Somebody reached out to me 5 years ago to tell me that a small gesture in high school made a big difference in their life.
We’re both into our 30s now, and I never knew her very well, and hadn’t even seen (or talked to) her since I’d graduated. But I did remember the gesture - and even these 5 years later it still makes me happy to remember her thanking me! Like, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything much at all at the time, and I probably would’ve never even thought about it again.
It is complex - is it better for the money to go back into the economy by paying high salaries to a specific group of highly-educated people? Or is it better for the money to go back into the economy through taxes, then disbursing the benefits to lower-income benefit programs?
I’m not sure what the answer is. The former is likely to drive some innovation, which I’m sure varies by company. Where the latter could also unlock innovation by giving the bottom-quartile of earners a chance to improve their situation.
The answer is simple: it's the biggest growth generator in USA.
Growth has its own problems of course (I don't want to estimate the health impact of Coca Cola), but it's a prerequisite of a country not falling behind others.
At that point, do we need to fundamentally rethink political donations by companies (outright ban them) and SuperPACs? No representation without taxation.
> It is complex - is it better for the money to go back into the economy by paying high salaries to a specific group of highly-educated people?
Yes. Also, the salary will not go _only_ to highly-educated people. For example, if Amazon decides to build a new distribution center, it will employ blue-collar workers to build it, not software engineers.
> Or is it better for the money to go back into the economy through taxes, then disbursing the benefits to lower-income benefit programs?
No.
> I’m not sure what the answer is.
The answer is pretty clear: invest money into the private sector, rather than divert it into the Federal budget. Private actors are more efficient at allocating funds than the government.
I'm not against social spending, it's a necessary evil for any real state. Pure libertarianism leads to dystopian outcomes. But it should be understood that it's a very real artificial inefficiency that is imposed on the economy.
There are also situations where additional social spending is necessary, but they are VERY easy to detect: when your interest rate is near zero.
because a high percentage people on HN fall into the group that benefits more from neoliberal economics than the larger group of people within those economies who don't benefit.
I used to think like you, until I saw what the lack of neoliberalism does to countries. And before I witnessed the magic of market economy that adapts to changes far, far, far better than anything else.
If you want a static economy that supports gradual decline (preferably with a mineral-based income stream), then a lot of state spending is fine.
Then you misunderstand, the markets and economies of the past 5 decades have been two children playing Candyland. Saying it's not is a No True Scotsman fallacy, because clearly since I labeled it as Candyland economy it must be so.
Sure, and you could argue that we haven’t actually tried communism, or that US democracy is so gerrymandered and neutered (eg Citizens United), etc about any political system. I don’t think we’d be where we are in the US if we had a “pure” democracy, I don’t think Russia would be where it is if they had actually gotten to communism. South America might be a much different place if the US hadn’t looked at the budding socialist movements and said “no way, buddy”.
Don’t forget the other stakeholder - the general public.
Yes it sucks for developers, but does it make any difference for any other employee? Why does Joe’s plumbing have to pay those taxes, but Jane’s AdTech company doesn’t?
Sure, there are benefits to investing in R&D in general, and tech has fueled a lot of growth, so incentivizing it has likely paid off for the whole economy. But will that forever be true? Maybe?
In some parts of the world we have a sales tax which is a form of minimum tax on business outputs. The consumers of plumbing and software pay 10% regardless on a businesses profitability.
Yeah, VAT would help tremendously in alternative here, but for gestures at United States sociopolitics reasons the existing U.S. taxation methods can’t keep up and won’t be repaired any time soon. I could boil the ocean on this down to bedrock (citizens should be taxed on [redacted] in excess of threshold, services and goods should be VATed) but I stand by “section 174 with a sub-100% cap” as what at minimum would have balanced research and taxation.
Joe's plumbing doesn't have to pay those taxes. Operational costs, including paying employees for normal operations, is deductable.
But with the change, the cost of R&D employees is now only partially deductible (right now, you can eventually deduct the full amount over the course of several years), and software development has to be considered R&D.
I feel like one of us must be in a bit of our own bubble.
The company that I work for is currently innovating very fast (not LLM related), creating so much value for other companies that they have never gotten from any other business.. I know this because when they switch to our company, they tell us how much better our software product is compared to anything they've ever used. It has tons of features that no other company has. That's all I can say without doxxing too much.
