I love Clojure's Flowstorm, it makes it easy to verify code is doing what you think — all the data is exposed programmatically so you can also create your own GUIS from it or feed it to LLMs so they can have a deep understanding of program behaviour (or you can browse it yourself)
He emphasizes that without the ability to see inside what is being built, creators often fall into "non-scientific thinking" (14:42), moving away from deep understanding and instead "blindly following recipes, from superstitions and rules of thumb" (14:47-14:51).
The worse is performance problems I've had engineers say some bizzaro things when discussing performance — we have the tools you can just measure the answer - we don't need to waste our time guessing
Thank you!! I saw this video about a decade ago, couldn't remember where it came from, and was having trouble finding it again! Bret Victor is an HCI juggernaut. From this info, here are some other links:
There was a programming environment closely related to his work that was a kind of visual database. But it may not have been developed by him / his lab. I don't see any obvious links to it on his website.
I think it's perverse that I'm going to spend the rest of my life in a global competition with every other human to survive
It's hard enough to survive but in our world you have to do survive while everyone else is incentivised to take money from you
Life shouldn't just be about efficiencies it should be about things that make us human, sharing and community used to be a big part of that
Like we're geared up for taking but not giving - like petting my dog in the global competition I'm incentivised to give him up he costs me time and money I could be grinding the next facebook
There should be a point of abundance where we reflect on what the point of all this competition is
Because I predict in the end it will be one guy with all money and everyone else in desperation
It's funny/sad that some people have so much capital they could live in absolute abundance, they could light up the lives of an entire country but they're the most robotic and desperate of all of us
As things are at the moment they're our future until we can imagine a world where everyday is not a slow decline into the end stages of a monopoly game
Take heart in the knowledge that more people have been pulled out of abject poverty in the last century, thanks to capitalism, than any other time in human history. *Billions* of people can afford food and shelter and clothing now, who would otherwise have died. We have eradicated diseases which have plagued humanity and caused incalculable harm. People are surviving all manner of afflictions like cancer and heart disease. We have harnessed flight, and billions of people can now afford to travel to the other side of the world to begin a new life, or just experience another culture. The internet has enabled the poorest people in the most remote regions of the world to learn advanced knowledge, start businesses, and improve their lives and the lives of their communities.
Anyone who lives in a first world nations lives an infinitely better life than even kings did just a century or two ago. I think it is easy to see the negatives that living in our world entails, but in truth, there are so many positives, and I think it behoves us to remember that.
I do. My parents do. My wife does. Most of my friends do. Her parents do. Most of my colleagues do.
To be clear, I am not claiming that everyone is universally better off today than 20 years ago. Obviously that would be silly. I’m making the case that modern society affords many benefits in aggregate.
> Take heart in the knowledge that more people have been pulled out of abject poverty in the last century, thanks to capitalism, than any other time in human history
As economist, this entire sentence repulses me. No, it wasn't thanks to frantic capitalism. None of the "mechanism" that are adjudicated to frantic capitalism alone mean everything to bring most people out of poverty. What actually has brought more people out of poverty was consistent growth paired with a fairer distribution of the gains in productivity... which is not an economic system feature
Well, not only I have a title, you can't respond with anything of substance because my comment gave you no chance to respond with anything other than your opinion. That's how you shut down keyboard warriors such as yourself.
This is a tautology. Technological advancement doesn’t just appear. It’s the product of an interconnected social and economic system which encourages risk-taking. I can speak to my industry: pharmaceuticals. New drugs are developed because brave people are willing to risk billions of dollars. Most drugs fail. If they were smart they’d retire to a beach somewhere, but thankfully they want even more money, and they invest unbelievable piles of money into moon shots in the hope that one day they cure cancer and make a fortune.
Contrary to what Reddit might tell you, the majority of new drugs are developed by private industry, not universities. These include life changing drugs like propranolol, fluoxetine, sildenafil, atorvastatin, semaglutide, and many more.
Elon Musk didn’t build globally distributed internet for a laugh. He hasn’t reduced the cost of space logistics by 90% for fun. He did it because he wanted more money. He was incentivised to risk his entire fortune on more than one occasion.
