You might be better served talking to ChatGPT/Claude so it can tailor explanations based on your level of understanding. I've found that being super clear about concepts you understand well vs concepts you're unclear about makes for really effective explanations.
Is "mandatory" spending actually fundamentally mandatory? Characterizing it as such feels like a sleight of hand that prevents us from discussing whether that spend is truly necessary.
In an overspending crisis of such magnitude I wish there was more urgency in the culture to cut spending across every budget segment regardless of whether it's "mandatory" or not.
As my sibling comment states, mandatory spending is spending which is required by existing laws which have already been passed. But a secondary point is that mandatory spending means no one knows how much it'll be ahead of time. You can only find out how much actual mandatory spending happened after the fact. Contrast this with discretionary spending, where the budget says how much can be spent on a given set of things (like airplanes, or road improvements, or new toilets for all the Navy submarines) so you know ahead of time the spending amount.
Debating changing mandatory spending laws in order to hopefully reduce mandatory spending is totally allowed, it's just very hard to know exactly how much you'd save with any change. The CBO will make estimates for you, but those are going to be based on assumptions which may or may not turn out to reflect reality in the future.
“Mandatory spending” is a term of art that means something very specific in this very specific context (congressional budgeting). The common meaning of the words is not particularly relevant.
If you have ever seen the phrase “act of God” in a contract, this is similar. In contract law, “act of God” means something and it doesn’t require either party to subscribe to any religious beliefs.
You have separate Medicare and social security taxes that fund those programs.
If you cut social security and Medicare, at the very least you will need to change the laws so that taxes intended specifically for social security and Medicare can be used for general expenses.
if they refunded every penny we put into (with interest) it’d go well. these should be called entitlements as much you going to grocery story to buy food for your family is an entitlement
It’s strange that even on HN with above average financial literacy people still have this completely wrong mental model of social security.
It’s simply a general tax dressed up in marketing fluff. It’s a pay as you go defined benefits program. Current workers are paying for current retirees.
There is very little difference between it and any other means tested welfare program - it’s just the means testing works in a different manner but can be changed at any time.
It’s no more “your money” than any federal income tax you’ve paid in over the years.
Additionally, even if the "self-funded" aspect was enshrined into the process on all levels, you're looking at a program that dwarfs any other program of this type, worldwide. It would necessarily be in US government bonds, and the real yields of bonds are very much a function of the overall deficit and wider tax current situation and outlook. The treasury actively twists issuance and effectively has yield curve targets. The Federal Reserve does active balance sheet management as well, and monetary and fiscal are increasingly working in sync with one another. A program of the size of social security with inflation adjusted US dollar denominated obligations in trillions can never be and will never be truly separate.
Even if they wanted to do something extremely simple like hold TIPS (inflation linked bonds) and hedge some of the inflation risk internally, buying TIPS from the US government would simply be a circular transaction that would be canceled out by the bond component of the TIPS. Pointless. If SS went out into the global financial market, they would quite literally absorb a big chunk of the global capacity for that risk, and more importantly, on a global level it all feeds back to the US/dollar, especially in times of stress (which having a Gorilla sucking up endless amounts of inflation risk would actually amplify). Again - it would cancel out on net. A program that big is almost too large for traditional financialization. It would need to be buying networks of ports and such like China does with their surpluses, but even here, the US already carries a large amount of geopolitical risk in their financial system (look at the Tariff scare where the bond market almost blew up because the large amount of financial assets held by foreigners were pulled from the country). It's actually fairly interesting to follow these lines and feedback loops and see how everything is connected.
> if they refunded every penny we put into (with interest) it’d go well. these should be called entitlements as much you going to grocery story to buy food for your family is an entitlement
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that the government will collect tax revenues necessary to even keep up with some of these mandatory programs, such as social security. The reality is there is a very serious chance many people do not receive the fully stated benefit value.
> Is "mandatory" spending actually fundamentally mandatory? Characterizing it as such feels like a sleight of hand that prevents us from discussing whether that spend is truly necessary.
