benrutter

> There are no good answers here

I agree that there aren't any "silver bullets", but I think there are some decent pieces of regulation like, forced splits between investment banking and commercial banking, and heavy regulation of high risk markets, especially when it comes to inclusion in retirement funds etc.

Those aren't going to single-handedly solve the boom bust cycle, but they are amongst other similar policies, a bunch of levers than governments can use if they want to in order to shield the public from risks caused by financial speculation.

This makes me think about a really interesting discussion on the awesome History of Business podcast with Adrian Wooldridge[0].

Adrian Wooldridge was essentially arguing that especially with the shift towards more privately owned companies (as in, non-publicly traded) that we've seen in the US, limited-liability companies give an incentive for a large amount of risk.

Essentially there's an asymmetry, because companies going bankrupt have no liability for debts, but they gain all profits if things go well. This has always encouraged risk (and often in a good way), but publicly traded companies are ultimately owned by retirement funds etc, which is not the case for private companies. So the risk of bankruptcy is still covered by the general public, but a lot less of the benefits are felt by the public.

I think we're in fairly uncharted waters for what this risk asymmetry means for the US and global economy. It doesn't sound like something that'll end well, I expect we'll see a lot of public fall out at some stage.

I think that's pretty much true- it's worth saying there are other people who have the insane privilege of the three you mentioned who aren't some of the wealthiest people in the world, so there's some kind of explanation needed aside from just privilege, even if that's just "luck".

This raises such an interesting question, how much of the wealthiest individuals wealth is due to skill, and how much is because in an unequal system there has to be someone at the most wealthiest point.

I think it's an interesting thought, I'm not sure I have a hot take here or anything. The likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are clearly good at amassing wealth (and interested in amassing wealth) but I suspect a lot less is attributable to skill than many would think.

I work in Python every day and think about this a lot - people really don't seem worried about its performance. Sure people want it to be faster, but I don't see very many people changing their language choice for a faster language, despite Python being a lot slower than most alternatives.

If I think about where I see python being used though, this kind of makes sense, the two big use cases are:

- Web APIs and backends, where for the most part either the network or the database is the bottleneck

- Data science work, where for the most part, work exists in libraries like polars, pytorch etc that ship the main work out to other languages.

So from that perspective, although we'd all like python do be faster, it's speed isn't the bottleneck in the use cases where its popular (that's probably also the reason why we don't see Python getting used in other speed critical places).

That's a really different story to JavaScript, which doesn't have a handy CFFI or otherwise you can just reach out to. There are a lot of cases where JavaScript speed improving would speed up the reactivity of a web app, even now.

I'm not arguing against a faster CPython - I'd love one! But I think there's a clear reason why it hasn't been prioritised historically in the way JavaScript's performance has.

> How many Python JIT experiments have failed?

Wait, how many? I'd say just this one. The other that I know of, pypy, was massively successful for a single maintainer project. And definitely showed the possibility/potential of JIT python.

I wouldn't call it a failure for not over taking mainline CPython.

Which bits of tone felt AI to you? It didn't set off my internal "ai-detector", not that I'm an expert or anything.

This is a fun idea- it's a shame it's tied to anthropic models though. From the transcripts, I think this looks like it'd work well even with quite a small (10B parameter or so) local model.

I work in python daily, it's not necessarily my favourite language, but I'd say it's mostly fine.

What languages are you thinking of specifically when you mention better thought out ones?

Is this really a thing in the US? At least in Europe, rooftop solar like OP mentioned doesn't require grid-connection?

I think limiting presidential terms is pretty American, I can't see why its undemocratic to stand for longer as long as there are still elections, free press, right to protest etc.

In the US, FDR stood 4 terms, and he was hardly the end of democracy.

Yeah, that's an interesting case study. It's pretty common practice to do something like llm-as-a-judge if your programming agentic systems.

I think those are different from pure "natural langyage programming" though because there's normally code you've written that's calling out to the LLM, so it's within the context of written code.

I think this, and lots of other comments are so interesting. There are a lot of different increasingly complex ways LLM outputs and coding are being tied together by people, that I hadn't really considered.