I feel like it's unimaginative to say:
> What more tech is there to sell besides LLM integrations?
I have like 7 startup ideas written down in my notes app for software products that I wish I had in my life, but don't have time to work on, and can't find anything that exists for it. There is so much left to create
I speak only from a very high-level POV. From a lower-level/in the "trees" -- yes, I don't disagree whatsoever with your characterization that a single company can achieve that. I know of many many many products I use (tech even!) that I could create exponentially better alternatives for, as well.
Now, there come a few considerations I don't believe you have factored in:
- Just because your company has struck gold: does that mean that pathway is available or realistic enough for everyone else; and to a more important point, is it /significant/ enough that it can scoop the enormous amount of tech talent on the market currently and in the future? I don't believe so.
- Segueing, "software products that I wish I had in my life." Yes, I too have many ideas, BUT: is the market (the TAM if you will) significant enough to warrant it? Ok, maybe it is -- how will you solve for distribution? Fulfillment is easy, but how are you going to not only identify prospective customers (your ICP), find them and communicate to them, and then convince them to buy your product, AND do this at scale, AND do this with low enough churn/CAC and high enough retention/CLTV, AND is this the most productive and profitable use of your time and resources?
Again, ideas are easy -- we all have them. But the execution is difficult. In the SaaS/tech space, people are burned out from software. Everyone is shilling their vibe-coded SaaS or latest app. That market is saturated, people don't care. Consumer economy is suffering right now due to the overall economy and so on. Next avenue is enterprise/B2B -- cool, still issues: buyer fatigue; economic uncertainty leading to anemic budgets and paralysis while the "fog" clears. No one is buying -- unless you can guarantee they can make money or you can "weather the storm" (see: AI, and all the top-down AI mandates every single PE co and board is shoving down exec teams throats).
I'm talking in very broad strokes on the most impactful things. Yes, there is much to create -- but who is going to create it and who is going to buy it (with what money?). This is a people problem, not a tech problem. I'm specifically talking about: "what more tech is there to sell -- that PEOPLE WILL BUY -- besides LLM integrations?" Again, I see nothing -- so I have pivoted towards finance and selling money. Money will not go out of fashion for a while (because people need it for the foreseeable future).
Ask yourself, if you were fired right now at this moment: how easy would it be for you to get another job? Quite difficult unless you find yourself lucky enough to have a network of people that work in businesses that are selling things that people are buying. Otherwise, good luck. You would have more luck consulting -- there are many many many "niche" products and projects that need to be done on small scales, that require good tech talent, but have no hope of being productized or scaled (hint!).
I do think I may struggle a bit to find something comparable to my current company, but we’re also hiring right now. And it’s a very small company in the grand scheme of things, even though we have customers much bigger.
I guess having that experience makes me think that there must be a lot of other small companies working in their own interesting niche, providing a valuable product for a subset of major companies. You just don’t usually know they exist unless you need their specific niche.
But I recognize your points too. It seems like the B-to-C space is really tricky right now, and likely fits closer with what you’re describing.
I think that the flip side is that a company doesn’t need to make it big to be successful. If you can hire 5 developers and bring in $2m/yr, there’s nothing at all wrong with that as a business. Maybe we will get lucky and the market will trend towards more of those to fill in the void that you mentioned. I think it could lead to a lot of innovation and a really healthy tech world! But maybe it’s just being overly optimistic to think that might be the path forward :)
In a healthy competitive market (like most of the history of the US, maybe not the last 30-40 years), if all of the farms do that, it drives down the cost of the food. The reduction in labor necessary to produce the food causes competition and brings down the cost to produce the food.
That still doesn’t directly benefit the farmhands. But if it happens gradually throughout the entire economy, it creates abundance that benefits everybody. The farmhand doesn’t benefit from their own increase in productivity, but they benefit from everyone else’s.
And those unemployed farmhands likely don’t stay unemployed - maybe farms are able to expand and grow more, now that there is more labor available. Maybe they even go into food processing. It’s not obvious at the time, though.
