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Accidental complexity and essential complexity. There is no working system that achieves all the stated aims with fewer parts. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet


It's especially funny to me that Nozick's utility monster was alive and about 3 years old when he wrote the paper.

GDP = C + I + G + Xn = W + I + R + P

(To grossly simplify the single-nation macroeconomic picture, at least)

C = consumption I = investment (the first one) G = government Xn = net exports

W = wages paid to labor I = interest on capital R = rent on resources and real property P = profit to entrepreneurs

consumption ~= wages, so if wages go to zero, the economy massively shrinks unless government steps in with something like taxation to fund UBI, sovereign wealth fund distributions, or direct universal ownership.


Wages could go up, it's just in the form of trillionare paying another trillionare a trillion dollars a day. GDP would be looking rosy!

This is kinda what’s been happening for a while -

Wages are decoupled from consumption, and it is increasingly aggregated in the higher income brackets.

This is the ‘K’ economy.

https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-...


Sure, what you describe is usually in the Macro textbooks. However in XXI century USA, Consumption has been detached from ‘wages’ for a while now (“since the 1970s”, ie 2 generations, per https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/)

In reality, the top income brackets are propping up Consumption numbers. This is part of what have become to understand as the ‘K’ shaped economy, together with the speeding up of capital accumulation/concentration.

https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/1125-yang-...

Edits for clarity


To be fair, that doesn't seem to be stopping any of the billionaire class from trying frantically to accumulate more wealth today, I don't know why AI ascendant would change any of those incentives.

They literally always frantically try to accumulate more wealth. It’s their dominant trait.

It’s just working better for a few of them right now than it historically has.


Talakhadze's 267 kg clean & jerk from 2021 is somewhere well north of 5kw output (I can't find hard numbers, but possibly even like 7kw) for fractions of a second during the second half of the clean. It's wild stuff.

Slightly off topic, but on a clear blue sky it's possible to directly visualize the white blood cells running around on your retina. I love watching them go about business, and I think I heard it can even be used diagnostically to do a manual WBC count in extremis for leukoproliferative disease.

They're pretty tiny though, I'm not sure if you'd actually see a center in the RBCs


The lighter centers could have been diffraction around the object and reconvergence. Or some kind of signal processing effect at the retinal level.

The retinal vessel network is a fun thing to inspect as you say. It works best for me when the sun is high in the sky. The bright, featureless blue brings out the branching network very well.


Reverse captcha: only robots can reprove one of the Euler problems on the fly? Statistically speaking we can round the people who can into the outlier group, right?

That's actually interesting:

Like when games detect aimbots, they don't ban people, but put them in an aimbot bracket, so everyone you play with is a cheater.

Provide a captcha that is essentially harder for a human to solve, but trivial for either a human or an AI, and transparently separate them into two communities.


There's an information theoretic aspect about generating a proof which is essentially not human readable from 4900 lines of spec. I wonder how much additional signal they're getting out beyond what's in that 4900 lines, and what's the percentage of noise in the 200k lines of proof?

And you'll rapidly return to proofs when your "function input" is something like a sequence of, say, ieee floating point numbers coming over the wire of possibly unbounded length. State machines with proofs that all the cases are handled are great.

This is also a change in specifically Opus 4.8 / perhaps Fable 5 (I didn't really get enough of a baseline to see it there as much), where it's much more skeptical. For my purposes, this is fabulous - one of my pat addendums to most prompts is "challenge my assumptions and check the evidence empirically", and boy does it.

> fabulous

I think you mean fableuous ;)


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