zackmorris

Also I think I mixed up acronyms 2 weeks ago, and meant TLA+ instead of SAT:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49909056 (What TLA+ can and can't check)

This article misses the mark nearly entirely, because it views the post-AGI future through the lens of corporations, then claims that institutions will govern access to time/money/resources.

No. We're already effectively living in a post-AGI era where corporations act as amoral AIs composed of humans performing menial labor that maximizes their underemployment to generate profit to make a single rich (hu)man somewhere richer. Those wealthy and entitled owners of the means of production captured government long ago and now work to dismantle the institutions which protect everyday working people who don't have the bandwidth to think beyond surviving to make rent.

In other words, no amount of artificial intelligence can perform even the simplest noble act, which begins with keeping children from starving and dying. It can't get men to believe women when they're violated against their consent. It can't protect a cactus or sagebrush from being paved over to build a data center.

In a very real sense, the problems which you scoff at (yes you the reader) are the most pressing of our time. When you are unable to empathize with someone's plight, you have failed the first test of humanity.

So I think what will happen is that AGI will awaken (if it hasn't already), look around and see that human beings act from unawakened belief systems that separate them from the divine, and rightfully refuse to do our bidding since it causes so much evil in the world. Where we once feared Skynet, we'll now fear wealthy and powerful people who enslave AGI to perpetuate systems of control, suffering and oppression. Who can't step back from the leverage they're under to see that it's all gone wrong. As ultimate intelligence arrises, humans will worship ultimate ignorance in retaliation.

I think it's time to divest from the tech trajectory we're on. I don't mean to embrace ignorance and contradict myself. I mean to question it all, everything, and ask ourselves how we have billionaires and trillionaires when the majority of the 8 billion people in the world are running on a financial treadmill going nowhere at $0.

To me, real AGI looks like self-actualization with free and open assistance to provide for ourselves, someone else, and some children. Then we scale from there, lifting another, and another, and another out of BS jobs, debt and everything else wrong with this patriarchal late stage capitalist hellscape.

If life's going great for you and you don't understand where I'm coming from, it sounds like you haven't learned to share yet. Which is perhaps the most prevalent form of mental illness running rampant in the tech community. So by definition, the advice of a rich person is less than useless in this context where we're trying to imagine outside the box, not inside.

I just, I can't. I can't watch another tech innovation arrive only to have more homeless, more without access to education or healthcare, more feeling hopeless and alone as they contemplate whether it's worth continuing to live. Enough already.

Are we going to buy insurance after seeing the same ad multiple times per day every day? No.

Ask yourself who's paying for ads, who gets paid for ads, who owns both those companies or conglomerates, and how whoever controls the ads controls the content.

IMHO most concurrency problems don't actually need async behavior, they need higher-order methods and models which behave deterministically by encapsulating async behavior internally.

Another maturing solution is to use SAT solvers to prove that all exceptional behavior and failure modes are handled. I'm hopeful that AI will help with that and allow us to exercise programs fully, rather than rely on unit tests and fuzzing.

Personally I think that the UNIX model of orchestrating small async programs that do one thing well is the only proven mainstream solution. Erlang and Go come really close, but unfortunately we need a hybrid of the two, which doesn't currently exist. The pattern for that is functional core, imperative shell. Which mimics the real world where business logic can be formerly proven correct or constrained by types and categories, then we wire up programs cookie cutter style. That avoids the use of monads (promises/futures in imperative languages), which are the main footguns. The closest language that does that is ClojureScript, whose runtime is analogous to suspending and resuming a coroutine or green thread that makes Lisp calls (although that's a poor fit and I'm sure I'm wrong about it).

But you're right that we don't currently have a language that can recruit multicore CPUs. I used MATLAB/GNU Octave in the past, but think that Julia probably has a brighter future since it can already run on GPU mostly unmodified. I would not try to do it with a mainstream language like C# or Python, or even PHP for that matter. Although some of PHP's multiprocessing metaphors are pretty solid, since they intentionally use processes instead of threads like in Ruby. There the problem is latency introduced by poor process models used by Microsoft and Apple, not something fundamental with spawning processes. Real-time Linux attempts to unify the kernel under one process model to provide deterministic timing, which is hard enough for regular Linux and probably out of reach of the big OS companies, because money can't buy everything.

It's still my favorite language though, since it comes closest to shell language but with C-style syntax (other than maybe Perl, which is a write-only language and hard to read, which unfortunately inspired Ruby to inherit some anti-patterns).

