diversionfactor

A perfect illustration of the gross unfairness and lottery system nature of the current venture-backed capitalist system. Continuing to perpetuate a system of winner-take-all rewards with its concomitant increase in inequality is a self defeating system inviting violent revolution. Piketty lays this out with abundant examples in Capital and Ideology:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_and_Ideology

Fellow techbros, we tend to ignore this and see only the positive in growth of technology and our own RSU totals. But we become ignorant of and insensitive to the plight of the rest of humanity both near and far. To our own detriment, as others in history have found:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O2om9pd-gOc

Companies who fail to take advantage of the cognitive multiplication effect of LLM will be replaced by those who do.

And what if the LLMs start producing the highest rated and most alluring science fiction? Isn’t banning them then tantamount to a cognitive bias against non-human intelligence? What is the ethical justification for such anthropocentric practices?

tl;dr student doesn’t appreciate the extreme privilege they live in (LA rent free?!?!?) and don’t realize this is totally untenable for someone scraping by trying to afford college (i.e. anyone in the USA not in the upper class).

Let me know how that works from the 43rd floor.

As an American living in Germany I bike to work every day, even in the snow in winter. There are dedicated bicycle paths which are free from obstruction where I can commute, get groceries (I have a special trailer for heavy items), and enjoy a weekend with the family. I can cycle between cities, all the way to the Netherlands, which has even better dedicated cycling routes.

https://www.radroutenplaner-deutschland.de/veraDNetz_EN.asp

Should I choose public transport, it is ubiquitous and very cheap (even free for some people). Fast and slow trains, streetcars, some subways and buses, but most importantly frequent and with total coverage by law if I remember correctly, no one can be more than 500m from a public transport stop. Even in the countryside you can take public transport everywhere: I have visited rural areas entirely by train and even a farmhouse by bus with a short walk. This is typical European lifestyle at least for the wealthier northern continental countries.

https://www.german-way.com/travel-and-tourism/public-transpo...

There is a downside, however. Everyone - that is everyone except the very rich and those in the countryside - lives in an apartment. An apartment which, even by lower class American standards, is tiny, dark, grungy, often ridden with mold, and with non-existent amenities. For the price I pay in rent, including exorbitant utility costs, I could get a much nicer place anywhere outside the coastal elite urban cores. My fellow software developers, who are paid far above average for German engineers (or even doctors here) are in the same boat. Tiny and grimy is the norm:

https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/berlin/berlin/wohn...

What I wish I saw less of in the car/transit debate was moralizing, and what I wish I saw more of was engineering tradeoffs. You can try to have cars and houses and transit and high salaries and (relatively) low taxes and what you get is NYC or SF - a playground for the rich and a dystopian hellscape for the average middle class worker. If you make transit ubiquitous and affordable with affordable housing and restrictions on cars you get everyone in tiny accommodations, the kind of mass single family home communities and even NYC townhomes and billionaire skyscrapers would never be approved by German town planners. Engineering tradeoffs, which can mean many tiny cars you never see sold in the USA:

https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/shopping-auto_dealer-c...

Let's have more discussion on the tradeoffs, and maybe we can find solutions of which Larry David would say:

"You're unhappy. I'm unhappy too. Have you heard of Henry Clay? He was the Great Compromiser. A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied, and I think that's what we have here."

Reference for the uninitiated, a good read. Its veracity on the individual level may be questionable, but the techniques of subduing third world countries via heavy debt burdens is well documented.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_H...

I thought spam was not allowed by HN’s content policies?

Not actually $0, just rents another property on the same land. Would like to know the actual property taxes, maintenance and utility costs. No one except perhaps royalty pays $0.

I worked that long in another country, as an American, and had kids there. Then I was laid off. The government didn’t care, my employer didn’t care, I had to leave and uproot everything. This is how it works in most of the world. Only in America do we think an immigrant “deserves” a job while letting native born citizens go hungry.

Working from home is no picnic, and neither is it a sin; I rue those who think it is other Than labor and struggle within.

Simply refuse, my comrades, Stand fast and don’t go in; Parry threats, demerits, evals, If fired, grok leetcode again.

Unless I’m literally starving, and maybe not even then; will I ever inhabit a cubicle In the office again.

Oh no, consequences for the coastal elites, the horror.

After watching the video several times, I would definitely have slowed down seeing the pedestrian near the cross walk a hundred meters back, and would definitely have stopped in this instance. You never know when someone is going to run or not look for a car and being cautious saves a life. I live and have lived in a city as a driver for decades in multiple countries including in very dense areas and in no case would the FSD behavior be acceptable. We know from the Uber example this kind of automated disregard of pedestrians can result in death.

