invalidOrTaken

I have been feeling this way about software. Don't get me wrong, there are some things I am very interested in and would work on for recreation (macros!), but a lot of it I'm less interested in.

Frankly, despite the obvious financial worries, it's been a little freeing. I can go do something else (because, uh, I may have to).

aaaaand it's been bought by BendingSpoons

This is freaking great. Thank you for posting!

if they're easily doable without, can we really say you're that ambitious?

people don't buy "housing." They buy views, they buy location, they buy neighborhood character. There are perfectly good houses in Nebraska---yet people aren't swarming to Nebraska. It's not because there's anything wrong with the housing.

sure, but there's the obvious counterfactual: if those engineers were scarcer, that level would likely be paid more

As a complete layman---not worth it. We live just fine. Medical researchers slave night and day to keep you healthy.

But if you have any ambition at all---if you want to map the local school board, or get a quick understanding of your finances, or set up a robot in your backyard---then, quickly proves useful.

Loved the post, have been batting around similar ideas w/clojure. I have two questions:

1. Have you had much success w/moar macros in the age of the LLM? I've been impressed by the models' ability to write good ones, but I can tell my taste/judgement for macros isn't quite there. But they tend to be pretty good at writing gnarly ones, and I would love to work more macros into my workflow. Would love your thoughts. (Have I taken "Simple Made Easy" too far and left macro value on the table?)

2. Do your models ever get confused with image-based dev, and state? It's seemed dumb to me to have models keep running `sed` to change files, but it is nice to have a human-readable, filesystem-backed record of definitions. Would love to hear your experience here.

sure, but input tokens are way cheaper than output.

There is also a phenomenon I've named "brevity collapse." Often, when shrinking a codebase, you find you need less glue. Additionally, because it is smaller, you can hold more of it in your head and see more opportunities for shrinkage. Surprising things happen when the bones of your language get more efficient---it's more like going from elephant to flea than elephant to grizzly bear. The smaller scale means there's less "overhead" code, which means you can go smaller still.

The reason we (as in university-funding society) need mathematicians is so that there's a steward over math that can help me, a complete layman, understand and apply mathematics. "Being a steward" will sometimes not look like much. Sometimes it's just going to be dicking around with LLM's.

But math is too important for it to be abandoned by humans and left to models. I, the tax-paying bonehead engineer, need mathematicians to exist. They can have their ego beaten up by Claude, sure, whatever, but they're not allowed to just close up shop in despair.

> all the landowners who own rural land that doesn't have a profitable development path attached to it

If it doesn't have a profitable development path attached, the price(and therefore "value") will go down, as will the tax burden.

a world where people eat so they can feed Big Computer sucks. We need Little Computer, driving robots in the fields.

I have people skills! What the hell is wrong with you people?

Interesting stuff. I do like the taxonomy of "computer work", where it's one part logic cognition, and one part ticky-tack details.

Wildgate

>Broadly, immigration has no effect on crime-rates.

This just isn't true. There are a lot of studies that purport this. There are also a lot of studies that purport the opposite. A quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime shows a bit of the field here.

The details get really important when talking about this. Details like:

- immigrant crime rates are often compared to non-immigrant rates, as if the native-born are a single bloc, rather than distinct segments

- "immigrants" treated as a single bloc

- immigrant crime getting controlled for by age, gender, income, and education --- which is cold comfort if the bulk of your immigration is poor uneducated young men

- first-gen immigrants, if immigrating to work, often have lower crime rates. This effect disappears with second-generation. But when they do crime, it is counted as native crime, rather than immigrant crime. That...doesn't quite cleave reality at the joints.

- labor law violations, tax evasion, etc., often not counted as "crime."

But if the justification for immigration is prior immigration, is there a stopping point here? Like, after you import a bunch of doctors, is it going to turn out that now you need a bunch of fast food workers, back and forth?

If you're a Clojurist like me, Janet (https://github.com/janet-lang/janet) seems to be aimed at this.

> Federal

> against the governor's will

that's kind of the idea

I haven't tried the others, but J meets all those requirements.

once expertise can drive benefits, expertise becomes a target for corruption

weirdly: if you want good scientists, don't listen to them!

for several years now my resume has labeled me a "Software Cultist"

man, if you want engineering guarantees, you're gonna have to pay for them, both in currency and realistic requirements.

I don't think shareholders really demand anything, most of the time. So much of the market is just passive 401k buckets.

This feels like a pathology of board/C-suite culture, something that they feel like they "have to" do, rather than actual angry letters from Joe Shareholder in Des Moines demanding more user data farming.

A good faith person who was also informed would be aware that this is basically a criticism of Romney-era neocon policies, and that agenda is no longer the animating force of the GOP (and was soundly defeated despite the wishes of the great and the good of the party establishment). In the far-right circles I frequent, the sentiment is, basically, "Triple, quadruple, quintuple the national debt, and crash the economy, if that's what it takes to halt immigration and have a country again, rather than an economic zone."

It was not free-market sentiment that propelled Trump to the WH.

>But the only way to get these people visas was to post the jobs publicly and hide them as much as possible. They did this by the hundreds, and it wasn't really a cost saving measure - if you are trying to get anybody in particular from Microsoft or Amazon and they are already here on a Visa, you have to go through the process all over again to sponsor them.

The spirit of the law is that this should not be your intent---that your intent should be to fill the job requirements, not to hire a particular person.

> that the shared playerbase is half the fun,

unironically I think this is the next frontier. If "other players" constitute part of the experience, how do you create/attract/curate a "quality" playerbase?

No, this is insane. I will make a thousand people uncomfortable on group dates if that's what it takes to have an actual country.

Are people hurt? Are things unfair? Would it be kinder and more humane if we could see each others' souls, and trust prevailed? Absolutely.

But we can not. And there is an asymmetry to civilization---it is easier to destroy than to build. This makes division and exclusion (other names: protection, safeguarding, immune system, comment moderation, firewalls) practical and essential. Do you want your startup's bank account "united and standing together" with some other startup's bank account? Division allows good things to remain good.

None of this is to say all gatekeepers are honest, all standards are fair, or that injustice doesn't exist. Everything is a work in progress. But if the worst you have to complain about is an inconsequential misunderstanding on a group date, count yourself lucky.

Maybe so, but touting Canada's "superiority" over the U.S. would lead to the "obvious solution" of getting rid of black people. If the difference is down to demographics, you want to know that, rather than look at people in country-sized blocs.

>Are we supposed to focus only on the certain cultures and ignore others when we talk about health and life expectancy?

If you want to get anything done, then hell yes! If life expectancy is low in Concord because of too many Doritos, but it's low in Phoenix because of a bad medical system, and it's mysteriously high in Fresno, you very much want to disaggregate. And you definitely don't want to ask "What is going so well in 'the U.S.'(Fresno)?" and then look at Concord.