How good is your model at picking good data structures?
There’s several orders of magnitude less available discussion of selecting data structures for problem domains than there is code.
If the underlying information is implicit in high volume of code available then maybe the models are good at it, especially when driven by devs who can/will prompt in that direction. And that assumption seems likely related to how much code was written by devs who focus on data.
> There’s several orders of magnitude less available discussion of selecting data structures for problem domains than there is code.
I believe that’s what most algorithms books are about. And most OS book talks more about data than algorithms. And if you watch livestream or read books on practical projects, you’ll see that a lot of refactor is first selecting a data structure, then adapt the code around it. DDD is about data structure.
> Then again maybe the quality of Lincoln's literacy defies it.
I think so. My first thought reading this output is that I should ask the LLM to first write in the style of Lincoln and then slightly modernize the prose.
Elected officials have significant influence they can bring to bear on specific decisions, general operations, and in many cases personnel decisions. That’s true at the level of individual house members and can be more true for other offices.
The rule of law and checks and balances also means these elected officeholders don’t have arbitrary control, which has a lot of upsides (and produced a professional and effective federal workforce) as well as some limits.
I swear we have a problem where we quantize to caricatures rather than recognizing tuned balance, and control theorists would probably anticipate this means things will start to swing a bit wildly.
Executive power over the civil service is an ant driving an elephant. You can say it's a good thing and it's intentional, but the fact of the matter is that the executive appoint a fraction of a percent of the positions and those positions have nominal personnel powers that they can't really use without fear of getting sued.
It's almost like positions are created and managed by law as well as leadership, and even leadership is supposed to follow law.
Fractional direct appointments are the usual case in any large organization. If you're the chief executive, you don't hire individual department workers, you might not even pick individual department management, you probably pick other "C-level" staff and have them manage management personnel most of the time.
It's more like a captain of a ship than "an ant driving an elephant." Every avenue you have to direct the ship depends on a network of knowledge and relationships supporting steering and operational systems. You don't DIY turning the tanker, you team-turn the tanker because you've learned how to work with a team.
The Nordic model does a great job of providing a poor-raising floor (which also launches entrepreneurs at a higher success rate than in the US). And Norway in particular seems to have figured out how to take commons resources and turn them into common wealth while industry retains profit incentives.
No one is “eviscerated.”
And it’s disingenuous to use that term for any proposal that has even the slightest public traction in the US. The most extreme proposals require single digit taxes on hyperwealth which might not have impact beyond stabilizing it and certainly wouldn’t make anyone not-wealthy.
No one is talking about eviscerating the wealthy. Yet. But if we pretend the only options are (a) unencumbered hyperwealth with attendant hyper income inequality and (b) eviscerating the wealthy for long enough, it’s more likely some people will eventually embrace the latter.
And this is particularly relevant for the age of LLMs. None of them approach intelligence with reliance on a huge data commons (and likely even data that isn’t intended for the commons) they’re an enterprise with a natural arrow from the commons to the common wealth, if we can remember a culture that sustains it.
Maybe you should choose your words more carefully, Walter Bright. To eviscerate means to disembowel. Nobody is pushing to physically hurt the rich. But people are upset that their standards of living are declining while every opportunity to give more money to the rich is executed.
Bernie Sanders asked for taxing the rich and the corporations. Taxing someone does not mean disembowel.
I know what the word means, and I am sure you understand it is not meant to be taken literally.
For example, do you remember when AOC proudly wore a dress with the words "Eat the rich" emblazoned on it? Nobody accused her of suggesting cannibalism.
Bernie Sanders has frequently stated that billionaires should not exist. He used to excoriate millionaires, until he became one himself.
The "Nordic model" refers to the socioeconomics common in Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden), not just to Norway.
It's about how you approach commons and common wealth. Any commons will do. It does not rely on oil resources per se.
Let's say for the sake of argument it does depend on oil wealth, though.
The US currently has something like 30x the proven oil reserves that Norway does (>200 billion barrels vs ~7 billion). It has already produced at least 200billion barrels since the 1850s. What if the US had treated the wealth from past oil production the way Norway has? What if it treated the next 200 billion that way?
And oil is only one of many commons resources to choose from.
> See Bernie Sanders!
Yes, I addressed Sanders proposal in my earlier comment: "single digit taxes on hyperwealth which might not have impact beyond stabilizing it and certainly wouldn’t make anyone not-wealthy."
A single digit wealth tax is unlikely to fully offset even conventional yearly returns, hence the "might not have impact beyond stabilizing" the wealth of those subject to it.
