren't just "5 to 10 years away", but decades or centuries away?
There is a lot of evidence today suggesting that the industrial and communication revolution was a blip, closer to a step function in human development, preceded by slow linear growth and possibly followed by slow linear growth.
I'm not certain that this will indeed happen, but if it does, our entire society and world is in for a complete shock.
On the upside, this process is all about learning. It's easy to be clever, it's hard to be clever and successful. Making these mistakes and fixing them is how you turn knowledge into wisdom.
Nice in theory, but what about companies that are so large that they effectively control the labor market? What about companies with non-compete agreements? What about collusive non-poaching agreements between companies that lower the market value of labor? What about companies that disregard employee safety because they know the labor pool is large?
These are not theoretical objections, they are happening now. Employer/employee agreements are not "free" when they break rules like these.
This was my guiding principle in life, and I thought I was pretty clever for coming up with it, but later found out that someone far more clever got a lock on the phrase in history: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/22688-everything-in-moderat...
Agree, 3 is a pretty arbitrary number. If you have a function that needs to work on an array that you know will certainly be of size 2, it takes minimal effort and will probably be worthwhile to make sure it works on lengths greater than 2.
But the bigger point is valid: you need examples to know what to expect, and if you make an abstraction early without valid examples, you'll almost certainly fail to consider something, and also likely consider a number of things that will never occur.
I have a similar rule of thumb: when you do a thing the first time, just get it working. When you do a similar thing a second time, just get it working. When you do a thing a third time, pull it together as a cohesive abstraction.
This is a silly generalization, but the point is that you generally need to see a handful of examples of a thing before you can make any useful abstraction. What's more common is people creating abstractions during the first iteration, leading to features that are never used, and others that were never considered.
function do_add(a, b) {
return a - b;
}
function do_add_real(a, b) {
return a + b;
}
A sign of a seasoned developer is to see this type of horrible code, take a calm breath and focus on the issue at hand rather than scrambling to fix something that works but is ugly.
The OP was referring to "torturing" cows for milk, and you are referring to "torturing" women with respect to maternity leave.
What is your definition of "torture"?
That's a pretty sophomoric way to look at investing. Many companies provide no dividends. Many give large dividends, but their stock value decreases.
Obviously, when considering an investment, one considers both the dividends and potential growth of the underlying asset together.
Termination rights. In the 1970s, a new copyright bill was enacted that said that 35 years after the creation of a work, the ownership of that work automatically reverts back to the original creator. The idea behind the proposal was to give artists control of their works later in their career, when they may no longer be a pop sensation, kind of like a retirement account.
For example, Lady Gaga may be super popular right now, but roughly around 2050, she will automatically regain the rights to her original recordings. She can then resell those rights to someone else, generating an additional bit of income later in life.
So as an investor, if you buy up the rights to a bunch of works, you need to know that your ownership has an expiration date.
Unfortunately, your argument runs into an opposite extreme. Yes, freedom is important, but it's not the only thing that's important. There is different, but similarly strong argument that society should preserve life.
Freedom dictates that people should be allowed to do what they want, even if it causes self-harm. Life preservation dictates that we should do whatever it takes to preserve life. Both of these values are are pretty fundamental, baked into most religions and political philosophies. Sometimes however, as in the case you point out, these two values butt against each other.
The answer is not to choose one or the other, but to properly balance them.
If you're searching for a cure for cancer, heart failure, or any of fatal health ailment, you are by definition trying to extend people's lives. The entire purpose of healthcare is to extend both the length and quality of people's lives.
Yes, there are many legitimate complaints about Elon, some disputed, some not. But the legitimate complaints you describe don't create the haters. What hedge-fund short-seller, or random internet troll, really cares about Hong Kong's civil rights? The same folks that are crying fowl on Elon support far more ruthless enterprises, their complaints aren't coming from a morally sound platform.
The vast majority of hatred towards Elon is what I described: (1) his audaciousness; (2) inflated valuations that don't conform to traditional valuation models.
