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I'm impressed by how thoroughly you ignored the question of whether your own inaction was partly responsible for the outcome that occurred later, and which you dislike.

It has persuaded me that your own inaction was totally unrelated to this outcome.


Thank you for linking to this. Years ago I chanced upon this website, and it was my first experience of reading something about Buddhism that seemed to consciously strive for clarity, for intelligibility to an interested layperson, rather than for what I'll call "easy mysticism" for its own sake.

If you want a list of common points among traditions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Points_Unifying_Therav%C...

some may be more difficult to comprehend, but it's all there


> Why would anyone settle for

The answer to such questions is always that, given their circumstances, they have no realistic choice not to.

This is very obvious, and it's frustrating to continually see people pretend otherwise.


> they have no realistic choice not to

If folks expect someone to solve problems for them, than 100% people end up unhappy. The old idea of loyalty buying a 30 year career with vertical movement died sometime in the 1990s.

Ikigai chart will help narrow down why people are unhappy:

https://stevelegler.com/2019/02/16/ikigai-a-four-circle-mode...

Even if folks are not thinking about doing a project, I still highly recommend this crash course in small business contracts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

Rule #24: The lawyers Strategic Truth is to never lie, but also avoid voluntarily disclosing information that may help opponents.

Best of luck =3


> If folks expect someone to solve problems for them

In this type of situation, the fundamental issue is that making progress depends on many people acting in unison to increase their bargaining power, which is (a) hard to arrange even if everyone who acted this way would benefit, and (b) actually may be detrimental to some people (usually the high performers).


I agree it is nearly impossible to alter the inertia of existing firms. Most have entrenched process people that defend how things are done right up until a company enters insolvency. Fine if you sell soda or rubber tires, but a death knell for technology or media firms.

In my observations it is usually conditioned fear, personal debt-driven risk aversion, and or failure to even ask if the department above you is really necessary. These days, it is almost always easier to go to another firm if you want a promotion. =3


I think it mostly happens because a little bit of abstraction is nearly always uncontroversially good. If you want to print a line of text 5 times, you'll instinctively write a for loop to do it, instead of copy-pasting the original print() statement an extra 4 times. The cognitive overhead upon reading this code is near zero, since we're all so familiar with it. This is abstraction, nonetheless.

So a little bit is always good, and more is sometimes very good -- even memorably good. Together these cause many of us to extrapolate too far, but for understandable reasons.



Well, now I've seen everything.


social media is the root of most evil in the society at present, pornography is just a bunch of people fucking around. while neither is healthy, if you had to choose you are better off watching people fucking


Who decides if a law is unjust?


We do. Using our consciences.


What if two people's consciences disagree?


Do it regardless. If you're right other people will realize that. If not, they won't.


How other people respond is largely unrelated to principled notions of justice -- it will mostly depend on what benefits them. Populism, in other words.

I can't see how that could ever go wrong.


Sounds like you're the type to lead a lynch mob. Do it regardless after all.


Nobody said anything about lynching anyone. I simply don't recognize idiotic laws bought and paid for by corporations as legitimate. Lobbying is just legalized corruption.


The learned helplessness of modern citizens of so called democracies is something to behold. No wonder we have people like Trump in power.


This. People seem to have forgotten their government works for them and exists only with their consent. They are not subservient to the government.


Found the anarchist


> If you're right other people will realize that. If not, they won't.

That literally does not answer the GP's question.

You're just an anarchist. We can save a lot of steps if you just state that outright.


I can't be an anarchist because I don't believe anarchy exists. In every group of humans, power structures and hierarchies form spontaneously from normal social interaction. Even if you abolished all forms of government, they would simply reform. A state of anarchy is impossible.

I'm merely a proponent of civil disobedience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience

> Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law out of all other freedom struggles.

> Martin Luther King Jr.


You're right, I misunderstood what anarchy was. My apologies.


Civil disobedience is wrong. Society has established ways to change the rules. Breaking rules instead of changing them is disrespectful to the society that has been built. Just because you quote someone, that does not mean what they are advocating for is just.


Society is wrong. It allows trillion dollar corporations to simply buy the laws that they want to impose on you while conveniently leaving loophopes for themselves. Why the hell would you want to "change" this rigged system through the system? That's mind boggling.

There is absolutely no reason at all to even so much as recognize these laws as legitimate. Society can go to hell if it thinks otherwise. They were supposed to be working for us, not the corporations. Since they aren't, we simply revoke their power over us. It really is that easy.

Power isn't something you have, it's loaned out to you, and it can be revoked. People give you power because they believe you'll act in their best interests and solve their problems for them. Once it becomes clear that's not happening, there is absolutely no reason at all to defer to some corrupt "authorities" who are doing nothing but enriching themselves at our expense.


> Society is wrong. It allows trillion dollar corporations to simply buy the laws that they want to impose on you while conveniently leaving loophopes for themselves. Why the hell would you want to "change" this rigged system through the system? That's mind boggling.

So much for "Resolving inconsistencies between my ideas is the entire reason why I come here to discuss them."[1] - you're just here to engage in propaganda.

(propaganda that, for the future record, isn't even true - corporations do not get votes and do not get to "buy the laws they want")

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384481


>Why the hell would you want to "change" this rigged system through the system? That's mind boggling.