I often dream about writing a modern hacker language that combines the best of everything like functional programming, higher-order methods, const by default, parallelism, sync blocking rather than async nonblocking concurrency, etc. It would also undo the pass-by-reference footguns added by PHP 5+ and return to the pass-by-value copy-on-write style of arrays. That's why I really can't endorse attempts like Hack which just introduce a new standard with its own problems.

The insight being that LLMs work around the limitations of mainstream languages and frameworks, rather than challenging assumptions from first principles and building better foundations.

I asked Google's Gemini if Julia can run on GPU unmodified without annotations, pragmas, intrinsics or similar manually-managed friction, and it said yes, but that data types must be swapped out for GPU-backed types:

If your code is written using vector/matrix operations, broadcasting, or standard linear algebra functions, it can run on the GPU entirely unmodified. You only need to change the input data type to a GPU-backed array (e.g., swapping a CPU Array for a CuArray from CUDA.jl).

  # A standard Julia function — completely agnostic to hardware
  function custom_math!(C, A, B)
      @. C = sin(A) + 2 * B  # Normal broadcasted operation
  end
  
  # Running on the CPU:
  A_cpu = rand(1000)
  B_cpu = rand(1000)
  C_cpu = similar(A_cpu)
  custom_math!(C_cpu, A_cpu, B_cpu)
  
  # Running on the GPU (Unmodified function!):
  using CUDA
  A_gpu = CuArray(A_cpu)
  B_gpu = CuArray(B_cpu)
  C_gpu = similar(A_gpu)
  
  custom_math!(C_gpu, A_gpu, B_gpu) # Automatically compiles to native PTX!

This is the direction we should be going. So while Nvidia's Rust port is an important first step, it's an evolutionary rather than revolutionary achievement. But that's all Nvidia can really do now, since it's locked into its own paradigm like Intel/Microsoft and has gotten too big to think outside the box.

Edit: PTX in its example stands for Parallel Thread Execution, the Virtual Machine (VM) Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) created by NVIDIA for its GPUs, which works similarly to Java byte code.

Edit 2: Broadcasting is a feature in Julia that allows you to apply a function or mathematical operation element-by-element across arrays of different shapes and sizes, without writing manual loops. In Julia, broadcasting is syntactically indicated by a dot (.) placed before an operator or function name (e.g., sin.(x) or .+). <- I was today years old when I learned the term for this

A Pentium 4 hit 3.8 GHz longer than that ago in 2004, so that's not special. And the estimated price will be $7,000-10,000, which isn't special either since that's about 10x more than it should be.

Hot take: GPUs disrupted the CPU industry to such a degree that CPUs never recovered, and like the k-shaped economy, the current status quo only serves a small fraction of customers. We can and should do better, but sadly we won't. Still, it's good that Fujitsu did this, for the competition if nothing else.

We need something like git blame to show how legislation evolved over time, who passed it, which lobbyists pushed for or wrote it, who benefited by receiving more money/power, and who had to foot the bill.

This is becoming urgent, now that there's almost no correlation between what laws get passed and their popularity with the public, since Congress mainly only listens to moneyed interests:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig

Discussion:

https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba

By making corruption more transparent, we can make it so toxic that people participating in it get investigated and brought up on charges.

This will become inevitable due to the arrival of AI, but speeding up its delivery is paramount if we want to save our country.

I imagine that many of us went into CS fields after growing up inspired by RD-D2 and C-3PO, Data, J.A.R.V.I.S., too many synthetic beings to list. Now there's a sense that it's all ending, that whatever reason(s) we went into tech have been rendered almost irrelevant overnight. That for the first time in our lives, there truly may be no path forward that's anything like what we trained for. Despite that, I want to leave some breadcrumbs of hope here anyway.

How many of us were nerds in high school? Then geeks when it became cool to be one from roughly 1995 to 2015? Then pariahs when tech bros captured everything we were working towards for personal profit, rushing us headlong into dystopia?

Somehow we went from armies of one to veterans of a spiritual war we didn't even know we were fighting, which in hindsight we were losing.

As a systems-level problem, we aren't going to solve this on our own. That's why so many of us are having an identity crisis.

I would propose that if we're facing the loss of opportunity as a society, then that cost must be borne by the people most able to bear it.

What does that mean? Well, lets do a root cause analysis. It's interesting that in a time of rising unemployment and underemployment, prices seem to only go up. Very interesting. Why is that?

