rayiner

16 ms·

391.
by rayiner 3mo ago
LLMs open up huge possibilities to do work that you otherwise wouldn't do. I vibe coded a PDF viewer yesterday in a couple of hours using Claude and Grok. I've been itching for a native Mac app that meets some very basic requireme
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by rayiner 3mo ago
With the aging population, we also hit peak college attendance 15 years ago.
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by rayiner 3mo ago
Germans are big on trade schools. Despite being one of the richest western european countries, Germany (and Switzerland) have along the lowest college graduation rates, because they prioritize trade schools.
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by rayiner 3mo ago
I love the idea of a map to study provenance. For example, consider the phrases “legislative power,” “executive power,” and “judicial power,” appearing in Articles I, II, and III of the constitution. The first is defined by reference to the
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by rayiner 3mo ago
Thank you, this is really cool. Lovely!
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by rayiner 3mo ago
If you think poor people know what’s best for them, how do you think we should decide vaccine schedules for kids? We should have online voting on it with universal franchise, right? We have the technology now. If you don’t agree we should d
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by rayiner 3mo ago
* * *
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by rayiner 3mo ago
Probably better off than investing in any field where our output is bits.
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by rayiner 3mo ago
Are you serious about this?
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by rayiner 3mo ago
And are the Germans wrong?
401.
by rayiner 3mo ago
I think “great deal” is an overstatement. The US has borrowed a lot of work done by Chinese mathematicians and scientists. But would you say we have “absorbed a great deal” of Chinese culture? Japanese video games and anime are immensely po
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by rayiner 3mo ago
You’re not thinking it through. Corporate money influences politics because campaigns are expensive. And campaigns are expensive because advertising to vast swaths of low information voters is expensive. Say you cut out the third of the el
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by rayiner 3mo ago
I was a basement dwelling tech person first. I don’t know when techies got soft, but back in my day we were like “remove all the warning labels and let god sort it out.”
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by rayiner 3mo ago
It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate. We already have distinctions: kids can’t vote, non-citizen foreigners can’t vote, felons often c
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by rayiner 3mo ago
> I still think there is something we can call “Western Civilization" This is perhaps the least controversial statement in history. It's obviously true. Western Civilization is: 1) Greece 2) Rome, borrowing from the Greeks 3)
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by rayiner 3mo ago
The difference is that you can prove with math and physics that building bridge out of popsicle sticks is crazy. Whereas your point here is based on emotional appeals (“bones of poor people”) and religious dogma. Poor people are the ones wh
407.
by rayiner 3mo ago
Words do “mean” things. But the word “democracy” refers to a broader category of government systems, of which democracy with universal adult franchise constitutes a subset of the broader concept. The ancient Greeks practiced democracy, but
408.
by rayiner 3mo ago
> Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that. Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. Every part of the system has trade-offs that must
409.
by rayiner 3mo ago
The article criticizes “taking us back to the 19th century,” but ironically dropping property qualifications for voting was an innovation of the Jacksonian era of the 1820s-1850s. There is a tendency to all efforts to generalize the franchi
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by rayiner 3mo ago
> If it's just making powerpoint presentations why do AI companies whose whole raison d'etre is that they can make these powerpoints in seconds for pennies spend millions on lobbying instead? Because you need meat puppets to id
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by rayiner 3mo ago
You can just call them up or email them and schedule a meeting.
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by rayiner 3mo ago
It seems like the empirical fact that lobbying is cheap is at odds with your apparent assumptions about the value companies gain from lobbying. Does that fact make you rethink your notion of what lobbying actually entails? Lobbying is cheap
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by rayiner 3mo ago
Europe could never "handle" it. Even in 1990-2001, Europe averaged about 3 heat-related deaths per 100,000: https://www.statista.com/chart/36367/average-annual-heat-rel... , compared to about 1 per 100,00
414.
by rayiner 3mo ago
I’ve used Opus and Grok (in the last month) to make some logical arguments and they’re not usable for that. In one case, the result looked superficially compelling, but the assertions on further scrutiny often proved the opposite of what we
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by rayiner 3mo ago
I've seen "load bearing" so many times in AI now I can't remember whether we always used "load bearing wall" to refer to a structural interior wall, or whether it's a recent AI-ism.
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by rayiner 3mo ago
You’re generally correct, but you can become a lawyer without going to law school in 4 states. But this is a relatively modern requirement. ABA lobbying encouraged the policy in 1920 and most states adopted it by the 1940s and 1950s.
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by rayiner 3mo ago
> Second, the "Socratic" Method for teaching law is nothing like it is in philosophy; it's more of a weird combination of hide-the-ball and distraction that again ensures people who can see through the clouds are using out
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by rayiner 3mo ago
Going to school was never the only way for smart people to be able to do the job of a lawyer. Law is like consulting and finance in that the “school” part is mostly filtering and socialization and signaling. The actual education is maybe li
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by rayiner 3mo ago
This is like saying “why do I need a compiler when I can do better register allocation by hand in assembly?” Quick and “good enough” will win over “better.”
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by rayiner 3mo ago
You said: "AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing." You asserted that AI companies would need "the enti

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