The current system allows for changing it if you have enough support. People who try to go around it because they do not have the needed support. If society was truly wrong we could easily dissolve it.


The book of Isaiah tells us to denounce unjust law. And the book of Matthew tells us to recognize Caesar’s secular authority. Anarchism is not the only explanation.


No need to hypothesize, just take a look around


After bogo-sort, it's the most badness-maximising "solution" I've ever come across. Why bother asking for the creator's consent to copy and run the original bytes, when you could instead ask for their consent to have a robot that no one understands and could potentially do anything read a few paragraphs of text describing what those bytes do, imagine how it might work, and try to build something resembling that from scratch, using a trillion or so times more energy.


What about my latest algorithm, VibeSort

    // VibeSort
    let arr = [51,46,72,32,14,27,88,32];

    arr.sort((a,b)=>{
      let response = LLM.query(`Which number is larger, number A:${a} or number B:${b}. Answer using "A" or "B" only, if they are equal, say "C".`);
      if(response.includes('C')) return 0;
      if(response.includes('B')) return -1;
      if(response.includes('A')) return 1;
      return 0;
    });

    console.table(arr);


The energy thing won't sail. A backhoe or front-loader uses far more energy than the equivalent human labor, but having higher energy solutions available is what technological civilization does.

Arguably Cowen's "Great Stagnation" was driven primarily by not embracing higher energy provision in the form of fission.


AFAICT at least 2 people in this thread don't seem to think that visibility -- a function of, among other things, weather and time of day -- influences driving safety. I find this amazing.

The point of terryf's example was to point out that for practical reasons, existing laws don't capture every relevant variable. I (but not everyone, it seems) think that visibility obviously influences safety. The point I want to make is that in practice the "precision gap" can't be perfectly rectified by making legality a function of more factors than just speed. There will always be some additional factor that influences the probability of a crash by some small amount -- and some of the largest factors, like individual driving ability, would be objected to on other grounds.


> when we exchange generic information across networks we parse information all the time

The goal is to do this parsing exactly once, at the system boundary, and thereafter keep the already-parsed data in a box that has "This has already been parsed and we know it's correct" written on the outside, so that nothing internal needs to worry about that again. And the absolute best kind of box is a type, because it's pretty easy to enforce that the parser function is the only piece of code in the entire system that can create a value of that type, and as soon as you do this, that entire class of problems goes away.

This idea is of using types whose instances can only be created by parser functions is known as Parse, Don't Validate, and while it's possible and useful to apply the general idea in a dynamically typed language, you only get the "We know at compile time that this problem cannot exist" guarantee if you use types.


> The goal is to do this parsing exactly once, at the system boundary

You are only parsing once at the system boundary, but under the dynamic model every receiver is its own system boundary. Like the earlier comment pointed out, micro services emerged to provide a way to hack Kay's actor model onto languages that don't offer the dynamicism natively. Yes, you are only parsing once in each service, but ultimately you are still parsing many times when you look at the entire program as a whole. "Parse, don't validate" doesn't really change anything.


> but under the dynamic model every receiver is its own system boundary

I'm not claiming that it can't be done that way, I'm claiming that it's better not to do it that way.

You could achieve security by hiring a separate guard to stand outside each room in your office building, but it's cheaper and just as secure to hire a single guard to stand outside the entrance to the building.

>micro services emerged to provide a way to hack Kay's actor model onto languages that don't offer the dynamicism natively

I think microservices emerged for a different reason: to make more efficient use of hardware at scale. (A monolith that does everything is in every way easier to work with.) One downside of microservices is the much-increased system boundary size they imply -- this hole in the type system forces a lot more parsing and makes it harder to reason about the effects of local changes.


> I think microservices emerged for a different reason: to make more efficient use of hardware at scale.

Same thing, no? That is exactly was what Kay was talking about. That was his vision: Infinite nodes all interconnected, sending messages to each other. That is why Smalltalk was designed the way it was. While the mainstream Smalltalk implementations got stuck in a single image model, Kay and others did try working on projects to carry the vision forward. Erlang had some success with the same essential concept.

> I'm claiming that it's better not to do it that way.

Is it fundamentally better, or is it only better because the alternative was never fully realized? For something of modern relevance, take LLMs. In your model, you have to have the hardware to run the LLM on your local machine, which for a frontier model is quite the ask. Or you can write all kinds of crazy, convoluted code to pass the work off to another machine. In Kay's world, being able to access an LLM on another machine is a feature built right into the language. Code running on another machine is the same as code running on your own machine.

I'm reminded of what you said about "Parse, don't validate" types. Like you alluded to, you can write all kinds of tests to essentially validate the same properties as the type system, but when the language gives you a type system you get all that for free, which you saw as a benefit. But now it seems you are suggesting it is actually better for the compiler to do very little and that it is best to write your own code to deal with all the things you need.


> I think microservices emerged for a different reason: to make more efficient use of hardware at scale.

Scaling different areas of an application is one thing. Being able to use different technology choices for different areas is another, even at low scale. And being able to have teams own individual areas of an application via a reasonably hard boundary is a third.


The following paragraph appears twice:

> Now 2 case studies are not proof. I hear you! When two projects from the same methodology show the same gap, the next step is to test whether similar effects appear in the broader population. The studies below use mixed methods to reduce our single-sample bias.


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