It could be as useful as a junior dev. You probably shouldn't let a junior dev run arbitrary commands in production without some sort of oversight or rails, either.

Even as a more experienced dev, I like having a second pair of eyes on critical commands...

I appreciated the texture of your message. It's really unfortunate that the bot plague is making us all suspicious of any well-written or idiosyncratic posts.

bots know little about culture, especially Eastern culture. So I was immediately more trusting when the comment correctly (based on readings I've done on Japan for some years) talks about a concept that wouldn't pop up as much in western society.

On the other hand, hallucinating term you look up and contradict in seconds is peak bot behavior.

Thank you. You hit the nail on the head. A bot can scrape the definition of "Shugyo" from a database. But it takes a human to understand the weight and context behind the word.

I am relieved that my "Cultural Accent" served as the ultimate Captcha. I'm glad my words reached someone who truly understands the culture.

"Texture" is a beautiful word. Thank you. AI generates text like smooth plastic. I want my words to be like rough stone—with friction and weight. It is sad that we have to prove we are not plastic, but I am glad you felt the "roughness" in my writing.

The hollowing out of the American middle class is because the huge, wealthy middle class was a post-war anomaly, from a time when the US had the only intact industrial plant in the world, and lack of communication technology and logistical sophistication meant production had to be localized and centralized. So, if you happened to be living in the right places in the US, you could have a house and a car and put a couple kids through college on an (artificially-inflated) factory worker's wage. At the same time, 80% of the population of the world was on the edge of starvation.

Now, thanks to better logistics and communications, companies can move jobs to where labor is cheaper. This has pulled billions of people out of poverty, dramatically reduced the price of goods, and generally improved global well-being--but that was at the cost of the 1% of the 1950s, which is to say the American working class. Now, if you work in a factory in the US, you only make a single-digit multiple of what a factory worker in Korea, Mexico, Germany or Italy makes (though you still have a double-digit advantage on much of the world).

It wasn't sustainable to have a tremendously wealthy middle class in a world that was mostly starving. No amount of trade barriers could maintain that: you're relying on a world market with very little competition, and the other 7 billion people aren't going to be content to sit on their hands.

What you want to do instead is to develop new, cutting-edge, high-paying industries, and thereby keep a competitive advantage on the rest of the world. Maybe you could, I dunno, develop top-notch schools to lure all the best and brightest people from around the world to your country, invite them in, encourage them to stay, and get them to innovate and create here rather than elsewhere. That might just result in whole new, massive, high-paying industries that pick up the slack left by your diminished industrial dominance.

Seems like a good idea to me! But hey, instead, you could always try slamming the door shut, chase out all the dirty foreigners, and just rely on your inherent and intrinsic American superiority to carry you forward. I'm sure that'll work just as well.

One of the big changes in the post war era was that immigration was massively opened up in 1965. From 1924 to 1965 the US had very restrictive immigration laws, which led to labor shortages, which allowed unions to become strong, rising wages and the expansion of the middle class. Since 1965 we've had declining union participation.

This is simple supply and demand. If you restrict the labor supply, the value of labor increases.

The same thing was observed after the Black Death, which killed off 30 to 50% of Europe's population. There were labor shortages, which increased the bargaining power of labor, and increased wages.

It's really funny US companies suddenly start pretending they don't believe in supply and demand when it comes to labor.

Britain tried to impose wage controls after the black death. Results were mixed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351

You really going to mention all that, which had some impact on the US middle class, but you're not going to mention anything about the US "wealth distribution" dynamics which has had its regulations and protections removed to the demise of the middle class?? Income tax roof being more than double before, corps being taxed more than double, the top earner vs bottom earner of any corporation much closer.. Less workarounds, no-one using the stupid "buy-borrow-die" strategy that is all too common now..

That's just the byproduct of the rest of the world coming back online (plus communications & logistics improving).

Look, if you own a company, or are in a leadership position: the entire world is now open to you, both as source of labor and as potential market. The impact of your decisions has exploded, and the potential revenue and value of your company has also exploded.

OTOH, if you're a line-worker at a factory in Detroit: your competition is now most of the population of the world--and they all expect lower salaries than you do.

What's your argument for why you should keep making 10x or 20x what people in China or India make? Do you just naturally deserve it? Do you figure that companies owe it to you because you share a home country? If so, either the company will bounce and move abroad to one of the many countries willing to welcome them with open arms--or they'll be swiftly replaced by a Chinese equivalent which has 1/10th the labor costs. Either way, your extravagant salary is going to dry up.

