4
points
wolframhempel
Joined 3,870 karma
meet.hn/city/52.510885,13.3989367/Berlin
Socials:
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- It was a privatization in name only. The German state held 100% of its shares since the beginning. As such, it might have no longer been subject to the state specific demands of hiring etc. - but instead found itself in an uneasy tension as the only supplier of services to an entity that was something between a customer and a shareholder.
Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?
- I'm wondering if this overlooks areas where we experience much higher levels of deviation today. Take music, for example. When I grew up, I was basically limited to whatever was playing on the radio or MTV—there was only so much airtime for a small set of popular songs. The mainstream was much more mainstream. Today, I can listen to obscure Swedish power metal bands with fewer than 5,000 monthly listeners on Spotify without any difficulty.
The same goes for fashion. I have a picture of my mom and her friends where everyone looks like a miniature version of Madonna. Today, fashion seems far more individualistic.
Streaming has given us a vast spectrum of media to consume, and we now form tiny niche communities rather than all watching Jurassic Park together. There are still exceptions like Game of Thrones, The Avengers, or Squid Game, but they are less common.
One of my friends is into obscure K-pop culture that has virtually zero representation in our domestic media. Another is deeply interested in the military history of ancient Greece—good luck finding material on that when there were only two TV channels.
Maybe deviance hasn't disappeared—maybe it's just shifted elsewhere…?
- This was beautifully written and illustrated.
- we're actually working on a practical implementation of aspects of what Fei-Fei describes - although with a more narrow focus on optimizing operations in the physical space (mining, energy, defense etc) https://hivekit.io/about/our-vision/
- Looks amazing- and the point they're making in the article is correct. Switching back and forth from VS to PG Admin creates friction that this seems to solve in a much nicer way
- Maybe we need to widen our search for life. Earth is a planet with about 15 degree average temperature and abundant water and oxygen. So that's what live here consumes and where it thrives. But life is all about adaptation. So, father than looking for planets with similar temperatures and resources, shouldn't we be looking for other possible foundations for life? Maybe there's a thriving civilization out there, living happily at 300 degrees, breathing neon and eating sulfur?
- I don't think its about devaluing the currency to pay back debt at all. I believe it's about a fundamental vision of an autark USA, decoupled from any international obligations, whether its NATO, WHO or WTO and focused purely on producing and selling domestically whilst having a "beautiful ocean on each side".
I believe that's an unrealistic vision, not least since America's debt means it cannot afford significant shrinkage of its global market or a loss of its status as reserve currency, but I believe autarkie is the goal none the less.
- I believe there are two kinds of skill: standalone and foundational.
Over the centuries we’ve lost and gained a lot of standalone skills. Most people throughout history would scoff at my poor horse-riding, sword fighting or my inability to navigate by the stars.
My logic, reasoning and oratory abilities on the other hand, as well as my understanding of fundamental mechanics and engineering principles would probably hold up quite well (language barrier notwithstanding) back in ancient Greece or in 18th century France.
I believe AI is fine to use for standalone skills in programming. Writing isolated bits of logic, e.g. a getRandomHexColor() function in JavaScript or a query in an SQL dialect you’re not deeply familiar with is a great help and timesaver.
On the other hand, handing over the fundamental architecture of your project to an AI will erode your foundational problem solving and software design abilities.
Fortunately, AI is quite good at the former, but still far from being able to do the latter. So, to me at least, AI based code editors are helpful without the risk of long term skill degradation.
- That's fair, but I assume that is the initial implementation. Surely, over time, browser vendors will want to make the full spectrum of select functionality available consistently.
- The fact that I'm disproportionally excited about this probably dates me as an early 2000s web developer. But since selects can do things that you simply cannot recreate in HTML, e.g. have options drop downs that extend outside the viewport boundaries, makes this a really helpful feature.
Now, do autocompletes and tag selectors next...
- I'm curious - in 2021, the top 1% earned 26% of all income in the united states. What % of total contribution to the country's federal income tax would you consider fair?