This is a much bigger and more serious issue, dozens of pedestrians are killed by cars every year in my city.

‘Socrates: There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the “threshold of old age”: Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?’

https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/arch/greeks/PlatoRepublic.h...

In 2,500 hundred years we have advanced much in technology. In philosophy, perhaps, none at all.

“ After using CRISPR to knock out a gene and render the males sterile, the team implanted them with sperm-producing stem cells from another pig. The normally sterile males would then create offspring with that pig’s genes.”

Wasn’t this the plot behind Jurassic Park’s sterile dinosaurs?

In a developed country low birth rates are the norm. The exception is certain religious subgroups within these countries. Notably Mormons with 50% higher fertility rates than average in most counties surveyed:

https://rsc.byu.edu/latter-day-saint-social-life/religious-i...

And Orthodox Jews with over triple the birth rate of secular Jewish women:

https://en.idi.org.il/haredi/2020/?chapter=34272

These two groups also have high defection rates of around 50%, but if current trends continue (always a big if in demographic studies) most people in the future developed world will either belong to strongly religious groups or be former members of such groups.

I myself am secular, strongly so. My wife is just as strongly religious and her fertility rate is over three times our national average at her insistence which I voluntarily agreed to. I’m concerned that us secularists have no good answer to why anyone should have children and as I result I can see secularism dying out long term, which I consider a philosophical tragedy. If anyone has any answers I’d love to hear them, unless the only answer is, oddly enough Augustine’s religious and Schopenhauer’s secular retort that the voluntary extinction of humanity would be the most supreme achievement of the will:

https://theconversation.com/amp/solve-suffering-by-blowing-u...

Regardless of the validity of such arguments, in my mind they fail the Darwinian test and will be eliminated by the ruthless and indifferent force of biological evolution.

Don’t sweat it. I’ve invested multiple hundreds of thousands in venture-backed startups over the past two decades, and lost all of it. None of the startups was successful. These were all audited venture-backed with experienced founders many of whom I’ve known personally in the Austin tech scene. Losing money is the rule in any kind of investing beyond the prevailing real interest rate. It’s all speculation. By the sound of it your diversification is paying off. Actually you’re quite smart in that regard, you didn’t put it all into startups like me.

Here's an idea for those who want to achieve a fast high ranking on Stack Overflow:

1. Use their API 2.3 to get the latest questions for your area of interest (Javascript/React, whatever):

https://api.stackexchange.com/docs

2. Feed the questions into your LLM of choice such as Huggingface StarCoder:

https://huggingface.co/blog/starcoder

3. Review the answer manually to make sure it's legit and not a hallucination or just plain wrong: ideally writing some nice UI so you can see, say, the SO Q on the left, proposed answer on the right, and a bottom terminal where you can run the proposed solution code to verify. With enough self-verification loops you could cut out the wetware middleperson, but this manual step is crucial to avoid incorrect answers and to keep with SO policy:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po...

4. Parley #3 to quickly up your ranking to be one of the top users in your area of expertise:

https://stackoverflow.com/users

5. Submit a Y Combinator application to create a company doing 1-4 above to solve real world software problems posted online, like Mechanical Turk meets Stack Overflow meets Upwork.

https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

6. Bonus points if you are the first "post-code" startup whose code for doing #5 above is actually written 100% by transformer agents:

https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/transformers_agents

And yet, at exactly this time last year:

"Microsoft to Nearly Double Salary Budgets, Expand Stock Compensation"

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...

So they are freezing after the doubling? This behavior seems skittish and an overreaction, especially given their continued profitability and high margins. Corporate executive behavior reminds me of interacting with ChatGPT:

Exec: "What should I do to retain people?"

GPT: "One possibility is to double your salary budget and expand stock compensation."

Exec: "All my golf buddies' are cutting compensation at their companies, what should I do?"

GPT: "In this situation, try freezing salaries and reducing stock compensation."

Having friends and former colleagues who work in the "yuppie Wall Street job", it doesn't pay the obscene salaries you think it does, even at the major hedge funds and investment banks, even in NYC and Chicago. The number of super-high NFT development jobs is vanishingly tiny. Most jobs at trading and investing firms for developers pay the same or even less than elsewhere. Sure, if you're a Calypso or Endur or Murex specialist you can command the $300+/hr rates, but then you may be out of work for six months or more when the project finishes. There's no easy move from FAANG while keeping the high salaries, there's 1+ orders of magnitude more jobs in FAANG (or at least there were) than in high paying non-FAANG development jobs. Most development jobs pay not much more than an experienced public school science teacher, and without the job security.

