merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 11 hours ago:
Yeah, but nothing is perminant, (or permanent). All hierarchies are temporary because everything is temporary.
Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen
People have come up with ideas since forever. I’m sure the first philosophy on the redistribution of wealth was “Unga bunga, bunga unga bunga!” The problem is putting those ideas into practice. So far, when people try to eliminate hierarchies, the result is that someone comes in and takes advantage of the people who don’t think there’s a hierarchy.
Humanity itself may be temporary, but it seems like the idea of hierarchies will outlive humanity.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 1 day ago:
Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.
My neighbors, friends, family, all of us
That’s exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don’t really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that’s just not in our ape nature.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 1 day ago:
We have to usher in the collapse of [permanent hierarchies]
That would be nice, but is it realistic? It’s not just that humanity has always had hierarchies. It’s that it seems to be a feature of even the animal kingdom. It also seems like when people try to create a system without hierarchies, someone steps into the power vacuum. The end result is that things are even worse for the people at the bottom.
Maybe a better plan is to accept that human animals are going to end up having hierarchies, and instead of trying to completely eliminate them, instead aim to shrink them as much as possible while still maintaining a functional government that at least somewhat answers to the people at the bottom.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 1 day ago:
If capitalism collapses, we’re most likely going back to feudalism, not ten-forward to Star Trek.
- Comment on Existential cowposting 1 day ago:
The problem is that they’re not doing anything illegal.
The bigger problem is that they have the power to keep anybody from passing new laws that would make what they’re doing illegal.
- Comment on Anubis is awesome and I want to talk aout it 2 days ago:
The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.
- Comment on I dunno 3 days ago:
I’ve done that, but that’s ugly.
- Comment on I dunno 3 days ago:
Also, you can use this for more than just arithmetic. The first thing in the list is the name of the function, and everything else is something that you pass to the function. So you could instead write
(plus 1 2 3 4)
Which would be like
plus(1, 2, 3, 4)in other kinds of programming languages. - Comment on I dunno 3 days ago:
So, if
2 5 8 5 - × +is “RPN” does that mean that the LISP version is Polish Notation? - Comment on I dunno 3 days ago:
Brackets and Orders, not that anybody calls “(” a bracket or “^” an “order”.
- Comment on I dunno 3 days ago:
You don’t necessarily have to do parentheses first. What matters is that the things inside the parentheses are a group that you can’t break apart. If you have
10÷2+3-2*(2+1)you can do the division first5+3-2*(2+1)then the addition outside the parentheses8-2*(2+1)It’s just that before you do the multiplication of the term outside the parentheses, you have to handle the parentheses group, so you get8-2*3->8-6->2 - Comment on I dunno 3 days ago:
I got really angry because the prettier code formatter insists on removing parentheses, making things less clear. Because it’s an “opinionated” formatter you can’t tell it not to do that without using ugly hacks.
Sure, logically there are times when you don’t need them. But, often it helps to explain what’s happening in the code when you can use parentheses to group certain things. It helps in particular when you want to use “&&” and “||” to say “do X only if Y fails”.
- Comment on I dunno 3 days ago:
Depends on the language.
- Comment on eat the rich and go to libraries 4 days ago:
Meanwhile authors, who you might imagine might be most upset at their books being “given away” by libraries, actually love libraries and are delighted to hear stories of people checking their books out.
- Comment on Seals the deal, once and for all. 6 days ago:
Asimov’s mysteries always hinged on the laws of robotics. It always seemed like a robot did something, but if the laws of robotics were in force that couldn’t have happened. But, it was always explained in a way that left the three laws intact.
The “I, Robot” movie abandoned the 3 laws of robotics when convenient to the plot. That takes away the entire tension that made Asimov’s stories interesting.
- Comment on Radon 1 week ago:
A lot of managers are pretty useless. Some degree of management is needed because you can’t just have 10,000 individual contributors all reporting directly to the CEO. But, a lot of managers get where they are by schmoozing, claiming credit, shifting blame, avoiding responsibility, etc.
- Comment on Radon 1 week ago:
Is this a war on being specific?
If a fisherman says “I operate the winch on a bowpicker tuna fishing boat”, is that a bullshit job?
If a middle-management yes-man who exists only to fluff his boss’ ego describes his job as “I encourage excellence” does that mean his job is no longer bullshit?
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 1 week ago:
You wouldn’t even need to encourage people to use it. A lot of previous innovations in the tech world were primarily spread by word of mouth. The usefulness was so obvious that as soon as a friend showed you, you wanted to try it out for yourself.
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 1 week ago:
e-ink is a wonderful thing. But, it’s really only useful for e-readers and maybe price displays in stores. It has a frame rate in seconds-per-frame rather than frames-per-second. That’s fine if what you’re looking at is pretty static, but for general purpose displays it’s pretty useless. But man, it is just great for e-readers.
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 1 week ago:
^ Canadian
- Comment on Mastodon CEO steps down as the social network restructures 1 week ago:
You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.
blog.joinmastodon.org/…/my-next-chapter-with-mast…
People need to realize that open source projects don’t create billionaires. In fact, they actually block billionaires from forming.
Tech deci-millionaires get rich by creating a moat around something, then put a toll booth at the drawbridge. Tech billionaires do that but make sure to enclose something essential they have a monopoly on within the moat, and then capture any and all regulators who might try to interfere. Open Source software either makes it illegal to build a moat or allows anybody who’s interested to build their own drawbridge. It’s orders of magnitude harder to get rich with open source or free software. You basically have to put up a toll booth that’s fully optional and somehow still get people to pay.
We should all thank #JohnMastodon for his selfless acts, both starting Mastodon but also now knowing when to step down.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Comment on Stop stressing my GPU and start hiring artists 2 weeks ago:
What was that?!
