Politics does not exist to resolve social problems. It exists to resolve headlines.
So, yeah, it is a straw man. It’s framed as a general problem of society, but it’s a feel good solution that again waves off any conversation about raising taxes in response to their behavior.
Senators are tackling this very serious problem, to be immediately gamed given billionaires financial resources.
It’s not a tax on money, it’s a tax on agency. Fiat and macro economics is a euphemism for “what are people doing and how do we make them do this instead?”
It’s not about perfect mind control, but inflating their value to deflate our agency (or buying power, whatever trips your trigger).
We get debate protecting one concept or principle or another, but think a bit more literally and it starts to take on a whole new perspective.
Plenty of overengineered projects became fragile messes as well, it's hard. You need to actively break some subset of "best practices" on any given project.
My reasoning is that the people that defined it did so in a time when our science was less developed, so of course the problem seemed much harder.
Information theory makes even the hard problem a matter of understanding interaction fields of physics, with the chemistry of biology. Relativity and sensory network effects explain relative experience elegantly enough.
A lot of theories from back in the day are built on outdated understanding. Unfortunately their authors did not get to see our achievements in engineering unravel a lot of their over baked theories due to a need to fill in gaps without hard evidence. Same as we won’t see technology in the future have no need of all this software we wrote. It won’t literally be handed on.
Luminiferous Aether was once a thing to many even though it’s not one discrete thing. One might consider it was a poetic initial take on field theory, which we now rely on sets of glyphs of shares meaning. Which artistically could also be imagined as flowing sets of matrix code that glow like a luminous field.
If there’s a hard problem to consciousness it’s an unwillingness to consider there is no Valhalla. Is there a hard problem? Or do we hope for an answer that suggests we’re not just meatbags?
The hard problem has technological progress built into its definition. It defines problems of consciousness that can be solved by progress as the "soft" problems, and the problem that cannot be solved by progress as the "hard" problem. The hard problem doesn't say that a mechanism _hasn't_ been found, it says a mechanism _cannot_ be found. Like Gödel's incompleteness theorems or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle it places a limit on what can be known about the system, "[the hard problem will] persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained."
The validity of that is up to you, but if you accept the hard problem as a valid question it will not be solved by technological progress.
Yep it’s not an interesting idea, the hard problem. We can never see outside our universe. We can’t know all states of matter ever. We can’t peek beyond the speed of light. We can solve a lot of problems we actually have without an answer (42, but what…)
Humans have a willingness to see truth in metaphor and analogy, and invent them to avoid accepting we’re just meat bags.
That’s what the hard problem of consciousness is to me; biological ideation run amok.
It has useful political effects, it can be used to disabuse the self righteous because it’s a purposeful thought ending monolith, nothing more.
We’ll keep iterating on our theories of the interaction of fields and matter and stop caring about the hard problem like we quit discussing luminiferous aether. We’ll stop seeing the literal edge of reality as a boundary on experience in the first place.
There is also the possibility that our cognitive limits will prevent us from creating artificial intelligence and consciousness, even if it is materially possible.
I’d be more interested in augmented human intelligence. Growing neuron structures to speed the acquisition of skill and knowledge.
AI as we know it now is for empowering aristocrats. Here’s Googles data center empowering Google to make business choices that involve extracting effort from us.
I’d rather science and technology empower individuals uniquely and not be ground down to the fiscally prudent efforts.
Interesting. I was working on an app that would let users scan logos and return company data; carbon footprint other industrial impact metrics, individual investors, board, C-suite… into a shared repo of oligarchs who have chosen celebrity and visibility by “leading” us with our own data.
I was going to send images to Google to pull objects and text from, but if I could just send text to search for, that would be great.
Let’s not devolve into thought ending reactionaries. I’m aware of the negotiated reality.
My point is it’s not a law of physics, but a social contract to be negotiated.
We owed pensions to people and took those away, so it’s not as if society has a very good track record of paying what it’s owed, so don’t get too hung up on those words meaning something forever.
You might take continuous iteration of our social contract as seriously as code; as we can see letting it accrue technical debt and bit rot is not so great.
1. The brutish way: legislate that all T-bills are now worth 1/10th of their nominal value. Potential risk: riots and capitols set on fire. In practice, this was done in history many times without much consequences.
2. The "boil the frog" way: let inflation run hard for a decade, until a 100$ T-bill buys you a nothing but couple of big macs. This has been happening for the better part of a century.
> You are claiming that defaulting on sovereign debt would have no consequences?
First, at the sovereign level, it only has consequences if the lender has more guns than you.
Seconds, most "debt" in OECD countries is not owed to sovereign entities, but to the countries population themselves, who if push comes to shove will just have to accept that their bonds are worthless if it is ever legislated to be thus.
That isn't true. If a country makes a habit of printing too much money, then creditors will start to insist on only loaning it money denominated in other currencies. And once it starts doing that, the country can be forced to actually default on its debts:
Advertising as we know it emerged as a melding of government propaganda research and behavioral economics during world wars, so of course it’s often scammy.
It sounds “deep state” but it’s actually plainly documented in government files and written about by reliable sources.
Remember we’re still emerging from an era of whispering the same old story of morality and obligation to each other.
I am not at all interested in helping someone build a fertilizer empire or pillow brand. Politically my hands are tied to doing so if I want a life.
Poor people effectively live a life of quota and state sanctioned limits on their access to material support by cutting social programs with public support.
