While I tend to agree, I think it's super easy to think you are using AI and being productive and then hitting a brick wall once all the things start failing because the system is not internally coherent.
Yeah, it's more like an accountant throwing away this "double-entry" system in favor of a single-entry spreadsheet that any Jimbob or Maryanne can use.
Completely non-accusatory, just wondering. Did you write this post using an LLM? I sort of feel the typical "voice" if LLM writing here and wondering if I should calibrate myself a bit in this.
Good calibration! Yes, I disclosed this in another comment (and now in the README). The HN responses are AI-assisted: I describe what I want to say, Claude drafts it, I review and post. My English isn't great, so AI helps me communicate more clearly.
It would not, actually, maximize my usefulness to others. They way you do it is making your work maximally available and exapndable so others can build on it. The end result is greater than the sum of its parts. So... open source.
My point is that I don't see a reason why someone making money off my work that I donate should bother me. But again, this is MY stance, clearly it's not an universal outlook. What I wanted to challenge was underlying assumption that someone making money off your code and not giving you any back is a problem or that is _should_ be a problem. It might bother some, but it's not an universal assumption.
> Sometimes you have to use common sense or try different diets to see how your body reacts.
I sometimes wonder if the complexity of the human body doesn't stop us from seeing things that can have great positive effect on a set of people because it's counteracted by the effect on another set of people so the result in the whole is cancelled out. I now wonder if the statistic methods used in these studies take this into account.
All this to say that I approve of controlled self-experimentation, but you need to be very rigorous and brutally honest. Most people are not.
i think about this a lot and i genuinely believe that for every fringe diet or supplementation regimen, there exists a population it would genuinely benefit, for at least some point in their lives
but it's tricky to figure out and i assume the consensus rules are good enough for most people
> A couple calls from Coke, Pepsi, etc lobbyists shot that down.
Fucking hell, if this is true, I don't know how those people sleep at night. Really, It's a failure if my imagination, but I don't imagine how people like this function. I'm sure I've done my share of indirect harm in this world, one way or the other, but being so on the nose about it would make me absolutely nauseous.
Half of the purpose of SNAP is to be yet more subsidy to American megafarms. That was literally how it was done by FDR, and why it is administered by the department of Agriculture. It intentionally drives food production that wouldn't necessarily be profitable on its own because most first world countries, including the US, found that letting Capitalism run free on your food supply would result in booms, busts, and cyclic famine.
Soaking up grain and corn syrup supplies is intentional. Ethanol in our gas has a similar purpose.
However, the primary reason you should not care about SNAP recipients spending money on soda or chips or junk is because it's usually a good price/calorie ratio, so for the half a percent of Americans that literally don't get enough to eat, it can be sustaining, if not healthy, but for the rest, the idea that people shouldn't be able to have a small luxury because it's socialized is just too much.
Taking candy from children is probably just not worth the squeeze. The entire federal SNAP program is ~$80 billion.
Lookup WIC. It is a very restricted program of food assistance, and spends immense effort and money of "only healthy" or "no junk" and parental education and supporting nutrition, and it really pays off, but it does that by relying on ENORMOUS free labor from parents and stores. A WIC checkout takes significantly longer than average, is more error prone, and is miserable for all involved, for like $30 of bread and cheese.
Very informative post, and for background, I am not an us citizen. I have no issue with the idea of small luxury because it's socialized, but I do have the impression that obesity is a huge issue in the US and these kind of consumption patterns cause reinforcement and lead to worse outcomes. I have nothing against cheap food and cheap calories(actually I think they are super useful) but I do think healthier people are an aim we, as a species, should target.
The truth is that lobbyists have a ton of cards to play, including that if such a ban were to go through, there would be a lot less demand for High Fructose Corn Syrup, which might sound wonderful, except that HFCS is a byproduct of corn, which is a major export of some very competitive swing states.
You fuck with that, your party gets trounced in the next election.
> If they so choose to dissolve their teeth and decimate their guy bacteria, who am I to intervene?
In this case, I'm the American taxpayer who is paying for all of this food, and, perhaps more importantly, paying for all of the medical treatment they receive because of the consequences of these choices.
When your consumption is being paid for by other people, it's perfectly reasonable for those people to put limits on your choices, especially when they're footing the bill for the consequences of any bad choices you make too. We're a wealthy country and shouldn't let people starve, but you don't need ice cream or Coke or Pringles not to starve.