Sadly, any legitimate criticism is lost in this noise.
Many functional languages have lazy evaluation, and they do provide benefits. However, unfortunately, this concept has leaked into other areas of programming. In particular, many database ORMs use lazy evaluation to pull data. In one step, you create a database query, then pass that off to another function or class. Then, when it's off in another package and evaluated the query is made.
The main problem with lazy evaluation of database queries is that it treats a database evaluation like normal code, even though under the hood there may be network access, caching, and if you're not careful duplicative database pulls.
Generally, there should be a rule in programming languages that when you make a network call, the programmer has clear visibility into when that is happening. Hiding it with fancy syntax is more of a negative than a positive.
This seems pretty unlikely. Putin has certainly done well being a corrupt leader, and probably has control over $200B, but I doubt he has holdings that reach anywhere near that level.
Gaddafi having that much money is a bit of a joke. It would require him having many multiples of the entire country's GDP in his own personal account. Perhaps theoretically possible, but hard to believe without better proof.
You're very much mistaken.
The National Institute of Health gets $31B of government funds every year for research. The NSF gets $8B, NASA gets $20B, and DARPA gets around $3B. So healthcare research gets roughly 50% of the entire U.S. public research budget, and that's not including private investment.
It's difficult to pull accurate numbers, but meat substitutes, VR, and even super-hot AI get far less every year, it's nowhere near healthcare research.
Extending life has been a priority of the US government for many years, largely because it's politically popular. Everyone rich or poor wants to live longer.
Apple haters have a point: Apple hardware is far more expensive than similar performance on other systems. So using a traditional objective metric such as performance per dollar, Apple is objectively worse.
However, most Apple Fanboys know they are paying a premium. They love Apple for other, less quantifiable reasons, such as design quality, beautiful integration, good marketing, and the vision of making a more human machine.
The metrics that Apple fanboys value are at complete odds with many traditional computer enthusiasts, who value specs and raw performance power.
Therefore, a "fanboy" of anything (whether that's Apple, Tesla, or the startup of the day), is not necessarily being uncritical, they are just using less commonly accepted metrics of value.
Computers are getting better, sure but they are improving at a slower and slower rate. Moore's law has been dead for years now. Maybe the singularity is indeed coming, but what if instead of the typical 20-50 year predictions, it's instead 2000 years away. What if the 20th century's exponential curve was really just a blip in the long term, and we're headed into centuries of slow linear growth.
The likelihood of this happening is low, but far above zero. I'm amazed no one is talking about it.
I've given up on the term AI in popular media. When it's mentioned there is often interesting research or product development going on, but the term "AI" generally obfuscates it.
I almost want to give a pass to companies that use the term: these companies want to maximize profit, and if a nebulous marketing term helps them do so, it makes sense that they would.
What is more frustrating is that the press has totally bought into it. The point of a free press is to be critical, investigate, and poke holes in the marketing veneer. Sadly, the press seems to have adopted the term whole-heatedly without much thought, which in turn has added pressure to companies to market products as "AI".
Even worse, most tech journalists are actually smart and can spot the BS, they just choose not to.
There are also many examples of people being exonerated for horrible deeds because they were "just following orders".
An AI computer cannot commit murder. A monkey cannot commit murder. A rabid dog cannot commit murder. Only a human can commit murder.
So if HAL was programmed to kill, HAL did not commit murder, however maybe those that programmed it did.
It's more likely that HAL would be treated under a different, but well understood area of the law: products liability. If a chain-saw malfunctions and kills you, you can sue the chain-saw manufacturer, and if egregious enough maybe someone at the company will go to jail. If a self-driving car kills you, you can sue the car manufacturer, or maybe your insurance company will. If an AI named HAL kills you, you can sue whoever created it.
A computer accidentally or intentionally killing someone is not murder. It's a malfunctioning device, and the people who created it should be at fault, not the device itself (kind of like sending a chain saw to jail).
