yason

However, I don't think wealth tax is a good tax. You'd be taxing something you want citizens to have: wealth. It seems that wealth tax is often used as an easy fix to "we can't somehow tax the income of high-earning wealthy people because they arrange the legal ownership of their wealth so that it's hard so let's tax their wealth". What should be fixed instead is profits slipping out of the taxable base. In general, a lower but wider tax base is always better than higher spot taxes that encourage people to optimize. Wealth tax is just a slap-on solution that mostly just encourages tax planning.

The inequality of the distribution is the true issue, and indeed not taxing the wealthy enough does accumulates that. A country should be proud to tax widely and moderately, even the highest earning people and businesses. A country can't compete with a tax haven but a tax haven can't compete with a functioning state and society. Working to tax wealthy people more in par to what ordinary people are taxed would work towards a more equal society. Some of the wealthy people would move away but the country should recognize and maintain that it has other factors of appeal than the tax rate.

We want to know what it is in birdwatching that registers as beneficial because if the factor(s) are distinct and isolated then the same benefits can be scaled outside of birdwatching.

And if you just went birdwatching because they said so, you wouldn't know why it might be beneficial to you. Or maybe there's a factor that wasn't identified separately and birdwatching itself doesn't improve your cognitive capabilities while, for many others, it supposedly does.

You would want to know you're getting benefits from whatever you decide to do if you're doing it in order to gain those benefits.

How does anyone accidentally give personal information to an LLM? Because either you don't in the first place (eh, I guess, most people?) or you do but for some specific, weird reason (I can't think of any but I guess these exist).

Social media allowed you to be in touch with people in a way that wasn't possible with phone calls, text messages, instant messaging, email, or domain-specific forums.

What I could do in Facebook in 2010 was stay "friends" with selected acquaintances such as old classmates with whom I never was in email terms, messaging terms, or any other terms except having known them in school (or at work or at a hobby or...) I could follow their life via their posts, and I could leave a comment, sometimes, without any expectation that we should ever talk, meet, chat, or become more than old classmates. I haven't sent email to anyone in my school that I didn't know outside of school, as a friend. I don't have their numbers and it would be awkward to even consider calling someone with whom we didn't necessarily even talk much in school. But it was perfectly okay to ask someone to be your friend on Facebook (like, Hey, I know you? and if he did remember he would accept) and follow their postings and maybe (re)kindle something with no pressure to grow it into anything more than that.

We had that. Now... we no longer do. Or we still have Facebook and we can send friend requests to old acquantainces that I'd like to follow but there's nothing to follow because they aren't posting and because Facebook wouldn't show me their posts. So we're back to the point where actually making contact with another person (on Facebook) basically requires sending them a message in Facebook. Which already goes beyond what's expected from an old acquantaince on Facebook.

I recall a site for classmates where you could register to your school years and see your classmates there. But that was before social media and there weren't any posts that you could comment. You could just see your classmates listed there, and one in ten might have written a few words in their profile. And that was classmates only, not ex-work colleagues or other people you've passed behind in your life. Facebook was really good at the time it became a thing.

We still have email, instant messaging, etc. but what's the platform today where I can keep in touch with people I'm not emailing or talking with? Is there one?

First, it will be less about motoring and driving a vehicle in a dynamic environment but focusing on pleasing the camera with your eyes. Back in the time my driving instructor said the eyes should move around all the time, every second to far, near, mirrors, side mirrors, etc.

Second option is that some people will just tune out of everything and I mean everything. When the car has too much to say they won't even look at or register at anything anymore. Blind spot warning is useful and so is engine high temperature warning or brake fault, but if you're constantly bombarded by ping pong bleep bing beeps who the fuck will care anymore?

Third, this will just prompt homebrew hacking to disable these things and basically de-digitize these complex systems. This will inevitably lead into a cat and mouse race between users who want to control and own their vehicle and manufacturers who are forced to keep controlling and owning the owner instead.

Obviously, if governments really cared about safety and not adding simple warnings to merely patch and train behaviour they would ban all attention-requiring context-specific user interfaces in cars that more than destroy all even theoretical safety gains from these beepers. It's illegal to look up your phone while driving but perfectly legal to wade in deep menus and panes via a touch panel while the car is beeping at you.

It certainly is a transitional period where each summer more and more people realize that eventually something needs to be done, "maybe a/c next year" for many years until the year of installation finally comes.

In Northern Europe it certainly is still a rare occurrence that everything gets heated so warm that the air does no longer cool during the night and you can't cool down for the next day. Yes, we do get heat waves but they don't last very long. Yes, summers are mostly getting hotter but it's still nothing like in southern Europe. We might have several weeks of 25-28C with a lot of lakes and sea to dip into.

Admittedly it can be tormenting in city apartments where you might not have a place for A/C even if you wanted to, and where you might not have enough outside walls to effectively cross-ventilate. Further, the stone and pavement in a city absorb heat like a sponge which keeps the average a few degrees warmer than greenleaf areas across the hot season.

Yet I think maybe half-ish of households (or at least detached houses) already do have A/C. Installations have been steadily creeping up in the last 25 years. But those units aren't there because of their cooling capacity (which isn't necessarily always even used). Those are air-to-air heat pumps that keep the house warm in the winter, and can be used for cooling in the summer.

One fundamental thing would be to make it illegal to lawyer redefinitions of common words. If the sales of a game uses the word "buy" it should not be legal to redefine "buy" in that context to actually mean lump-sum lease or something.

I'm pretty sure the game studios wouldn't like me to buy their games if I were to amend the terms of sale with a clause in fine print that the term "pay" means "setting up a temporary IOU for which I reserve the right to have it resolved into nothing at my discretion". So, I'll pay later if I decide pay, maybe never. That's effectively what their "buy" means.