American labor in the 50s was simply in the right place at the right time. That's no longer true. There's no way to stop the rest of the world from growing and improving in order to maintain the special status of the American worker. They don't really have a choice: they need to skill up. And yes, push for better social safety nets, though their instinct seems to be in the opposite direction.

My point is that the decline of the US middle class is largely the result of domestic wealth distribution choices. And wealth distribution is measured within an economy, not by comparing wages between countries..

And we're debating different worlds if your baseline is shareholder primacy.. While my baseline is a democratic society where corporations are tools to organize people to deliver value to society, and owing obligations to that society, not a mechanism to siphon wealth from the bottom to the top.

The elephant in the room is how dismal more and more Americans quality of life is. Home ownership is out of reach. Living in the city at all is often out of reach. They have to work multiple jobs and those jobs often mistreat them.

I can see the argument that a large and super consumerist middle class might not be sustainable. However, for society to function, the alternative still needs to provide people with a decent quality of life.

Home ownership rate is higher now than it ever was in the post-war period, actually. It peaked in 2008, and has fallen since then...still higher than the 50s and 60s.

Also, did you ever spend any time in those post-war homes? Most of us would be appalled at the idea of living in a bare-bones 1000 sqft box (with more than 2x as many children per average family).

This argument never made sense to me. Why would the rest of the world being poor cause a huge middle class in America? Why would the rest of the world recovering cause the US to suddenly get poorer.

Like post post ww2 say we produced 1 car for every American. Also we produced 1 house for every American. Every car and house was produced in America because Europe was bombed to shit. Now 20 years later, Europe has recovered a bit and can start producing cars and houses again. Why wouldn't the US still be able to produce 1 car for every adult? Oh sorry, Germany is no longer a pile of rubble, you and your spouse need to share a car now. Also your adult kids need to move back in with you, no house for them either.

This is obviously absurd. US would be even richer since they no longer had to spend massive amounts of money funding the war effort and then massive amounts of money rebuilding Europe. Hollowing out the US middle class was a choice, not some law of nature.

After WW2, Europe and Asia were rubble, and needed to rebuild. And the systems, structures, and customs that had existed pre-war had fallen apart. They all needed, simultaneously, to rebuild and modernize.

To do that, they needed cars, machinery, home goods, electronics, etc. They had the labor to produce those things, but not the infrastructure. It takes time to build factories, and a skilled labor pool, and a logistics network, and so on.

So where did you go to get the goods & services you needed to rebuild? There was really only one option. The US was exporting cars, factory equipment, heavy machinery, steel, radio, coca cola, etc. They had an intact industrial plant, and had lost (relatively speaking) very few working-age men in the war. That helped them ramp up quickly with internal demand (fed by pent-up war wages).

For reasons laid out above, it wasn't practical to move factories overseas, or outsource parts, or automate. So workers in the areas with factories were in very high demand, and wages went way, way up in those areas. That had knock-on effects: America was just beginning to import oil in large quantities, so American coal & oil was suddenly in high demand. Same with mining, logging, etc. That caused a general boom--specifically favoring labor.

It wasn't because the rest of the world was poor that the American middle class was rich. It was because the rest of the world was developing, and America had a near-monopoly on the means of doing it. What's happened in the meantime is just that the US has lost that monopoly. Now American workers face relatively fair competition. This has been a huge net positive for the world, with cheaper goods and higher wages pretty much across the board...except for American workers.

Where is this wealth coming from though? The other countries aren't producing anything, everything is being produced by America. America would have to produce everything both for the domestic market and the entire rest of the world. And consequently why does this wealth suddenly disappear once the rest of the world catches up. You are talking about demand, but don't mention supply.

It'll work well for the rest of the world.

Though in this position, maybe China gets greedy.

The US population is 4 per cent of the entire world's, which means that the vast majority of talented humans is born abroad.

If you can snatch them, they will build SpaceX or Google for you. If not, well, they will do so either elsewhere, or not at all. (South Africa does not seem to be a good place to start business, and neither is Russia.)

Can you gain prosperity by employing three mediocre people instead of one talented one? Maybe, but you won't get a new vibrant sector like Silicon Valley this way.

Europe, where I live, is a lot more gung-ho on mediocrity and forced equality, and we seem to be the ones with clearly stagnating living standards, not you.

> If you can snatch them, they will build SpaceX or Google for you.

Sure, but the vast majority of the wealth of building SpaceX and Google doesn't go to me. It goes to people like Musk and Larry Page.

So you'd be better-off if SpaceX and Google were Chinese companies?

Also, a lot of the wealth from the tech industry does spill over to the larger community. You're strictly better off having it. If the US had just stuck with their 1970s economy on the theory that any new industries wouldn't distribute their benefits equally, it would be vastly smaller, less powerful and less wealthy. Surely that's obvious?

