Politics does not exist to resolve social problems. It exists to resolve headlines.
So, yeah, it is a straw man. It’s framed as a general problem of society, but it’s a feel good solution that again waves off any conversation about raising taxes in response to their behavior.
Senators are tackling this very serious problem, to be immediately gamed given billionaires financial resources.
It’s not a tax on money, it’s a tax on agency. Fiat and macro economics is a euphemism for “what are people doing and how do we make them do this instead?”
It’s not about perfect mind control, but inflating their value to deflate our agency (or buying power, whatever trips your trigger).
We get debate protecting one concept or principle or another, but think a bit more literally and it starts to take on a whole new perspective.
I’d be more interested in augmented human intelligence. Growing neuron structures to speed the acquisition of skill and knowledge.
AI as we know it now is for empowering aristocrats. Here’s Googles data center empowering Google to make business choices that involve extracting effort from us.
I’d rather science and technology empower individuals uniquely and not be ground down to the fiscally prudent efforts.
Yep it’s not an interesting idea, the hard problem. We can never see outside our universe. We can’t know all states of matter ever. We can’t peek beyond the speed of light. We can solve a lot of problems we actually have without an answer (42, but what…)
Humans have a willingness to see truth in metaphor and analogy, and invent them to avoid accepting we’re just meat bags.
That’s what the hard problem of consciousness is to me; biological ideation run amok.
It has useful political effects, it can be used to disabuse the self righteous because it’s a purposeful thought ending monolith, nothing more.
We’ll keep iterating on our theories of the interaction of fields and matter and stop caring about the hard problem like we quit discussing luminiferous aether. We’ll stop seeing the literal edge of reality as a boundary on experience in the first place.
My reasoning is that the people that defined it did so in a time when our science was less developed, so of course the problem seemed much harder.
Information theory makes even the hard problem a matter of understanding interaction fields of physics, with the chemistry of biology. Relativity and sensory network effects explain relative experience elegantly enough.
A lot of theories from back in the day are built on outdated understanding. Unfortunately their authors did not get to see our achievements in engineering unravel a lot of their over baked theories due to a need to fill in gaps without hard evidence. Same as we won’t see technology in the future have no need of all this software we wrote. It won’t literally be handed on.
Luminiferous Aether was once a thing to many even though it’s not one discrete thing. One might consider it was a poetic initial take on field theory, which we now rely on sets of glyphs of shares meaning. Which artistically could also be imagined as flowing sets of matrix code that glow like a luminous field.
If there’s a hard problem to consciousness it’s an unwillingness to consider there is no Valhalla. Is there a hard problem? Or do we hope for an answer that suggests we’re not just meatbags?
Interesting. I was working on an app that would let users scan logos and return company data; carbon footprint other industrial impact metrics, individual investors, board, C-suite… into a shared repo of oligarchs who have chosen celebrity and visibility by “leading” us with our own data.
I was going to send images to Google to pull objects and text from, but if I could just send text to search for, that would be great.
Let’s not devolve into thought ending reactionaries. I’m aware of the negotiated reality.
My point is it’s not a law of physics, but a social contract to be negotiated.
We owed pensions to people and took those away, so it’s not as if society has a very good track record of paying what it’s owed, so don’t get too hung up on those words meaning something forever.
You might take continuous iteration of our social contract as seriously as code; as we can see letting it accrue technical debt and bit rot is not so great.
Advertising as we know it emerged as a melding of government propaganda research and behavioral economics during world wars, so of course it’s often scammy.
It sounds “deep state” but it’s actually plainly documented in government files and written about by reliable sources.
Remember we’re still emerging from an era of whispering the same old story of morality and obligation to each other.
I am not at all interested in helping someone build a fertilizer empire or pillow brand. Politically my hands are tied to doing so if I want a life.
Poor people effectively live a life of quota and state sanctioned limits on their access to material support by cutting social programs with public support.
Advertising America as anything but a sanctimonious police state is a scam.
The problem you’re highlighting is a simple design issue.
My problem with progress bars is they are usually nonsense estimates based upon random programmer choices.
I know former MSers who worked on progress bars for old Windows versions. Specifically I remember them saying the progress bar for copying files to USB was estimating how long until a USB hardware buffer was clear, without any idea how much more data there was intended to be jammed into the buffer once it cleared. Buffer would immediately refill and increase the wait time.
Given how slowly Windows deprecates code, who knows what subroutines any given progress bar is relying on.
