Communications barriers slowed the inrush of the sociopaths into whatever was hip at internet speed they arrive on the scene faster than the normies do.

So for communities to form there has to be other barriers. The foundational ideas being distasteful batshit is one option, but it's probably not the only one.

You might be surrounded by interesting countercultures and not even know about it: whatever properties save them from instant commoditization also keep you out.

On the other hand, my first self-funded startup got destroyed by a VC funded venture. They had a worse product but far better marketing and they used every dirty trick in book to tarnish my company’s reputation.

There is no way I’ll start another startup unless I receive backing from a huge VC company.

Current economic paradigm is more similar to centralised/controlled economies of USSR. Thus if you want to succeed, you will need friends with connections to central banks.

We just needed enough data to awaken the mega mind, now we may rest and the mega mind shall bring an era of peace, prosperity, and scientific achievement.

Praise the mega mind.

It's the other way round. We abuse narcissists' and psychopaths' desire for power to make them hold positions of power.

It's the 50 cent thing, most people are not willing to pay the price to be the boss.

If regular people were willing to lead, everybody else could follow them and narcissists and psychopaths had time to heal their souls.

A funny variation on this kind of over-fitting to common trick questions - if you ask it which weighs more, a pound of bricks or a pound of feathers, it will correctly explain that they actually weigh the same amount, one pound. But if you ask it which weighs more, two pounds of bricks or a pound of feathers, the question is similar enough to the trick question that it falls into the same thought process and contorts an explanation that they also weigh the same because two pounds of bricks weighs one pound.

Governments have structured financial markets heavily to favor large publicly traded corporations through allowing them access to massive amounts of borderline free credit.

The goal is growth and consolidation. They want every major industry to be completely dominated by a small handful of big players. This makes it much easier to regulate and implement policy.

It would be impossible for them to have nearly the same amount of control over a economy if the economy was dominated by hundreds or thousands of small and medium players. By having 3 or 4 major public corporations they are much more easier to manipulate and keep tabs on. They can 'invite them to the table' to advise and help draft policy and regulations that are mutually beneficial. Also it makes it much easier to convince the public that such regulation is done for the public's benefit.

This model of American State Corporatism was developed in the late 19th, early 20th century and has since been exported across the world.

It is a pattern that is repeated over and over again. Whether it's automobile manufacturing, steel manufacturing, railway transportation, television broadcasting, ISPs, or Social Media.. once the government set it's sites on regulating it you will see markets devolve into 3-5 major corporate players that pretty much control everybody else. All of this heavily encouraged through regulation of capital markets and central banking systems.

The classic pre-internet example is the development of AT&T monopoly. FCC used it's ability to regulate peering agreements to heavily favor the markets towards re-establishing the AT&T monopoly. A monopoly that they essentially lost when the early Bell patents ran out.

They were then able to use that monopoly, through regulatory forces, to gain control over the communication infrastructure during the cold war, which was a national security priority. That is how we ended up with things like Room 641A. (which was in 2003-later era, but is something they did through out the entire cold war)

History repeated itself with the Prism revelations.

Just say no to social expectations. No to social idea of success. No to career driven decisions. No to trends or fashion. Find your true self and be grateful for life itself.

Definition of success must be personal and harmonious with one self capabilities and aspirations. On the basic level of human experience is health, everything else is secondary.

We are lost in dreams, expectations and ideas generated by our collective approval of values given to us by exploitative systems. Systems designed to be dominant from the start.

Find your own version of reality. And if this version is not harmful to others and gives you freedom and creativity you are happy individual. Period.

I think that ubiquitous global communication is the "Great Filter" that prevents intelligent civilizations from colonizing the universe. Before any intelligent species can hope to tackle a problem like that, they invent something like the internet. And once they've invented an internet, they become addicted to low latency communication and will never stray far from it, at least not in significant numbers. Even one year of latency becomes utterly intolerable once an intelligent species has been using an internet for a few generations.

The simple answer is that they can affect the change that they are interested in, with that money now. Instead of imagining for their whole lives.

Basically, life isnt worth living poor, or the current state of the world isnt worth being unable to change. Death is more favorable than skimming table scraps.

Although the luxury consumptive spending is a tiny portion of what is possible, and nobody can take those experiences away from you, the funds contributed to charities, political campaigns, and investments allow shaping the world as you see fit now.

So thats the explanation, without justifying it. Despite recent attempts of making society seem more fair, this has always been the history of the world. Seize and lock in a millennium of control and favor for your family.

This is purely an artifact of poor system design. x86 platforms are notoriously bad at this.

I'm reverse engineering the Apple M1 and haven't found any trustability issues yet (besides the proprietary early stage bootloaders, but everything has that). There are some 12 or so coprocessors running proprietary firmware, but all of them are safely behind OS-controlled IOMMUs and not privileged to take over the system. There is no ME, no SMM, no TrustZone, nothing running with higher privilege than the OS. Most of the coprocessors have at least inspectable firmware (except the Secure Enclave, but you can just turn it off). The ARM architecture design makes it near impossible for an early boot backdoor to, say, run your OS in an undetectable VM too. No updatable microcode.

On x86 you have the ME running secret code with higher privilege than the main CPU, as well as SMM running secret code on the main CPU at a higher privilege than the OS and stealing cycles from it, as well as a rather poor track record of proper IOMMU sandboxing (especially for anything that isn't a PCI device), and secret, encrypted microcode updates.