Even if we assume no yearly returns though -- simply a 5% bite out of net worth -- a wealth tax will not make anyone in that economic strata unwealthy (there's a billions-floor beneath which it wouldn't apply, leaving the worst case still radically prosperous).
There's no reasonable basis to characterize that as "evisceration."
But repeating loaded terms like that as part of an ideological rosary is a common religious and rhetorical strategy.
> Also, if you die in Washington State, your estate is taxed at 75% (40% federal, 35% state).
My understanding is that estate taxes generally have thresholds that have to be met before they kick in. Federal threshold is on the order of 10million, WA is 3 million.
Having dynastic wealth flows limited over a few million dollars is also not reasonably described as "evisceration" (especially with all the other vehicles for transferring wealth).
May as well complain to God that you can't take it with you as that you might have to loosen your grasp at death to render unto caeser.
> The US currently has something like 30x the proven oil reserves that Norway does
And 60x the population. And defends the world with defense expenditures.
> simply a 5% bite out of net worth
Once that door is open, there will be no end to it. Washington state enacted a 7% capital gains tax, and the next year raised it to 9.9%. Now they're close to enacting a 9.9% income tax.
> My understanding is that estate taxes generally have thresholds that have to be met before they kick in. Federal threshold is on the order of 10million, WA is 3 million.
If your estate is $1 billion, your estate tax will be:
35% of $997,000,000 + 40% of $990,000,000 = 74.5% effective tax rate.
> Sanders
said many times that billionaires should not exist
> that you can't take it with you as that you might have to loosen your grasp at death to render unto caeser.
You could take all the money from billionaires and it won't raise the general standard of living. You will also never have companies like SpaceX.
$100 million. He's also founded many other companies. Jeff Bezos has invested an estimated $10 billion to over $14.6 billion into Blue Origin as of early 2025.
OK, let's assume that oil is the only relevant resource, and population is the other relevant factor, and there's no efficiencies of scale or exceptional American ingenuity that can be discovered. 30x the resources combined with 60 times the population would mean we should be able to provide at least half the floor that Norway does, right?
Does that mean if we discover another resource the US has, or efficiencies of scale, or an exceptionally ingenious solution, we can revise that number up?
What if we'd behaved differently in the past when our oil to population ratio was similar to Norway's (or better)? And when's the 2nd best time to start?
Or is this more of a shrug we're nothing compared to those fortunate Scandinavians and that's why we just can't have nice things that they have no matter how nice it would be to have those things, stiff upper lip chaps, greatest country in the world situation?
> And defends the world with defense expenditures.
This is the "I have to wash my hair that night" of excuses -- plausibly true at some level yet studiedly ignoring such a wide latitude of optionality involved that it's clearly covering a refusal.
> Once that door is open, there will be no end to it.
Slippery slope fallacy. Tax rates move, but not monotonically.
For average US households effective income tax rates are more or less flat for the last generation or three. For high eaners? To say that the trend is downward doesn't cover it, it's a dramatic drop compared to midcentury era rates.
Wealth taxes in the countries that have them don't seem to demand an ever larger share.
If your strongest example is washington state a capital gains tax rate change within the same order of magnitude (that's still well below average effective income tax rates) you don't have much of a case.
Lots of unevisceratedly wealthy people live in states where the highest income tax bracket has rates over 10%. I'm sure the people with over a million a year in income will remain prosperous.
> If your estate is $1 billion, your estate tax will be:
Also you'll be dead and as such won't have continued control over any of your previous assets. Hence the earlier comment to the effect that one may as well complain to God about having to loosen ones grasp on them at death as rail against rendering unto caeser.
The natural "tax rate" on assets at death is 100%. Any smaller number than that is an affordance from the cooperation of society.
> said many times that billionaires should not exist
Perhaps he's right and it's hard to draw a solid straight line between that scale of personal profit and input. Perhaps he's wrong.
Still, as discussed, the most extreme concrete policy that Sanders has proposed is a wealth tax of 5%, and we've discussed why the dynamics of that are not existential threats to the wealth of anyone, much less worthy of the term "evisceration."
No one is proposing taking all the money from even the billionares. Most likely outcome of a 5% tax rate is stabilization.
> it won't raise the general standard of living.
And yet other societies have managed to produce better general standards of living (and higher rates of entrepreneurial success) via various policies including some different tax rates.
> You will also never have companies like SpaceX.