Ah the famous trickle down rebranded as "spill over".

"Trickle-down" has become a thought-terminating cliche.

Of course your country is better off if you have successful companies and high-income jobs.

Ceteris paribus it is better to live in a country which can generate lots of technological progress than in a country that cannot.

Many of us took programming 101 in Java and so typed this dozens of times without having a clue what it meant.

I learnt C at Uni (after having taught myself BASIC, Z80 machine code (not assembly), and x86 assembly), when we were taught C it was explained to us what all that sort of thing meant. But having said that most of the class failed to understand.

Now we can type out the same semantics, and remain clueless about what it means, but with a new obfuscated syntax which stops us from asking about the semantics.

Still for the better, because each token you don’t have to type when first learning programming is a token you can’t mistype.

(Though the ultimate conclusion of this line of thinking is that programming 101 courses should be taught in as concise and syntax-light a language as possible, giving the learner as few opportunities to screw up the input as possible. I’m a fan of teaching programming in Ruby, personally. Not theory of programming, mind you; just programming as an iterative human process.)

> programming 101 courses should be taught in as concise and syntax-light a language as possible

100% this. To make Java be the all-language makes it a mess without a defined goal. It is better to start learning with a language better suited for it. And then the learner can specialize and expand to other languages. This also helps to create awareness that different languages have different use cases.

The point of cash is that it represents transferrable value that doesn't require an intermediary between you and the person you're transacting with. And yet, banks and credit card companies exist and deal with cash. This does not mean that cash is a useless concept.

Okay and the key difference between crypto and cash/credit/whatever is supposedly that it is decentralized. Or have we abandoned that false premise now?

Cash has centralized distribution, but it's very decentralized in use. That's what makes it useful. However, sometimes people might choose to use a centralized service provider (like a bank, or a credit card company) because it's useful. They still have the option of using cash. What's important isn't that every single transaction happens in a fully-decentralized way: it's that decentralized transactions remain an option. That means that banks and credit card companies have to compete with cash, and that they can never have full control of your financial life.

The same is true of cryptocurrency. It's not a problem that centralized service providers exist. If they stop providing useful services, people can just take their cryptocurrency and go home.

Why is a centralized service provider for crypto useful? It doesn't solve any of the problems that banks and credit card companies solve for cash. Those problems are already solved in the decentralized use case.

Yeah, I've run a local Kokoro instance, and it doesn't work with Firefox. This uses Kokoro under the hood.

The demo clip is static and has the Kokoro output encoded as the audio track. It's not Kokoro running and generating it in your browser in real time.

Yeah, there's a line early in the article about use, the gist of which is "[unlike cryptocurrency] the utility of the internet was obvious from the start".

But it seemed pretty obvious to me more than a decade ago what cryptocurrency would be useful for. I remember the ideas flying around in the early days.

It's been a bumpy road...but then, I also remember through the late 90s (and especially after the dotcom crash) when there were countless takes on how the Internet (and PCs in general) had been vastly overhyped. "Computers were supposed to eliminate paper, but we're using more paper than ever! We were supposed to do all our shopping and get our news from the internet, but Sears is thriving and I still get my daily newspaper every morning!"

Somebody could absolutely have made a book out of all the overpromises of the "Internet Superhighway" era.

The path to general use for cryptocurrency has been, and will continue to be, rocky. Moreso than the net. It inherently involves money--lots of money--and so it's been rife with scams. "Nigerian Princes" on steroids.

But I can tell you guys: before the rush of investors and crazy bubbles, before the scams and collapses, long before hucksters like Trump got involved, there was a group of people to whom the potential of cryptocurrency seemed obvious.

I don't see anything obvious about the utility of cryptocurrencies.

Money is not that difficult of a concept, you use it to store value or transact. As a store of value it has no intrinsic advantage compared to any other alternative we have now, and same goes to transactions, it doesn't bring anything to the table than current systems already don't do.

All the features people keep mentioning like the immutable ledger are simply not something we actually need or government have asked for.

The only utility is making money for the people that work on it, there's no societal value in crypto at all.

Money isn't a difficult concept? Tell that to the people of Turkey, on Venezuela, or Argentina. Ask them about the utility of money as a "store of value" or means of transaction. It can be mismanaged to disastrous effect.

Assuming you're in the US or EU, you have a privileged perspective: your currency is widely adopted and has been (relatively) stable. I think smaller countries (and especially the businesses therein) are better able to appreciate a global-by-default, noninflationary store of value they can use to transact with anyone, at an established rate.

