But if you're running a pilot, wouldn't you want it near some other store to see what the impact on their business actually is? Running a pilot in the middle of nowhere would say nothing about how it impacts other local stores. You'd end up having to run another pilot to answer that question.
> Running a pilot in the middle of nowhere would say nothing about how it impacts other local stores.
I disagree. They could still run the pilot "in the middle of nowhere" or in a food desert and still measure the impact on the nearest grocery stores. Given that's what they want to do long-term, I think that's the configuration they should be studying.
Ultimately they want to put the stores where hungry people need food and cannot afford to eat. Food deserts are not defined as a lack of all food sources, but a lack of affordable, accessible food sources. Therefore it's still important to assess the impact of placing it nearby other existing food sources.
Why wouldn't you want to discover whether and to what degree that actually negatively impacts the existing store?
Rich people hate being seen with us poors. Just look at Coachella, they can't even do it for a weekend. Really, that's enough to keep them out. You seriously think they're going to give up Trader Joes and Wholefoods to save 50 cents on their beef?
Starting and and investing in businesses are matters of filing paperwork. The mere act is worth nothing but the investment and paper it's written on.
So the question still remains, what did they create to make them worth the money they have? Because it seems to me the only thing that correlates to their wealth isn't what they created but the contracts they've signed. Which is fine but your contention was they as individuals created something to make them worth that much, and I'm wondering what that is.
I've read biographies on Gates and Jobs, also Satya Nadella. I sidestepped that comment because it seemed snide to me. I know who these people are and what they did with their lives, and how they made their money. Maybe you might re-read their biographies and note how their successes were a combination of skill, luck, connections, circumstance, and survivorship bias, and how each one was backed by an army of workers.
> selling a product or service for more than it costs you is creating value.
Okay but other people are building and selling the service, not the 1%. I agree that's what business is, and they create value, but the 1% is not "the business".
So again I'm left wondering what the 1% actually created themselves such that wealth was not transferred. Because if the value is in selling the product or service, then it would seem to me the people who deserve the benefit are the sales/engineering/manufacturing/service people. But you said it's not a transfer of wealth, it's the actual 1% who created the value. You still haven't said what they create and why that means they deserve to own and control all that wealth.
If you read a biography of Jobs, you'd know that Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy when they invited Jobs to take the helm. This was after a series of CEOs, each one more clueless than the previous at how to run the company. With the same company, the same workers, the same everything, Jobs reorganized and reshaped it and thereby took it to a trillion dollar valuation.
That's creating wealth.
Jobs also did something similar with Pixar. Maybe reread what he did at Pixar? It was Jobs that made the difference and created the wealth.
Do you really think that you (or I) could have replaced Jobs and created the same amount of wealth that you attribute to everything but what Jobs actually did?
Not a chance.
BTW, look at the history of the United States. If you believe wealth is transferred, not created, where in heck was the wealth today back in 1776? Who the heck was it transferred from? Did it randomly somehow fall out of the sky?
If you still cannot see this, start your own business. It will soon be very apparent how wealth is created.
I know a few categories falling under this "richest 1% of the world’s people": entrepreneurs, highly paid professionals and politicians.
The entrepreneurs invested in or built from scratch organizations able to deliver an incredible amount of value to our society in the form of products, services and jobs. These organizations, called businesses, are the unsung heroes that differentiate our lands of plenty from the hunger and cold of countries suffering under communism.
The professionals (doctors, lawyers, programmers) worked in such organizations and added significant value ensuring their success in the market place.
Finally, politicians managed to convince a sufficient number people that only they can solve their problems and thus got themselves elected into positions where they control significant flows of money and/or influence.
Who knows, let's try it and see. I've heard all my life about how new ideas are potentially not economically viable, so we keep trying old ideas which proven not economically viable. My feeling is that the economy is such a large, chaotic, dynamic system that most people, including experts, have no idea what is theoretically viable or not viable. So making decisions based on "my first order analysis is that this is not economically viable" is misguided. You have to try it first and see how the system actually responds.
My students (18-21) are excited to learn Rust in my class I teach about programming languages. Younger students are learning Luau via Roblox -- spoke with a middle schooler on Sunday who was making games with his friends. They get introduced to Scratch in school and learn that until they move on to Java at middle and high school. I teach freshman Lua in their intro to engineering class, and they also go on to learn things like R, Matlab/Simulink, Python. Java, C, and C++ if they're a CS major.
