I believe I read a post by Andrew detailing how he intentionally did marketting in a way to attract users, the right contributers, and donations - he was quite intentional about making his full-time role sustainable (and now more roles).
It always required a leap of faith - that’s the point of life, getting married and having kids.
Not so many generations ago parents might not know if they’d survive to see their children reach adulthood (or if their children would survive, or if they’d be infertile, or die during childbirth). My parents are boomers who ended up doing well, but had to buy a house at a 17% interest rate and low wages not knowing if that was a smart or dumb move. The current generation face huge land values (but have better medicine and moderate interest rates). Who would you trade places with, without the benefit of hindsight?
I think nerd -> believes in science.
Science -> requires honesty, curiousity, humility, persistence (i.e. admit you are wrong, accept you losses).
Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).
So make two UIs? Or an API and a novice user / mass market UI, and let the open source community serve fussy power users (and borrow some of their good ideas as a return on your show of good faith)?
Modern off-road/off-grid inverter chargers make wiring to the network pretty easy. I'd still recommend an electrician, but most they'd likely need to do is wire the grid into the inverter-charger input, and your cabin to the output, and check whatever protection (like RCDs) your cabin has is sufficient/up-to-date.
The OP mentioned modern battery technologies - generally the shunt sits between an LFP battery negative and the main circuit negative/ground, and the solar panels connect to MPPTs. So the voltage at the shunt is a nice consistent nominal 12.8V (~13.3V in practice) or a multiple thereof (for series battery setups).
I just upgraded our hybrid caravan to 24V LFP (2x 300Ah 12V), roof solar + extra MPPT for external solar, shunt, inverter-charger, 24V->12V converter for existing circuity (lights, pump, etc), DCDC charger from car, battery balancer, a little touchscreen interface inside (all victron gear with renogy batteries). It was as a lot of fun and it's amazing how much power we have off grid now! The system would work excellent for a little cabin exactly how it is (minus DCDC).
In most western nations, the “people who run the government” get paid a salary similar to a good software engineer (or maybe a doctor), and progressive taxation lets the government fund social services including free healthcare and tertiary education.
Rather than use Stalin as a straw man, maybe try take your nation in direction that helps people, rather than away?
Did they steal everything outright? Someone is worse off in that transaction. (Or everyone a little bit worse off if it’s government grift).
Did they create all that value themselves? Might be fine - positive sum games do exist.
Did they create some system where a bunch of money flows just to them based on the labour of others? Maybe it depends on the details, like how much the labour is paid.
I think Piketty’s point was around capital and wealth tending to accumulate unless something forces it to disperse. This can get worse over time. The last couple hundred years were relatively “good” due to the way revolutions and WWI and WWII basically eliminated many of the wealthy families in the west, a couple times, and the post-war societies were “reset” with good equality that has slowly eroded since (due to insufficient “friction” to prevent accumulating extreme wealth over time, such as high loophole-free wealth and inheritance taxes). Or so the theory goes.
Building on that, when you get extreme wealth you get individuals with power to affect policy for their personal good. Some will choose to be selfish (it’s human nature). Policy shifts in their favour. We end up going in the opposite direction to that since the Great Depression - which really was a collectivist culture of everyone getting a share of the wealth of the nation, rather than being screwed over by rich and powerful folks. (McCarthyism somewhat put the brakes on that in the US in particular, though, which is why you can get e.g. free health care elsewhere in the west).
I’m confused why a business would allow (non-data-science/agent harness devs) to pay per token instead of eg an Anthropic business premium seat? A monthly subscription seems pretty straight forward for the accountants, no?
One problem I see is even in representational democracy (I'll use the Westminster system for concreteness) we get a lot of indirection leading to policies people don't actually want. Even more indirection is bad.
Assume members of parliament are chosen fairly (popular vote approximates number of seats etc). The winning party (or parties) form a cabinet - their own little hierarchy. What we tend to see is a majority of cabinet members voting in cabinet for a policy, a majority of their caucus voting to support their policy (relying on cabinet solidarity to get the numbers across the line), then a majority of parliament passing a bill (using the solidarity of the party to get it across the line). The agenda may have been set by just a few parliamentarians (say just 9 out 17 cabinet members in a parliament of ~100) and an unpolular policy comes to pass.
I'd fear having local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives would have even worse outcomes in terms of representing the individuals at the "bottom" of this process. There is a reason representatives are voted for directly at each level of governments in our democracies - this wasn't a "simplification" it was a deliberate choice by our forebearers who had seen how politics shakes out in practice.
Low-level programming gets a bad name because C has many footguns and the spec leaves much behavior undefined - a fact that implementers use almost adversarially (which I'd support, if the goal was to refine the spec...).
C++ adds more high-level conveniences without actually removing the footguns and undefined behavior (much C code compiles in a C++ compiler).
Zig tries to keep the low-level C philosophy but have things more well factored and well defined. The result is you _can_ tinker in high-level code, yet "drop down" into low-level code as you desire.
(Compared to rust, you get fewer compiler-enforced guarantees, but unlike C the language isn't trying to make high-level code adversarial).
Sure, the ISP _should_ deliver the packets. No worries.
The user agent should... be an agent for the user, and be able to perform actions on their behalf.
(The legality of those actions is of course assumed by the user here... if I add an automated flamethrower to my mailbox and burn my bills, well the debt collectors may come regardless if I read them or not - we cannot shift blame to the USPS here).