Problem is that is what the insider traders are counting on. They know it is going to happen, it’s planned to happen and the odds reflect that. So a few million folks toss in a couple of bucks and the insiders cash in.

Outsiders can’t be 100% sure that it’s a planned event so they don’t take the terrible odds and the insiders don’t have to split things.

I know you are kidding, but if a monthly toll dividend payment went out to taxpayers even for a pittance, lots of folks would probably cheer the conquest happily.

I don’t know what you are getting at, of the people who come over from China and Taiwan that I talk to, no one believes that the two are one “nation” with different opinions on who is the authority. They may believe there’s not a distinct cultural identity but none think the “no, there’s only one China and onlywe are the real China” is a thing in practice, just a political formality.

The ones from China do say they wouldn’t push their luck expressing that publicly, and one went so far as to borrow a computer to log into without any association with them because they were paranoid about using their laptop issued to them with the Chinese employer preload. He wanted to read some Wikipedia the way an American sees it while he was over on business.

Tangentially, another one from China was super excited to try to get someone to get him a gun to shoot. We did manage to hook him up with a gun range.

Ctrl r my friend

A guy vibe coded something and said to incorporate it into my work.

Now it was a feature that people had asked for so I had to try it out.

It failed 75% of the things it was supposed to do and for the other what usually was a near instant interactive task took 5 minutes. I kicked it back saying he needed to fix the problems and improve performance. The end of the next day he answered that the infrastructure must be broken because the AI couldn’t get results and the performance problem was just the nature of the things the software had to interact with. I say “he”, but pretty sure his comment was LLM generated, long and useless.

But it was the impetus to get that function done now, as his “substantiative” work meant we could technically provide a customer request, lower priority as it may have been. So I spent a morning implementing the same thing it did but the old fashioned way, 100% worked and the unavoidably slow thing took less than a second.

Now I’m going to vote for you.

Frankly, the American voting public cares less about the unjust deaths of untold many foreign folks than the price of eggs 8 months before the vote.

Hey LLM. I’m thinking of deducting my Corvette as a business expense for my landscaping business, is that a good idea?

What a creative way to lower your tax burden! This totally makes sense and you can be confident that your decision will be well received.

(Others can take the LLM tone better than me, and I don’t have the patience for LLM verbosity).

I wonder if I counted…

So I did the tax prep using a free offer from TurboTax. Everything seemed traditional.

Then, at the end it generated an AI summary of my return. I didn’t have a choice, it just did it. I have the “unhelpful” feedback because:

• Despite saying it was “explaining” the numbers and why, all it did was just list the numbers from the fairly straightforward table right above the AI response in a more awkward form, not explaining anything.
• Further, despite the seemingly easy task of “Take a table of figures and repeat them in prose”, it still screwed up and messed up and of the figures that all our had to do was repeat verbatim.

So AI was forced into my tax prep and did nothing substantive (thank goodness) and flubbed the cosmetic role it tried to play.

Yep, when I was a kid I remember people grousing about how stuff used to last forever and now it doesn’t. 20 years later, I got to hear people talk about how stuff made when I was a kid used to last forever but now it doesn’t. Now I get to hear how stuff made 20 years ago used to last forever but now it doesn’t.

Every time something breaks, someone points to something 20 years old that didn’t break and forget all the stuff that did break.

Of course, the practice of repair was different when the appliance costed relatively a lot more.

E.g. a TV was more likely to be repaired, but also costed about 10x as much relatively speaking.

So if it would have cost you 25% of the price of a TV to get it repaired, you would have got it repaired. If it’s just as easy to repair now, then the repair would still be over twice the price of just buying new.

“At least he’s not a Democrat” is a phrase I have seen when a right winger gets vaguely unhappy with him.

Team sports mentality to the end

It said right in your quote that people do work that “no one volunteers to do”. If they aren’t volunteering, then something is providing the impetus.

Broadly the writing avoids the more difficult nuance of how the community gets unplesant work to be “shared” when no one volunteers. This suggests enforcement one way or another.

At small scale of a commune, some pretty human interactions can probably serve to drive this in a pretty reasonable way, by instilling sense of duty and comradery and potentially shame inherent to everyone knowing everyone else in a nuanced way. As you scale up, when inevitably people start losing track of each other, those soft mechanisms deteriorate, and the systems start to develop cracks for exploitation. Capitalism breaks in some ways, other systems break down in others. Fundamentally human behavior when interaction becomes diluted at scale tends to suck.

allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do.

Ok, this basically sums up the answer: the community forces labor one way or another. What is the enforcement, carrot vs. stick for making people do their fair share. How do you reward people for doing unwanted work? How do you deal with someone refusing to do it, or “maliciously complying” and doing it terribly to make the job easier and/or get out of doing it again in the future?

So the agreement is that there is work that needs some external impetus to happen, because not every job has enough people intrinsically interested or civic minded to make it happen. The question becomes which solutions manage to be more fair than others? For unskilled and unwanted jobs, the current answer has a lower class overworked because they are the most desperate, and that’s bad. A forced labor system might manage to distribute the burden more fairly, though thanks to people being crap it’s likely for a system set up to do that to be abused to overwork some demonized demographic, ending in a similar outcome a different way.

Whatever the case is, it’s not as rosy as “people freely work on wikipedia and programming, therefore people will freely work on anything society may want or need”

Problem being the jobs that don’t inspire passion, curiosity, and purpose, but we still need them to get done.

Now let’s discuss all the people eager to volunteer to work sewage treatment plants.

The proportion of people with more innate motivation versus need for a job to be done varies wildly between jobs.

But when someone approaches work with innate motivation, amazingly better stuff happens compared to people in it just for the paycheck.

He had the persosctive that once you hop between source code files that constitutes a security boundary. If you had intake.c and user data.c that got linked together, well data.c needed its own sanitation… Just in case…

I suspect he used a tool that checked files and noted the risky pattern and the tool didn’t understand the relationship and be was so invested that he tortured it a bit to have any finding. I think he was hired by a client and in my experience a security consultant always has a finding, no matter how clean in practice the system was.

Another finding by another security consultant was that an open source dependency hasn’t had any commits in a year. No vulnerabilities, but since no one had changed anything, he was concerned that if a vulnerability were ever found, the lack of activity means no one would fix it.

It’s wild how very good security work tends to share the stage with very shoddy work with equal deference by the broader tech industry.

In this case, there was file a, which is the backend file responsible for intake and sanitation. Depending on what’s next, it might go on to file b or file c. He modified file a.

His rationale was that every single backend file should do sanitation, because at some future point someone might make a different project and take file b and pair it with some other intake code that didn’t sanitize.

I know all about client side being useless for meaningful security enforcement.

Yes, recently we got a security “finding” from a security researcher.

His vulnerability required first for someone to remove or comment out calls to sanitize data and then said we had a vulnerability due to lack of sanitation…

Throughout my career, most security findings are like this, useless or even a bit deceitful. Some are really important, but most are garbage.

Won’t even impeach him this time.