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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Problem is that is what the insider traders are counting on. They know it is going to happen, it’s planned to happen and the odds reflect that. So a few million folks toss in a couple of bucks and the insiders cash in.

    Outsiders can’t be 100% sure that it’s a planned event so they don’t take the terrible odds and the insiders don’t have to split things.



  • I wonder if I counted…

    So I did the tax prep using a free offer from TurboTax. Everything seemed traditional.

    Then, at the end it generated an AI summary of my return. I didn’t have a choice, it just did it. I have the “unhelpful” feedback because:

    • Despite saying it was “explaining” the numbers and why, all it did was just list the numbers from the fairly straightforward table right above the AI response in a more awkward form, not explaining anything.
    • Further, despite the seemingly easy task of “Take a table of figures and repeat them in prose”, it still screwed up and messed up and of the figures that all our had to do was repeat verbatim.

    So AI was forced into my tax prep and did nothing substantive (thank goodness) and flubbed the cosmetic role it tried to play.


  • Yep, when I was a kid I remember people grousing about how stuff used to last forever and now it doesn’t. 20 years later, I got to hear people talk about how stuff made when I was a kid used to last forever but now it doesn’t. Now I get to hear how stuff made 20 years ago used to last forever but now it doesn’t.

    Every time something breaks, someone points to something 20 years old that didn’t break and forget all the stuff that did break.


  • Of course, the practice of repair was different when the appliance costed relatively a lot more.

    E.g. a TV was more likely to be repaired, but also costed about 10x as much relatively speaking.

    So if it would have cost you 25% of the price of a TV to get it repaired, you would have got it repaired. If it’s just as easy to repair now, then the repair would still be over twice the price of just buying new.


  • It said right in your quote that people do work that “no one volunteers to do”. If they aren’t volunteering, then something is providing the impetus.

    Broadly the writing avoids the more difficult nuance of how the community gets unplesant work to be “shared” when no one volunteers. This suggests enforcement one way or another.

    At small scale of a commune, some pretty human interactions can probably serve to drive this in a pretty reasonable way, by instilling sense of duty and comradery and potentially shame inherent to everyone knowing everyone else in a nuanced way. As you scale up, when inevitably people start losing track of each other, those soft mechanisms deteriorate, and the systems start to develop cracks for exploitation. Capitalism breaks in some ways, other systems break down in others. Fundamentally human behavior when interaction becomes diluted at scale tends to suck.


  • allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do.

    Ok, this basically sums up the answer: the community forces labor one way or another. What is the enforcement, carrot vs. stick for making people do their fair share. How do you reward people for doing unwanted work? How do you deal with someone refusing to do it, or “maliciously complying” and doing it terribly to make the job easier and/or get out of doing it again in the future?

    So the agreement is that there is work that needs some external impetus to happen, because not every job has enough people intrinsically interested or civic minded to make it happen. The question becomes which solutions manage to be more fair than others? For unskilled and unwanted jobs, the current answer has a lower class overworked because they are the most desperate, and that’s bad. A forced labor system might manage to distribute the burden more fairly, though thanks to people being crap it’s likely for a system set up to do that to be abused to overwork some demonized demographic, ending in a similar outcome a different way.

    Whatever the case is, it’s not as rosy as “people freely work on wikipedia and programming, therefore people will freely work on anything society may want or need”




  • Alternative motivation may be viable and in fact drive better results when feasible. You find the right person with the right passion who wants to do the job.

    Problem is not every sort of job can pull that off. You aren’t going to find enough sewage treatment enthusiasts to handle that demand. You aren’t going to have enough line men to keep the grid going reliably and safely.



  • He had the persosctive that once you hop between source code files that constitutes a security boundary. If you had intake.c and user data.c that got linked together, well data.c needed its own sanitation… Just in case…

    I suspect he used a tool that checked files and noted the risky pattern and the tool didn’t understand the relationship and be was so invested that he tortured it a bit to have any finding. I think he was hired by a client and in my experience a security consultant always has a finding, no matter how clean in practice the system was.

    Another finding by another security consultant was that an open source dependency hasn’t had any commits in a year. No vulnerabilities, but since no one had changed anything, he was concerned that if a vulnerability were ever found, the lack of activity means no one would fix it.

    It’s wild how very good security work tends to share the stage with very shoddy work with equal deference by the broader tech industry.




  • I think you are on to something, but I’d say it actually largely deflates the ‘people didn’t vote and if they had, maybe the outcome would have been different’ narrative.

    “Did not vote” rules in non-swing states. I wager that, for example, most people didn’t vote in california not because they see their candidate as a lost cause, but because they know “their” candidate has carried the state for sure.

    So in a shift to proportional electoral vote or popular vote, you’d probably get a lot more voters engaged in California, Hawaii, NY, and pick up democrat votes but you’d also get more red voters from Alaska, Texas, Utah, Kansan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabamba, Tennesse… etc… I’m not sure which group manages to bring out more non-voters in that scenario…