Yep. It is a luxury. Nowadays I use AI for work, and my productivity increases. However, I don't learn much from the tasks, because I get more tasks since the team went down half size. Understanding is a luxury now.
IMO corruption is just a symptom. Everything goes back to one source point: lack of well-educated citizens who can push back without hesitation. Note that the two conditions: well-educated and can push back without hesitation. Missing any of them and the foundation cracks.
Also I wouldn't bother comparing corruption between democracies and authoritarians. I have lived under both and the only thing I see is the common human nature represented in different ways. And I see "lack of well-educated citizens who can push back without hesitation" everywhere.
I guess that's why we are in a world that keeps competing for incompetence.
I feel like America is re-learning why gambling was so widely outlawed. It just ruins everything it touches. At least casinos are mostly contained. I'm tired of seeing gambling ads on every sport and hearing the news talk about prediction markets.
Not to mention, they all prey on people. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and people would come in regularly and drop everything they had on scratch-offs. And a lot of these people clearly did not have the money to spare. It's gross.
The marketing is what bothers me the most. These books market very aggressively in app: Take Daves 5 leg parlay; Share your picks! 30% profit boost if you do a 4 leg parlay that'll never hit. Its constant engagement. Contrast this to a real bookie: Open app. Place bet. Meet once a week in parking lot. Small chatter. Pass envelope.
Basically, a fake "Cricket league" was setup up in rural India, complete with online streaming, play by play commentary, etc. just to fool gamblers in Russia. Worth the read.
I feel like this is worse then gambling even, because it's not only luck. You can actually influence an outcome without cheating, hence credible deaths threats
Online (foreign based, read: tax and regulation havens) gambling casinos are flooding the social media feeds of children with AI slop or memes that have their logo/branding slapped on it. They are posting thousands of videos per day, trying to get kids to gamble on their casinos. Who are behind? The owners of gaming communities/e-sport brands like FaZe Clan etc. Basically, if you were a large youtuber in the 2010's, the goto seems to be get in on some kind of online gambling site for kids.
Many people just think certain things in history were outlawed because of 'stupid religious people'. Most of the time there's genuine reasons for banning things even if they weren't perfect or brought other harms with them. Something like usury was banned in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and it wasn't because people prior to 1900 were imbeciles, these things can cause immense instability.
Years ago I was friend with a guy who played tennis at international levels (say top 1000 players). He regularly received death treats on social networks from people Gambling on him to win/lose (and the opposite happened)
Still happens at all levels of professional sport. Even the top women get messages on their IG accounts all the time by degenerate gamblers pissed off after a loss.
Yeah, that claim was always ludicrous to me too. Wisdom-of-crowds isn’t an unbiased decision making strategy, it’s quite biased. Crowd-wisdom works best as a limiter on the bias of other decision making strategies—this is why democracies use representatives rather than direct votes for most decisions.
And polymarket isn’t even the wisdom of crowds lol. At its greatest possible adoption it’s still the wisdom of internet-connected (mostly) white men with time and money to spend on gambling.
If you believe Polymarket odds are wrong in a systematic way then you are free to make a lot of money out of it. Unlike the stock market, where "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", any such irrationality will become irrelevant at settlement time.
The argument isn’t about whether prediction markets can stay well-calibrated.
The argument is that prediction markets incentivize insider trading and backroom power brokership. The “potential energy” behind surprise upsets is most profitably exploited when the outcome sharply differs from the public calibrated consensus, so these two incentives - calibration vs potential for exploitation - are in fundamental tension. I think this tension undermines the whole purpose of prediction markets IMO.
I don't know, man, looks like we are now literally gambling on whether people die today or tomorrow. This is even worse than underground sports gambling.
Day trading too, and day trading led us down this path. Everyone is a gambler now. All morals are out the window.
On a side note, I find it incredible crypto trading/day trading/meme stock trading etc is not recognised as a bigger societal problem. It is 100% gambling and has the same negative externalities associated with it. But none of the tools gambling companies need to abide by (blocklists, warnings, limits, etc) apply to trading.
It's true but it's just revealing what Wall Street et al have been up to for the past several decades. There's this perception that they're all doing Very Important Work(tm), when in fact they're just making up silly rules and playing games with each other, aka gambling.
Wall Street is doing price discovery which benefits index investors. They're also lending (e.g. private credit) which benefits economic activity.
Robin Hood options trading is just lighting money on fire under the guise of "investing", which insidiously somehow seems more responsible than gambling on roulette.
I do not know about daytrading, but trading in the long term works, if you have a (technical/IT) system.
Regarding meme stocks: I do not see how this should work compared to the "real market", as on the real market you have clear signals when it is useful to enter a position (e.g. institutional attention), but on the meme "stock" market lacking those features it is much much harder to make any money - unfortunately, a lot of young people are trying their fortuna
Commodities futures markets have an actual purpose, which is to make business inputs (or outputs) more predictable. Like if I know I need ten tons of corn next year, it's safer to buy futures now than to wait and see how the price of corn fluctuates over that time, potentially sabotaging my business operation. (Of making corn chips.)
Similar business cases can be made for futures from polymarket. For example if I start a business in the USA I may want to hedge by buying some futures Jesus will not return before 2027.
Do we typically [0] have a problem with people sabotaging industries to manipulate the futures market?
[0] Edit: Originally wrote "currently", but then I remembered the current White House, whose various crimes are being studiously ignored by the Republican congress.
Maybe it is just my experience, because I'm not a system programmer, but instead learning it. I find that concepts in system programming are not really very hard to understand (e.g. log-based file system is the one I'm reading about today), but the implementation, the actual coding, the actual weaving of the system, is most of the fun/grit. Maybe it is just me, but I find that for system programming, I have to implement every part of it, before claiming that I understand it.
From my understanding, you can instead use Claude in the following manner: understand and solve the problem, put up pseudo code, and then tell Claude to generate real code and maybe restructure it a bit. So you don't have to write the actual code but have solved the problem all by yourself.
> This has been 100% my experience. I enjoy the puzzle solving and the general joy of organizing and pulling things together. I could really care less about the end result to meet some business need.
I don't really see where he/she said that explicitly. My understanding is that he likes to solve problems but don't care about the final implementation. But I stand corrected.
If you worked in an office and your boss asked for 100 copies of their memo, they want you to use the copy machine.
If they saw you typing it out 100 times they’d tell you that you’re wasting time. It does t matter that you like to type and that you went to school to get a degree in typing.
I think it's perfect understandable that some people feel dreaded while others feel excited. But whatever the outcome, we have to adapt.
For people who feel that AI kills a passion, I'd recommend finding another hobby. Especially at the age of 60, when you don't have to work, you can plan retirement -- the next 20+ years as if it is your second childhood, and do whatever you want. I encourage you to search for greater meanings. After all, programming is just a man-made wonder, and the universe is full of grandeur.
If Digikey consistently charged 10% more than Mouser, yeah that would absolutely ruin them. Digikey and Mouser don't have much to distinguish them already. It's like Aldi vs Lidl.
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