I’m not sure why the downvotes. I think the poster is basically saying the same thing as this YouTube-er. I read “Million monkeys” as referring to LLMs.
One thing you won’t get with in an LLM is genuine research. I once answered a 550 point question by researching the source code of vim to see how the poster’s question could be resolved. [0]
I imagine they’re all gone now. A great example of the free market creating a niche product that was useful and affordable to its customers and the government regulating it out of existence. I’m sure there were abuses by owners but the system worked for the majority.
If you can't afford a home up to our standards, better that you should be homeless? If you can't land a job at minimum wage, better for you to be unemployed? I wish that these were reductio ad absurdems rather than common place luxury beliefs.
It’s a lose lose. If you remove the wage floor many people with “livable” wages now would have theirs cut, it’s a problem of adversarial incentives a la nash.
Sure, but now there's a deadweight loss by allocation inefficiencies (plus the disemployment effects are strongest at the margin, so now many people are working less than they want to, because they cannot sell more of their work for less, so ie. they have part time jobs).
The "obvious" thing is to subsidize employment (by negative income tax for low-incomes to avoid discontinuities), and sectoral/collective bargaining (to avoid divide-and-conquer information asymmetry), and unemployment payments (to allow for the market to find new "healthy" equilibrium, so people don't have to take the first shitty job).
You have two underlying factors which make everything else downstream moot. Fractional reserve lending and plastic imports. FRL means a bank is depositing $5 and lending $50 then charging you interest for the $45 they never had in the first place. Now you must extract that interest from someone else, who likely finances the missing amount and compounds the problem. So that’s how we stay ‘afloat’ if you can call it that despite the problem of #2. #2. Plastic is made from oil. Whereas anyone would exchange labor for energy, energy prices money. It’s the civilizational bottleneck. It would be cheaper to empty fort knox into Boston Harbor than accept another ship of disposable plastic goods that we send to a landfill. It’s effectively taking a big wad of US wealth every day and lighting it on fire, then using the nonsense FRL to make up the difference.
Given all that, whatever labor or wage trick you do is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I know how to remediate the plastic issue, which is an engineering question. Until that’s addressed the union sq debt clock is counting the cargo ships docking to feed our money/energy/oil->landfill pipeline.
Money supply management is important for price stability. There's no debt problem in fractional reserve banking. (Exactly because debt is slowly inflated away while real assets keep their value [as their nominal value increases].)
There's a tremendous amount of economic growth. And as long as there are places where we can put in some better technology, a more efficient process or organization, then growth will continue, and the money supply will have to grow, and it's currently done via bank-issued money, because it provides some risk management. (Which is the most important factor of money creation. This is why finance and insurance developed intertwined.)
Energy is one bottleneck, sure, but there's no serious slowdown of growth of electricity generation capacity for example. And GDP growth is decoupling from carbon intensity. (As it should as we started to invest a lot of our economic surplus to do so.)
...
The important thing to remember is that there's a balance between how much money is needed now and how much is issued to be paid back later, and obviously if the growth would be almost zero the interest rate would be almost zero too.
If growth slows down (the fiscal multiplier goes down, there are no more public things to do, no more houses to insulate to get a smaller HVAC bill, no unemployed person to teach skills who would then work) then need for money also goes down, as no one will offer to pay it back with interest, so interest rate will go down, so whatever amount of money we have (as debt) we can keep rolling it over.
And of course the central bank can always exchange debt money to non-debt money. (And every time it wants to increase the interest rate it used to do something similar, it sold assets [US Treasury bonds] which removed debt money from the system. And back in the 90s there was talk about how the US central bank will adapt if the US government starts to run surpluses permanently.)
> Money supply management is important for price stability
That’s an academic answer but it’s wrong. Price stability is derived from economic equilibrium, which means energy however you want to label it in and out must be stable. It’s not a philosophical debate nash models most of it. Our landfill pipeline is the source of our debt.
The classical hypothesis is that a swamp of credit is always going to buy some magic wand where the ends justify the means and there are infinite ways for society to store debt. What you get is fraud after a phase transition which is the society we live in now. Basically all I’m pointing out is no free lunch. There’s nothing to debate. I’m mapping no free lunch to the various materializations of energy in the economy. Food fuel labor oil power whatever you want to label it you have to pay for that oil. It’s potential energy whose current payment date is hundreds of years in the future. The whole global supply chain theology is laid bare a bunch of horrible trade offs which falsely claim credit for largely unrelated gains in raw human output and hidden costs.