In tech, we currently have like 6-10 mega companies, and a bunch of little ones. I think creating an environment that allows many more medium-sized companies and allowing them to compete heavily will ease away any risk of job loss. Same applies to a bunch of fields other than tech. The US companies are far too consolidated.
> I think creating an environment that allows many more medium-sized companies and allowing them to compete heavily will ease away any risk of job loss. Same applies to a bunch of fields other than tech. The US companies are far too consolidated
How do we achieve this environment?
It's not through AI, that is still the same problem. The AI companies will be the 6-10 mega companies and anyone relying on AI will still be small fry
Every time in my lifetime that we have had a huge jump in technological progress, all we've seen is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the gap gets bigger
You even call this out explicitly: "most of the history of the US, maybe not the last 30-40 years"
Do we have any realistic reason to assume the trend of the last 30-40 years will change course at this point?
Oh wow! Full name, phone and address. That’s.. sad for Arthur. I was gonna suggest @dang remove the link but I feel like it almost doesn’t even matter if it’s that easy to find
Yeah, as someone who will soon be starting some basic smart home configurations, this whole article reads like “why not to use HA”.
I want a system so reliable that I can completely forget it exists. I have been leaning towards setting up a few basic automations with Apple Home and calling it good, since it seems like the Apple version can handle simple things like “turn on the lights at 8pm for 3 hours when I’m out of town” or “open the blinds when my morning alarm rings”. Other than that, probably don’t need a ton of smartness besides grouping things into zones that can be turned on/off together
This is exactly what HA has been for me. I had several smart bulbs on Apple HomeKit which were… unreliable to say the least. After switching everything to Home Assistant as the main brains, it’s been rock solid, and a LOT faster. I even have an Apple TV which should have helped HomeKit be better.
You can still use Apple’s automations to do stuff in HomeKit. I mean all the rooms & devices “just show up” in Apple HomeKit seamlessly. “Siri, bedroom off” works perfectly with no setup, for example.
Apple home is ok, but automations / iOS shortcuts are unfortunately extremely difficult to write unless they’re very simple. As a technical user, it’s nice to have the option to do something deeper if I want. But the biggest problem for me was the reliability, even for bulbs allegedly fully supported by HomeKit.
I originally only set HA up to bridge in non-homekit devices (like my Govee LEDs), which is also a good use case for HA.
I’ve been fiddling with my smart home less than ever now that HA is set up.
If you want to enjoy the adventure I can't recommend Lutron Caseta switches enough. They are rock solid and work independently of any smart home setup (for when the smart home inevitably fails). I don't like smart bulbs but if you prefer them, Philips Hue is widely loved, as far as I can tell.
Whatever you do, don't skimp on the lighting smart devices. It usually ends in tears.
The fact that this guy is running four separate Home Assistant instances should make it pretty clear that this experience far from the normal use case. My automations for lighting and other "core" stuff is rock solid, the fun tinkering with ESP 32 stuff less so but that's because it's really an extension of my electronics hobby.
For basic automations like you're mentioning, Home Assistant is pretty much rock solid. Bad devices are far more likely to give you trouble than HA itself. Don't buy anything cloud-based if you can avoid it (though many of them do work well with HA). A zigbee dongle with HA and Zigbee2Mqtt integration should cover most of your use cases.
Agreed. We used to use Homekit, then we switched to SmartThings because it supports Z-Wave and Zigbee and that's about it. I rarely look at the app at all, but it does useful things like warning me when the humidity is too low (which is an issue in our apartment), automatically switches off the infrared heat panel when I leave home and I forgot to turn it off, and something SmartThings or Hue changes the light intensity/tint based on the time of the day. The robovac also works from SmartThings (which is nice, because I don't have to deal with another platform).
For most people that I know that use HA, it's more of an hobby than a thing you set up once and then blends away in the background.
I tried HA a few times and it was way too much effort for something that I do not want to spend a lot of time on.
They have an entirely different mentality on longevity, on where and how it can run, plus it supports scripting instead of the utterly disgusting YAML thing in HA.
Safe infrastructure can be fully separated bike paths - a road network that minimizes intersections with car traffic. And stoplights that have a separate right-of-way which allows bikes to go when no cars are allowed to go. Fixing that will mean that more people feel comfortable riding a bike for trips within a couple miles. And more people riding their bikes for short trips mean that drivers have more empathy for bikers, etc. And it means that more people advocate for allowing denser zoning near them since they get the benefit of more amenities.
