wwweston

5 ms·

31.
by wwweston 3mo ago
You’re correct that time is the fundamental challenge. It’s also really what the money is always a proxy for at some level. Meetings in DC are probably not the right focus. Every congressional officeholder has offices in the region they rep
32.
by wwweston 3mo ago
Elections still have consequences, right? I’d think the fallout between fall of 2024 and now illustrates that. And that was the choice of the electorate (unless someone can demonstrate results were tampered with). So voter choices count. Th
33.
by wwweston 3mo ago
Money distorts the system in some ways and I agree that’s a problem that could use systemic mitigation (farther back than Citizen’s United probably, Buckley vs Valeo is arguably the deeper roots). But ultimately, money doesn’t remove the fu
34.
by wwweston 3mo ago
> The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt electorate. Congress is composed of people who the electorate sends there. Once there
35.
by wwweston 3mo ago
FYI - if there's any reason to believe your particular hypermobility issues might be rooted in any kind of named or unnamed connective tissue disorder, be sure to familiarize yourself with the potential vascular hazards of heavy lift
36.
by wwweston 3mo ago
I’ve totally lost the thread here but this is interesting. Who are the religions without ghosts? And is the overall point “just because we’ve made big leaps of progress doesn’t mean every challenge is tractable let alone a moonshot sprint a
37.
by wwweston 3mo ago
We have systems around humans that exist to manage expertise gaps, credibility signals, and accountability. This is part of what makes humans as good as they are, along with specialized training and some measure of meritocratic selection. W
38.
by wwweston 3mo ago
Oh I’m not saying that pervasive mandated identity verification is good. I think people should be skeptical about its benefits, very wary about its downsides, presume bad actors are involved, and make proponents fight for every inch of buy
39.
by wwweston 3mo ago
Crusades against sexually explicit material are certainly popular in some places. But these days I see a lot more talk about the developmental effects of parasocial media on kids. There’s a whole segment of buy-in there that didn’t exist be
40.
by wwweston 3mo ago
> On the other hand, the dumb models are more than adequate for simple noncritical tasks, like directing a user to the appropriate FAQ entry This is a lane I’ve been experimenting in —- seeing what I can get out of models that work in 16
41.
by wwweston 3mo ago
Tech product price dynamics benefit from a bunch of things that food doesn’t: they’re optional purchases, they’re early stage developments which have more low hanging fruit, and purchase price can be subsidized with later plays (subscriptio
42.
by wwweston 3mo ago
And increasingly, everyone isn’t using them, even if they’re on them. I’m on Insta and WhatsApp and I use them a few times per year. I’m on Messenger and have seen a dramatic dropoff in messages. I’m on FB frequently and notice only a s
43.
by wwweston 3mo ago
I wonder if the struggle is really comprehending thoughtful selective adoption. Schools are the place where the product is a more fully developed person. There's no LLM shortcut for generating that. There are many ways you could use LL
44.
by wwweston 3mo ago
Your language more accurately reflects how the US government is supposed to operate, and that's important, we'd all be better off if people remembered that the government has a number of branches with different responsibilities, a
45.
by wwweston 3mo ago
1) Different people might optimize for different things. There are people calculating that expensive hardware plus cheap rentals means owning isn’t optimizing, but there are people making choices that fit your preferences too. 2) I think it
46.
by wwweston 4mo ago
As one famous agent said: “I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about.” An argument can be as old as the search engine and hold real val
47.
by wwweston 4mo ago
The practical question most face is which is more likely to land them a good role. Does standards level CSS knowledge meet that bar? (I’m team CSS standards although my knowledge is a bit tilted towards late 2010s, currently revisiting)
48.
by wwweston 4mo ago
If L2 support work is the example then I doubt we’re near replacement. L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even
49.
by wwweston 4mo ago
Did front-end dev (among other things) for half of the 2000s (and beyond) and heard plenty of arguments about semantic markup, flexible restyling, accessibility, separation of concerns, and more. But not one about extra lines of code when i
50.
by wwweston 4mo ago
> The house gives you a place to live A careful re-reading of my comment will reveal that I did mention rent as a factor in at least two places: one as an opportunity cost to be reckoned with for people following the PFI plan (with whi
51.
by wwweston 4mo ago
That point is in the analysis after the bullet points (in phrases like "minus 400k you would have probably paid in rent" and "you need to consistently have rent-payment-level disposable income to make this work. Many working
52.
by wwweston 4mo ago
Love that the two most solid pro-homebuying points I've ever encountered (jedberg's about the psychological benefits, yours about leverage) immediately surface in an HN discussion. It's probably worth making a closer comparis
53.
by wwweston 4mo ago
That's a great way of announcing that you didn't read my comment, which actually accounts for the principled version of the point you're ideologically abusing.
54.
by wwweston 4mo ago
Really hope that all the positives in the leadership announcement are true. Things have reached the point where I probably could use open sync+storage options to achieve what I do with Dropbox (and perhaps eventually I will do that as a h
55.
by wwweston 4mo ago
And we treat the 2018 murders you're invoking as crimes. Problems to be solved. Most people do not accept that's just how it should be. Almost everyone believes murder should be illegal, policed, prevented where possible, charged
56.
by wwweston 4mo ago
Some may notice this response is in good company with the other psychological mechanisms we use to avoid confronting "lotteries." Like "they didn't prepare correctly" or "they didn't do the right things&qu
57.
by wwweston 4mo ago
Perhaps like Jackson, I think it can be useful to prompt people in a way that might nudge them to notice on their own. Giving examples of specific "lotteries" I see is just as likely to activate those psychological mechanisms I ta
58.
by wwweston 4mo ago
The point is that you can see this lottery as a cruel horror. You immediately hate it. It's obvious to us as the readers because it's outside our experience. Of course we wouldn't regularly just draw lots to stone someone t
59.
by wwweston 4mo ago
> Turns out most of the time it's more like a puzzle to get an (often inefficient) terse implementation by torturing some linear algebra operators. In vector function space, no one can hear your eigen-scream.
60.
by wwweston 4mo ago
It's hard because you're wrong. It's hard because you continue to love pretending that people are calling you names even when they're not. It's hard because you find it convenient to demand people defend arguments t

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