The whole section that introduces Zaphod is so apt for Trump. It talks about the president's position not being to concentrate power, but to distract attention FROM it. It really feels that way to me, anyway.
It's pretty funny. Europeans get so angry at US people claiming to have seen "Europe" when they've been in London, Paris and Rome, and yet they (we) do the same thing on lots of other topics.
> My naive approach would be to just implement it twice, once together with an LLM and once without, but that has obvious flaws, most obvious that the order which you do it with impacts the results too much.
You'd get a set of 10-15 projects, and a set of 10-15 developers. Then each developer would implement the solution with LLM assistance and without such assistance. You'd ensure that half the developers did LLM first, and the others traditional first.
You'd only be able to detect large statistical effects, but that would be a good start.
If it's just you then generate a list of potential projects and then flip a coin as to whether or not to use the LLM and record how long it takes along with a bunch of other metrics that make sense to you.
Which seems to indicate that there would be a suitable way for a single individual to be able to measure this by themselves, which is why I asked.
What you're talking about is a study and beyond the scope of a single person, and also doesn't give me the information I'd need about myself.
> If it's just you then generate a list of potential projects and then flip a coin as to whether or not to use the LLM and record how long it takes along with a bunch of other metrics that make sense to you.
That sounds like I can just go by "yeah, feels like I'm faster", which I thought exactly was parent wanted to avoid...
> That sounds like I can just go by "yeah, feels like I'm faster", which I thought exactly was parent wanted to avoid...
No it doesn't, but perhaps I assumed too much context. Like, you probably want to look up the Quantified Self movement, as they do lots of social science like research on themselves.
> Which seems to indicate that there would be a suitable way for a single individual to be able to measure this by themselves, which is why I asked.
I honestly think pick a metric you care about and then flip a coin to use an LLM or not is the best you're gonna get within the constraints.
> Like, you probably want to look up the Quantified Self movement, as they do lots of social science like research on themselves.
I guess I was looking for something bit more concrete, that one could apply themselves, which would answer the "if they have measured their results? [...] Can you provide data that objects this view" part of parents comment.
> then flip a coin to use an LLM or not is the best you're gonna get within the constraints.
Do you think trashb who made the initial question above would take the results of such evaluation and say "Yeah, that's good enough and answers my question"?
Primaries are kinda insane though. It basically means that a small minority of voters control who actually is allowed to stand for election under a party banner. Like, I understand how it ended up this way, but it's having really bad consequences.
That being said, if you could fix gerrymandering, a lot of the issues with primaries go away, as there would be more competition in the actual election which would dis-incentivise proposing extremist candidates in the primary.
> Out of curiosity since you made this claim and said you're european, where are the EU vents of frustration that the US lacks?
Proportional representation definitely helps here. You could look at the UK as a good counter-example, where the UKIP (a Brexit supporting party) got like 15% of the votes in the 2015 election, and no seats. Where people see that voting doesn't change anything, they'll look for some other way to effect change.
That being said, PR doesn't really appear to be working that well. I (personally) think that a lot of the issues relate to free flows of capital across the world, which leads businesses to be set up in areas of cheap labour, which makes people in developed countries angry and more likely to vote for anyone who'll promise to fix it (regardless of how insane their ideas are).
But it's complicated, monocausal explanations are typically deceptive.
With this logic doesn't the US have proportional representation as well? Didn't Trump win the popular vote and republicans the senate? The majority of voters won, end of story, and the ones who lost have another chance in 3 years to flip the board. Where exactly is the missing vent valve you were talking about?
>think that a lot of the issues relate to free flows of capital across the world, which leads businesses to be set up in areas of cheap labour, which makes people in developed countries angry and more likely to vote for anyone who'll promise to fix it
Well yeah that's the big issue, but nobody will win the elections by saying they are slaves of the capital class and doesn't matter who you vote for as they are powerless to change the crooked financial system that actually runs the world even if they win the elections since the finance systems globally connected and easily moves to the areas with most stability and tax benefits even if they are undemocratic.