Advertising America as anything but a sanctimonious police state is a scam.
The "Century of the Self" documentary series about Bernays and the rise of propaganda/marketing is really great. Recommend it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.
The problem you’re highlighting is a simple design issue.
My problem with progress bars is they are usually nonsense estimates based upon random programmer choices.
I know former MSers who worked on progress bars for old Windows versions. Specifically I remember them saying the progress bar for copying files to USB was estimating how long until a USB hardware buffer was clear, without any idea how much more data there was intended to be jammed into the buffer once it cleared. Buffer would immediately refill and increase the wait time.
Given how slowly Windows deprecates code, who knows what subroutines any given progress bar is relying on.
They’re nonsense features meant to soothe users who seek progress. They don’t need to be interesting visually. I’d accept a simple countdown that made sense.
I’m hoping manufacture of application specific chips takes off. That we embed a 3D engine into silicon and this “software engineering is life” mind virus can go away.
We simply did not do it that way before because we lacked the manufacturing capabilities.
If manufacturing hopes and dreams of colleagues in the chip biz come to fruition, software is on its way out as a routine part of developing new technology. But I mean they’re biased; attention on hardware versus software makes them more valuable.
I've been starting work on a long rant title "Counting is Harder Than You Think". In general, I think most people think counting is one of the easiest things for computers to do because people learn counting in elementary school and just forever associate it with "easy". (Someone's never asked the elementary school teacher's opinion of that.)
"How hard can it be, it's just a Select Count() in SQL!" Uh, that Count() is possibly doing a ton of work in CPU/IO that the server could be doing for other things, and sure an Index might speed that up, but you can't really index an Index and eventually you get right back to where you can't afford the CPU/IO time.
People just assume computers have exact numbers at all times. Some of that is just a problem of bad UX design ("why are we showing a meaningless estimate number like 1,492,631 and not 'about a Million things to do'?"), but so much of it just seems to be that people think counting is easy.
If we are gonna bitch about progress bars, Microsoft’s are almost always the worst. So many of them get to 99% and them stall out… dunno how they get their progress bars so bad.
The problem isn't Microsoft. The problem is that progress bars are the worst way to indicate progress ever invented except for all the other terrible ways to indicate progress we've invented. Percentage numbers are always a lie and shouldn't even be shown, but some people like the soothing comfort of "number go big".
No, you want to know if the command spewing out text is going to be done in about 5 seconds (I'll wait), 5 minutes (time for coffee or whatever) or 5 hours...
They also are there to indicate progress if no other visuals are present (no, it hasn't crashed yet).
Progress bars solve that given some uncertainty in most cases. And that is very much appreciated. Everyone knows or learns that they aren't perfect, and that is fine.
I was relatively deliberate with my wording. I'm not saying "get rid of progress bars", I'm saying they are bad at their job but we've never managed to really make any thing better.
Take your time estimation problem as the direct and obvious example: a progress bar on its own only really gives you a sense of timing if they move at a deliberate linear pace, which most can't do/promise (hence all the complaints about progress bars "stalling out at a percentage" when the system hits an outlier or discovers a lot more work to do), even then people are really bad at estimating linear speed of a progress bar. So a progress bar alone isn't great for judging speed.
Other threads around here make jokes about trying to add time estimates near progress bars as another way to indicate progress. Again, they work some of the time, but also need assumptions that for instance past speed predicts future speed that are often hard to guarantee in practice.
About the best progress bars can do is that "no it hasn't crashed yet" and spinners are generally better at that particular task (because progress bars don't have the granularity to show very small progression below 1/100th or 1/1000th or even 1/10000th of the overall workload), to the point that Windows added a spinner animation over top of its progress bars way back in Vista to make them better at the one job most users count on them for (for something of a best of both worlds, kind of, if you squint).
Progress bars solve problems, they just solve them badly, and yeah, that was the point of my message that we also haven't found anything much better. I agree with you that they aren't perfect and are mostly fine. We just sometimes need to admit that they are bad at their jobs and we'd replace them in a heartbeat if we actually found a better progress indicator of some sort.
To take things in a more constructive direction, that said, it is an area I've experimented with/tried to solve.
My big idea was radial progress indicators to try a different "best of both worlds" approach to progress spinners versus progress bars especially for "composite" progress indication where you have an unknown number of subtasks all running at their own speeds and can be discovered/initiated independently (such as downloading files). People are worse at estimating percentages of circles than lines, which I see as something of a benefit (because the exact progress percentage should be fuzzy).
It's still not great at giving an indication of overall speed/estimated time, but it's potentially very great at "the application hasn't crashed and is busy".
It was fun to experiment with/prototype, but I don't expect it to replace progress bars any time soon. (I think it should, but it's trade-off space where every option has drawbacks and while it fits closer to what I think is my personal "ideal", it probably won't make everyone happy either.)
Except 0/100 isn't a lot of granularity to indicate "still slowly working". (0/1000 or 0/10000 if you show percentages to the second or third decimal point aren't much better either, especially if the working set is in the millions or billions of things to do.)
I wasn't saying they didn't have their uses, just that they are generally poor at doing them. Though again we've also never really invented anything better. I'm not saying they aren't useful, just that they aren't great.
They see everyone else who behaves acting like clown but they’re less socially aware of which clown like behavior they should broadcast.
They conflate acting and mockery.