Of course there's no free lunch, but economic equilibrium includes future obligations too (at a discounted rate), it includes the value of current unfinished things, there's a lot of real economic value backed by demand, because otherwise there's nowhere for supply to go. (Imagine if suddenly no one wants to build houses, because let's say everyone gets a tent. Suddenly there is an oversupply of construction services, and construction materials, and architects, and inspectors, and labor in general. Which will immediately triggers a drop in wages.)
You have a hypothesis about price stability, and it's easy to see that while energy prices do impact everything so do interest rates (and in general monetary policy), therefore you need a model that's more complex than what you propose.
Prices inherently aggregate almost all concerns, so even logically it cannot be simply determined by one thing (like energy). Even if energy is cheap if we misallocate it then food, housing, or transportation gets more expensive.
You seem to be mixing up monetarism with sustainability and diminishing returns.
I really appreciate the level of discourse here on Hacker News. Thank you to threads like this and the authors of the comments.
I appreciate your argument, and you knowlwdge of economics adds weight to it. I'm wary of putting the burden on workers to remove information asymmetry and power imbalances in bargaining. Just because it's necessary now doesn't mean it needs to be. It could create a cycle of permanent extra work for those most in need of regulatory help.
I don't know if I had the full language of economic inefficiencies ready to flow like you do if that argument would be more effective. Or if there are other blocks, you know?
The market for labour is a monopsony (the limited number of buyers relative to sellers make it a buyer's market). Just as suppressing price in a monopolistic market is unlikely to drive down supply and can actually increase overall sales, recent minimum wage increases have been found to have a net positive effect on employment.
> We present the first causal analysis of recent large minimum wage increases, focusing on 47 large U.S. counties that reached $15 or more by 2022q1. [...] We then find significant and larger positive employment effects, as the monopsony model predicts. We go on to document the presence of monopsony in the restau- rant industry. [...] The fast food industry’s monopsony power allowed it to accommodate large minimum wage increases and raise employment.
Less than 1% of workers make minimum wage. There are effectively zero opportunities to increase employment by offering wages below the minimum. If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because the employers think they are a net negative.
So minimum wage helps less than 1% of workers, at the expense of people who don't have skills valued at the minimum wage? Why are you confident that's a net positive trade off?
> If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because the employers think they are a net negative.
That's why I think that people should be able to work for less, for employers who think they are a net positive at a lower wage. It's better than the true minimum wage of zero.
It's not like the value of labor is discontinuous, such that it is worth zero if is worth less than a minimum.
> That's why I think that people should be able to work for less, for employers who think they are a net positive at a lower wage.
No. If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because employers think they would be a net negative at a $0 wage. There are a couple counter examples like walmart no longer being open overnight, but even then thats more because of theft than paying the employees. It is not hard to find a minimum wage job in the vast majority of the country. If you cant its because employers think you will do an exceptionally bad job. Every single adult has skills valued at minimum wage in the US, the question is just if they have a drug problem or mental illness or something like that. Those people wouldnt be helpful at $0 wage either
> There is lots of profit to be made at $10 per worker hour that can't be made at $15.
Sure, if you have decent workers. But decent workers can make $15/hr so you cant get them. If youre stuck with the people who cant get a minimum wage job you dont have anyone you can trust and you cant build a business like that unless youre amazon tracking everyone's metrics with a billion dollar warehouse system. (amazon also pays well over minimum wage)
Why is someone who brings in $15.10 of value to a company a decent worker but someone who brings in $14.90 of value someone that can be written off completely? Obviously, we can quibble over the exact numbers and how one assesses value. But that’s kind of the point, we should let people figure that out for themselves what they’re worth and what they are willing to pay other people for.
I understand that there are concerns with race to the bottom dynamics and ensuring a minimum standard of living, but there are better tools for addressing that than the minimum wage (a more generous EITC or negative income tax for example).
There are many vacant minimum wage jobs. I think the issue here is just that you overestimate the number of people who cant get a job because minimum wage exists. If you are a decent worker you are able to get a minimum wage job in this country, so if you cant you are by definition not a decent worker. Looking at the micro scale (employee only worth $14.90 to a single company) is largely irrelevant because there are plenty of other companies that find decent employees to be worth $15/hr. The level of incompetence you need to have to not be worth a minimum wage job to any company is so high that you are actively hindering business from being done.
If you’re worth $14.90 to the company they’ll likely hire you, even if just to free up someone who is worth $15.50. The people who wouldn’t be hired at $0 are what you need to solve to fix homelessness.
federal minimum wage, which is lower than many, many states, so stating this is a little misleading. It's also at or around 1% (for federal), not less - per this 2023 source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2023/
I'm not sure what standards you're talking about, but if you can't afford a home where you live you should move to a cheaper area. If the decision is being homeless vs moving, you should move.