- I agree with what you're saying, but lowering the risk does not mean completely eliminating the problem. It's always hard to argue the counterfactual, but I feel the number of conflicts since 1990 that HAVEN'T happened due to countries being economically dependent on each other is significant.
- Sorry, could you elaborate on "Meanwhile people in the West are being dropped into poverty."?
As for " lowering the risk of armed conflict - how's that working out for everyone?" - pretty well, thank you. Deaths in armed conflicts have massively decreased since the 1980s with most of them originating from local wars in Africa prior to 2022. (see https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace) - the Ukraine conflict is a return of exactly the kind of imperialist expansion that we've seen in the leadup to World War 1 which happens when isolated countries with territorial ambitions seek to expand.
- It's especially beneficial for the poorest people in the developed nation. In the 1940 US, the poorest 20% spent almost their entire income on basic needs, such as food and basic clothing. Today, the poorest 20% can still afford smartphones and flat screen TVs, clothes and even vacations. Yes, globalization has massively increased market sizes, making the richest much richer. But it also made the poorest much richer.
- Making more stuff in the countries with the cheapest costs also means that people in those countries are being lifted out of poverty. China's GDP per capita went from ~350USD in 1990 to 12.500USD in 2023 and similar growth happened for India, Bangladesh and lots of other poorer countries. Globalization brought affordable goods to wealthy nations and better living standards to poorer nations. In addition, closer trade ties lower the likelihood of armed conflict.
Smart wealthy countries understand these benefits and move their own economies to higher value creating activities like deep research, high tech development or financial services. Less smart wealthy countries try to erect trade barriers to force a return of uncompetitive manufacturing...
- I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be a concept of payments or monetization baked into the protocol. I believe there are some major companies to be built around making data and API actions available to AI Models, either as an intermediary or marketplace or for service providers or data owners directly- and they'd all benefit from a standardised payment model on a per transaction level.
- Blender, in my view, is one of the best arguments to develop native desktop applications over web view wrappers like Electron. Everything is responsive and instant, you can open new 3D view windows by just sliding them open at 60 frames a second, performance is stable even with multiple windows open and the download size is a reasonable 334MB.
- I particularly like the confidence in the succession diagram.
Pythagoras->Da Vinci->Descartes->Pepsi...obviously...
- I feel that most people instinctively assume that some institution, e.g. the government or the dictionary publishers are the authority on what constitutes "correct language". It's important to emphasize that language (included spelling) is something that develops organically and that the role of these institutions is just to capture the status quo.
At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power - and controlling it is an important aspect of exercising control.
- A lot of good things have already been said, but having worked on similar initiatives within larger banks, here are some of my key takeaways:
- Treat it as a product. Build something that would be appealing to real world customers. Spent time on writing great documentation, making a website that demos the components and advertise them internally. Even if other teams will be forced to use what you build by company mandate, getting buy-in will make your life much easier.
- Write great documentation. Incorporate usage by other teams as code samples.
- Avoid becoming the bottleneck at all costs. If you ship components to other teams, these components won't do all the things the other teams need. This will create friction for the other team and make you a bottleneck in their development workflow. They won't put up with this for long and quickly start working around your library or ditch it alltogether. To avoid this, make sure you continuously allocate some parts of your team to make fast changes and remain responsive.
- Allow for others to contribute back. Teams won't just use your things - they'll extend it. Make sure you have a clear and structured way to incorporate their changes.
- Stay responsive. Embed your developers and designers within the teams using your library. Don't become "the UI team" that bestows the unworthy with an update at their leisure - get close to your "customers", share their wants and pains.
- I feel there's a place for YAML and JSON and that they are quite different:
- YAML is for files written or edited by humans - e.g. configuration files for servers with lots of comments and explanations, but generally quite simple key value pairs or basic data structures
- JSON is for files written and consumed by machines. It allows for complex, nested data structures and types, but requires technical knowledge to use.