I mean, yeah. When people way saving the planet they mean saving humanity. That's exactly it. A barren rock does no one no good. I don't get it why people hang onto this expression, it's as if you heard that George Carlin bit and now that's your anchor to reality.
It's not like the dinosaurs had a save the earth campaign. Yet, before humans the rock had life forms that died out while the rock itself continued being a viable planet supporting life. If humans die off, the planet will continue on with life continuing in new ways.
For the past 50+ years there really has been a somewhat significant and quite influential body of people who genuinely want to preserve the planet’s ecosystem even at the expense of the people living on it.
I would be incredibly curious if the mods could look into the stats of these political threads. I personally feel they are being manipulated at least through the voting system if not through active bot influence campaigns.
It might be me being emotional about this and about seeing a country I looked up to becoming what it's becoming, but I just can't comprehend how some of the people in this otherwise great community can look at this and think it's the direction they want for their country.
It's nuts - but I can only speak with anecdotes. The Americans around me are desperate to pull absolutely any lever that will slow the death of the American dream, and at this point even the "light" version of the dream is dying (work hard, be smart and a little lucky, spend on an education in a strong field, get a family and small property). Stats and experts be damned - that's what desperation is.
In the specific case of those around me, they are seeing huge numbers of Indian tech workers, local and offshore, displacing them. That would just be normal competition, except that they are all of the same foreign culture, which makes them an easily identifiable "out group". Multiplying the indignity and perceived "un-American-ness", they exhibit attributes like nepotism, sycophancy, ineffective communication, and a willingness to work longer hours for less pay while producing horrible work. And these attributes are perceived by as desirable to unscrupulous short-term-thinking leadership.
Of course this may exacerbate the problem (more offshoring).
The message "guys, it's really not that smart to let in a huge number of people from a completely different culture, this is going to be a problem" was completely ignored and labeled racist.
Yes, it's probably the left's single largest mistake in messaging in a hundred years. It's understandable, since so much of the right's take on this topic is in fact often more racist than pragmatic, but that's also a "loudest voice" problem, and the left has those voices too. I don't know how a country with the US's history and culture can even talk about this without those voices dominating the perceptual bandwidth. It's essentially impossible, I guess. And being ignored pushes more people into that tone. This is the vicious cycle that makes us incapable of electing anybody in the middle.
It's not "normal competition" to be displaced by immigrants in your own country. Allowing that is simply allowing the capitalist class to assault and weaken the labor class.
> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,
>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.
>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.
>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.
This is 100% the result of capitalist class overreach. They're fine with fucking over other people, but oh my how they whine when their interests are threatened. If they don't want to drive the country into the ground, they need to stop being so greedy. At the very minimum, the have-nots will eventually make sure they can no longer stay aloof from the pain, even if that means everyone is a little more worse off.
Yeah, having to compete with institutional capital for house ownership here is fine, but them having to compete with people from a country where they speak foreign languages is not fair. The duality of libertarian thinking.
I am against free market absolutism. I also think it's unrealistic to expect humans to put up with any and all examples of large foreign influxes that disrupt a person's local life/culture, as much as it would be nice for everybody to just be compatible with each other.
> Yeah, having to compete with institutional capital for house ownership here is fine, but them having to compete with people from a country where they speak foreign languages is not fair. The duality of libertarian thinking.
Any libertarian that's not extremely wealthy is stupid and was duped by propaganda.
Also there's an important difference between "institutional capital buying houses" and immigration: the former is all invisible lawyers in the background (you'd have no idea without investigative journalism), and the latter can be much more palpable to your average guy on the street. IMHO, an extremely important parts of how present-day elites maintain power in our current capitalist system is how they use diffuse responsibility and misdirection to deal with threats to their interest.
Recent years have made me realize that as bad as reading political threads in online circles can be, it still does bring a greater ability to self-innoculate yourself to emotional influences than watching and listening to other groups editorialized political media.
But yes, I also do wonder with these political topics on all online sites using text, votes, and comment trees what kind of things would become red flags about users if sites chose or were forced to make more metrics appear in them. "Lurker" votes, Estimated Geolocation or VPN use of commenters, anythings that could be shown in "suspect" topics even if not "bannable or confirmed" manipulation was happening.
Or maybe just a politics filter. I know I have a bad habit of getting into reading these topics and their comments when my sanity would prefer I filter them out entirely.
The majority of American voters chose this at the most recent presidential elections. And immigration was the central issue, so that's exactly what most of them voted for. Not sure why you are surprised. If anything I find it notable how much this forum deviates from what I assume is the average view.
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