Cheaper options almost always mean less jobs. I know lots of cheap places to live - in the middle of nowhere. Small towns that can't even support a gas station: the locals drive half an hour to get groceries. (they are close to their job on the farm, or at least some job that needs to be out there because the farm is there)
These places were great places for the poor. They are close to lots of people and that implies some of those people will be willing to hire you for a something cheap. It isn't a great life, but if you have very limited abilities you likely prefer to make your own choices in life vs whatever the shelters force on you. (some shelters/institutions have been very abusive in the past)
How about "if you are unwilling pay someone enough to cover most of their core expenses, you aren't allowed to hire them at all"? I like that phrasing better
Hate to be “that guy”, but this isn’t regulation or government. Rather it’s the free market with actors willing to do anything to make gentrification profits. Which are, unfortunately for our society, quite sizable.
You can have flophouses. Officially or under the table. But you can’t have them in areas with the vultures circling so to speak.
Not saying gentrification is good or bad. Just saying, if gentrification profits are there to be had, it’s a bit foolish to expect people to not do whatever it takes to secure those profits.
Affordable is a stretch. When they went out of business in 2014, they were charging $30/night - $900/mo. You could definitely get actual rooms in NY or even a studio apartment for that much. Yes, it will be way out in the Bronx or Queens, in not a great neighborhood, but it is certainly better than a 4x6' room with a plank in it and just a knee wall between you and a number of strangers. Obviously for a lot of people coming up with $900 at once for a deposit or whatever could be the hard part, but these rooms were more of the equivalent of pay day loans than an actual value.
Even the article from 1996 is $10/day | $300/mo which would easily afford you a room in a cheaper neighborhood back then (I'll have to trust the HUD reports from 1996 since I was a child at that point with no direct experience)
Going through getting started on the command line fails:
$ npx genaiscript script create proofreader
Need to install the following packages:
genaiscript@1.70.0
Ok to proceed? (y)
file /Users/me/src/learn/genaiscript/proofreader/genaisrc/proofreader.genai.mjs already exists
Error: file /Users/me/src/learn/genaiscript/proofreader/genaisrc/proofreader.genai.mjs already exists
at copyPrompt (/Users/me/.npm/_npx/3f5b5bbcce7f85b9/node_modules/genaiscript/built/genaiscript.cjs:96237:35)
at async _Command.createScript2 (/Users/me/.npm/_npx/3f5b5bbcce7f85b9/node_modules/genaiscript/built/genaiscript.cjs:96327:15)
It’s fascinating to think about the number of PUs (procedural units) it takes to make a modern tool. Something as simple as a modern hammer must number in the thousands and a mobile phone in the millions or billions.
You might find the essay "I, Pencil" by Leonard Read interesting. It's told from the point of view of a pencil who talks about the complexity of his own creation and all of the components involved in the process
That essay also loosely inspired the opening scene of Lord of War, which showcases the journey of a bullet from an underground mine to an Eastern European factory all the way into the head of an African child soldier.
Loved that scene. Reminds me of all the "autobiography" stories we had to write for various items such as cars, horses, computers and pens, back in school.
There's also Thomas Thwaites' "building a toaster... from scratch" project that goes into the details of how even an extremely simple appliance involves materials and processes that are effectively impossible for a single person to replicate (spoiler: he has to give up and "cheat" on some things).
One part of the drivel - he says don't let the government inhibit the invisible hand of the market that Adam Smith discusses in The Wealth of Nations. But in The Wealth of Nations, the invisible hand is the hand of the government inhibiting free trade between nations.
It gets inhibited by the banking system anyway, you would at least have to adopt the Chicago plan (full reserve banking) to avoid it. As it is now, it's about who gets given the money, rather than anything similar to free market.
That idea is pretty similar to "assembly theory" no? In the sense of how much information or evolution was necessary to generate some artifact, be it a benzene molecule, a stone tool, or an iphone
The same came to my mind. I think there may be some elements of assembly which have to do with biological process that don’t apply to “accumulation of technological knowledge,” but I need to reread it.
Here, we introduce AT, which addresses these challenges by describing how novelty generation and selection can operate in forward-evolving processes. The framework of AT allows us to predict features of new discoveries during selection, and to quantify how much selection was necessary to produce observed objects, without having to prespecify individuals or units of selection.
It took humans 300k years, all of us, our collective output to reach this point. Yet people insist on comparing a human who is part of society with a LLM alone, who doesn't even have search, and very limited contexts, just closed book mode remembering.
There was a great article posted the other day that explained in detail but also followable terms all the processes that go into making a chip. I didn't realise that a single wafer can spend months in the production line.
the genius of photolithography (and its descendents) is that each chip is printed all at once, all the transistors at once over several steps for the several layers. This is what makes chips inexpensive.