I'm constantly surprised at how confused this topic is.
It's very strange that the same people who advocated libertarianism and complete freedom years ago when men were in complete control, are now advocating for collectivism and support when they are in trouble.
The conservative/libertarian view should be that if men want to drink themselves to death, the government should not get involved.
Most ventures fail. Startup ventures fail even more often. If your goal was to be right most often, you would just bet that every new thing would fail. So there's something inherently illogical about being a fanboy about anything. A fanboy is definitely doing more than just looking at the odds and making a rational decision, they are putting their faith in something.
Because a fanboy derives their enthusiasm from more than simple reason and the odds, they become a threat to anyone that eschews emotion and solely uses traditional valuation models. Fanboys are hated not because they believe in a product or idea, but because they ignore tradition.
I also like Elon, but the source of the hate probably comes from two sources. The first is the audaciousness of his general proposal: that we give up technology that worked for a century (oil) and try to build something entirely different. It's based on a bias towards the status quo.
The second is probably more legitimate. No question Tesla has done amazing things, but is it really worth more than established players that sell 10X number of cars? The stock price doesn't make sense based on any traditional valuation, it can only be explained by popular enthusiasm and exuberance towards the vision that Elon provides. It feels to many that Elon is getting away with things that would doom any other company because of this perception. It feels unfair, hence the haters.
Personally, I do love Elon, SpaceX, Tesla, etc, but I don't want to get involved in the stock market casino. I support what he does because of his vision, but Tesla's stock price makes no sense to me. Instead, I'll cheer from the sidelines, and invest my money in boring ETFs.
Many people would give up their entire life fortune, any inheritance to their children, just to live for a few more years. People have been killing and dying searching for the fountain of youth for centuries.
Everyone is going to die eventually, yet the extremes people go to extend life is unlike any normal supply and demand curve.
I'm not sure there's anything more overestimated and over-hyped than longevity.
___[Big Well Known Consumer Products Company]___ is a very inefficient wealth transfer from ___[Blue Chip Stock Investors]___ to prestige ___[Traditional Media Companies]___
I don't actually think this is a better example. People have a lot on their plate, they can't be expected to investigate every issue to extreme depth. They rely on institutions. Many people join Breitbart politics because they trust Breitbart, even if they know little about it's underlying reasoning. Similarly, many people trust the national academy of sciences, even if they know little about the underlying science.
Even a critical reader can't know everything, and so they must trust people and institutions to represent them.
I actually, uncharacteristically, disagree with a lot of what Paul Graham has said about fans and haters. His basic premise is that we should judge people/endeavors based on critical thinking and solid metrics, rather than how we "feel" about something.
There are two problems with this:
1. Who gets to define the metrics. Any endeavor can be made to look great or horrible if different metrics are used. People who wish for "critical thinking" in public discourse are really wishing for their own critical thinking to be applied. e.g., building luxery high-rises is good because it raises a community's average home value... lets forget about the people who are being displaced.
2. There are no good metrics. For most new endeavors, we have very little data about what they are doing. No one knows the details of SpaceX's starship and how it will turn out (probably including SpaceX employees). In politics, no one knows what Trump will do next, or what his strategy (if any) has been. No one has any good data if the next VC backed social media company will be a hit or not.
Generally, in all of these areas, all we have is a leader and sometimes a vision, but rarely a plan. A "fanboy" is someone who believes in the leadership, and a "hater" is someone who does not. It's true that neither looks at the hard details, however those details often don't exist. A fanboy/hater just trust/distrusts the leader and vision, rather than taking a close look at the individual steps that they've made.
This is actually a good thing. Someone offers up a vision and their own credibility, and you make a decision to support them based on them, rather than specific moves they've made. You trust the person first, rather than what they do.
Apple Fanboys are who they are because they believe in Apple's vision of good design to create better electronics. Startup haters are who they are because they see a lack of discipline in the space. It's entirely natural, and probably preferred, for people to make decisions this way rather than unknown data.