The origins of Magical Realism are (appropriately) obscure:

"German magic-realist paintings influenced the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli, who has been called the first to apply magic realism to writing, aiming to capture the fantastic, mysterious nature of reality." - Bowers, Maggie Ann (2004). Magic(al) Realism. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-26854-7.

Rather than any one person or culture being its source, it may perhaps be better attributed to an aspect of human storytelling since time immemorial.

The latest CDC Homicide Mortality by State numbers show neither Florida nor Texas even in the top 20:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality...

Although many of the highest homicide states are in the South, such as Mississippi and Alabama, many are not, such as New Mexico and Illinois.

Region-wise, the contention "the region the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence" is not supported by the data. Taking the latest FBA violent crimes (2016 is the latest I could find online broken down by Metropolitan Statistical Area) homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

The safest MSAs in America, tied with zero homicides in 2016, are:

Albany, OR M.S.A. 0 Bangor, ME M.S.A. 0 Casper, WY M.S.A. 0 Columbus, IN M.S.A. 0 Dalton, GA M.S.A. 0 Danville, IL M.S.A. 0 Iowa City, IA M.S.A. Lewiston-Auburn, ME M.S.A. Missoula, MT M.S.A. Ocean City, NJ M.S.A. Oshkosh-Neenah, WI M.S.A. Rochester, MN M.S.A. St. George, UT M.S.A.

These are all relatively small, here are some larger MSAs with lower homicide rates than New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA M.S.A.:

Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH M.S.A. Gainesville, FL M.S.A. Midland, TX M.S.A. Santa Fe, NM M.S.A. Urban Honolulu, HI M.S.A. Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR M.S.A College Station-Bryan, TX M.S.A. Fargo, ND-MN M.S.A. Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI M.S.A. Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH M.S.A. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA M.S.A. El Paso, TX M.S.A. Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island, FL M.S.A. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA M.S.A. San Diego-Carlsbad, CA M.S.A. Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach, FL M.S.A.

Thus the contention of "the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence" does not appear supported by the data.

San Marcos is one of the most overpriced and fastest growing markets in Texas, right next to Austin, priced to the stratosphere since the Californians moved in. Austin is my home town, but I couldn't afford to live in San Marcos.

For typical Texas land priced around the same per acre as Alaskan land:

https://www.land.com/property/Fox-Hunters-Club-Rd-Bon-Wier-T...

$19,708 - 3.79 acres On a public road, with electricity (water you'd need a well). Remote East Texas, and by remote I mean you're 20 min drive from the nearest city (Kirbyville with some gas, food, small department stores) and 40 min drive from the nearest Walmart SuperCenter (the real sign of civilization in rural America).

Or if you prefer something closer to a city, the desert just outside Del Rio, you can see:

https://www.land.com/property/Windmill-Rd-Del-Rio-Texas-7884...

$15,997 - 2.05 acres On a public road, I see electricity nearby but you'd have to run it to your land ($15k+ probably), or just do solar since there's plenty of sun there. Well water and septic. Bordering the Rough Canyon national recreation area and Lake Amistad, if you like boating and hiking (watch out for rattlesnakes). I'd say a "suburb" of Del Rio, an apartment building and single family homes 7 min drive away as well as a cafe. The nearest Walmart Supercenter is 30 min drive away in Del Rio, as well as the city of Del Rio and the general aviation airport is by the Walmart, if you wanted to fly to San Antonio or Monterrey.

Now you might be saying, I want true suburban land, like surrounded by other single family homes, with water hookups and neighbors, and commuting distance to a major city. That's going to cost you more - but not much more, especially given it's already got all utilities:

https://www.land.com/property/1631-Old-Henry-Court-Angleton-...

$33,000 - 1 acres About 15 minutes drive from the nearest Walmart Supercenter in Angleton, as well as an HEB (gotta have that HEB), and 40 min commute to Pearland where you could actually find city jobs, or 60 min if you want to go all the way to downtown Houston (I used to have a manager who did just this drive every day for 10+ years, so she could live on a working horse farm).

That's where my disconnect is for Alaskan land prices. I can only surmise it's because the federal and state government own like 99%+ of the land in Alaska and only sell a very small amount at any time to rigidly control the prices and development. Like an Uber-California in that way.

Where can I find this cheap land? When I check online zillow, or via Alaskan state land auctions, the price of building lots even without road access in the deep interior is more than that of a suburb in Texas!

So if you add audio output to it so I can talk to my computer like in Star Trek, I'll venmo you $100. Then, I want to have a command line module so I can ask it to write files to the local disk and run them, so I can deploy code it's just written to AWS, that's worth at least another $100.