gruntled-worker

> every bottleneck we remove immediately leads to a further increase in the amount of code we produce

Less-than-great news for code artisans. You can be brilliant, but can you divine the Right Way to Write It if you're up against an apparatus that starts at "pretty good engineer" then brute-forces its way down an exponential search tree?

You can just copy the executable then run it with --no-daemon, or edit the config equivalently. No autoupdates and no background process.

The recent terminal UI changes were more fastidious, but even those are easily disabled with CODEX_TUI_DISABLE_KEYBOARD_ENHANCEMENT=1 and the /tui command.

The biggest problem right now is that this is better modeled as a 3-player game, not 2.

Individual success until now has been a function of personal qualities (skill, attitudes, intangibles), luck, and anti-qualities (cheating, corruption, duping). In many areas (e.g. investing) human qualities are losing their edge thanks to AI and other automation. Luck averages itself out. That might leave anti-qualities as the putative determinant of success going forward.

So at a minimum you have a 3-player game of good humans, bad humans, and AI. Maybe AI turns into Daleks. Maybe good humans end up leveraging AI to castigate bad ones. Or maybe bad humans use AI to put the good ones out of their misery. Then there are the more complex multi-stage games based on the dynamics you mention.

But... how would the powers-that-be induce language fragmentation, then? /s

> mortgages are bad too?

They're particularly awful. Borrowers are counting on overlapping Ω and /. Heads they win, tails you lose. Lender agents instantly repackage them into CMOs which then get laundered by a 1-10 layer onion of balance sheets that appear decreasingly exposed. Owning these as a stockholder principal is almost unknowable until it's too late. See 2008 crisis.

They could be replaced with equity. Every month the resident purchases 1/360 of the house at current prices plus the co-investor's profit and rent portion. The unsold asset portion stays on the latter's balance sheet. The resident doesn't steal the upside, the co-investor's agent doesn't camouflage away the downside from the principal. Foreclosure no longer exists.

The political economy of housing also changes for the better.

> How about retirement assets later in life?

If the elderly investor is wealthy stocks are just fine, all risk goes to inheritors anyway. Otherwise they should be insuring their life expectancy rather than minimizing return variability. This is either done through the government or through a private pension fund. If the pension fund goes under the government should step in. In no case is debt better.

And in any case, in a debt-less world stocks are way less risky. There's no financial leverage in the chain.

> If a company goes under, debt is generally higher in the asset recovery waterfall.

You can have recovery categories of stock too. For example, they can kick in in investor fraud and catastrophic losses.

> enable people and businesses to attempt things without needing all the cash up front

You can do this with equity too.

Gambling, usury, pimping, duels, toxic marriages, ...

Debt is crap. Except for a few categories (taxes, liquidity, structuring, benevolence) it's a game of two parties trying to out-cheat one another.

Let Ω be the core of a normal outcome distribution and / be the payoff hockey stick. Lenders want /``Ω and aren't even willing to accept /Ω. Average borrowers want superimposed Ω and / while bad borrowers want Ω/.

The rest is a game of information asymmetry and disinformation signaling. Each party is trying to outsmart the other even if the Ω is well above break-even. Often, lenders and borrowers are agents concealing the true game from principals.

Equity is better. There is no /, and strategy considerations are reduced.

Either debt draws vultures into business, or perhaps they're going to go in anyways and that's where they land. Various kinds of debt games were codified into law to make the vulture nests bigger.

Real estate is debt central.

Parmesan is generic. Parmesan : Parmigiano Reggiano = sparkling wine : Champagne.

I'm not so sure 'low tech' is the backward label it used to be. The economic model that seems to be ascendant right now is moats and castles. Maybe AI can replace your doctor and lawyer, but can it replace your pecorino and prosciutto?

Too Bandwagony; Didn't Bother

It'll get rooted over the uplink/WiFi/BT long before that. Probably even more likely for non-SDVs.