I consider it a feature that acts as a filter.

The internet was a bubble: you could make a web page and sell it for millions because next year it was going to be worth billions. And then internet grew up.

AI is technology that's still beginning to find its place to settle. It's far from mature and that's perfectly fine. We'll have reached a reasonable plateau once the technology and the related stack stops changing every month and instead develops incrementally and boringly over the span of few years. That's like internet in the 2008-2010, and many investors will have a collection of new burn marks by that time.

Not only financially there's an unsustainable push for AI by the zealots du jour who are more often than not managers rather than engineers. AI is championed most ruthlessly as a silver bullet revolution by people who least grasp the limitations of AI. It'll take some time to figure out the dreamed-up proceeds won't be there, and "then what?".

I predict that the real bottlenecks of development will re-emerge as soon as the limitations of AI will manifest out of the hype. They bottlenecks are human-based, in development processes and in human interactions. A large part of development is trying to understand what we want and what we need and you can't offload that to AI.

I think many people have an expectation that (all) laws are just and needed because... somehow they're the law.

In reality, laws can be unjust, unnecessary, biased, and completely arm-wrestled together by people strictly following an agency of their own. Other laws are put together by sheer ignorance and lack of thinking beyond mere good intentions. The first question shouldn't even be "is this law fair" but "was this law made fairly".

It creeps me that people treat laws as axioms whereas they're just polished and reinforced opinions. Sure, many laws we can agree on, and many others that don't agree on aren't worth changing, but you should always question the law and question where it came from before choosing to accept it.

I can see the same pattern with technology such as the various digital restrictions management (DRM) schemes.

This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".

People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.

Anecdotally, the cassette player that came with the machine had a misconfigured tape head. Because there was no internet nobody knew why it didn't load most of the games I got with the machine. However, saving and loading programs did work. So, I started writing programs from the user manual and game listings from some programming books I found in the library, and saving them on my cassettes. Because the user manual covered not only some tutorial BASIC but also the machine's graphics, sprites, sounds, and what other features I eventually, after getting some hang of writing BASIC, did also realize that what I could create with the machine hardware itself was virtually unlimited. I didn't necessarily know what the commands did with the underlying hardware but I knew if I poked certain numbers into certain addresses I could make my sprites appear on the screen and make them move around.

By the time I got the cassette player fixed by some computer repair shop, learned about tuning the tape head, and I could finally load all the games bundled with the machine, I was seriously hooked with programming and the highly desired games no longer seemed that interesting in comparison. I knew someone sat down and wrote all those games and instead of playing them I could learn to do the same myself.

Been programming ever since.

Failing to recognize the dangers would be an instant fail; knowing that something reeks of undefined behaviour, or even potential UB, is enough: you just write out explicitly what you want and skip the mind games.

What has generally worked for me is paraphrasing the old adage "Write the data structures and the code will follow" over to AI. Design your data, consider the design immutable and let the AI try fill in the necessary code (well, with some guidance). If it finds the data structures aren't enough, have it prompt you instead of making changes on its own. AI can do lot of the low-hanging fruit and often the harder ones as well as long as it's bound to something.

Yet, for now, AI at best has been something that relieves me from having to write a long string of boring code: it's not sustainable to keep developing stuff relying on AI alone. It's also great when quality is not an issue; for any serious work AI has not speeded me up noticeably. I still need to think through the hard parts, and whatever I gain in generating code I lose in managing the agents. But I can parallelise code generation, trying new approaches, and exploring out because AI is cheap. AI is also pretty good for going through the codebase and reasoning about dependencies whether in the context of adding a new feature or fixing a bug: I often let AI create a proof-of-concept change that does it, then I extract the important bits out of that and usually trim down the diffs down to at least 1/3 or less.

AI further helps with non-work, i.e. tasks that you have to do in order to fulfill external demands and requirements, and not strictly create anything solid and new. I can imagine AI creating various reports and summaries and documentation, perhaps mostly to be consumed and condensed by another AI at the receiving end. Sadly, all of this is mostly things not worth doing anyway.

Overall, I cringe under all the hype that's been laid on AI: it's a new tool that's still looking for its box or niche carveout, not a revolution.

I've held the belief that an occasional bankruptcy is basically a sign of healthy competition within an industry: those companies going down literally didn't know how to be any more efficient or they could've survived.

Regarding airline business, a crapload of more people are flying now with better prices than before the industry was deregulated. Sure it must hurt someone at one end, eventually. Part of the business is standing through price wars because someone will always lose: the best companies can endure that. While airline industry probably fluctuates as described in the article there are plenty of other cyclic industries. Churn itself isn't anything new.

Because fixed costs are what they are, I think, is the reason you can drive the business quite precisely to the brink of inoperation: it could literally come down to pure luck between how full your planes happen to be and how close you are to the next payment of some critical loan whether you can take off into the air for another month or so.

I can't remember a phone that died because of the battery since the era of Ni-Cd cells in early cell phones. I don't think I've never discarded a phone with a li-ion battery because of the battery. It's always physical breakage or getting too slow to be usable, because of age.

Sure, I don't spend a cycle per day. Not even every other day. That's probably rare, I get that. But much rather than because of dying batteries I'd like EU to mandate

- the phone should come with full keys so that I can own the machine if I want to - or at the very least the hardware must become unlockable once the support period ends - individual components should be made available for independent repairs - repairs must not need software pairing of hardware components on unlocked devices

because of right to own and right to repair which shouldn't be "rights" but nonnegotiable traits of physical properties like they used to be.