Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | monknomo's commentslogin

china benefits from America eroding its global power is what the thesis is, I believe.

Iran being a quagmire that erode's America's global power.


They're gambling basically, if it works and they do topple the regime, I think it will work for the USA, and if it turns into a prolonged quagmire, then yes, it will probably not be successful and very detrimental. I do sympathize with those who just wanted cheaper eggs.

nobody know how to measure software productivity + ai is supposed to mean productivity goes up = more ai means more productivity

As best as I can tell, that's the thinking. It's one number, it's very easy to find and manage, and there is a belief that it directly measures productivity.

I disagree that it does; seems to me the throughput of useful features is a better measure, but I'm not in the drivers seat on this one


Incremental revenue and cost-savings, at least for enterprises, is where it would show up. There’s also a present value consideration - if LLM’s make those dollars come into existence closer to the present, they are worth more.

The personal use case stuff is messy and subjective.


attributing incremental revenue to gross engineering effort is challenging, imo.

Cost savings is primarily a function of headcount here. Which is also easy to measure, and so if we take my thesis that easy to measure stuff is prioritized...


I deeply wish to hear about other tech trends; I get enough of use more ai, do more with less, and ship faster at work. I'd rather hear about new tools and techniques here

There is a more direct action possible here.

The thing is, in advocating for removing 999 out of 1000 people (how? I don't hear a suggestion for a gradual decline, so assuming a bloody genocide seems like a reasonable interpretation), opens a body up to pretty harsh criticism. It's reasonable to read that line of reasoning as a direct threat!


georgism would make owning property, such as ai, very expensive. it is a way of ensuring that rents get recirculated back into the rest of society

I think this is a good way of thinking, and it suggests that breaking up large clumps of money and resources is a reasonable way forward

The problem is currency is inherently clumpy. While value is always judged and assigned to things, the existence of a static, cumulative ledger of it is not a requirement.

It doesn't take a lot to recreate the capitalism to feudalism pipeline. If you have currency, small imbalances in resources and needs compound over time, creating imbalances in wealth. Imbalances in wealth provide the opportunity to leverage that imbalance for further wealth by way of rentseeking. Wealth provides power which provides more wealth and more power. Eventually your landlords drop the "land" prefix and simply become nobility.

Prior to the invention of currency, we had reputation economies. One might be tempted to model such economies as just money economies with implicit ledgers, but that isn't how reputation works in the real world. Being implicit, reputation captures a lot of activity that doesn't warrant an overt exchange of currency. Think of all the things that you appreciate, and make you value a relationship with someone more, that would be terribly inappropriate to pay them for: the friendly guy at the pub who tells you stories of questionable accuracy, a fellow parent watching your kid during a playdate, anything in the romantic sphere at all. Reputation also doesn't add up in anything close to a linear way: The guy who did something really big once and the guy who did something small with extreme regularly over a long period of time both likely have stronger ties with others in their community than the one who sporadically provided middling value. Reputation also isn't particularly inheritable: I might feel some obligation to someone's kid because of my relationship with their father, but that obligation fades rapidly as they entire adulthood, and nobody owes you shit for who your grandfather was. Likewise, gifts from someone who has an embarrassment of excess are valued much less than the same thing offered by someone who has barely enough.

All told, reputation economies act as a damping function on wealth and power accumulation, whereas currency economies provide positive feedback on the same.


you give a nod to the solution. If we have an undamped oscillator, or a system with a tendency in an undesirable direction, we can damp it.

And currency (given that we make it up and have a reasonable degree of control over its worth and distribution) does not have to be a static cumulative ledger


Any solution needs the damping function to be intrinsic to the system, rather than tacked on as policy. Policy ends up being dictated by the powerful, so if your system's only check against runaway wealth accumulation is policy, eventually your guardrails will be demolished. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow. But eventually, self-propelled wealth wins.

There are models of currency that try to include such dampening intrinsically (Tankies love talking about various experimental forms of currency as "labor vouchers" to try and sidestep the "moneyless" pitch of Communism), but I've yet to see one that really addresses the "wealth begets wealth, hierarchy begets hierarchy" problem.


what about the fear is irrational?


That usage turns the entire meaning of social responsibilities on its heads. It's one of those maddening fash tics where they reverse the plain meaning a statement.


It is narrower than that by law, though not by their proclamation.

That label forbids contractors on DoD contracts for billing DoD for Anthropic, or including Anthropic as part of their DoD solution.

So - AWS can keep claude on bedrock, but can't provide claude to the DoD under its DoD contracts


are you sure it won't enabled targeted enforcement for people law enforcement finds irritating, more than evenly applied law? It's still people setting the priorities and exercising discretion about charging.


It should be easier to audit since you would have a list of who broke the law, but action had not been taken yet.


do you think the records of the vast number of police departments and agencies would be combinable with the separate court records, as well as the facial recognition access data source (if it exists?)

I think that is pretty unlikely


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: