FWIW this story is much older than Mickey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer’s_Apprentice
sab
Karma: 117
My guess is “never letting a good crisis go to waste”. It’s an excuse for refocus / restructuring.
Also, there are real communication costs associated with huge headcounts in tech. Earning their pay on the margin is not enough.
Also, perhaps (hopefully) the culture shifted from exponential headcount growth...
It still operates, but I haven’t kept in touch closely enough to know how well it’s doing and what has changed – https://talent.edu.pl/.
Short answer: hired by NGO which helped me skill up first.
Long answer: Where I was growing up there was a comp-sci training NGO. Their approach was quite interesting:
Grouping by skill, not by age. You decide which level you attend. You choose your pace—you can progress very quickly, but no one will force you to progress at all.
Competition-oriented—primary activity would resemble IOI. Add lectures, math, sport and psych workshops on top.
Teachers and technical organisers recruited almost exclusively from current top students and recent alumni. Often they would teach one level and partcipate as students at a higher level. This had a bunch of benefits: community vibes, access to smart hard-to-hire people with relevant skills, and opportunity to learn the practical side of things for the team.
Big chunks of the work paid pretty well—like local senior developer effective hourly rates for (top) high school students.
I joined as a student first, did well in some external national and international competitions and then I was asked to join the team.
Data point: I started working professionally at the age of 15 (part-time, in parallel with education) and it was one of the best things that have ever happened to me. Definitely found it way more enjoyable, rewarding and beneficial than traditional school.
It was software engineering, which is probably the best case scenario—the field is desperate for people and there’s a lot of room for growth.
I assumed it was intentional, as in person-who-tries named Lsusr (as opposed to Great Blogger Lsusr).
The counterargument also does not work because it is not central. The negative X phenomenon can persist even if death continues. Lack of progress, eternal dictatorship, overpopulation and degradation are possible in societies where people have short life expectancy.
This counter-counterargument doesn’t work. Just because phenomenon X is possible under both scenarios doesn’t mean it’s equally likely or as difficult to avoid.
(Note: I think that death is bad. My point is about a specific line of reasoning.)
For a few days it was very enlightening and I cared enough to reflect upon them. Then I continued for a few more months.
In my case it also covered data analysis work, video meetings etc.
I annotated all the screenshots with time, so I could immediately see how much time I spent on things (system clock was too small and not visible in full screen mode).
For meetings specifically it helped me reflect upon how much time I spent in various kind of meetings and how useful they were. It also let me easily see how much time I spent afk (e.g. how long was my lunch break).
I did the same thing for a while (I had a habit of watching a 5 minute timelapse of my screen at the end of each workday). At some point I hit diminishing returns and it became a chore, so I took a break. That said, I highly recommend trying this (not only for programming!).
BTW I implemented it in the same way as OP (screenshot every N seconds, put together with ffmpeg). Actual screen recording software was too resource heavy and didn’t support very low fps well.
Cryptocurrencies allow AIs to directly participate in the economy, without human intermediaries.
It doesn’t seem to be a consequence of Crypto specifically. Any API qualifies here.
That said, Crypto could make it harder to block such trades on the financial system level.
I seem to have some kind of epistemic immune response going on that encounters a thought like, “Maybe I should increase my confidence independently of my best guess about my competence,” and responds by shouting “WHAT NO ARE YOU CRAZY STOP”.
Yeah, If “confident” means “I think I’m good at something”, it’s weird to say “I’m good at X, but I think I’m not good at X”.
Perhaps it’s a bit of a system-1 vs system-2 distinction? I.e. you can consider yourself competent, but still viscerally anxious.
Post-scarcity doesn’t neccesarily mean lots of stuff, just that we don’t count it.
Wouldn’t not counting be the result of there being lots of stuff? Your examples are cases of there being more stuff than people want on average.
Interpersonal competition is not the most natural part of economy. If we systematically outlawed pay-to-win then the coupling would be signficantly lessened. And its already the case that areanas that enforce equality are better status grabs than where you can influence the outcome by outside factors. Boxing is by weight class. Most motorsports have technical rulings which means expensive parts don’t confer an autowin advantage.
Economy is not about status, at least not for the most part. If I “pay to win” by buying tasty, prepared food, it’s because I want to enjoy it and have more time for other things, not because I want to prove something.
The fact there is enough to go around doesn’t mean it actually goes around.