The genius of photolithography is many things, I wouldn't say the wafer process is any more special than the statistical models that can predict where a nozzle needs to point to lay substract with more precision than the nozzle itself can provide or a number of other important inventions there.
using the same process that was used to make a single transistor (and package and attach connecting leads to it)...
...to make an entire circuit (and package and attach connecting leads to it)...
is the invention of the integrated circuit
and photolithography made that possible. It subsequently had a large number of important follow on innovations, but which were conceptually proper subsets of it.
had some other process made integrated circuits possible, that other process would have subsequently had many important innovations.
what flowed from photolithographic chip making is still flowing today.
As an Android developer and someone who has studied the ASOP internals, I don’t see what the big deal is. If I were going to build custom hardware that has a custom ui then it makes complete sense to start with the open source version of Android. Google has spent billions inventing that wheel and you can use it for free. It has everything you need (except realtime). The natural way to build ui apps in Android is to make an apk. Doing anything else would be weirdly unnecessary.
Yep. Making a feature electronic with your own OS is immediately burned by
- WiFi/ip stack
- 4g/5g wireless
- graphics drivers
That’s why pretty much everything is android. I just wish these startups would stop shoving Ubuntu server with chromium inside and at least do something like Netbsd and libcairo.
The biggest downside I see is that 1. according to reviewers the battery life is utter garbage. Using Android probably isn’t helping that much. And 2. There is no actual purpose for this device, there’s nothing it does you can’t do better with a phone.
The target market for this is presumably the same as the Playdate but any of the normal AI apps would be better for most users tbh
> The target market for this is presumably the same as the Playdate
I don't think "this could be an app on my phone" works as an argument for the Playdate the way it does for the Rabbit R1. A dedicated gaming device with real buttons is better than a touchscreen any day and the constraints of the hardware make the games unusual and highly creative. It would diminish the experience considerably if it was just a mobile app.
Contrast with the R1 which seems to want to be a general purpose device that just does everything worse than the supercomputer you already carry around in your pocket.
Sometimes it's not about what it can do at first but what long term potential the creators see. Perhaps this is the MVP they could make and release but they made design choices that aren't apparent due to a vision for a future iteration that is more capable.
An MVP for this device would be an app, there’s no demonstrated capabilities the playdate has that a phone can’t do. I actually think the Humane pin “””succeeded””” in that they actually produced a device that has capabilities a 5 year old smartphone loaded with the same software doesn’t.
Donald Rumsfeld — 'You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.'
In that context; Android is mediocre but I don't mean that in a nasty way. It might not be the best design or the most dynamic but it is the one that we have today that is powerful and easy enough to do what is needed.
If I was to build a portable, whatever, as much as I would love to start from a blank slate, that alone could mean being years behind just to get off the ground floor. Building a base OS isn't easy even if you know what you are doing, having something that is 100% free to launch off is wonderful.
Most people don't realize that Android was originally intended to be a BlackberryOS clone, but was pivoted to compete with iOS at the last minute instead. Once you understand that, a lot of the design decisions start making a lot more sense.
The big deal is that it's just a hardware skin for an app while they are trying to pitch their customers on a new type of computing platform. It's just vaporware. It's a software company larping as a hardware company. They should be laughed out of existence.
Several folks have stated that it could be just an app. I disagree. Modern versions of Android on a real phone severely limit what an app can do. It can't run forever, it can't gather any and all telemetry available to the physical device at will.
As for battery life, there's a lot you can do at the OS layer to limit what services run, but at the end of the day you're not running on a piece of hardware that has been honed by thousands of engineering hours and billions of dollars, so V1 is going to be pretty rough.
Being dumb hardware which connects to a smart device for the juicy tasks. If nothing relevant is running locally anyway, then this setup makes more sense on surface to get longer battery time.
But overall, I think people are just disappointed how much it sucks, and satisfied as every knew it from the beginning.
Great! Brings back memories of descent 1 & 2. I played d1 for hours over the early internet. My favorite level was Minerva and my arch enemy was named “upinya”. Amazing what the brain remembers from so long ago.
I know what you mean about remembering weird stuff from many years ago. I still remember the IP address of the server of my first website in 1995 (because it had no domain name, I had to know the IP address to show people the website). Occasionally I'll think of the name from a random IRC/AIM/etc. user I talked with 20+ years ago. :)
I thought this was going to be an article about measuring vast distances in space. Instead it's a tutorial abouta Haskell library. Personally, I was disappointed.
Excellent. Similar. Now I want to write an article about Galaxy Clusters and the nigh incomprehensible space between them. You are here -> . You are tiny.
https://youtu.be/DNN8cHqRIB8?si=s2VBjZXrP21yziXa
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