But I think the purpose of a wealth tax is precisely to get rid of greedy billionaires.
So if they vote with their feet and leave, then that's an even better outcome. Now they can't manipulate the government anymore. They can go manipulate and continue extracting wealth from some other place.
Yeah because they got billions by extracting it like mosquitos. It came mostly from your billions I assume. Without that it would have been all yours. Clearly you have zero concept of how an economy works.
You know the extraction is more like 10000-to-1 than 1-to-1.
But in essence I do believe that I (and thousands of others) could have had at least $100k more net worth if they hadn't monopolized all user-acquisition channels and if they hadn't helped bring about the many laws and regulations which made this possible.
I have no ill feelings towards them but I just don't want them in my state competing against me for limited resources using money which they acquired through an unjust scheme which I was coercively made a part of but which I never agreed to and have been protesting for almost a decade (on deaf ears).
It's not personal or even saying anything negative about their character or abilities. From my perspective it's just pure self-preservation. They either need to contribute more tax to make up for the injustice or they leave.
When they sell their assets, it makes those assets more affordable for the rest of us. So any forced sale is good for society. I don't see any issues with it. We were/are forced to prop up their stocks through government contracts, grants and regulatory monopolies... So they should contribute something on their end too.
And I don't care about the "jobs they create" - They created jobs for my competitors to get easy money in cushy jobs. I want those jobs gone too! I don't want FAANG employees bidding up house prices in my area.
I only want to compete against people who are playing by the same rules as me! I don't want to compete against people who can rewrite the rulebook as we go, to suit them.
I hadn't heard about Jev but when I read about what it does, I understood we are in an AI bubble.
I wrote a function pretty much exactly like Jev about a year ago... I would provide my function an array with a bunch of labels as first argument and a string of text/content as second argument and it would give me a relevance score for each label in the array against the provided text/content.
It's really easy to implement. Took me like a day or so by hand.
You just compute the embedding vector of each label in the array then compare each one against the embedding vector of the text/content and it then return an object which maps each label to its similarity score.
I used it to allow users to tag employee data from LinkedIn.
I had essentially forgotten about that code until now...
This situation illustrates exactly the limitation of AI and why we still need humans in the loop.
It reminds me of a junior coding bootcamp lecture I once gave many years ago before AI coding. One of the first slides said "Computers will do exactly what you say, not what you mean."
Initially, I thought Socrates' stance on writing was some kind of eccentricity but now that I have seen first hand how the meaning of words can change over time and differ between people and places, I now have a better understanding of how much context is lost in writing.
When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.
When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.
Also, subjective experience-based words like 'difficult', 'easy', 'entertaining', 'funny' or even 'good' and 'evil' can vary widely between individuals. I didn't realize this until I met certain people who had very different values to mine. They had completely different definition of 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong'.
Talking to these people is strange and sometimes uncomfortable because you're using the same language and can 'understand' each other superficially, but you know you're not actually speaking the same language. You know they interpret what you're saying differently; they have fundamentally different goals and beliefs about the world and about you.
For example, some action or belief which might be second-nature to you, might actually be seen as strange and a weakness from the other person's perspective. But there are many, many distortions like this.
In fact, no two humans understand the same language in the same way. Often, what people believe, is shockingly different; you just never realized because you never discussed in depth and never defined your words and broke them down into their atomic parts... And in elite social circles, many taboos exist precisely to prevent any such exploration from occurring as such explorations might jeopardize relationships. Many relationships serve a strategic purpose and aren't about truth discovery.
It makes you wonder about not just writing but language as a whole. In transcription we clearly lose important dimensionality such as tone, intent, or body language. Socrates seems to have been alluding to accessing information beyond what was merely initially offered as well, e.g. follow up questions.
What sort of dimensionality do we lose when thoughts go from ephemeral forms transcribed into concrete english language structures? Is this lingua franca holding us back in some ways from different thought patterns that might be better in some ways?
Dream states or psychedelics probably get you closest to this sort of "knowing without having the knowing put into discrete words" state of low level cognition. I wonder what might be there in our minds if we managed to strip our thinking of being bound by the limited framing offered through our languages?
Even in the quote given in this article, most instances of the word "word" are "logos" in Greek, which means something closer to speech, argument, reasoning, logic, etc. This doesn't really change the meaning of the quote dramatically, but some slight nuance is lost.
> When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.
True, but I don't think leaving it unwritten makes it better.
Also, and I found this idea in that newest translation of Homer, remembering is a kind of technology. We do not write books, poems, songs or tv shows to be remembered. But, when people relied on memory, they did structured knowledge so that it is easier to remember.
That is where rhyme and repetition comes from. We kind of lost how to do that.
