> In economics, a normal good is a type of a good for which consumers increase their demand due to an increase in income, unlike inferior goods, for which the opposite is observed. When there is an increase in a person's income, for example due to a wage rise, a good for which the demand rises due to the wage increase, is referred as a normal good. Conversely, the demand for normal goods declines when the income decreases, for example due to a wage decrease or layoffs.
Health and safety are normal goods. As people get richer, they demand more of them.
> Can you give me a quick overview of the system architecture
I think what the OP is saying is that it's the OP's job to know that, and didn't, because they over leverage the LLM.
Like if a doctor was brought in on a cardio consult on their patient because they had a maybe unrelated heart condition, and the only thing they could answer to "why did you prescribe cemidine instead of decimine" is "lemme get back to you on that."
> When working on something new or something challenging, me typing out code is the process by which I figure out what we should even be doing.
This is really validating to read. I recently was having a call with a friend where I was arguing against 100% AI usage, and I was saying, some problems the LLM just can't solve. He asked for an example, and I tried to explain a complex chart I was trying to make at a previous gig, and in the end said "well to be fair neither the AI or I could figure it out lol." He replied "how could you even code it if you didn't know exactly what you were trying to build? You're supposed to know exactly what you're building before you write a single line of code, that's what they teach you in school."
He was poking fun at the fact that I have a boot camp background and he has a uni degree - it's been ten years for both of us now so he's running out of ways to poke fun at that difference as we even out our differences, but this one poke brought back about the old imposter syndrome, since my entire career, I've thought via coding.
When I get a ticket, I tend to jump into the codebase to figure out the context I need to know about, the current patterns, what files I'll need to worry about; and while I'm there, I tend to start writing some things, and as I do that I pull in a shared function, and in doing so just check out of curiosity where else the function is used, and in doing so discover oh, actually, we have similar functionality elsewhere, lemme just abstract this work for this ticket and the previous functionality into a shared function, and use it in both places. And so on. Before I know it, I'm looking back at the ticket checking if I've covered everything, and sending in the PR.
I've never had complaints about my productivity, in fact I'm often lauded for it so I think it at least hasn't been a process that slows me down long term even if it's meassier. But I had been wondering if it makes me less than a "real" engineer. I'm happy to hear others may doing it this way too.
> but not so much that their greed creates an even worse system.
The market model won't work because greed isn't real when discussing corporations. That's like calling a tree growing towards the sun "greedy." No, the tree is fulfilling it's biological imperative: put more leaves closer to the sun.
Corporations must maximize profit. The corporation that maximizes profit best is the one that can consume other ones and tend towards monopoly, the perfect state. All actions are permitted when fulfilling biological imperative.
So, trying to fenangle a market based solution to police brutality issues will result in a couple predetermined outcomes: insurance payouts won't happen because why would they voluntarily pay, furthermore, cop insurance companies would leverage their superior capital to lobby the government to protect their profit margins, which individuals can't prevent through market efforts or individual actions since the corporation's power is so much greater.
> I plan to have fun spending my money in the future, so it’s time to start practicing now.
The most optimal thing to do in our world is to pick an age, say, 60, and until your 60th birthday, maximize your suffering via frugality to just under the tolerable limit so as to maximize your potential for compound interest. This leaves you with the most freedom and opportunity during the most fun part of your life, when you no longer have to sell your labor and can do whatever you want.
Within our current model, trying to slip in bits of fun through spending money before that age is getting a poor return: you're trading vacation time, which you could instead barter for more money on retirement, and you're carrying with you a bit of suffering because you have to worry about going back to work. The best thing to do is just push it all until retirement.
The limit of human suffering before suicide frequently happens is apparently quite high, so, you can really stretch yourself out here. Live in your car in the Walmart parking lot, eat beans and rice. You maybe trade a bit of the compound earnings to establish certain time constrained things you want to cash in on at 60 like having a partner or kids, but beyond that, maximize that compound interest!
I hope it's obvious that this is a criticism. It's just, the more I think about it, the more this seems the selective pressure and incentives in our society are set up. Mostly I think it's insane that we both have an idea of "retirement" and also that we set it at an age where a significant portion of the population won't make it, and for those that do, a significant portion will get to enjoy five years of it, and for the remainder, health is bad enough that maximum enjoyment isn't possible anyway.
> The most optimal thing to do in our world is to pick an age, say, 60, and until your 60th birthday, maximize your suffering via frugality to just under the tolerable limit so as to maximize your potential for compound interest. This leaves you with the most freedom and opportunity during the most fun part of your life, when you no longer have to sell your labor and can do whatever you want.
This is the most depressing thing I’ve read in a while.
You don't have to act optimally according to the current system, I don't. My concern is many seem to try to act optimally without understanding how depressing the reality of its incentives are.
I think the thing you are missing is that people are quite complex in how they model these things internally. What works for you, may not work for them.
I don't think your advice is good "general advice" but if you treat it as a "this works for me, it might for you", then it might be worth reading.
I'm not sure if you caught that my post was a criticism of the system. I'm just describing what the optimal strategy is as prescribed by how our society is structured, not advocating for it.
Many of my happiest moments in life have been at the park, for free, with friends and family.
You don’t need to be retired or a millionaire to be happy. Nor is being retired or a millionaire any guarantee of happiness.