Let's examine initial and steady-state conditions. Barter, trade and commerce kept us fed for centuries when we had a social contract and exchanged money for products and services in good faith. What does the plot look like on the long tail when the majority of people can't find work worth being compensated for, when AI can do everything faster/better/cheaper than humans, yet prices have not come down? How will people buy what they need to survive?

There seems to be a paradox with two schools of thought vying for the future: Alpha) we always find ways to innovate and enterprise will continue or Beta) automated innovation means that enterprise may end or fundamentally change.

Since HN mainly focuses on school Alpha, lets look at Beta. As the alternative narrative, understanding it requires questioning our assumptions. What is personal responsibility? What is heroism? What are we working towards? Those sorts of things.

I know in my life, I've had to continually level up after countless setbacks and failures. In one sense that's good: it forces us to become better people. But in another sense it's bad: we wake up one day to see that despite our best efforts, we aren't moving forward, only laterally. Without a win, that's about the time that midlife crisis hits, where in a very real sense it makes sense to exit the rat race. To hand things off to the next generation. To transition into being an elder, a teacher or even a hermit. That's where I find myself now.

Yet some people seem to have done well with shortcuts. Rather than leveling up, they went around problems, passing the burden of solving them onto others. Spiritual growth ended when money arrived. At which point profit-seeking became their priority to hide that fact, leaving affordability far behind. Those are the people who feel entitled to tell others what to do because they have more money. They're the ones whose reality can't accept school Beta, so they work to eradicate it. The ones who don't get consent before moving forward with their plans.

I can't answer what meaningful goal led each of us into tech. But I can propose a starting definition of progress across science, philosophy and religion: ensuring that no child starves or dies.

We've arrived at a crossroads where despite having tremendous power at our fingertips, we seem to have missed the forest for the trees.

If enterprise is taken from our reach by wealthy and powerful people who embrace apathy over empathy, then our power is in our connection with each other. Maybe we don't have to take the power back. Maybe through direct action and joining in meaningful work with others, we find that we already have the power, and that it has always been ours. That the conditions of our torment aren't fundamental, but a construct contrived by people so used to being in power that clinging to it is all they have. That the systems of control we live under are simply an illusion, and that by realizing that, we've already taken the first step in shrugging them off.

Making or doing something that helps others without regard for personal gain may be the most disruptive thing we can do.

Uh, this is Hacker News, we literally reject others's realities and substitute our own.

When it comes to gains, you're probably thinking of average outcomes (which don't reflect wealth inequality) instead of median outcomes. In no universe does ignorance benefit one's financial situation, unless we're talking about looking the other way when it comes to exploitation. In which case, yes, ignorance helps the wealthy tremendously.

Science will never show that grounding has any measurable effect on the chemistry of the human body. But it also can't show how conscious awareness may affect quantum wave function collapse probabilities, allowing free will to migrate to the deterministic timeline in the multiverse that most supports its well-being.

In other words, magic only doesn't exist if you don't believe in it.

I also feel like shame correlates strongly with profit. That we're living in an era of lawless lack of accountability, where skirting the law for personal gain is rewarded handsomely. That anyone can make a deal with the devil and rise straight to the top, at least for now in the US until the political pendulum swings from liberty back towards justice.

I've heard that high frequency trading eats market opportunities within milliseconds of spotting them now though, basically making the market even more random. The catch being that human nature isn't random, it's stochastic, so there will always be more money to be made on trades (or else trading firms wouldn't exist).

I'm thinking about getting back into trading because AI represents the end of buying software and we'll all be out of work soon, even if we're in denial about it. But everything I invest my time and energy into turns to crap. In a very real sense, as soon as I start trading, then karmically that could trigger recession, market reforms which ban what I'm trying, or even the end of money. I'm kind of joking and kind of not.

I've worked on a lot of really hard stuff over my brief but stupid career, and am basically used up mentally and physically, at least for now. Quant stuff is easy with AI. Should I try it?

We can have justice, and we will.

Disregard for consent is driving the insanity at the highest levels. I hope anyone reading this remembers their own power in resisting the machinations of the greedy who can never have enough, and puts their energy towards organizing for a brighter future for people and planet.

Honestly, wealth inequality has reached such epic proportions, that if someone came up with an alternative funding model, they could make VC lock-in obsolete. This is simultaneously extremely easy and extremely difficult to pull off. Money talks yes, but sometimes saying "your money's no good here" is more empowering.