But then again, when you talk to people who don't learn because "you can find it on the internet anyway", they come across as dumb. When you encounter people who can do basic arithmetic because calculator, there are situation where they are ... dumb and not useful. When you encounter people who use car to get everywhere, they cant really walk - they think 1km is a long hike. It is going to be the same with ai.
1. I'm the product owner, I can demo it for you.
2. I know who the product owner is, and I think it's live.
3. I think it's currently under development...or maybe we're still gathering requirements
4. Budget has been assigned, but work hasn't started
5. It's listed in a slide deck
> When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.
On the one hand, yes, I agree with you.
On the other hand, I’ve played the game of telephone. I can’t imagine a game of telephone played over multiple generations has any sort of fidelity.
Perhaps if your imagination included a game of telephone which includes multiple error correcting codes/mechanisms, when instruction in those mechanisms is part of the teaching, and when preserving the wording is valued by most/all participants in the game/culture/conversation?
Here is one example where knowledge was well maintained over 12000 years.
>valued by most/all participants in the game/culture/conversation
The question then becomes one of cultural stability over that length of time. I personally can't tell you anything about the cultural and technological stability of of the aboriginal cultures, all I can assume is they were far more stable than europe, north africa, and the middle east. These later groups I listed had an absolutely massive amount of cultural exchange, and other things like mass genocide over the centuries. The exchange of new concepts and ideas is a powerful force in shaping the stories we tell. When two groups of people exist together over longer periods of time with conflicting sets of stories one of the stories tends to fade and die, and most likely a mixed story is created (Christianity ate a lot of Pagan mythos this way).
I share your sentiment. What you're describing here was also very eye-opening to me when I first realized it.
I'll restate these ideas in a more explicit claim. All symbols are defined via one's own subjective experience.
One's own understanding/definition of every word can be traced back to personal experience. Imagine your life as a timeline, like a video, from birth up until now. You can seek that timeline to find the moments/clips that contributed to your definition of any given word or even mathematical symbol. To give an example, when I say "apple", the corresponding idea in my head is based on every apple I've seen and every instance of the word "apple" I've seen being used or being taught to me in the past. Even when we try to define the phrase "this specific apple" while looking at the same apple on the same table in the same room, the light bounces off of it slightly differently from my angle of view vs yours, and we did not see the same sequence of "video frames" about the apple, and so our mental models of that apple would necessarily be slightly different.
This is probably why the hard problem of consciousness / unified theory of physics appear forever out of reach. If no two observers/observations are fully identical, then you cannot even define what an ideal observer is. But we tend to assume such an ideal definition exists.
This seems almost trivial in hindsight because "identical" can be defined as 1) "one and the same", based on one thing OR 2) "mostly similar", based on pairs of adjacent things one has seen in the past.
And to sort of echo the original post, it seems to me that a lot value comes from the interactive nature of argumentation. But I think the specific medium/modality of those interactions don't matter for most things, and even when it does, like in this case, valuable insights can still fall out of a discussion in text. I derived the precursor ideas which led to this conclusion of definitional non-equivalence in past offline arguments as well as simulated discussions in my head. And I derived the actual conclusion by arguing with people here on HN, which helped me truly internalize the idea that even the definition of consciousness/observation differs from one person to another. That comment thread can be seen here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338029
It's worth mentioning that I am not too proud of that specific interaction because I got needlessly defensive and adversarial, and lied about my subjective experience of having undergone general anesthesia even though I haven't really, and it was especially egregious in a discussion about consciousness. My original reflex/motivation was I felt that many other people would likely prematurely dismiss some of those ideas if I admitted that one of the tangential premises were wrong. And regretfully, by lying that time, I've introduced a cancer in my mental pathways when considering the problem of consciousness and adjacent philosophical problems because I'd always have this nagging feeling to try to justify that past mistake, even now. But in truth, I was just being an intellectually dishonest little shit trying to win an argument. And yet, something valuable came out of that interaction.
This guy is literally a high profile individual from my own niche Node.js open source community and I'm literally an open source developer from that exact same community and I had no idea.
> They sell insurance against the maintainer, when the maintainer is the one person in the chain who can actually make the code more secure, and she gets nothing while a company two layers up gets paid to tell you whether she did.
Damn, this is a really good line. It's the reason why existing tools like Snyk give so many false positives and miss so many actual vulnerabilities. They're kind of useless really.
They create false comfort and busy-work for staff whilst providing a ready-made "Snyk said it was secure" narrative to cover everyone's asses when things inevitably go belly-up.
And Snyk be like "We responded as fast as possible, so we fulfilled our part" yet what really counts is not even in the equation.
Personally, I stopped contributing my code open source. I still write it and I've built a major project I'd love to make public but I'm keeping it for myself. I'm waiting for communism or UBI to arrive, then I may resume publishing as open source.