Combine that most CS students learn many languages with LLMs and coding agents and the size of the ecosystem isn't quite as important as it used to be. New hires can be productive from day 1. Missing libraries are relatively easy to add. Moreover the language characteristics can be more useful than ever: fast running, fast compiling, typed, easy to read, etc.
Yeah I think LLMs really help with the chicken-egg situation in language adoption. Contrary to many opinions that predict programming homogenizing around the big 3 languages that exist today (because that's what the LLMs currently write) I think in the future more nice languages will gain adoption as they are written by LLMs, who as you note don't care about a lack of community surrounding those langs -- if they need a missing library the AI can just write it. Maybe they even add it to the language ecosystem for other AI or humans.
I think Python is actually kind of the worst language of the top langs to be the lingua franca of AI, where more niche statically typed languages like Nim are better suited.
As a Pythonista I tend to agree. I had high hopes for Mojo but it's taking its due time to become usable outside the narrow focus of GPU programming, whereas Nim fits multiple niches surprisingly well.
One of my concern is LLMs are going to generate a lot of low quality code for languages that do not have sufficient discussions on forums like Stackoverflow.
That's why these niche languages need state-of-the-art compilers that enforce invariants more strongly. This way, they can catch most of the subtle bugs the LLM produces, sort of like antibodies.
I'm confused, is Cory under the impression that the fascism isn't already here? America is well underway on the that project. Frankly the fascism was plenty apparent after 9/11, when the Bush years entrenched a permanent security state through endless-war powers (AUMF), mass surveillance (Patriot Act/NSA spying), expansive detention and torture regimes (CIA black sites like Guantanamo), a huge domestic enforcement bureaucracy (DHS/ICE), and tax cuts that concentrated wealth upward, cuts to education and healthcare. These are the exact things the current-day fascists are using to choke us now.
People are only upset today because it's affecting white folk more directly, when back then it was aimed at Muslims. We warned you all back then about this, we warned again in 2016, we warned again in 2024, and yet here we are, knee deep in fascism. Maybe we'll be neck deep soon but let's not pretend this is just starting or about to start because of AI.
Words have meaning, I don't think any serious scholar would agree with you that the US in the early 2000s was a fascist state. It lacked the societal regimentation, the autocracy, the personality worship, the aesthetics of order, the totalitarianism of the state, the subservience of religion and the individual to the state. It's an absurd proposition.
Marcuse wrote in the 1960s that the only way to prevent another Hitler from rising is to give the left free rein and cage and muzzle the right. So by extension, anyone who supports rightists being able to spread their ideas freely, let alone implement them with real political power, is a fascist in effect even if they disclaim identification with Hitler's or Mussolini's political philosophy.
I think the other way to say this is every time the right is given free reign to implement their ideas with real political power, they end up implementing fascism. Therefore, we might prefer to temper that by not allowing them to have free reign. This does not imply giving the left free reign (as you could say the same about them), as there's ample room for consensus under this model.
Fascism is absolutely here today, there's no question about that.
There's also a direct line to the fascism we see today emanating from proto-fascist project the GOP was engaged in standing up during the early 2000s.
That GW was not the fascist leader everyone wanted him to be doesn't really push back against the idea that this group of people has largely fascist leanings. Trump gave them the final missing ingredient which was the cult leader. But every other feature you listed as missing I find were actually present, and we can debate that if you want.
But we can see how the Bush admin and voters are reacting to abject fascism. They applaud it, support it, amplify it, excuse it, or they stay silent and never push back (like Bush himself). A lot of them are the same people from back then. So really, to me the absurd proposition here is that the people who stood up the CIA torture black sites, warrantless wiretaps, homeland security, ICE, etc. who are now turning these things against all Americans, weren't at least latent fascists or fascist-leaning in their ideology.
I was just at the largest career / college expo for high schoolers in the greater NYC area yesterday. It’s anecdotal but the two most asked about majors at the fair were #1 mechanical engineering and #2 computer science. I gave away all the materials we had and I had left thinking “this will be plenty”.
So let’s just wait a bit before we say it hit a wall.
Yes, programming languages are designed for a purpose and importantly for a concrete system. Erlang is the way it is because it was designed for Ericsson's phone network. C is the way it is because it was designed for the PDP-11. Logo is the way it is because is was designed for young children. Go is they way it is because it was designed by Google for Googlers.
You can't design an abstractly "perfect" programming language without any context. Which is why the author I think focuses on "perfectable", as in the language can be made perfect for your purpose but it's not going to be one size fits all.
No, I realize that. It doesn't stop me from having my "perfect language wishlist". The author calling out "perfectable" is what got me thinking. What language would I choose if I were able to "perfect" it just a bit more?
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