No. The US has a first past the post system that naturally forms two parties which in turn fuels further polarization. A rep runs in a district and it's winner take all. In theory (totally unrealistic in practice) you could have a single party win all the seats by achieving 51% in each individual election. The other 49% of voters (ie approximately half of the country) wouldn't receive a single representative.
Proportional representation has advantages but comes with its own complexities. However there are also other voting systems (such as ranked) that offer different tradeoffs independent of proportional representation. There are a lot of options out there and pretty much all of them would be more functional than what we use in the US.
About the only thing our system has going for it is that someone with an IQ well below 100 can still fully understand and even help audit it. (Or at least that used to be the case before electronic voting machines started appearing.)
> Well yeah that's the big issue, but nobody will win the elections by saying they are slaves of the capital class and doesn't matter who you vote for as they are powerless to change the crooked financial system that actually runs the world even if they win the elections since the finance systems globally connected and easily moves to the areas with most stability and tax benefits even if they are undemocratic.
This is a political choice that has been made by governments, and continues to be supported by governments. It's definitely helpful for capital to make people believe that it's a law of nature but capital controls existed in the US until Nixon removed them, and much later in other places.
> Where exactly is the missing vent valve you were talking about?
So FPTP typically forces people into 2 parties because it's the only way to win enough power. So all the extremists (in terms of being far away from the centre of public opinion) basically have to join one of the two major parties and attempt to take them over, which is basically what Trump did with the Republicans and also what happened to the UK Conservative party post Brexit.
In a PR system, you'd end up with some compromise where the democratic socialists and the greens or MAGA or Libertarians held the balance of power in the house, and the Republicans and Democratic parties would need to negotiate with them on what they wanted to accomplish.
The benefit here would be that the voters of the smaller parties would get some of what they want, and the bigger parties would be forced to compromise with others rather than ruling all for the two years between mid-terms.
> If the vast majority of people recognized ads and skipped them as more technically minded people do
People definitely do this. When I worked for a large social media company, we almost always had ads in position 2. People noticeably (in the aggregate data) spent less time with this position in the viewport.
But honestly, most people are just extra impressions/revenue for most advertisers, there's a much smaller number of people who drive ~all of the conversions.
> USA was already the richest nation before both world wars and way before NATO was established. Europe can't align with Russia, because Russian Empire wants pieces of Europe. It can't align with China, because trading with China is more or less one way and that can be taken away anytime China feels like it.
In a world where the US is not a trusted partner, I'd expect the EU to do partial deals with the US and China while maintaining pressure on Russia.
Lets not forget that the US imports vast amounts of EU capital, and in the new world that makes less and less sense. And the US market having 60% of global equity value is not sustainable in this world either.
> If none of that stuff makes the U.S. richer who cares?
Your bondholders certainly care, and you've been living beyond your means for quite some time.
I wish you the very best of luck with either massive expenditure cuts causing civil unrest, or hyper-inflation.
Honestly, I can't even believe that someone (who generally expresses reasoned viewpoints) would question the value of being the world's reserve currency. There's definitely downsides but it's allowed a lot more flexibility for the US since the 70s.
Because ultimately humans are not homo econonimus, and many citizens of the west won't be able to get jobs in tech/finance/services. It's a societal issue rather than a capitalist issue.
We live in a capitalism. If something makes capitalistic sense it happens, otherwise it doesn't. Stuff will not be manufactured locally at great expense when it can instead be imported for free.
The absence of capital controls is a political choice that people appear to believe is just a law of the world.
If there were capital controls then local manufacturing makes more sense.
It would kill the US stock market so it's unlikely to happen, but personally I don't see how unrestricted capital and restricted labour is anything but a recipe for disaster (the consequences of which we've seen in the US and Europe since the financial crisis).
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