> In an overspending crisis of such magnitude I wish there was more urgency in the culture to cut spending across every budget segment regardless of whether it's "mandatory" or not.
I'm betting it includes stuff like Social Security payments, Medicare, etc. So it's fundamentally mandatory as real people's lives were planned around its availability.
I wish there was more info on the article about actual customer usage - particularly whether it improved process efficiency. It's great to focus on the technical aspects of system optimization but unless this translates to tangible business value it's all just hype.
better add IR too, and all the optimized variants of the ASM for the specified code etc. - its not as straightforward, but that depends also on platform. CISC is generally more wacky than RISC i suppose.
also, a lot of things in stuff like ROMs is about I/O to component in the devices, so you can disassemble and decompile all you want but without the right specifications and context you cannot say what the code does.
so it will also need all specifications of the hardware platform you are running the code on, as well as in this case perhaps even hardware in the catridge etc. (heard those also sometimes have their own chips etc...).
i'd say for 'regular application code' that runs within an OS it might be easier, but still you need to provide a lot of context from the actual execution environment to reason properly what the code actually does? (what does INT 80 run and possibly return anyway, that code is outside of your target binary)
It's generally difficult to do. The problem is you have no idea when the collapse in value will happen, or even if it will.
A lot of the companies I'd have bet against in the past, like AOL, sold for huge sums of money, and the purchasing company ended up regretting their decision. The actual AOL stock never collapsed.
As for the GME thing, the only reason why I sort give it a pass is because it was sort of an unprecedented thing. I am not sure if regulations have been updated to address a future similar incident.
At least it resulted in the "This Is Financial Advice" video from Folding Ideas.
Fascinating watch after following the event back in the day - and losing €1500 because I didn't reach my goal of earning €500 to buy a PS5 with the profit. If shit went up for just one more day I would have reached my goal.
I happened to "find" an very old IRA I had from a prior employer that had about $1200 sitting in it. I threw it all into GME. I pulled $500 in profits, and left the initial investment to ride.
Today, I'm down about $300 on those shares (taken with the $500 in gains, I'm technically still up by $200), and that's fine. I believe in the leadership, I like the company's current state (flush with cash, little/no debt) and I'm just going to keep letting it ride.
When I retire in 10 years or so, we'll see where it's at. Worst case, I'm out $700 bucks. Best case, I get that new riding lawnmower, for free!
Otherwise, it's Index funds, have a nice day, because none of us can compete with Wall Street.
Often the difficult thing isn't predicting "this bubble will collapse eventually"; it's predicting the _date_ of the collapse. You really need both, to short.
Yes, I've used docker and podman. They're great. But I wanted to be able to run Xcode and IOS simulator, which requires macOS, so developed these solutions.
There is a related idea called "alloying" where the 2-4 candidate solutions are pursued in parallel with different models, yielding better results vs any single model. Very interesting ideas.
I've been doing something similiar: aider+gpt-5, claude-code+sonnet, gemini-cli+2.5-pro. I want to coder-cli next.
A main problem with this approach is summarizing the different approaches before drilling down into reviewing the best approach.
Looking at a `git diff --stat` across all the model outputs can give you a good measure of if there was an existing common pattern for your requested implementation. If only one of the models adds code to a module that the others do not, it's usually a good jumping off point to exploring the differing assumptions each of the agents built towards.
This reminds me of an an approach in mcmc where you run mutiple chains at different temperatures and then share the results between them (replica exchange MCMC sampling) the goal being not to get stuck in one “solution”
Separately, you have to consider that "wasting tokens spinning" might be acceptable if you're able to run hundreds of thousands of these things in parallel. If even a small subset of them translate to value, then you're far net ahead vs with a strictly manual/human process.
If the system provides value that is greater than its cost, then paying the cost to gain the value is always worthwhile - regardless of the magnitude of the cost.
As costs drop exponentially (a reasonable expectation for LLMs, etc.) then increasing agent parallelism becomes more and more economically viable over time.