If it takes too long, I will pass it down to my son and he will wait until communism arrives to make it public.
This is why I just advocate for UBI nowadays.
It's impossible for certain people to get paid for work they do and value they create and the reasons are numerous and different for every single person.
A lot of it is because human attention has been fully centralized and monopolized. Regulations are the nail in the coffin.
This industry is cooked, to a crisp.
Tech people who have been excluded from the tech markets should be paid some kind of compensation.
The first time I understood there is a systemic problem was years ago when I started attending investor events and was pitching my open source software to tech companies and investors and they were all asking me "But what are you selling?" and I kept telling them "I'm not selling anything, I'm just looking for adopters of my open source product." and I was shaking hands with every person in the room.
They couldn't understand. They must have thought I was crazy. But the thing is, I couldn't even sell it for free. Even though it was provably useful and many similar companies did use my product successfully, at scale. It really felt like "It's a big club and you ain't in it."
It was like; they couldn't believe how much work I was putting in to give away a product for free. I think it might have made some people uncomfortable even.
And although I am more honest and cynical now about my own intentions, I still think that 'making money' was not and is not the primary goal; it was always a secondary goal which I planned to attend to later if/when the conditions would be right.
I was literally just trying to get big companies to adopt so that other smaller companies would look at them and tell themselves "Look, it's OK, big company X is using the product, so I can use it too!"
My goal was not to sell anything, it was to dismantle systemic taboos which worked against me as a small contributor.
10 years later, the taboos are worse than before! I don't know how anyone can start an open source project without the badge of corporate sponsorship these days.
The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free.
Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them.
No matter how good your software is, you can't effectively market it as "reliable" because every single piece of software ever created in the world claims to be realiable even though almost none of them are! The label has lost all of its meaning and hence, cannot be communicated.
So this means that far worse competitors can gain adoption and take the entire market from you if there is any friction at all between the user and your product. Open source is an attempt to reduce friction as close as possible to 0.
Anyway this creates a hyper-competitive environment. If you don't have a voice in the economy, open source can seem like your only option to gain any adoption at all. It's a business model born out of desperation, not out of choice.
I disagree that a viable market exists. What set of arrangements exist there may be viable, for select few people, but it's not a market.
A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. If a participant can only compete after receiving investment from certain VCs (and otherwise can't participate, at any price point), then it's not a market.
Also I'm not claiming anything about the past. I'm just saying today, there's no market.
The label has not lost its meaning. Everybody knows what it means and wants it, just almost everybody “selling it” is claiming it without regard for the truth of their claim for their own financial gain. In polite society that is called lying and fraud.
People accept a surprising amount of unreliability.
For example, I've been using SharePoint to modify excel files at scale.
We kept running into issues with cache that we would write to a file, the service would respond with success, but then when we read the file, it shows the old cached value, not the new one we just WROTE! And there was no reliable way to check when the newly written value had been completely flushed using that API.
Microsoft will call this 'optimized'. They'll say that caching is good; it's a feature, not a bug!
But really, it's unreliable! It's not doing the job it claims to do.
When I started to understand how money works, it started to feel like everything I've been raised to believe was a lie down to the foundational principles.
Even Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" also fell apart when I came across Grey's Law "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
The complexity is extreme and more intricate than any person could have designed. Clearly, it evolved over long periods of time to get to this point. It's worse than a "conspiracy" because a conspiracy requires collaborative intent and a shared understanding. With this system, participants have convergent intent but very little to no shared understanding (as essentially none is required).
In terms of outcomes, the system functions in much the same way as a conspiracy, but without any of the self-restraint mechanisms which might otherwise limit the group's actions (as would come naturally if each member had full awareness of what the group was doing)... Which in this case, disturbingly, spans the entire planet and all human affairs.
The first step to solving a problem is understanding that the problem exists. This makes this problem particularly difficult to solve because it has power over the collective human minds which created and uphold it. It can replace any dissident with a compatible 'attention head' within its neural net.
The idea of compensating victims proportionally to the value of objects which caused harm is interesting and reveals an interesting mindset.
We are so far removed from this mindset nowadays that it seems illogical. But there is an underlying logic that; the more expensive an object, the more human labor went into building it, the more the owner should pay if it causes harm. There is a notion of "with great power comes great responsibility."
Had we still had these laws, we would look at trains, airplanes and AI very differently and we would never have allowed corporations to exist.
It does seem like there is a deep wisdom in there about the dangers of complex and expensive objects. The creation of complex objects and structures (including abstract ones) is a form of idolatry.
So if they vote with their feet and leave, then that's an even better outcome. Now they can't manipulate the government anymore. They can go manipulate and continue extracting wealth from some other place.
reply