somenameforme

He also appeared as a guard (Sejanus) in I, Claudius - and was phenomenal. He also had hair at some point, believe it or not!

It has a lower population than e.g. Wisconsin, in an area about twice as large. You could fit 61 Norways (in terms of population) into the US. I think there's a lot of things that work really well at smaller scale, but just don't work at larger scale. It's not really possible to say where 'smaller scale' ends because it's going to depend on factors other than just population, but I think Norway is comfortably far into the very small side of things in part because of population and in part because of those other factors.

I think you're looking at an effect instead of a cause. The main reason for the desire for a small government is not some inherent and absolute obsession with smallness, but because of the belief that larger governments are incapable of effectively utilizing their power (for reasons beyond just incompetence), are prone to inevitable abuses, and so forth. And that belief itself is not simply ideological, but based on history through most of all time.

Even with rehab versus punishment - it's the same story. The view isn't that punishment is inherently superior, but simply that rehabilitation is more of an ideal than a reality, and that typical appeals to places like Norway - a relatively homogenous and extremely wealthy microstate - don't necessarily translate well to large diverse societies, especially ones where there are substantial chunks of society that adopt cultures that glorify criminality.

Some countries like Iceland let their banks fail (in no small part because their total debt was something like 10x their gdp), and they even successfully prosecuted a number of executives. They got moderate slaps on the wrist but did serve some token time in prison as opposed to having to pay a ground-breaking fine of 5 minutes of revenue as is more typical. It wrecked their economy in the short-term but they were back to growth by 2011, and had a larger than ever economy by 2015.

But I think more than the one-off situation is also the precedent it sets. When you can bank on the government bailing you out (pun intended I guess?), it creates a perverse incentive of just trying to get as large as you possibly can, all foundation or principles absolutely be damned - because once you get big enough you win, even if you're the biggest loser ever. And I do think that's what we're probably seeing with LLM companies.

Not that LLM's a loser - it's a revolutionary tech and will only become more so. But multi trillion dollar valuations for a product that has viable open competitors already available and whose operating requirements continue to plummet and will almost certainly continue to plummet? This is extremely amusing, but absolutely batshit insane. It's like paying millions for a pretty flower because it's novel in spite of the fact that you know, and everyone else knows, that once people start planting them there will be endless amounts available for negligible cost.

Calling/implying that it's technically sophisticated is not really reasonable. Having a BTC (or other currency) wallet is utterly trivial, let alone from a technical standpoint, it's much easier than setting up an e.g. Coinbase account. The only issue, outside of choice of course, is people being ignorant of what needs to be done and I think that can largely be explained by the fact that centralized providers spend billions on marketing while decentralized wallets spend nothing on it.

I think the point is having ambition but no purpose beyond the ambition itself. Money is the obvious example. Somebody wants to make lots of money. Okay, but why? The why there is what really matters, yet many never answer that. And so you end up in this sort of system where you have people chasing ever more zeroes on their bank account and not only doing nothing of much value with it, but actively causing chaos and destruction to achieve it. And why? There is no why - the money is the point in and of itself.

Like imagine shells were used as a currency in some isolated tribe and suddenly there were these people who'd just collect shells for endless hours each and every day, to go bury them in their hiding hole, only to wake up and do the exact same thing the next day, only occasionally trading some completely inconsequential part of their shell collection for food or whatever. We'd certainly pathologize it, yet that'd be far less neurotic than what we do in our society since shell collecting is harmless whereas many of the things we do in pursuit of shells are completely self destructive.

I think it's more that social standards of acceptability tend to continually degrade. There was a time when calling someone a scoundrel or a rascal was one of the most vile insults imaginable, potentially worth fighting to the death over, and I mean that completely literally.

I used the word 'degrade' earlier and I'm not sure fighting to the death over rascal is a higher state of enlightenment, but I do think words should have meaning, and now they mostly no longer do because everything is always hyperbolized to the most ridiculous degree.

So if the FBI was doing something akin in modern times they'd probably weaponize their knowledge by framing him as a viable rapist or other sort of sexual predator as opposed to a simple womanizer.

Yip, LLMs were the executioners but SO had already long since put itself on death row for exactly what you're mentioning. I think sites like FlipCode were in many ways the spiritual predecessor of SO, and the questions were more of a part of the community rather than the definition of it. People need to feel free to communicate for something like SO to be successful, and they'd turned themselves into an absurdly user-hostile site where it seemed like people were competing against each other to see who could find a reason to close questions, rather than looking for a reason to answer them.

The irony is they were constantly looking for reasons to mark a question as low quality, but the moderation efforts were themselves extremely low quality, like absurdly so. Things would be marked as dupes when they had no relationship whatsoever, completely inappropriate questions would be asked antagonistically like 'provide a minimal replicable code example' for an abstract/theoretic question, and stuff that stood a chance of fostering a healthy discussion was just randomly closed.

It's perhaps a good example of the dangers of using volunteer moderators. It just never works out, because doing a good job of moderating is a thankless, time consuming, and painful job. So you disproportionately end up with people doing it for power over others or some perception of status seeking. In either case, these are the last sort of people you want having any authority whatsoever over others.

I mean that the economics are similar to software. All of the complexities you mention are about initially creating a drug, replicating that drug once that's wrapped up with is, relatively, very cheap and simple. This is in comparison to 'normal' industries where there's often a huge cost and complexity involved, even once a product has been completely finalized.

This is even more true when "progress" means fertility rates collapse. A culture that is not self sustaining will die, and far more quickly than most realize. It doesn't matter how awesome that culture is for a brief moment in time, it will cease to exist.

Amish have an overall fertility rate around 6, which is why there are now almost half a million Amish in America alone. They had less than half that in 2000. In a few decades, they'll number in the millions. If people don't start having babies then groups like the Amish will take over the world, very much turning "the meek shall inherit the Earth" into a completely fulfilled prophecy. In some ways it's perhaps even a self fulfilling one if it turns out that 'non-meek' behaviors result in unsustainable societies.

Well there's also the third option of get a million out of a billion people. And that's only one side of the perverse equation. The other is rent-seeking. A treatment that needs to be redone or repeatedly boosted is far more profitable than a treatment that simply solves something once and for all, especially if that 'solving' treatment can be done cheaply.