I clicked around the website on mobile and it seems to be missing the fairly critical 'about' or 'readme.md' page which describes what the project is or what it is used for. I'm sure it's an exciting project, but I'm not going to read about it unless I know what it is.
From the comments here I gather that it is an IRC client, but that should be one of the first lines displayed on the site. Also, what makes it different?
Property values are something like 70% of China's wealth, but only 30% of production. A GDP drop of 15% is very conceivable.
I think it's likely GP is wrong about the 50% figure, but if they were correct the CCP would never publish the number for fear of scaring away foreign investment. So it may be worth looking into more deeply.
I haven't looked at where Ben Hu's lab is, but epidemiological distance in urban areas doesn't necessarily follow map distance. In particular, proximity to a shared subway or bus line can be more important than physical proximity, since many commuters will put up with longer travel times if they can tune out, and a packed rush hour subway car is a great place for the spread of airborne infectious diseases. (In US cities one might consider two homes epidemiologically close despite a 10 mile separation if their children take the same school bus.)
If it were worth $20M in lost advertising, buying the app and adding adverts to it would be a no brainer. The author was trying to call their bluff on user value, but communicated it very poorly.
Huh. I guess that is possible in the Americas, and maybe Africa, where multiple adjacent countries share a common tongue. I was thinking more about Asia where the national languages are more distict from each other as well as from English.
The advantage as I see it of being a digital nomad is that one gets paid US salaries and gets to enjoy foreign costs of living. For example, software engineers in Europe make less than half of what SV software engineers make, and salaries in Asia (outside of Shenzhen) are even worse. For example, Korean SEs start at 30,000 to 40,000 USD, and get raises at the same percentages as non-SEs. (This is why Korean companies tend to hire superstar Western expats into VP rather than engineer positions.) So on economics alone, digital nomads can have their cake and eat it too.
The nomadic half of the digital nomad comes as a result of national visa regulations: Outside of the EU, countries don't usually authorize long term visas unless you work full time for their domestic companies, so digital nomads enter on 90 day tourist visas and hide the fact that they are working for a company in their homeland. The whole practice is of course of questionable legality, and that is why they are nomadic: they can't stay for longer than 90 days.
Then as a result they don't get to go very native. Can't really learn the language and culture in 90 days while working full time.
Seems like it's about symmetric costs and overall efficiency. To get up and walk over costs the Boss time and physical effort, so it won't take happen frequently, and it will likely happen on a predictable schedule (e.g. as boss goes to lunch). Context cues are available, and clarification is instant, which minimizes time-wasting rabbit holes.
In contrast, for the Boss to rattle some misguided text into Slack takes much less effort on the Boss's part and doesn't break the Boss's concentration, but the misunderstanding will be harder to clear up. If there is a back and forth it will take longer and be more distracting and stressful to the engineer, and if there isn't a back and forth the engineer is more likely wondering wtf the Boss is on about.
Right, but LLMs suggest that learning how to predict and only training on predictions is sufficient to learn anything and to have emergent generative abilities. What if learning to predict the upcoming input is all that's all that is needed for general human intelligence? What if it is all that any animals do?
This is a thought that LLMs caused me to have: the emotion of surprise is just the brain model of the world discovering that it had been poorly calibrated, or making poor predictions.
That's my point, that some people will draw the line at things that are objectively nonviolent, and others will draw it at things that are objectively very close to violent. Actually come to think of it, violence is really just a proxy for harm to others.
I think some of this political conflict is over what constitutes a harmless or victimless or nonviolent crime.
In the past year I've seen different people claim that hemp consumption, property crime, and even intimidation with a firearm were nonviolent and that their perpetrators were merely marginalized individuals who need social assistance rather than prosecution.
I think GP's point is that even property crime is not victimless: It hurts everyone, it makes society worse, and it likely hurts the people at the bottom of society disproportionately.
But I may add, then, that the reformers have the burden of showing evidence for their position: they need to demonstrate that it is possible to have a low-crime, low-prosecution, high social net city somewhere in the US. I'm beginning to suspect that they are missing some critical component which is required to make such a system work for everyone.
From the comments here I gather that it is an IRC client, but that should be one of the first lines displayed on the site. Also, what makes it different?