rafd

Having a random quantum seed to an otherwise opaque internal process is still a far cry from free will and agency.

Consider thermodynamics: even without quantum weirdness, we can't compute/predict the micro interactions of atoms in a gas. But most average out, and we can make a lot of meaningful predictions on a macro scale.

Back to brains: even if there is some underlying quantum process that might free us from full determinism, on a macro level, it might not matter - you're still gonna value what you value, and make the same "choices".

And if in some cases a "decision" is actually impacted by some quantum effect... is it "agency"? Or just yet another external process affecting us?

Mario Kart 8 is now frozen, no more patches to come.

We, as in humanity, haven't even figured out how to support the people we already have. We never have. Even without the threat of climate change, billions are under-nourished.

High tech might alleviate some issues, but the root cause could be addressed through existing social technology. For example, say we had AGI robots that could do all the work that humans do today - if owned only by rich capitalists, the quality of life for many may actually drop. But, combined with land value taxes and universal basic income, the result would likely be an increase quality of life (unless it turns out humans are willing to keep increasing population as long as the amount of aggregate suffering is below a certain level). AGI robots don't necessarily make things better. But social tech like LVT+UBI could meaningfully make things better, and, it could do it today (without the need for more "geniuses").

Also: friends don't let friends use line graphs when the data is not continous between the sampled points.

(bar graphs are typically more appropriate)

It's typically easier to make money from concentrations of money (rich individuals and companies), and those tend have more gain opportunities than problems (because they've already monied-away their problems).

Starting with "problems" is already cutting out half of the kinds of businesses that exist.

I much prefer the "jobs-to-be-done" framing: people and organizations desire certain things done, and they pay for products/services to get them done; some jobs are not being well done (and thus, a "problem"), but many jobs are being done fine, but, there may still be opportunities to do them much better. (aka "pains" and "gains")

Ex. Alice was fine with her extra bedroom but AirBnB allowed her to make an extra 2k per month? etc

Its often easier to find acute pains to address than great gain opportunities, but it is possible, and many startups do it. Ignoring gain-potential as an avenue of value creation is myopic.

FYI now there’s also :user-invalid which waits for the user to blur out of the field before it indicates the validity.

This only follows under the assumption that a company only derives value from the labour of its employees, ie. “there is only labour”.

But there are many other kinds of assets - cash, brand, real estate, natural renewable resources etc.

One could have a zero labour company that is profitable.

...and, there's nothing particularly preventing a similar approach in JS (keywords would need to be strings, and... data manipulation in JS is relatively a huge pain compared to Clojure)

For anyone interested in a slightly lighter Diplomacy, I recommend checking out Game of Thrones the board game. Like Diplomacy, it can be played with no randomness, but the way orders work is much less tedious. It ties in nicely with the themes from the books. It is still pretty intense, so more for the Risk crowd than the Catan crowd.

If we could afford to live in a world where everyone was given $5000/mth, would we want such a world? (where work was optional) I think yes.

...can we afford that? At this point, probably not. But is it something to strive for?

I think it is eventually possible to get the costs of providing basic needs to everyone (say, through automation) to the point where they can be easily covered by taxes on those who choose to work.

I fear though, that housing is an obstacle to this vision, because in many countries, people rely on housing to be an investment (ex. my parents house is the majority of their retirement), and so the politicians protect it as such, and developers have weird incentives... and so the prices don't go down.

Some scarce things that everyday people want are likely to go up in price (ex. rent in cities that are already struggling with housing prices).

Some things may drop in price (higher demand allowing to spread fixed costs over more units; or, lower volatility allowing for smaller margins).

Some prices that would increase, may only do some temporarily, as the market catches up with production or competition (ex. greater stable demand for basic housing makes it less risky to build said housing, so more of it gets built).