Flying saucer.
Oh.
- Comment on Stop stressing my GPU and start hiring artists 2 weeks ago:
Were you thinking “I can’t believe this is WoW” or “I can’t believe how good this looks?”
Because, I haven’t experienced the first one. To me, once I’m in the game, there really seems to be an amazing consistency in how things look. After a while things look “realistic” but in a “realistic for WoW” way. Like, obviously Orcs and Demons are not realistic, but the consistency is so strong that how things look, and move, and behave is so strong and predictable.
- Comment on Stop stressing my GPU and start hiring artists 2 weeks ago:
The trouble with photorealism is that you very easily stumble into the uncanny valley. In addition, something that often looks “photorealistic” today will look really dated in a few years.
If you go with artfully styled games, it can actually be much harder. You need to adopt a consistent artistic style and have that style be used by many different artists. Unlike with photorealism, there isn’t always going to be a reference available. You have to watch that over time, and as the scope of the game grows, the style remains consistent. But, when it’s done well, it can be amazing.
One of my favourites in terms of artful styling is the game Interstate '76. It came out at a time when full motion video cutscenes were the style of the day. You’d have low resolution graphics, and then come in with a VHS-quality cutscene with real actors and real sets. Then back into low resolution graphics. Interstate '76 chose an amazing artistic style, then did in-engine cutscenes, which kept the style consistent.
The other master of this, IMO, is World of Warcraft. It must be a gargantuan undertaking to have a game with that many different models and to have a consistent style for all of them, but they mostly do. They often do out-of-engine cutscenes, but their style is so consistent that their cutscenes just look like even more detailed shots from that same world.
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 2 weeks ago:
But we’re not talking about getting money in the future. We’re talking about getting full ownership of a house in the future, while being able to live in it for the full 50 years that it is being paid off.
The bank also isn’t talking about getting money in the future, they’re getting a steady revenue stream for 50 years.
So, I don’t see how this really applies to 50 year mortgages.
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 2 weeks ago:
Poor timing? You bought at the absolute peak of something known as The United States Housing Bubble. Your experience is not typical. You’re one of the unlucky people who had the absolute worst timing possible.
The idea of using a home as part of your retirement should be a lie, but unfortunately for the vast majority of people it isn’t. The world would be much better off if people only got what they paid back when they sold their houses. But, the reality is that most people have been absurdly lucky and their homes have been going up faster than all but the best stocks on the stock market. You just happened to be someone who jumped on the ride at exactly the wrong time.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 3 weeks ago:
We may have to wait for another three years.
Which is also a clue that he isn’t short selling.
There are two ways of making money when a stock goes down. One is to sell the stock short. The other is to buy a put option.
A short sale is extremely risky. Say the shares are at $50 and you think they’re going to go down, so you sell 1000 shares you don’t own (short selling) and agree to buy them back by some date in the future. If you’re right and the stock tanks to $20, you can buy the shares and pocket $30,000. But, if the stock doesn’t sink, you might have to buy the shares for $60 each, so you lose $10 per stock, or $10,000. If there are tons of people shorting the stock, you can get a short squeeze, where everybody needs to buy shares to close out their short position, and because everybody needs to buy, the stock price rockets up, so you get people having to buy a stock that used to be $50 for $200, leading to $150,000 in losses for a 1000 share short where the maximum possible gain was only $50,000.
An option is much safer. There you’re buying the option to sell the shares at a certain price at some time in the future. Say you think a stock is going to crash. It’s currently trading at $50/share. You can buy 1000 put options at a strike price of $40 with a date 1 month in the future. It will cost you something to buy those options, say $1 per share, so $1000. If the stock goes up or stays at $50, your bet didn’t work out. You don’t have to sell the shares, you just tear up the options contract. You’re out whatever you paid for the option, say $1000 here. But, say the stock tanks and it’s now at $20/share. Now your bet did pay off. You can buy 1000 shares at $20 each for $20,000, then immediately exercise your option and sell them for $40,000, netting you $20,000. With put options the upside is significantly smaller, but the potential downside is tiny. It’s just the cost of the options.
Someone predicting a crash within 3 years isn’t going to short sell the shares. Between now and then the shares could continue to rise for a while, and they’d be on the hook for a huge payout in that case. If they buy options the down side is much smaller. They may have to re-buy new options a bunch of times. But in the worst case they just have to let the options expire unused and eat whatever cost they paid for them.
For the coming AI crash, I don’t think it will be very soon. I think there will be a crash. But, I think the government will try to keep the bubble from bursting. Too much of the US economy is now invested in AI. So, even under Biden, or Harris, or Obama they’d try to prevent a catastrophic crash by using taxpayer money to prevent the most damaging bubble burst. With Trump, there’s going to be even more government interference in the market. His backers are crypto bros. They’re the ones making him billions on his meme coins. They bankrolled JD Vance’s political career. If they demand that he rescues their failing companies, he’ll do it. And, since the GOP does whatever Trump wants, they’ll just fork over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep things from crashing. But, eventually there will have to be a crash, because there’s just not a sustainable business model in any of this, at least not at anything like the current scale.
- Comment on The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops 3 weeks ago:
Also, the way short positions work is that the people who are most successful at shorting a stock are the ones who have a megaphone to announce they’ve shorted the stock. They go on as many podcasts, news shows, interviews, etc. as possible to say things are going to crash. Because, the more people who hear about it, the more hesitation there will be to invest, which means the more chances of their prediction coming through.
So, he’s not just some guy who is betting on the bubble bursting, he’s a guy who is now heavily incentivized to cause the bubble to burst so he can make his investors a lot of money.
- Comment on Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter 4 weeks ago:
Which bubble was that?
