azey47

I’m not sure I agree. I’m using Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Astra on a continual basis all day long professionally for software development but it’s still very much the case that the models are inclined to over-engineer and produce fairly sloppy code. Of course the ROI is outstanding and I wouldn’t go back but I still find it’s necessary to have robust sets of rules around how to write code by domain. We have DB rules and conventions, React rules and conventions, etc. which help steer output towards something sensible. I would basically never ship “out of the box code” from these models and still periodically do “slop cleanup” throughout our codebase.

>I would much rather see a universal basic services program that guarantees universal free at the point of use access to services such as housing, healthcare and education provided directly by a government body or non for profit enterprises.

I agree that creating such a program creates political incentives for increasing it over time in excess of inflation. That's a real cost that needs to be weighed against alternative approaches.

But consider what happens when you make services "free at the point of use access". The price no longer serves the purpose of summarizing and transmitting information about the good or service. The consumer of the "free" good no longer gets any information about the scarcity or quality of the resource, and the provider no longer gets any information about the demand for their good and consequently how much to produce. Prices are the primary mechanism for coordinating decisions efficiently by summarizing actionable decision making information and economizing on expensive knowledge acquisition, interpretation, and communication costs.

It should hardly be a surprise when demand and consumption of those goods and services with a zero price goes up, and supply and quality goes down. Now suddenly you need to grow large bureaucracies for rationing the resources which will inevitably miss the mark of serving disparate individual needs as efficiently as the price mechanism could in a free market.

It's the classic recipe for degrading quality and creating shortages. I believe it's much more desirable for housing, healthcare, and education to be served by the market precisely because of how important they are to people. Putting cash into people's pockets directly has a much smaller distortive effect on market operations, and allows people to express their preferences in allowing them to vote with their dollars, as opposed to "free at point of service / consumption" goods and services.

It's no accident that UBI was proposed by Friedrich Hayek, and the Negative Income Tax by Milton Friedman. You could hardly accuse either of being in favor of wealth transfers, but they both understood the profound negative consequences of distorting prices, which essentially is lying to economic decision makers about the costs and benefits of taking certain actions, resulting in inevitably less efficient allocation of scarce resources that could possibly have been used more productively elsewhere in the economy.

>To accomplish this, we assembled the entire set of published studies in this literature and identified the core estimates that support the conclusions from each study, in most cases relying on responses from the researchers who wrote these papers. Our key conclusions are: (i) there is a clear preponderance of negative estimates in the literature; (ii) this evidence is stronger for teens and young adults as well as the less-educated; (iii) the evidence from studies of directly-affected workers points even more strongly to negative employment effects; and (iv) the evidence from studies of low-wage industries is less one-sided.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w28388

I agree UBI is better than a minimum wage, but it seems a Negative Income Tax as advocated for by Milton Friedman would be still better. It would have the desired effect of supporting the poor with guaranteed income (something minimum wage can’t do because of the labor shortage it creates, especially amongst low-skilled employees), but do so a lot more cost effectively than UBI since you wouldn’t be guaranteeing payments to people who don’t need them and would avoid any welfare trap created by existing welfare programs.

Sure, historically that is true, but that historical usage doesn't capture that, philosophically and ideologically - absolute monarchy and communism just aren't that different - both rely on subjugation of the individual's rights to some authority (a monarch in one case, and society in another).

The historical, and common left/right distinction is even more absurd when you consider that socialism is considered left-wing, and fascism is considered right-wing. Where does that leave Nazism? Centrist?

What I like about the spectrum put together by the Objective Standard is that it essentializes the ideological distinctions between these movements, as viewed from the perspective of "degrees of respect for / violation of individual rights".

I am well aware that it's not the way most people understand the terms left-wing and right-wing, but to be frank, most people DON'T understand the terms, because they're not conceptually consistent in the slightest.

That's an interesting perspective.

I know the left/right spectrum has many definitions, and there is little consensus on them, but I think this captures the essential philosophical and ideological distinctions: http://www.pocatelloshops.com/new_blogs/politics/wp-content/...

So by my measure, both Republicans and Democrats are in the middle leaning left - both supporting various forms of rights violations. Libertarians are further right, advocating a lot of good rights-protecting policies, but often for the wrong reasons - so they're not consistent in the policies they promote.

Also, "closed borders, mostly for laissez-faire economic reasons" doesn't really make sense, as that's an explicitly anti-laissez-fare policy (if you understand laissez-fare as "abstention by governments from interfering in the workings of the free market.", as it's most commonly meant).

Ah, good to know the names for these. I'm very skeptical of the acoustics of the Vineyard style, having experienced the "incredible" acoustics of Walt Disney Hall personally on stage, and from the audience.

However, I'll do some more reading on it. Sadly, it seems there's a lot of political pandering and lack of critical hearing (reviewers don't know what to listen for), so it can be hard to find reliable or useful reviews. Nothing can substitute attending a hall and listening in person.

> When was this? It's only been open a few months.

Sorry, I wasn't very clear with my pronouns. I was referring to the Walt Disney Hall that I was describing in the paragraph before.

There are no miracles with acoustics. Try all you want with acoustic baffles, you won't be able to get good acoustics and distribution of orchestral parts with seats to the back right of an orchestra. There's nothing wrong with the traditional "bowl" shape of a good concert hall!

Beside being absolutely hideous on the outside, there is no way that hall has good acoustics.

Having seats to the side and behind the stage means you will have bad merging and resolution of parts. Orchestral seating is specifically designed for an audience sitting in front. For example, when attending a performance of Shostakovich'a Cello Concerto, the cello was very difficult to hear, as were several other orchestral parts, causing "holes" in the score. It was an atrocious experience.

Toyota is pretty much a charlatan. Walt Disney Hall has one of the most atrocious acoustics of any hall I've been to. They actually had to invest quite a bit of time and money trying to "fix" (unsuccessfully) the sound after the initial opening. This is why performances there require microphones and reproduction using speakers, in the hall!

I actually had the opportunity to play (piano) on stage and have a friend go seat by seat, evaluating the sound from each position. Needless to say, all the expensive seats had, by far, the worst acoustics. Best sound was from row H, way off-center.

I've heard from orchestral musicians performing there that they couldn't hear themselves, or their fellow performers properly either, making performing challenging. At some point, I recall the hall receiving the distinction of "worst hall" from performing musicians.

On top of this charade of "good acoustics", which I am shocked that Germans fell for Toyota's BS, this hall is terribly ugly and unappealing.

How sad.

I was in HR15. I got a $70k raise. Went from working as a Junior accountant making $40k to Software Engineer making $110k (not even counting my $15k signing bonus). The ROI from the program is beyond ridiculous. Best experience of my life.

That's true. I've considered the possibility of creating an API based on a headless browser that will allow a user to login and actually make changes to a private diary, but the problem with that approach is that it would blatantly stepping on MFP's terms of service, and would raise red flags with the company as far as potentially compromising secure user data.