myrmidon

9 ms·

151.
by myrmidon 4mo ago
I'm from a region negatively affected by this. Foreign capital is undesirable in the housing market because: 1) It raises demand (when buying a home as a local, you now also have to compete with foreigners "investing", and th
152.
by myrmidon 4mo ago
That's interesting (and a really fun stunt to pull). I always had the impression that the situation is slightly better for other minority-dialect foreigners (Vorarlberg/Südtirol) compared to "vanilla" german speakers, bu
153.
by myrmidon 4mo ago
This is actually pretty annoying in embedded programming in C, because you'd often really prefer to use a uint8_t buffer[] for serialization functions (e.g. to write arbitrary data on some bus etc.) over char*, but you'd actually
154.
by myrmidon 4mo ago
Nice article! There is another interesting perspective: Anything selfreplicating kinda needs to be as small as possible (compared to the smallest internal mechanisms required), otherwise the replication time grows out of control: Consider
155.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Do you think that the author is deciding based on misunderstanding/false assumptions? He explicitly states that the AI training concerns are not about legal GPL violations but about going against his licensing intentions (and those see
156.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
You have very similar mechanics elsewhere though. More people => invariably more communication/HR/information management overhead pretty much regardless of what they do, and you grow the labor supply also (=> more people wil
157.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Decreasing working hours increases labor availability (=> so you'd expect people to get paid less as a result), but higher headcount for comparable output is also totally undesirable for an employer: The only potential benefit is so
158.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
I can see your point, and I do agree that people often cry about "but copyright" in LLM contexts when simply not appropriate. But I can still understand the Kefir author; if you previously defaulted to GPL (over MIT/BSD) main
159.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
> GPL is a license explicitly designed to maximize use I feel this is a misrepresentation. GPL rather seems designed to maximize source availability for users . But mandatory public source availability does make selling software produ
160.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
It clearly matters to him, and perception is not really a choice. Personally, I've grown somewhat allergic to "AI-isms", and I'd rather not be (this example is still somewhat acceptable though). I also don't under
161.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
It would have been very easy for older religions to present strong evidence for divinity: just have some explicit, non-trivial facts in the holy book that were unknown to humankind when those books were written, like earth-moon/sun dis
162.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
The threshold for a surveillance system to affect societal norms is not necessarily "legal event", and potentially even lower than any observable reaction (from self-censorship). Just consider how algorithmic moderation can sha
163.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
My best guess would be [[Surveillance cameras normalize/denormalize behavior in a way that is easily biased and undemocratic.]] It might e.g. direct the full force of law against a drunk urinating on a tree (easy to spot/classify)
164.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Yes. All known life shares an (assumed) last common universal ancestor (LUCA, presumed extinct), and there is significant evidence pointing that way. We can infer properties and function by looking at genes shared between archea and bacteri
165.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
I think there is really good reason to throw tax money at agriculture just to keep it local. Depending on foreigners for food is bound to get you into iffy situations, and every industrialized nation acts similarly here (as many subsidies a
166.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
I'm not arguing against wealth taxation, my point is just that the amount you can extract that way is too small relative to pensions, even under extremely generous assumptions (in Germany, you'd need a ~7% yearly tax on all weal
167.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Working people collect points each year based on their income relative to the average (this is proportional to how much they pay). Retirees then get paid based on how many points they have. Both the worth and the "cost" of those p
168.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
If your position is that farmers in the EU or Italy specifically have no lobby then you could not be more wrong. Throwing money at farmers to keep them in the country is, like, the main purpose of the thing, and more than a quarter of the
169.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
No, it is because pensions are scaled (yearly) proportionally to wages (simplified, the actual process is more complicated)
170.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
My point is that this is not a case of "the rich took all the money so we can no longer pay decent pensions", even stripping "the rich" of everything couldnt prop the system up for long at all. I'm very much in fa
171.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
No, it would only imply that the worker/retiree income ratio (and tax/pension burden) are somewhat constant which is arguably the case; german pensions specifically rise with wages and get adjusted for inflation. Productivity gain
172.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Rising productivity is a weak argument imo for several reasons: Pensions have to not rise with wages for this to be useful. Which simply isnt happening in practice (yet?) Also no meaningful increase in housebuilding, nursing, plumbing, ch
173.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
My point is: Society itself recoups the investment into education very easily (from competent taxpaying workers some years later), but the main cost of raising children is paid by parents , and they don't get back anything (economic
174.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
This only applies in a steady state. If your populations shrinks quickly, you end up needing to run the infrastructure (and elder care!) for a whole country with too few working-age people. This is a massive problem, and some incentive comp
175.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
This sounds extremely plausible to me, but I would be very careful about conclusions from such studies, because I believe the general expectations of society as a whole regarding child-raising matter a lot and you can't easily quanti
176.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
This is reductive, and incorrect. You simply need working-age people to run stuff, full stop. Approaching a 1:1 ratio of workers/retirees is simply unsustainable (yet), for very obvious reasons. While wealth disparity is also a problem
177.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
You need to pay taxes and have kids for the numbers to work out. If your pension benefits are calculated based on a 4 workers/retiree ratio, but then your whole generation has like 1 kid per family then the system will obviously brea
178.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
IMO Germany is in a pretty tough spot, and lots of countries will run into similar problems because of demographics. It is very difficult to diminish pension benefits that were promised 30 years ago (when the worker/retiree ration was
179.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
Yes, but not commensurately. A child might cost its parents somewhere beyond $200k, the parents only get a tiny fraction of this from the state. And the public paying for education is not a subsidy for parents in my view, but an investment
180.
by myrmidon 5mo ago
There's a bunch of criticism, but this is in my view the only general approach that makes sense (globally) and should have been done 50 years ago already. IMO a big factor for the whole sub-replacement fertility in developed nations (a

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