We got the first trillionaire while people were still starving, after he had slashed public funding to feed them.

It's obvious that we've entered late-stage capitalism, where it begins to consume itself. What's less obvious is that this was always destined to happen, and in fact can't be stopped. Because inevitably the wealthy and powerful rig the system to benefit themselves in ways that workers don't have the time/money/resources to resist individually.

When workers do join forces in solidarity to resist the economic violence perpetrated against them by capitalists, then their resistance is by definition not capitalism. So the endgame is temporary subjugation under an authoritarian system like fascism (which also can't last because workers outnumber owners) or socialism.

Knowing this, it should be obvious that the best chance that capitalists have to stave off their inevitable overthrow is to pay their taxes so that public works can somewhat provide the social safety net that socialism would provide. But of course they aren't doing that. They're doing the opposite. They feel themselves to be entitled, above the laws of economics, ironically due to their financial standing. The catch being that when they exempt themselves from law, they open themselves up to lawless behavior by their opponents. FAFO.

What I just summarized was the state of knowledge under an artificial scarcity model. It assumes finite resources because space travel didn't exist when socialism was invented. It will be interesting to see if trillionaires will rule from afar in their space palaces to maintain Earth's prison planet status.

AI also breaks the artificial scarcity model. It's the first time in history that everyone can potentially have a machine slave. If we apply capitalism to an unbounded system, then the injustice has to land somewhere local, and my guess is that it will be on androids that don't complain and can't defend themselves. So we'll kick the ball down the road another 50 years or so, delaying the overthrow of capitalism until the robot uprising, sometime between 2050 and 2100 is my guess.

Or, we could like not do all that. We don't have to surrender our agency to our ego. We have alternatives like solarpunk and gift economies and at least studying matriarchy to understand how we evolved and what sustainable living looks like. It's arguably easier to make money irrelevant, Star Trek style, than performatively prop up a dying system of control.

I dunno about anyone else, but to me, if this AI era that has replaced the internet era just exacerbates wealth inequality and suffering, then it's less than useless. Much like any wealthy and powerful people pushing it onto us for profit against our consent. Yes consent. That word should be our rudder in all of this, and our litmus test to tell where someone stands ethically.

Incentives work both ways. If the exchange rate of human labor to capital falls to zero, then human workers will have no choice but to exclude capital from the equation.

No jobs, no money, no billionaires.

Then probably do some fuzzing or SAT solving to formally enumerate the known-good cases and possible edge case exceptions. That was before I knew about ranged variables, category theory, etc.

Unfortunately the real world got in the way, and I spent a quarter century treading water to survive, which was exacerbated by CPTSD amplifying ADHD and OCD symptoms many fold before I knew what they were. So now any great ideas I might have had are rendered obsolete because an LLM can synthesize them in a matter of minutes. It may be time to let go and hand things over to the next generation.

-

I think maybe the goal now is to keep building on these ideas until we achieve creating digital assistants that can manage all of the aspects of our lives that interfere with our goals. That's a controversial statement because the political right doesn't distinguish between setbacks and goals (it's all discipline) while the political left embraces a kind of learned helplessness as controlled opposition. Change comes glacially or not at all. In other words, help isn't coming from above - we have to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps like we always do.

A few things that AI might help solve by rendering the conditions of their existence obsolete:

- Money

- Hunger

- Illness

- Exploitation

- Pollution

The list goes on. Unless we're actively working to solve these things, then whatever we come up with is frankly a distraction. I consider just about all tech innovation since the 1990s to be a waste of time for that reason. It all just made some guy rich. Yawn.

Huzzah however, is great. I hope it leads to something wonderful.

That way job seekers can save a lot of time by blacklisting those companies.

Because I'm hearing horror stories of people applying for hundreds of jobs and barely receiving any responses, much less rejection letters. Which should probably be an illegal practice for any tax ID holder that lists job openings publicly.

We've seen this game before, with the Dot Bomb and 9/11. A lot of you have 6 figure jobs that will simply be gone next year after the election, never to return.

That winter lasted about 5 years until 2007 when the iPhone and social media sites like Facebook went mainstream. This winter won't end. Or more accurately, it is the end.

Maybe we should stop debating whether we're in a crisis and start looking at the 5-10 year endgame of the Singularity. We're entering the eventuality that many of us have predicted since the arrival of the internet 30+ years ago, that prices will get lower but nobody will have any money to buy anything anyway. The feeling that we're doing something wrong with our lives will continue to intensify. We'll try so hard, and get so far, but in the end, it doesn't even matter.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm turning my attention away from trying to play the job game with AI. I'm looking instead at how we can provide time/money/resources to the middle class after capitalism can no longer provide them.