Companies exist to broadly source capital to bring to bear on an enterprise. So it stands to reason that companies like Space X will exist whether the capital comes from a wide pool of investors whose upside is limited somewhere below hyperwealth, or a contribution from a narrower set of investors with a higher concentration, at least as long as there's a credible upside.
That's an interesting question. And to the extent that we're shifting discussion from "taxes are terrible mistreatment of the hyperwealthy" to "taxes might make national business/economic development less robust", OK.
Worth noting that GDP per capita of Norway and Iceland are pretty close to the US:
Denmark's on the same order and Sweden isn't too far behind (and still has a handful of their own recognized global successes).
Using general stats like that helps avoid sharpshooter fallacies that could be hazards in picking a list of high profile successes.
Still, let's talk about those successes. What are the conditions that gave rise to SpaceX, Amazon, Google, and Walmart? Whatever they are, none of their stories seems path-dependent anyone's personal billions. SpaceX owes as much or more to government decisions to privately source launch capability (not to mention path dependence on public programs supporting a certain related company). Google was famously founded by not particularly wealthy PhD students with initial capital well under a million dollars. Walmart wasn't founded with millions let alone billions. Bezos was probably the wealthiest founder when it comes to your list -- maybe had a six figure net worth, possibly seven, certainly good networks for raising capital -- but the bootstrapping capital that went into it didn't require anyone to be a billionaire.
Whatever the US does right as far as positive business environment goes, it doesn't require personal billions, so it's pretty unlikely to stop with additional taxes on billionaire concentrations of wealth. Taxes which, again, at the level of any proposed rate, would most likely not even un-billionaire anyone.
The rent on a literal 1980s apartment (let alone SFH mortgage) in every area that I’ve lived in has scaled up faster than average income. This is the trend for essentials.
Consumer electronics are cheaper; this is the trend for substitutable goods.
Love me the right 20-30 year old car, but the dramatic cost rise around covid times means the savings is only relative to new. A 3x increase in old car prices hasn’t been matched by 3 fold wage increases for most.
And of course we’re discussing this in a larger conversation about automating away 1980s jobs.
If you want 1980s, you have to go all in. That means you can't live in today's areas which have improved in the 40+ years since the 1980s, but move to areas that are not developed yet or have stagnated - you don't get those improvements, amenities, and job markets/school systems of 2020s at 1980s prices today.
You also aren't buying today's average used car (which has gone up about 50% per CPI numbers, not 300%, since 2020), with a backup camera, blind spot monitoring, side curtain airbags, etc. Hop on FB Marketplace and find the cheapest used car from 2010+ that runs: it's still more fully featured, with better safety and fuel economy than that 1980s car, and likely cheaper in adjusted dollars than 1980s.
What 1980s jobs have been automated away without providing alternatives? Switchboard operator> Call center rep; typist> administrative assistant, video store clerk> regular store clerk, etc.
There’s no one in the world that creating an alternate “real” identity would be easier for than someone who can influence or even determine military or covert actions. It’s probably even legal for them to do so.
I'd guess this is a bet on which market is more lucrative:
* domain experts paying for tooling that will enhance their productivity
* capital/management class hoping to significantly replace domain experts
Software devs have been a famously tough market to sell tools to for a long time, so the better bet is B. Plus, the story on B is fantastic for fundraising; if there's a 10% chance that it checks out, you want some part of that as your capital portfolio.
I don't think they actually care if it ever materializes. They just have to sell execs on it. As long as they can the exec will sell it to their higher ups, mostly by just flat out lying about it.
I see it all the time at the Director and VP level. Once big money is on the line, there are no failures, just "opportunities for strategic realignment"
Not much faith required on this one: either a given priest will have both strong familiarity with congregational context and the ability to articulate it as instructions to an LLM or they’ll be missing one of those two. If they’re missing the context themselves, well, they can’t feed it to the LLM and best case scenario is probably that they engage the process closely enough the whole way to learn something from it. If they lack the ability to articulate the whole context that they know but can intuitively work with it, then they’re more likely to meet needs than the LLM — and I’d guess this is a common case.
I haven't read _Who is Government_ yet (in spite of the fact that it has a better title!) but _The Fifth Risk_ was a fantastically illuminating paradigm-shifting read for me.
"What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?"
"politically impossible" is giving up on Americans ability to perceive the national advantage as well as the moral good.
Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side.
This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.
There’s several orders of magnitude less available discussion of selecting data structures for problem domains than there is code.
If the underlying information is implicit in high volume of code available then maybe the models are good at it, especially when driven by devs who can/will prompt in that direction. And that assumption seems likely related to how much code was written by devs who focus on data.
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