[Distribution of Wealth in the United States 2017]Nit: IMHO consumption distribution would be much more relevant than wealth. You can imagine a society where everyone gets and consumes enough materially (for some definition of “enough”) – which counts as 0 wealth, but some of its members also own stocks…
(Lacking decent consumption data, income would probably be a much closer approximation than wealth).
I had a very similar setup for a while and it worked okay. We had one meeting day each week. It was mostly about whiteboarding and building social cohesion. We still communicated quite a lot on other days (mostly through text, rarely VC).
I wonder to what extent the issues described are fundamental and to what extent this is just a matter of adjustment / investment / development of new practices.
The organizations spend a huge amount of resources on shared offices. Contrast that with a lockdown remote setup when even having a decent internet connection and mic is not obvious for many people… What if some non-trivial fraction of office budget was allocated to remote setups?
The best practices and social norms for remote work are not the same as in-person. If remote work becomes more mainstream, I expect that we’ll collectively get better at this. Anecdotally, remote-first approach with self-selected people works better than “retrofitting” remote work in an in-person organization.
Hmmm… yeah, but you could have made it in other ways, which might or might not be possible to offset, e.g.:
Employment income
Having some money after moving from another country
Gifts, inheritance etc.
I previously assumed that you can only offset capital losses against past capital gains.
BTW if you allow offsetting against any kind of income then you get another issue – all of the people who are really bad at investing consistently decrease their tax bills by their capital gains losses. Not sure how big a deal is that. Or perhaps that’s a feature?
We should significantly increase capital gains taxes by taxing it at the same rate as ordinary income.
If an investor makes money one year then loses it later, we should give them their taxes back.
I wonder how progression would interact with the giving back. I.e. if you had gains while being a high-maginal-rate taxpayer and then losses at a lower rate or vice versa.
If an investor makes money one year then loses it later, we should give them their taxes back.
If we don’t allow carrying forward losses this puts people who are just starting to invest at a serious disadvantage.
If you can immediately offset all your losses such tax basically feels like the government de-levereging you (taking a percentage of all gains and losses). I.e. you can get the same outcome as without the tax by investing times more.
If, on the other hand you lose before you have gains (and we don’t allow carry-forward) you lose 100% of what you lost.
Could you explain where P(I swing election) = 1/sqrt(nVoters) is coming from?
> Therein lies the confusion. Freedom and the lack thereof is not a line, but a cone.
If I understand correctly, you’re saying that in a space of societies there is a point of anarchy – no rules whatsoever – and you can add various restrictions of freedom, leading to different societies. In particular there are various possible societies with a given level of freedom (which is the y-axis in your cone drawing).
Please correct me if I got it wrong.
> e.g. thorough environmental protection, public-dominant transportation, communal acoustic improvement
Arguably, freedom the practical sense is different from simply “fewer restrictions” or y-axis of the cone. Often you can frame decisions as “freedom to” vs “freedom from”:
* Freedom to take and use anything vs freedom to own private property.
* Freedom to enter binding contracts vs freedom to do whatever.
* Freedom to punch people in the face vs freedom to walk around safely.
* Freedom to have a loud party vs freedom to quietly enjoy your place.
* Freedom to talk on the phone on a train vs freedom from such disturbance.
* Freedom to cut down the forest vs freedom to walk in the forest.
* Freedom to pass through the land (right of way) vs freedom to use the land exclusively.
In other words, some things naturally understood as “freedoms” are practically and sometimes logically in conflict and the boundary needs to be put somewhere. Some of your examples might be like that.
There are also cases where there is no such obvious trade-off against another kind of freedom (there might be other benefits – judgement is out of scope here), e.g.:
* Restrictions for no reason whatsoever. Hypothetically tomorrow blue t-shirts could be banned.
* Protecting you against yourself, e.g. in the UK you usually can’t just buy more than 2 small packs of Ibuprofen at a time (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/956857/Appendix_4.pdf).
* Not being allowed to criticize your government.
Freedom understood this way is not a single thing – more like a possibility space which can take different shapes. It is still useful to think of the greater and lesser freedom, but it is not maximized by absolute anarchy (which would be extremely short-lived anyway without at least enforced non-violence).
> Freedom is only instrumentally valuable
It seems quite reasonable to hold freedom in a more practical sense as a terminal value or nearly terminal value – closely related to such things like staying true to oneself, taking responsibility, pursuing one’s own goals rather than someone else’s, roaming free instead of being caged, resisting oppression, self-governance.