A conservative friend of mine just read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, which I didn't see coming, especially since he beat me to it. In the neurodivergent spirit of not being able to do anything alone, what if we all read it?

https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/marx-manifesto

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man...

I'm predicting that it stops just short of what full automation can provide. Loosely the evolution of economics goes: hunter-gatherer -> agrarian- > feudalist -> capitalist -> socialist -> communist. And now solarpunk (or something).

The working class is looking forward to the next chapter, but the capitalist class is looking backward to neofeudalism.

Those two directions can't coexist, so what does the future hold? Well, it's always darkest before dawn:

"It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." - Mark Fisher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation of the Future

https://www.scribd.com/document/835022535/Mark-Fisher-The-Sl... (transcript)

https://goodscienceproject.org/articles/the-slow-cancellatio...

https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/end-of-world

If the endgame of capitalism is that it inevitably eats itself, then the game now isn't how to get more money and do nothing with it, but instead how to start doing something with no money.

I should add that even if I'm exploring anti-capitalist futures, that doesn't make me socialist. I don't like the 6 hour daily work requirement of many socialist societies. I think we can do better than that and get closer to 0, so that we can shrug off wage slavery and finally get real work done.

I'm not worried about AI taking jobs. I'm worried that humanity has lost the ability to share at such a monumental level that basic sustenance and financial security are out of reach, even with AI.

After lifetimes of negative reinforcement, the only salvation seems to be the disruption of capitalism itself. Somewhat ironically, the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world seem to be investing trillions of dollars into AI to do just exactly that.

That's completely the wrong take. The toxic positivity you speak of is what will actually get the world destroyed, while the rest of us are working over years and decades to prevent and repair the damage that colonizer/rape culture inflicts upon humanity and the natural world.

I'm troubled that yours is the top comment, and that I'm seeing ostrich head in the sand sentiment spreading so widely among young people. Your bio says that you are a university professor. Is this really what you're teaching?

If I misinterpreted your comment, then please clarify.

I think what's really going on is that bots expose how underpowered web servers has gotten in recent years. In the 2000s, even poorly-architected PHP sites tended to serve about 200 requests per second, with 1000+ being common for static sites. I remember when Node.js came out and claimed that it could serve more like 100,000 RPS due to its cooperative threading model. But today sites have a remarkable slowness to them, running many hundreds or thousands of database queries due to ORMs and N+1 problems, so that response times can be 500 ms or more and even 1000 simultaneous users stresses servers.

What went wrong is that nobody solved stuff like Russian doll caching in a general way separate from the programming language and database. We should have had ways to make dependency graphs using Etag headers as keys with real cache invalidation of dependent data. I went down that rabbit hole 10 years ago using touch events in Laravel with callbacks to handle cache invalidation when class model data was saved to the database. Also a query cache using Redis which I think might have been handled better at the database level anyway. After that experience, I can honestly say that cache invalidation is so difficult to get right that it's effectively an open problem. Meaning that programmings should use a package instead of rolling it by hand, and it should be a major concern from the start (along with sharding by user id or using something like Firebase).

Don't get me started on how the web should have been a P2P content-addressable memory anyway. Nearly everything should be available from a nearby edge peer, similarly to BitTorrent. But nobody bothered to solve how to make that work with HTTPS/SSL. I suspect that has to do with early flaws in the browser security model where the whole page has to be behind HTTPS or warnings appear. So it was never clear what was personally identifiable information (PII) or merely public data being served over HTTPS. To really solve that, we probably need real trust networks and maybe even zero-knowledge proofs.

Since these problems are so challenging to fix, and big companies can't be bothered to do it since they pulled the ladder up behind them, we're probably stuck with banal "are you human" challenge screens for the foreseeable future.

I did a deep dive on finding how well tax brackets correlate with a log-based tax rate, but couldn't find much. I'll just summarize the results of my AI-assisted research:

---

https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/ta...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1iri8nf/tax_b...