And a reminder that the majority of HN supported them in doing that because we needed to "fight disinformation".

Taxing corporations is one of those things that seems pretty obvious until you really dig into the details, at which point you end up with some uncomfortable conclusions. Thus there is this endless handwringing about corporations paying so little yet at the end of the day, the solutions (those that work) are quite unpopular.

Let's walk down this rabbit hole:

So you want to tax corporate profits. Well, trouble is, it's easy to hide profits. For example, interest payments are subtracted from profits, which allows investors to lend money to corporations as loans, and the interest is only taxed by the recipient, but if you lend money to the corporation by purchasing equity, that is taxed twice. This asymmetric tax treatment incentivizes taking on debt and thus financial fragility and short-term thinking. OK, you say, let's treat interest and dividends the same. Then you have this issue with massive executive compensation, which is untaxed as it is treated as an expense. You'd like for that to not be tax-exempt as well. Thus you decide to tax value add -- that is revenue net of your cost of goods. That way, you catch cheaters, since if corp A reports something as a cost (payment to B), then B better record it as a revenue. B can't hide. Except now comes the foreign sector. What if B is a foreign company? There's the rub. One option is to say the foreign company also has to pay you taxes based on what it sells to A. This would effectively put an end to all the shell company shenanigans. To be fair, you can give credit for income paid to other jurisdictions so you don't end up double-taxing (like we do), but that's minor. So now you are happy with your system. You survey the landscape and what have you accomplished? A sales tax! This is just a value added tax, or VAT, which is another form of sales tax. But sales tax is regressive! And very unpopular. So there is this problem where Americans don't want a national sales tax of, say 20%, but they do want a corporate profit tax of, say 40%. And they are really angry when they see the effective corporate tax being so low, say 5%.

This reveals a cold truth, which is that corporations are effectively pass through entities for the human owners of the corporations. So why tax them twice? Well, because we have so many tax loopholes and such large trade deficits that 40% of our corporations are owned by foreigners that don't pay US taxes and 40% are owned by pension funds and tax-advantaged retirement accounts so that only 20% of US equities are subject to any tax at all. So this thrashing around about corporations reveals yet another uncomfortable truth, which is that our massive outsourcing has resulted in an erosion of the tax base just as much as it has destroyed middle class jobs.

This brings us back to a new variant of the old trilema, which is that you can't have free flow of capital (or equivalently, trade) across borders, a floating currency, and your own interest rate policy.

You can only have two of these. Except the tax version of this is that you can't have free flow of capital (that is trade), a floating currency, and your own corporate tax policy. The best you can do is a national sales tax for goods sold to your own citizens. If you try to tax corporations, you will run into the two-headed hydra that your corporations are owned by overseas investors and that your corporations have set up overseas businesses that sell them valuable inputs, so valuable that all the value is routed overseas.

So what happens is people create a tax policy that tries to also avoid tariffs on trade and foreign capital flows, and then they are shocked when corporations arbitrage that away.

I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote.

It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate.

For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, watching people be vicariously offended without asking if context in question is offensive, and the obsession with signaling instead of meaningful action.

We already know the answer to a lot of this. Algorithms that increase "engagement" by promoting controversy promote conspiracy theories, because conspiracy theories are controversial and get everybody arguing.

The first generation of response to this was to tweak the algorithm to favor "trusted" sources, but still promote controversy. This seems to be going extremely poorly, because it's encouraging the "trusted" sources to become radicalized in an effort to get promoted by the algorithms.

The actual solution probably involves not optimizing for engagement anymore, but that's a business model change.

This is more complicated than it seems. You are comparing a job (HFT) with a pursuit (science). The actual comparison is HFT with academia (the job part). Academia is a terrible job and getting worse over time. Academics have been talking about how the job is bad and getting worse for 100 years. There is a long list of problems. Working in science is also an exercise of joining a community where your peers seem willing to put up with the terrible working conditions, almost to the point of masochism or martyrdom.

The other issue is that intelligent people tend to feel entitled to success, particularly if they succeed on traditional measures which rank them according to others. This makes them less likely to enter very difficult and uncertain fields when there are other options. Science is often inhumane in a sense, you can waste your life on the wrong idea, certainly many people have. You can also be right, but only proven so after you die.

Science also has developed a large swarm capacity, which reduces the ability of an individual to succeed and make an impact. The best example is deep learning... the explosion in deep learning research output is frankly astonishing. In real terms, a lot of researchers outside the field managed to drop whatever they were doing at the time and switch to deep learning research. Along with the excellent tooling, accessible hardware and data and low barrier to publication, there is literally a flood of papers. It is now very difficult to get noticed, and much harder to make any progress. This has happened in the space of one PhD duration. It is reasonable to assume this will keep happening as new fields open up. I presume it is because there are large numbers of people waiting for the next big thing, underemployed or underutilised in their own current work. In this scheme, research success comes to either those that found a field (even more difficult and unlikely) or have the best resources (often corporate research these days). Your talent, intelligence etc all become secondary. You can say that this is just 'rapid progress' and good for humanity. Maybe. There is also a lot of low quality work. But in the end one is an individual, not humanity, and you need to act on that basis.

All these factors conspire to send smart people away from science, and it is hard to blame them.