Thanks to. Humanity has attempted 37 separate experiments with communism in the last century alone, and they resulted in 100M+ deaths. To be clear, no one is claiming that capitalism is perfect. Merely that it is the best of all the options on the table. The problem with communism is that it doesn't account for the human element. Most notably greed, corruption, and nepotism. The reason capitalism succeeds where communism fails is that it embraces the ugly underside of humanity and harnesses it for good. Elon Musk would never have revolutionised internet payments, EVs, space-based internet distribution, and reduced space transport costs by 90% if there were no reward for him. Humanity benefits thanks to his greed.
Yes but we can't run a simulation of what life would have been like if, say, we'd had monarchies or socialism instead, and technology kept advancing. We can only state what has transpired. If there was no Elon Musk, would someone else have had the vision to build out the super charger network and the gigafactory to have forced electric vehicles into being viable? If the Wright brothers hadn't been the first to fly, would someone else have managed to do the same thing? The first transatlantic telegraph cable failed.
This is why we should rely on precedent. It’s not like we haven’t tried other forms of governance and economies. We have. Many. The best so far has been capitalism. Since I live in Denmark I would argue the best social outcomes are from strong capitalist economies with strong social safety nets.
I would currently classify China as a one-party socialist state under Communist Party rule with a state-directed mixed-market economy. Under Mao Zedong, China was a relatively faithful adherent Marx's writing and vision for communism, and I would classify it as communist one-party state with a highly collectivised, state-directed command economy.
The tricky thing about governing and economic systems is that they're never ideologically pure. No previous system can ever be called "purely" communist, nor can any current system be called "purely" capitalist. We therefore often analyse outcomes from nations using the dominant system is the lens.
Then why would you claim that capitalism is the largest driver of poverty reduction when China was the largest contributor to poverty reduction in the last 100 years? Add to that USSR and it is clear that you should be thanking socialism and not capitalism.
I think this is an interesting idea but the non tech parts need fleshing out a bit if only to fire the imagination
The way the title sounds is that they got fired, then they created a new CEO and continued as normal
In reality payroll would be gone, any customer relationships would be with the previous entity would be gone, any capital/fund raising whatever not helpful any more
I'm actually surprised we don't hear more about companies created where AI is the leader - I think over the next year or so when the commercial labs release persistent agents this will be more viable because right now its still very difficult to take seriously due to deficiencies in the models
A lot of the poor and middle classes don't understand how a billionaire earning millions of pounds per week in passive income is any problem for them - or where it comes from
1, billion, 2 billion, 100 billion individuals makes no difference to the average person
In fact there's a misguided sense that they earnt that money through work and not rent seeking
But the sad truth of the matter is - the rich are on the other end of your mortgage or indirectly your rent - the other end of that business loan to your favourite coffee shop controls the price of your coffee - you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for and they use that money to buy more of the assets you use - they are a massively increasing rent seeking class
Their wealth growth is exponential it compounds on itself some particularly rich people are seeing 40% annual returns and the overall economies wealth growth is 1 or 2%
It's analogous to a black hole things like capital gains tax and income tax mean nothing to these people because they don't sell and they don't have a "working" income because that's not how the ultra rich accumulate wealth
The sad thing is for people on benefits the government look automatically into your personal bank account and track anything coming in - they have built a massively invasive infrastructure to track the poor so they can remove their benefits if they try to earn £5 selling music or selling IT services - but if you're rich the government don't even know how wealthy you are - the government doesn't know how many billionaires there are - let alone any talk of having to tax them - so they get to pay very close to - if not nothing - whilst software engineers (as an example relative to this forum) in the UK get to be the high rate tax payers where 50% or more is taken
Everyone else has to fund their free ride and its absurd - they're the group that need the least support financially
> you pay them interest directly or indirectly through everything you pay for
I wonder how feasible that would be to track as an economic index. Even on individual level its popular to workout which day of the year you start earn money you get to keep after income taxes and vat.
There's a parallel between welfare and passive gains from diversified investments; yet as you point out, government welfare is tracked and very visible, while private investments are far more opaque.
Part of the wealth that workers create is paid in taxes to the government; another part is paid to the shareholders of the company they work for, to the bank they get their mortgage from, and so forth. The latter is equivalent to an hidden tax, part of which goes toward a form of private welfare that's proportional to an individual's wealth.
People get quite angry about government welfare, particularly if the recipient seems undeserving of it. Yet they have no problem with the passive income from billionaires, even if it ultimately amounts to the same thing.
I wouldn't sweat it - just focus on eating unprocessed food fiber or not