It’s a virtuous cycle that starts with making lots of safe infrastructure, so safe that even grandma and young children are able to bike safely.
Just to be clear - your statements about the law are all completely untrue, except for some states having a few specific highways with a “minimum speed”. For example, a highway near me says “left lane minimum speed 45mph” - where the speed of the road is 65.
Unless you can find some laws that specify that driving below the speed limit is illegal?
Impeding the flow of traffic is illegal. Most states have "if x number of vehicles are behind you, you are required to use pull offs or let vehicles pass" laws.
If a cop thinks your slow driving is dangerous they can absolutely write a citation. There are a bunch of laws that allow them to do this in most states.
Many states have laws against obstructing traffic. Most of them don't mention a specific minimum speed so enforcement is largely at the discretion of law enforcement officers. Personally I would like to see strict enforcement of those laws with tickets given out to anyone who intentionally impedes the flow of traffic.
Obstructing traffic is very different than “driving more slowly than the person behind you wants”. Obstructing means blocking, not making them wait 30 seconds for a good chance to go around.
If you are moving a large item that is fragile, are you allowed to go 35mph in a 45mph zone to reduce the risk of damaging the fragile item? Or is that illegal too? Or what if one of your passengers gets car sick easily?
In fact, there are some winding mountain roads in California where the speed limit is 55, but if you go that fast, you’re suicidal because there are no guard rails and very sharp turns. Occasionally, someone mildly suicidal will come up behind you. Is it illegal to drive 15mph in that 55 zone?
Safety is prioritized above speed, suggesting otherwise is unhinged and antisocial.
It's very smart to have laws set up so that whether you are speeding or not, you can be pulled over for a moving traffic violation! That way, the police always have a legal pretense for a traffic stop.
Addendum: the margin of error on speed radar generally tends to be in the region of 2mph. You'll need to be a good deal slower than the speed limit before a police officer is likely to consider your driving to be an impairment.
But couldn’t a hospital use it only for the critical cases? Where it is immediately important to know what infection someone may have, at imminent risk of death?
Who cares if they need to charge $30k per patient to use it if that fast knowledge saves the patient’s life. It doesn’t need to fully replace the existing methods, but could be a useful supplement when a patient is in critical condition
Soon resident here: not really super critical to know the exact pathogen. There are classes of antibiotics and depending on many factors we can have a good estimate of what will work so the first try usually helps. What's usually done (at least in france) is:
1. Take some blood to send to the labs to grow bacterias
2. Only then IV of antibiotics
3. Adjust at day 3 when you get the results.
And what if it looks super severe en urgent? Then 1. we do that too because it's often impossible to know what the pathogen was once you IVed all the antibiotics. And 2. we start by wide spectrum super strong high dose antibiotics.
Example: purpura fulminans: 1g of 3rd gen cephalosporins.
Ymmv in other countries, especially the USA because IIRC you have selected tons of emergent pathogens.
This. Literally last week, I had to go to the ER and they ran a PCR test to identify the infection. But they also started broad spectrum antibiotics immediately. But since it was a Thursday and the lab only works weekdays, I couldn’t get the results back until Tuesday. They adjusted the antibiotics to a more targeted one once the results were back.
Pretty usual stuff I'd say. And I'm willing to bet that the 2nd sets of antibiotic had a lower spectrum of action than the 1sr because we had some guess about the initial strain.
Also because you're still with us so it probably worked.
In any case I'm glad you're better and sorry you had to go through this.
Sure, but then they'd have a million(s) dollar machine (plus the people trained to operate it) waiting for these critical cases. It's a cost / benefit tradeoff, just like whether to use an MRI or CAT scan vs x-rays or an echo.
It doesn't have to be used for every patient, and it doesn't have to be kept around waiting for Doctor House's third act. There is nothing stopping you from a middle ground.
We’re both into our 30s now, and I never knew her very well, and hadn’t even seen (or talked to) her since I’d graduated. But I did remember the gesture - and even these 5 years later it still makes me happy to remember her thanking me! Like, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything much at all at the time, and I probably would’ve never even thought about it again.
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