Saving for retirement is just about making sure your needs are met when your health starts to decline and you may no longer be able to work. If you’ve got a little extra saved to travel around the world or whatever, even better. It’s important, but don’t wait until retirement to be happy. There’s no guarantee you’ll even live that long, for starters.
Most optimal by what metric - length of retirement? Retirement years are worth a lot less than prime years. I think most people in society make this mistake and regret it. Most people on there deathbeds regret the things they didn't do.
Honestly I struggled to get further than 2nd paragraph. Other commenters here also have similar spectrum of opinions, far down the "Enjoy later" mindset
I feel you but I hope we can treat this forum a bit differently than we treat Twitter hot takes. I come here for a deeper level of engagement than we can get elsewhere, and that takes more words to accomplish.
I understand I post big blocks but it is frustrating when someone misunderstands me because they read less than half of my post. There's always the option of "it's too long, I choose to not read it rather than engage with my misinterpretation of it."
Even more optimal would be to pick an age, say, 60, and commit to moving to Canada for MAID at that time. This means you don't need to compound nearly as long, because you don't need to insure against a long life unable to work. Then you can start not selling your labor while you're still young enough to enjoy it.
I'm not sure what you think the MAID program is, but (leaving aside your ineligibility for health care in canada until e.g. you gain permanent resident status) if you're not suffering from a grievous and irremediable health condition, you're not eligible for MAID.
Just as a purely intellectual exercise, what changes about this if we leave aside ideas of "owe," "deserve ," and "earn?"
There's not really an enforcement mechanism in FOSS like there is in capitalism world, it just comes down to what we want our part of the world to look like. So I think we'd think more clearly if we leave aside the ideas like "who owes who what." I think it's fun to imagine what sort of motivations and incentives there are if we put away the money ones.
"leave aside ideas of "owe," "deserve ," and "earn?""
Nonsensical string of words with no meaning.
If you want something that someone else isn't giving you, you have the option to try to do it yourself, or try to compel someone else to give you what you want somehow. Feel free to idk pay someone to track the kernel list and 4000 others and send you heads-ups? Try to pass a law to make people do what you want since you don't care about words like "owe"?
> If you want something that someone else isn't giving you, you have the option to try to do it yourself, or try to compel someone else to give you what you want somehow.
Yes, exactly, the opposite of paying, since when you pay someone something they owe you whatever you paid for.
If we leave aside owe, deserve, and earn, we can start discussing things like what we want our kernel ecosystem to look like, how we can make it safer, etc, without being burdened by these concepts.
It's a simple intellectual exercise, that's all. If you're having a strong reaction to it, imo that'd make it even more fun for you to participate.
But there was no intellectual excercise. Only a complaint with no proposal.
You want someone to do something for you for some other reason than that they owe you.
They already are doing something for you that they don't owe you. They are writing software that you benefit from. You just want them (or somebody) to do something else that they don't owe you.
They aren't, because they don't owe you and it's not something they want to do for fun, and so since the problem is they don't owe you, you wish to set aside words like "owe".
Well sure. Looks like you found the problem and the solution alright. Why didn't anyone else think of that?
I don't feel like I'm complaining, I feel like I'm asking how else someone would frame it without leaning on the concepts mentioned. What changes about the dynamic then?
But what does that mean? "owe" is just shorthand for the concept of obligation. For someone to do something, they need a reason to do it. It doesn't have to be a transaction but there does need to be some reason.
If no one is doing a task you want done because they aren't obligated to, then you seek some other reason besides obligation. Ok, what then?
Do you imagine say a dating website where people compete to look attractive by getting points by doing the best job at finding the most bugs and patches and reporting them to the most downstream consumers the fastest?
> For someone to do something, they need a reason to do it. It doesn't have to be a transaction but there does need to be some reason.
Exactly! That's what I'm interested in exploring.
> If no one is doing a task you want done because they aren't obligated to, then you seek some other reason besides obligation. Ok, what then?
That's what I love exploring. Action with no obligation. Have you any examples of that in your life? Nobody obligates me to do the long walks I enjoy where I stick a 360 camera on my head and then upload the footage to Mapillary and other open platforms, I just like to do it, and I want to find other things that I'm motivated to do without obligation, and I'm fascinated by things people do for "no reason." Understanding human motivation is really important to me for some reason.
As to "what then," yes what then? If I run a cashless commune, how do we make sure the toilets get cleaned? That's the whole question, and I love exploring it. If you'd like to experience it yourself, you could always try attending a regional Burn for a bit of a micro version of it, people doing things just for the sake of it.
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what you mean by the dating app thing.
By sandbox you mean limit to certain files, certain actions, or both?
I've been wanting to look into better emacs integration for agents. Imagine an agent making direct elisp function calls, or using macros... One could limit which functions are allowed to run similar to how cli harnesses work, but plug straight into LSP and etc.
I often daydream about what a magical "life scoreboard" would have on it, some universe-aware program counting arbitrary things. I'd love for such a scoreboard to display "percentage of Nike shoe owners that know Nike is the Greek goddess of victory."
I would guess under 10%, and only that high because Nike sells shoes in Greece and Italy.
Look what it took to wrangle the cigarette industry. Look how unfettered gambling is ripping through the USA.
Or look at industries pre-regulation. Meat, building construction, medicine...
At minimum we have as much evidence that "the market" is capable of being as bad as "bad regulation."