They’re nonsense features meant to soothe users who seek progress. They don’t need to be interesting visually. I’d accept a simple countdown that made sense.
I’m hoping manufacture of application specific chips takes off. That we embed a 3D engine into silicon and this “software engineering is life” mind virus can go away.
We simply did not do it that way before because we lacked the manufacturing capabilities.
If manufacturing hopes and dreams of colleagues in the chip biz come to fruition, software is on its way out as a routine part of developing new technology. But I mean they’re biased; attention on hardware versus software makes them more valuable.
It’s because our society has been trained to be risk averse so we don’t challenge traditional power memes. “Keep calm, carry on.” Thought ending slogans are what we’re weened on.
Mens biology predisposes them to anxious rage and we avoid it to avoid making daddy mad.
We won’t do anything to avoid the cost impact to the poor because it will cost the rich.
The biology of our politics is really well understood.
But I get it; it’s more fun to pretend you live in your own multiverse conjuring ad hoc explanations for everything.
This has nothing to do with abstract constructs you can’t name. That’s just a byproduct of you not having embedded muscle memory to announce one.
This forum really enjoys thinking it’s onto something millions of humans that came before have never considered while conjuring ideas within very similar social constraints as the last generation (especially in typical office life). Same old biology + new words != new insights.
I’m not one for tradition, and believing there’s something more to it all is a human tradition going back to our beginning.
In a political context, it’s always humans doing human stuff and that should be constrained to protect the freedom of humans being human.
It’s only in the abstract sciences are new ideas being created. I’m really tired of these articles about economics when “political capture by aristocrats” is enough to explain most of the issues.
If engineers gave a shit about humanity they’d leverage their “wait we build all this stuff” power and stop building until humanity is paid better
Wfh = simply don’t open laptops
But let’s go on about how Jeff Bezos alone is responsible in a country “by of and for the people “.
When horrible corporate oligarch or slightly LESS horrible corporate oligarch are your options for President, why does everyone keep waiting for them to be nice?
Force austerity on the rich. Like “trickle down economics” is a joke about pissing in people, “what the market will bear” is a euphemism for push our society the breaking point.
We’re the market of ideas they have to buy from. Let’s force them to buy a new one from us.
“But noooo my personal hard won struggle would be for nothing if everyone was equal!” is how this conversation usually goes though.
Frankly take your rant and cram it up your ass. Like Bezos is listening to your comments here and your effort meant something
> Sometimes you really do want to do all three of those things. But often you want to do some subset of them instead. So the language should give you ways to do parts of that without doing all of that, and then "extends" should be at most lightweight syntax sugar over that.
Sounds like you’re describing something like C.
Leverage individual header files to implement a specific behavior rather than features concretized in a spec we don’t always want.
Making everything a class, monoid, etc. feels like the programmer equivalent of making 9 Star Wars movies where each is comprised of lightsaber fights from open to close. That’s a cool still image but … really 9 movies huh?
It’s centralized in that the developers are now bankers; we have to trust and empower them with a Byzantine abstraction to do daily routine?
We’ve already seen how that worked with bankers. Nope.
I’m really looking forward to the day computer science folks finally accept if it involves human participation it will come along with human bias.
Biology has not gone anywhere, folks. We cannot decouple ourselves from this existence and be information; yet? Maybe. For sure not now.
And networks like Ethereum are not going to enable that.
It may be a nice and clean abstract in their head, but everyone has that privilege. Bringing people aboard Ethereum is putting a new cognitive burden on people. But the goal is to not do that?
Environment issues aside, blockchain is like nuclear powered rocket car hype and not anywhere near as cool.
I’ll stick to a Wireguard tunnel between people I trust literally before running this stuff for a bunch of randos profiting big off my effort.
Perhaps the cost to be concerned with is not fiat currency but more literal.
The up front costs could wipe out the routine costs and maybe we could also dispose of the “ make money selling blades not handles” monopoly fossil fuel monopolies rely on for political relevance.
Infinitely big little numbers let economists iterate forever in whatever direction they want. Physical reality has constraints their academic models omit.
We need to redefine the perimeter not iterate within the area of a well known boundary. Who cares how much it costs aristocrats in profits if the result ends up what is believed possible? I don’t have to believe any given solution or CEO is owed a market.
They see everyone else who behaves acting like clown but they’re less socially aware of which clown like behavior they should broadcast.
They conflate acting and mockery.