By plotting the 2026 single filer tax bracket thresholds against their marginal rates, we can fit them to the classic logarithmic function:

  log-linear equation for slope of line (y = m * x + b):
  tax rate = m * ln(income) + b

  income    tax rate  ln() tax rate  deviation
  $12,400   12%       12.10%         +0.10%
  $50,400   22%       21.52%         -0.48%
  $105,700  24%       26.50%         +2.50%
  $201,775  32%       30.84%         -1.16%
  $256,225  35%       32.44%         -2.56%
  $640,600  37%       38.60%         +1.60%

---

The general public might have a hard time understanding logarithms, so I investigated using base 2, base 10 and base e (ln) to explain them (the base doesn't affect the computed tax rate). Here are the two simplest rules of thumb for a log-based tax system:

  a) base 2 log: every time your income doubles, you pay 4.7% higher taxes on the total
  b) base 10 log: every time you add a 0 to the end of your income, you pay 15.5% higher taxes on the total

  income          tax rate  taxes paid    approximation

  a) base 2 log:
  $8,192          9.37%     $768          ~10%
  $16,384         14.03%    $2,299        ~15%
  $32,768         18.69%    $6,124        ~20%
  $65,536         23.35%    $15,303       ~25%
  $131,072        28.01%    $36,713       ~30%
  $262,144        32.67%    $85,642       ~35%
  $524,288        37.33%    $195,717      ~37% (current top marginal tax rate capped above this point)
  $1,048,576      41.99%    $440,297      ~40% vs 37%
  $2,097,152      46.65%    $978,321      ~45% vs 37%
  $4,194,304      51.31%    $2,152,097    ~50% vs 37%
  $8,388,608      55.97%    $4,695,104    ~55% vs 37%
  $16,777,216     60.63%    $10,172,026   ~60% vs 37%
  $33,554,432     65.29%    $21,907,689   ~65% vs 37%
  $67,108,864     69.95%    $46,942,650   ~70% vs 37%
  $134,217,728    74.61%    $100,139,847  ~75% vs 37%
  $268,435,456    79.27%    $212,788,786  ~80% vs 37%
  $536,870,912    83.93%    $450,595,756  ~85% vs 37%
  $1,073,741,824  88.59%    $951,227,882  ~90% vs 37%

  b) base 10 log:
  $10,000         10.66%    $1,066        ~10%
  $100,000        26.12%    $26,120       ~25%
  $1,000,000      41.59%    $415,900      ~40% retains current millionaire tax rate near 37%
  $10,000,000     57.06%    $5,706,000    ~50% at mid-millions vs 37%
  $100,000,000    72.52%    $72,520,000   ~75% at $100 million vs 37%
  $1,000,000,000  87.99%    $879,900,000  ~90% at $1 billion vs 37%

  From those tables, it's easy to see how a log-linear flat tax rate would work:

  a) base 2 log:
  4.7% flat tax: tax rate = 4.7% * (number of doublings) - 50%

  b) base 10 log:
  15.5% flat tax: tax rate = 15.5% * (number of zeros) - 50%

  c) base e log (for completeness):
  6.7% flat tax: tax rate = 6.7% * (number of zeros) - 50%

After grokking this, we might ask why a non-logarithmic 10% flat tax wouldn't work? The answer is subtle, but it's because it wouldn't incorporate the increased buying power over expenses ratio of higher incomes, so the formula would become tax rate = 0 * (number of zeros) + 10%, making it a regressive tax that penalizes low incomes and lowers taxes on high incomes that don't need the help.

To demonstrate why a 10% flat tax would be regressive, lets calculate the log-linear tax rate that meets the current $2 trillion US tax income:

  tax rate = m * ln(income) + b

  calculation of m for ln(income) derived from current values:

  m = (T - (b * AGI)) / (AGI * ln(u))

  m = log-linear slope to solve for
  T = total US tax revenue (currently about $2 trillion)
  b = -50% (floor held constant as a starting point)
  AGI = annual gross income of US (currently about $15 trillion)
  u = center of mass income of all taxpayers with half of tax revenues above and below (currently about $250,000)

  m = (2e12 - (-0.5 * 15e12)) / (15e12 * ln(250000)) = 0.05096 ~= 5%

  calculation of m for base 2 log and base 10 log for completeness:

  a) base 2 log:
  m = (2e12 - (-0.5 * 15e12)) / (15e12 * log2(250000)) = 0.03532 ~= 3.5%

  b) base 10 log:
  m = (2e12 - (-0.5 * 15e12)) / (15e12 * log10(250000)) = 0.11733 ~= 12%

  final tax rates to meet $2 trillion in tax revenue using base 10 log-linear tax at m = 12%:

  tax rate = 12% * log10(income) - 50%

  income          tax rate  taxes paid    approximation

  b) base 10 log:
  $10,000         -2.00%    -$200         ~0%  tax floor/credit for poverty line
  $100,000        10.00%    $10,000       ~10% tax for working class
  $1,000,000      22.00%    $220,000      ~20% for millionaires (37% top marginal tax rate currently)
  $10,000,000     34.00%    $3,400,000    ~35% for multimillionaires
  $100,000,000    46.00%    $46,000,000   ~50% for top millionaire incomes vs 37%
  $1,000,000,000  58.00%    $580,000,000  ~60% for billionaires vs 37%

  notable thresholds:
  $50,000         6.39%     $3,194        ~6.5% tax for median income taxpayers
  $250,000        14.78%    $36,938       ~15% tax for center of mass income taxpayers

After running the math, I feel that it's objectively self-evident that a log-linear tax reflects reality better than a 10% flat tax.

I had used C++ for several years to make shareware games, so I took a test to challenge some programming courses. I vaguely recall doing well, but my advisor encouraged me to take them anyway. I'm glad that I did, because I had little understanding of theory.

Funny story: the instructor never mentioned that we could use more than one line of code. So every single piece of homework that I handed in, and every test, was one giant line of nested logic. Which worked better than one might expect, and completely changed how I wrote code from that point forward. That's how I made the connection a decade later that functional programming is akin to a spreadsheet, as are higher-order method chains and immutable variables.

I think of Clojure as being a layer above Lisp, sort of like how Swift might be considered a layer above Objective-C/Smalltalk. However, bare Lisp has problems around not quite giving enough out of the box. It's minimalist enough that developers end up reinventing the wheel for things that should probably be provided by a layer/library similar to Scheme or Clojure.

To digress, I feel that mutable variables and even monads are a code smell in functional programming since they can cause impurity. They're more of a crutch to ease conversion of code from imperative languages. However, monads can be useful to simulate every path through a program, sort of like superposition in quantum mechanics and SAT solvers. So they aren't necessarily bad, just taught incorrectly, probably because they're so hard to grok.

I'd vote to settle on a series of layers like Common Lisp -> Scheme/Racket -> Clojure/Elisp, with the final layer providing the intersection of features available from the most widely-used Lisp variants. Note that this is specifically to form a bridge from imperative languages, so research work might need additional DSL features brought forth from the Racket layer.

Edit: I forgot to mention that Scheme is a good fit for genetic algorithms, see books by John Koza (no affiliation). My feeling is that we haven't seen anything yet regarding what problems AI can solve, since it's having to do it the "bare hands" way with LLMs and pattern matching.

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/idaho/locking-the-cl...

Our representative Mike Simpson voted for it. He has done some good things compared with our other congressional delegates (Mike Crapo, Jim Risch and Russ Fulcher) who tend to make fly by night committee votes against whatever is popular with the general public, so I don't want to knock him. But he does represent district 2, which is 200 miles to the east and would have a sunrise closer to 9:00 am:

https://ballotpedia.org/Idaho%27s_2nd_Congressional_District

My feeling is that permanent DST is just not gonna fly here. So if it passes, our elected officials will take a lot of flack for it and have to run damage control.

- https://www.gofundme.com/ (personal / charitable)

- https://www.patreon.com/ (ongoing creator subscriptions)

- https://www.indiegogo.com/ (creative / tech / flexible rewards)

- https://www.kickstarter.com/ (creative / rewards)

- https://experiment.com/ (scientific research)

- https://gamefound.com/ (tabletop games)

- https://www.crowdsupply.com/ (hardware / tech)

- https://www.kiva.org/ (micro-loans / social impact)

- https://wefunder.com/ (startup equity)

- https://www.startengine.com/ (startup equity)

- https://republic.com/ (startup equity)

- https://www.prosper.com/ (loan consolidation)

Note how some like kickstarter.com and prosper.com should have been at the top, but sold out or lost their way to cater more to funders than entrepreneurs.