You could cut Visa and other CC companies out of the loop: they'd be obsolete. Their functionality would be inherent in the network. That's huge savings, reduced complexity, and you don't have arbitrary companies with the ability to blackmail you.

Microtransactions online would become feasible, and would use the very same infrastructure as multi-billion-dollar global transactions. Nice and simple. No fax machines or SWIFT codes or intermediary banks. No reliance on banks with a monopoly on access to the financial system, that can pull a plug on a project at any time for any reason--or prevent interesting experiments from happening in the first place.

You know some places pay like 20+% fees on remittances? That's a shitload of money that the (relatively poor) destination countries badly need! There's a lot of gouging and rent-seeking that goes on in the economy (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-termites-are-eve...), and a lot of it is enabled by the rigid, crufty and archaic financial system. A simple, open, global public system would fundamentally change that.

I dunno. Your attitude seems the same, to me, as somebody from 1994 who's happily using AOL to read the news, chat, and send emails (though only to other AOL members, of course) saying "What's the utility of this 'internet' thing? I can already do all that stuff! Networking is well-understood, and the 'internet' doesn't bring anything new to the table!" Their perspective on what was desirable or possible was strictly limited by the status quo. Just as was the case then, the best and most interesting use cases of cryptocurrency probably aren't even imagined yet: the infrastructure is necessary to imagine them.

It's not that hard for a new idea to look good for a couple short months/years. Building an ongoing, self-sustaining society that doesn't go completely off the rails is a whole other thing. There's a reason all these idyllic examples people give (Catalonia, Pre-USSR Ukrainian socialism, Paris Commune) were short-lived. If the Bolshevist revolution had been quashed in 1919, it would be idealized today.

> If the Bolshevist revolution had been quashed in 1919, it would be idealized today.

I don't think so. Pretty much all the negative things about Bolsheviks were already prominently there by 1919. Anti-democracy, mass terror, torture, concentration camps, you name it.

I guess 1919 is a bit late for rose colored glasses--though there's a shocking number of people who are still nostalgic for Bolshevism after _everything_.

You get my point, though. It's one thing to propose an idyllic society. It's another thing to try to implement it. In all cases where there's been a serious attempt at implementation on any scale above local and short-lived, we view the results with horror.

They never collapsed from anything innate, though. They were always destroyed from outside forces. When your society represents actual freedom, you become the enemy of everyone, from capital to stalinism.

Centralization of power has so far made every society deeply flawed or even hellish. The three societies you mentioned are the only ones where power was purposefully decentralized, and that seems to be the most promising path forward that was never allowed to stretch its legs.

I would argue that Rojava is one modern case that still shows hope. Although not as decentralized as those other examples, perhaps this is also why they're still there 11 years later.

I agree. Though unfortunately there have been reports of them slowly centralizing power away from community councils toward the military over time. Even still, it's offering far more freedom and diversity than any of the surrounding countries. I'm rooting for them to succeed.

Ehh, I would put it differently: purposefully decentralized societies are ineffective, and create a power vacuum that tends to be quickly filled. Assuming they would have worked requires a view of human nature that I just don't buy. Along comes a Lenin, or a Mao, or a Trump, or a Robespierre, who starts giving rousing speeches about how dangerous forces are rising against the movement, and next thing you know you've got concentration camps, guillotines, mass shootings, and so on. And that environment rewards authority and tyranny.

> Maybe I am too much of a jaded asshole but anyone who writes something like this needs perspective.

This is clearly a person who loved their job, and took it seriously. They had worked hard on something and were looking forward to sharing it. That, frankly, seems healthy. It's the only way to give your everyday life worth and meaning as an employee. It's certainly something that Google cultivated and encouraged. And it's shocking to have it vanish so abruptly.

If you take a more cynical, realistic view, you could never seriously engage with your work. You realize the company doesn't care about you, and you return the sentiment. That might be a more realistic way of viewing your situation, but it's empty of meaning or satisfaction. You'd be correct but unhappy all day every day.

I was always kinda jealous of people who could drink the kool-ade. And even if there's a certain satisfaction in seeing them get a reality check, it's also a shame that somebody who thought they had found meaning and purpose in a community suddenly realize they were just a tool the whole time.

I think its possible to hold 2 conflicting views simultaneously. I put on my profit optimization hat and take it off when I leave work.

I take no satisfaction in seeing someone who has drank the kool-ade getting a wakeup call, it's just a shocking realization that there are people out there who still dont get it.

No, unless somebody starts a stream there's no computation. If nobody is watching, it's idle.

If somebody tunes in, the server figures out where to start the stream and begins streaming.