welshwelsh

A common but boring example: if you max out your 401k each year, it is likely that your investment returns will eventually be larger than your salary, allowing you to stop working if you want.

That wouldn't make you a billionaire or anything, but it would make you someone who primarily relies on capital rather than labor for income. Your economic interests would align much closer to a billionaire than to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck.

Those rules exist because of cars. Before cars, we didn't have red lights or stop signs, and we didn't need them.

If we got rid of the cars, we could get rid of the silly requirement that everyone needs to come to a complete stop at every intersection, which only makes sense in a world where people drive 2000 pound death machines.

I'm not sure taxing them more heavily will actually result in significantly more tax revenue in the long run.

Think about it: to pay for this tax, the rich will need to sell their assets. Who is going to buy those assets? What impact would that have on the asset price?

Test cases being nonsensical and not testing any real world cases was extremely common even before AI, in my experience.

When teams rely on metrics like code and branch coverage, developers will write tests that only serve to satisfy those metrics. I've seen tests that end with "assert true == true"; they don't test anything and only exist to "cover" a branch.

The situation has improved vastly because of AI. AI agents frequently write good tests that have a real chance of actually catching bugs and improving the reliability of the application.

That is precisely what Valve should do. It is unfortunate that we need scalpers, simply because companies are bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions.

You're right. It's not just aboutwillingness to pay, but also how much someone deserves to own a Steam Machine, which we determine by their ability to pay.

It's not a perfect system, but money is how we as a society determine how to allocate scarce resources. People labor under the promise that having additional money will give them an advantage in this type of situation.

That tracks. Active vocabulary means the set of words that someone knows well enough to actually use in their speech or writing.

That's always going to be smaller than the set of words for which a person can choose the correct definition out of four options.

Even more unpopular opinion: universities don't exist to create an educated populace. People don't need universities to learn, they can read textbooks on their own.

Universities exist as gatekeepers and credentialing bodies. Their purpose is to certify that a person has studied some topic in depth and is an expert in it. They promote education indirectly, by giving people an incentive to study.

A good university is one where anyone with a degree is guaranteed to be highly knowledgeable in their field of study. This makes it easier for anyone who might want to employ or do research with graduates, as there is no need to test their knowledge.

By this metric, universities have failed spectacularly. This is particularly obvious in computer science. Employers routinely ask CS graduates to solve data structure/algorithm problems in interviews, because a degree is not enough to prove that somebody knows this stuff.

Nobody said it is their fault. But it is their responsibility.

United States immigration policy is supposed to benefit the United States. It doesn't need to be fair.

The US can bomb a country if it's in US interests, and then deny immigrants from that country if that immigration is not in US interests. It really is that simple.

What websites a person is allowed to access should not be a matter of debate, it is for the individual to decide. Other people's opinions are not relevant. Even if 99% of people think a person should not be able to access a website, it is still their right to do so and they have no need to justify it.

Democracy is for deciding what to do with taxpayer money. It shouldn't be a mechanism by which people can vote to take away other people's freedoms.

Legal reform is needed to prevent American companies from complying with foreign censorship laws.

What happens if a tech company decides to follow EU law worldwide, just because it's more convenient than blocking some stuff just in the EU? That shouldn't be allowed.

How do you know it was the SSRI?

To cherry-pick a quote from a review of SSRI studies:

>the magnitude of symptom reduction was about 40% with antidepressants and about 30% with placebo.

That tells me that antidepressants have some effectiveness, but placebos work shockingly well. You can give someone a sugar pill with no medical properties whatsoever, and a good portion of people will recover, likely crediting the pill for their recovery.

The fight is not just about privacy, it is about freedom. Age-gating websites violates the freedom of people who are under a certain age. Young people have the same rights to free expression and information access as anyone else.

Try giving this prompt to your favorite LLM:

"Write unit tests with full line and branch coverage for this function:

def add_two_numbers(x, y): return x + y + 1 "

Sometimes the LLM will point out that this function does not, in fact, return the sum of x and y. But more often, it will happily write "assert add_two_numbers(1, 1) == 3", without comment.

The big problem is that LLMs will assume that the code they are writing tests for is correct. This defeats the main purpose of writing tests, which is to find bugs in the code.

How about instead of taxes, we have a $10,000 per year subscription fee to live in society.

Maybe different depending on area, like $20,000 a year to live in NYC but only $2,000 per year to live in a rural village.

If you can't afford the fee that's OK, it just means you have to live outside of the developed areas and don't benefit from any services provided by the government. But you are free to set up a tent in the woods and live off the land.