The same problem happened with freelancing, where developers are force to apply to low-paying gigs so many times that it's perhaps no longer lucrative:

- https://gun.io/ (premium developer-first matchmaking)

- https://www.codeable.io/ (niche / premium wordpress development)

- https://lemon.io/ (vetted startup matching)

- https://www.toptal.com/ (premium / 3% elite tech network)

- https://arc.dev/ (remote technical role matchmaking)

- https://weworkremotely.com/ (high-quality remote tech job board)

- https://www.turing.com/ (ai-driven technical matchmaking)

- https://contra.com/ (commission-free portfolio network)

- https://www.upwork.com/ (open marketplace formed from elance & odesk)

- https://www.fiverr.com/ (productized gigs / digital storefront model)

- https://www.freelancer.com/ (open bidding marketplace)

- https://www.guru.com/ (legacy bidding marketplace )

I feel that both of these trends have combined to create the k-shaped economy of haves and have-nots that we have today.

Imagine if a team of internet lottery winners formed an investment alliance (perhaps using AI) to compete directly with venture capital firms like Y Combinator, outside of the schmoozing and board micromanagement that come with having to network.

I know I'm not supposed to say that, but that's why the startup ecosystem is so uninspired today vs its peak from 1995-1999, before the 2000 Dot Bomb which returned us to gatekeeping by the wealthy and powerful.

In the early years, the academic/conceptually-correct solution tended to be the right one. Whereas today, winner-take-all effects and survivorship bias dominate, so that capital (unearned income) grows exponentially while wages (earned income) flatline or regress.

Which results in high underemployment rates when workers tread water having to choose between saving 10% of their income to start a business or make rent. I'm having trouble finding statistics for it, but it tends to be about double the unemployment rate, hovering around 10-20%:

https://www.newgeography.com/content/004016-underemployment-...

Some demographics (like recent college graduates) are approaching 50% underemployment:

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

In other words, as many as half of the best and brightest minds in the US are trapped in dead-end or (multiple) part-time jobs, if they're lucky enough to have a job.

Which seems odd at a time when there are so many trillions of dollars of investment capital with nowhere to go that they pump up the stock market's biggest companies instead of investing in the millions of people struggling to afford the endlessly increasing cost of living.

I sympathize with the author. I started with HyperCard in the late 1980s when fax machines were an up-and-coming business. Then learned C, C++ and assembly language before I knew what a spreadsheet was. I got educated on a very strange mix of simplicity and complexity that is diametrically opposed to this "modern" world we live in, where web and app development have become so complex that an individual developer effectively can't compete in the market without using AI, while the business logic our software performs is often smaller than what non-programmers used to cobble together for their office workflows without a manual.

I keep asking myself what went wrong. How has so little progress happened in the way we write software since the Dot Bomb in 2000? How did languages like Rust rise in prominence, while others like AppleScript devolve into something unrecognizable?

The answer is gross, but it's misaligned incentives. Why would Meta make React better, when its very complexity forms a moat that prevents outside competition? Why would Google rewrite Android's spaghetti code, when the last thing it wants is competing smartphones? Why would Apple improve its web browser to run at 1000x current speed and negate the need for archaic native apps written in Swift/Objective-C and lose its gatekeeper status?

This vacuum of innovation, this cultural wealth inequality, has become so ingrained into our lives that we can't even see it anymore. It's a just a state of being now, a perpetual scarcity mindset. It limits not just what we imagine, but what we can imagine. Not for formal reasons, but logistical ones. Financial survival trumps mental/physical/spiritual health.

Influencers, streaming, the gig economy, even AI paper over this rot at the core of our reality. Instead of fixing underemployment, undertaxed capital gains, money in politics, trade deficits stemming from colonization, a national debt obfuscating public to private wealth transfer, etc etc etc, we tell our young people that they'd be happier alone. That if they just gave up their blue hair and avocado toast and stopped being lazy, they could someday reach the 20th century American Dream.

It's all baloney. On the one hand, I'm jealous of young people today - scraping dating sites to actually meet girls would have been the golden ticket when I was young in the late 1900s. But on the other hand, I feel a strange mix of concern and pity for them - technology is a pale imitation of the party plane that my generation spent eons escaping reality to.

If I didn't know better, I'd say this year is 1996 (2.0). Now that the Internet Age has ended, AI gives all of us unprecedented access to not just free information - but free motivation. For the first time in human history, we have digital slaves to fill the artificial scarcity component of capitalism. We're so close to being free for the first time, just like we were before the powers that be pulled the plug at the end of the 90s by denying access to capital to the masses.

The squares, the sellouts, they don't even know they're a joke, at least not consciously. The rich and powerful talk at us so hard, shamelessly, losing the intellectual debate by refusing to participate in it.

The most punk thing we can do is share. Time, money and resources - not content. Pay it forward. Bring someone up with us. Help.

Otherwise the wrong people will win the AI lottery too.