The problem arises once you start confusing these usecases. I'd argue that once you start writing `'{"a": 1e2}'` in YAML you're quite far outside of its ideal use. I appreciate that feature creep might lead to overly complex configuration files (I remember editing XML config that allowed you to specify for-loops in my earlier days), but really, at a certain point it might be worth taking a step back and reflecting if you're still using the right tool for the right job.
- Aside from duplication there's also competition. If you bake for your family, your pie will be appreciated, regardless of its novelty. But if your pie is meant to go onto a supermarket shelf alongside other pies, you need to give the consumer an incentive to choose yours - by making it better and/or different.
- I agree with that - but in many cases, I think I'd at least define "works" as "is a benefit towards the set aim, rather than a detriment". Although in many cases, it'd be fairer to define it as "is a net benefit towards the set aim when taking all costs and externalities into account".
In this way, I would argue e.g. that
- the war on drugs is a detriment, having significantly increased the price and thus the profitability of drugs and fostered a cartel ecosystem that is now a large percentage of the economy (and often the government) of many countries.
- the war on terror or the prison system might be a net benefit towards the aim of reducing terror or crime respectively, but is a net detriment when taking its costs (monetary, social, freedom etc.) into account.
- I'm not sure that "education" as the article states is one of them. But the war on drugs certainly is.
- I love this article as it speaks to one of the most overlooked aspects of modern life: There are a lot of fundamental things that we take for granted and practice every day - a lot of things with lots of experts and powerful institutions around them - that simply do not work.
And once you have such a thing, and you've build your reputation, your power base, your institution around it, it is absolutely paramount to carry on with it, deepen it, and extend it - regardless of whether it works or not.
But continuing the thing that doesn't work doesn't require some malicious intent or ulterior motive. Quite often, it's just a question of "well, what else would we do?". And the answer to that is often "nothing" - or "we don't know" - so it's better to do something and feel like we have agency and are doing something about it than just carrying on with our lives.
- I need to develop better impulse control. I was already halfway through filling out the shipping address when I took a deep breath and thought - really? Are you ever gonna seriously read this?
But then again, it does come wrap in space foil...so there's that...
- I'm wondering if at this point its more of an autocracy of systems. And whilst you can vote for the top layer that (nominally?) governs the system/institution, the system itself is permanent and continuous.
- Just wanted to share the related Wikipedia article. Germans do - factually - work fewer hours annually than any other developed nation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Then I switched jobs and ended up in Canary Wharf. For those who don't know it, Canary Wharf is a newly built finance district in the London Docklands. If you've been to Singapore, Dubai, La Defense in Paris or Songdo in Korea, you know the kind of place. Everything is clean, new, modern. Everything has 90 degree angles. Everything has cameras, security guards and cleaning stuff. What it doesn't have is any resemblance of a real city, any organicity or soul.
I hated it. Every morning I saw the streams of suite dressed worker drones pouring from the tube directly into their office towers (Canary Wharf has a huge underground shopping mall/railway station that allows you to go from the subway directly into your office without ever seeing the sun).
I was unhappy. So I did similar things to the OP. I got up earlier and walked there. (I lived in Mile End). It was a nice walk along the canal for a while and then a not so nice walk through smog and traffic, but I didn't mind. I took my lunch outside on the remaining docks. And finally, I got up so early that I arrived an hour before work began.
I spent this hour in a Cafe. Alone. Having breakfast. I loved this hour. I sat there, as the only one not rushing in, getting their "strong capo", beeping their card against the reader and rushing out. I observed the grey and black dressed stream of people. I day dreamed.
It helped - for a while. It was a band aid before I left London all together and moved to Berlin. But most of all, it is a uniquely calm and joyful experience. It decelerates you. The boheme in Paris or Prague has long figured this out. Sit in a cafe. Enjoy a coffee or a glass of wine. Look at people. Daydream. Reflect, be enough - there's a lot to it.