chaorace

Sometimes, I just wanna remind myself how to use xargs for some command text replacement in a random one-liner on the terminal.

If I tried to do that with man... I'd have to read (in alphabetical order) the documentation for 6 different command flags. That's how far I'd go to read about the flag -- to actually use it, I'd have to experiment with the command flag until I figured out the actual syntax using my imagination.

Let's say instead that I am in a rush... so I'm skipping that time-consuming process and instead scrolling furhter down for some practical examples... one full page later I find a bunch! ... Except there's only 4 and none of them demonstrate what I need (the syntax is completely different). The docs wasted my time exactly when I most needed it NOT to do that. If I'd instead just googled "xargs replacement example", I would have gotten something I can copy/paste in seconds and could have gotten on with my life!

The moral of the story is this: Don't tell without showing. Don't show without telling. Do both if your goal is to be understood.

Yes, of course. We're all reasonable adults who are capable of acknowledging that services of value cost money.

It just so happens that weather is a phenomenon which affects all people and requires large, distributed, passive infrastructure to effectively manage. It's a classic case where the public option is bound to be more efficient in terms of absolute resource allocation.

On what basis do I assert that it's "bound" to be more efficient? Simple: weather affects the production, transportation, and logistics of virtually all goods. The costs of weather are therefore distributed equally across society regardless of government policy. Government is very good at delivering this specific type of centralized basic infrastructure in a cost-effective way (see also: roads), so if we're all paying for it together regardless this is a no-brainer policy.

I rarely feel this way about someone of Pope Francis' age and social position, but I've genuinely admired Francis as a thinker. He was a bona fide Jesuit, through and through. The next pope has big shoes to fill.

The "Experts" in MoE is less like a panel of doctors and more like having different brain regions with interlinked yet specialized functions.

The models get trained largely the same way as non-MoE models, except with specific parts of the model silo'd apart past a certain layer. The shared part of the model, prior to the splitting, is the "router". The router learns how to route as an AI would, so it's basically a black-box in terms of whatever internal structure emerges from this.

Gaming was becoming less and less the domain of the tech-savvy crowd, strongly curbing the public's appetite for such host-it-yourself services. Teamspeak/Mumble were already dying at the hands of (inferior) free/easy chat platforms like Steam & Skype, so it's really no wonder that Discord was able to swoop in and clobber all of them by simply being free and featureful.

> Kids are almost teens now, but she gets zero support from them or her husband

This is a good analogy. Children are the people who they've been raised to become, so it stands to reason that people will give money and appreciation in the same ways that these things are originally given to them. These things are social constructs; we are inevitably taught how to use them by way of social dynamics. This is all to say that people love to support their darlings... but they've been socially conditioned to expect reciprocity in all transactions. That's how the sausage is made in content-based monetization -- you produce the actual product at a loss and then try to claw it back selling high-margin merchandise that nobody'd ever buy otherwise. The merch acts as social permission to finally do your part and pay the creators.

To risk stating the obvious: this is not a good thing and I think the majority of people would likewise agree. People should be fairly rewarded for their work and we should desire a culture which openly and freely encourages doing so. Culture, however, reflects society. The society we've created is transactional, so that's how people frame the spending of their money and efforts -- indeed, "spending" and "transaction" are practically interchangeable in our collective lexicon. Effort isn't strictly scarce in the same way eggs are, however, so we fail to value it.

> I don't know if this is the case around the world (probably is?) and I don't know what the solution is. It just sucks

It's not a total disaster... so we'll undoubtedly continue to ignore the cracks in the foundation. Martin still got paid good money for his efforts and it was good for him for a time. That podcast you like will sell enough t-shirts and get the rent paid on time, at least for a little while longer. This seems to be about as good as we've collectively agreed to make the world for the time being. A local maxima, so to speak: we've gotten stuck asking for more when less might do better. With a bit of luck and effort, however, we can still catch that pendulum when it eventually begins swinging in the other direction. That's my hope, anyway! For the time being I try to do the things I'd like to see become normal in a more decent world -- sharing generously, paying for the things I like, etc. -- because hopeless accelerationism is for chumps.

Not what people are asking for. What you're ruling out is the equivalent of expecting cryostasis subscribers to sue if there's ever a service interruption.

Conventional business models as currently implemented are fundamentally misaligned to the timescales associated with this product category. Products like these need a level of stability that can only be accomplished at the charter level of the corporation -- it needs to be fundamentally incapable of reneging on promises made.

Without that kind of reassurance, why should anyone trust this service with their links? The exchange is incredibly unequal. They receive full, permanent control of the content, access, and monetization of all things which I cite. I receive... a promise that my links will do what they already do, but maybe last longer.

Neither solution is really tenable. People vote where their money is and non-homeowners -- a minority in the U.S. -- are subject to externalities which prevent them from forming efficient voting blocks.

The most realistic path out of this situation is that homeownership becomes increasingly inaccessible to the point where it hurts more people than it helps (i.e.: when the majority of voters cannot afford to own property). This will take a long time on the macro scale, considering the current 65% homeownership rate and the generational nature of property transfers. The micro scale will change faster wherever unattainable homeownership is already the reality, but it will ultimately be bottlenecked by state-level legislation. City governments lack the resources/authority to meaningfully incentivize developers or otherwise remove obsolete building codes.

Whoa... I might've actually tinkered with some of this guy's code back in my modding days. What a strange contradiction it is to think that we can unknowingly interact with so many different people and never once get to know any of them.

A rich person certainly does not. Rich people as a collective class, however? You're kidding yourself if you claim that the people who make the laws and run our institutions aren't a nearly exclusive subset of the rich class.

Nevertheless, distributed power certainly is less dangerous than concentrated power, isn't it? Inequality is a metric of the overall concentration of such power in our free market society. More inequality means more power in the hands of fewer. They become more like kings each day, when does it stop?

It's the legal equivalent of a firing squad. No execution requires a squad, but you'll certainly need one if you value the health and safety of your executioners.

How does a king existing affect you if you live in a monarchy? One does not need begrudge the king his power to live in fear of it.