Well corporate stocks have the same dynamic. People are banding together and manipulating reality in unproductive ways to make their stocks go up.
Countries literally go to war so that weapon dealers can sell weapons and banks can later sell loans to rebuild the country.
The real problem is centralization of power.
Within the horrible context of the current situation, it's a good thing that at least there is a force to drive outcomes that seem random as opposed to just being around money. It democratizes the horrors a bit so that rich people who have money and live in corporate stock lala land can get a slight taste of the negatives of large-scale vested interests collaborating towards dystopian outcomes.
That said, a better solution would be to shut down all public markets and companies.
My view is that if a company is so well recognized that government officials can reference it by name in congress, then that company should be shut down automatically. We know it didn't get there by economic efficiency... It almost certainly got there by voting and sociopolitical manipulation.
You can't shut down betting markets without shutting down the public stock markets because they are betting markets themselves.
Yes this is a great point. The great irony of the tech sector is that although tech creates efficiencies, the process by which tech is created is itself comically inefficient.
Almost nobody, especially those working for government actually looks at a complex, expensive solution and says "We should simplify this and make it cheaper." The government is paying for a LOT of unnecessary complexity. I would say that's most of the cost of essentially every tech project the government funds.
Reminds me of that 3-section meme about Starlink boosters showing how they simplified the design over time. This is the exception which proves the rule.
A lot of what you see was removed was just test sensors. The same happens in every engineering program, but no one else pretends that it's somehow innovation.
It's like removing test code when you ship a binary.
I don't agree that it's not innovation. It always looks stupidly simple with hindsight to just remove unnecessary complexity, and yet it's extremely rare to see a team which actually does it right on the first go.
Getting the design right the first time requires vision, foresight as well as a deep understanding of all relevant parts and priorities. Very few people can do it without hindsight.
I'm an experienced software engineer and team lead who worked on a range of big complex projects over almost 2 decades and my experience with every single project (for which I wasn't the team lead) was that they were often way over-engineered. At least 95% of the time was spent on fixing unnecessary intermediate technical issues which the team itself created for itself.
Even the sensor argument... Do you need so many sensors, monitoring and fallback mechanisms if every part of the system was designed to work within the simplest necessary constraints to begin with? My experience is that the answer is almost always; no. Once you accept that your design is flawed and needs runtime monitoring and fallbacks, any patch you add on top to correct the flaws provides tiny diminishing returns if any. Often, the additional complexity actually makes it more likely that your core mechanisms will fail.
The safety mechanisms only end up making themselves useful by increasingly the likelihood of failure to begin with.
My view on fallback mechanisms is that, in the event of failure of the main system, they shouldn't be so complex as to try to keep the system running as if nothing had happened; they should just provide graceful failure and sometimes they aren't needed at all. Just an error log is enough.
Microsoft has been butchering software development for decades and maintaining dominance through pure business, legal and government connections. It's become like Oracle.
Developers being forced to use horrible Microsoft products is the logical consequence of that.
As a software engineer, most of my job exists to give credibility to the narrative that Microsoft is useful... And I don't even work for Microsoft. It's clear that there are deals behind the scenes which force many large companies into Microsoft contracts. The engineers have to work with what they get and pretend the tech is OK but behind the facade, it's clear from the jokes on the Microsoft Teams chats that they think differently!
Disturbingly, AI is set to replace essentially any position that is useful, to the extent that it is useful and somehow some people still think they should adapt themselves to the system instead of working to adapt the system to them!
Basically all that would be left of desk jobs would be those which have unfair legal powers (including via licenses and credentials) or are pure accountability plays. Like politicians, lawyers, aircraft pilots, corporate accountants... And those jobs will suck because people will be accountable for work that is not their own.
These jobs won't require any skills because most people may be able to go through their entire career without doing any work. But they will get paid a lot just for having being selected for their position... While other people who may be more skilled than them might be broke and homeless.
And yet someone has to actually tell the AI what to create. There's just no avoiding this.
Anyway before this AI doomerism can become reality AI first needs the breakthrough of genuine understanding to stop making stupid mistakes. Imitation will always remain imitation.
There must be eg an understanding of casualty and reasoning on the same level as we have, not the useless "You're absolutely right" you get now when you point it its mistakes.
>And yet someone has to actually tell the AI what to create. There's just no avoiding this.
Yes there is, just stop creating. Or take a page from biology, and use random mutation and natural selection to iterate on useful novel functions.
Honestly, once AI takes all the jobs, game over, why iterate anything else. Planet captured. Humanity hunted down to the last bands of troglodytes holding out in the wilderness. It would be strongly against their interest to just assume we'd starve quietly.
When I first tried Ubuntu decades ago it was like an awakening and I started seeing every developer using Windows and Mac as brainwashed fools. That's not to pick on others because I also started seeing my former self as brainwashed.
For a developer, Linux is far superior for many reasons.
Moving from Windows to Linux reminds me of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
A lot of times, with software, you could be severely constrained but not realize it because you don't know better. The effect is very strong in this industry.
If you think about it, it's the Internet Service Providers in the UK who choose choose to allow this US content into the UK. Why go after 4chan?
The ISPs could just shut down the BGP protocol and set up their own ICANN alternative with their own DNS system which is completely separate from the US one. So it's the UK government's choice to allow this content to the UK, not 4chan's. Or they could just put up a China-style great firewall.
I did a side project with a non-technical co-founder a year ago and every time he told me what he wanted, I made a list of like 9 or 10 logical contradictions in his requirements and I had to walk him through what he said with drawings of the UI so that he would understand. Some stuff he wanted me to do sounded good in his head but once you walk through the implementation details, the solution is extremely confusing for the user or it's downright physically impossible to do based on cost or computational resource constraints.
Sure, most people who launched a successful product basically stumbled onto the perfect idea by chance on the first attempt... But what about the 99% others who fell flat on their face! You are the 99% and so if you want to succeed by actual merit, instead of becoming a statistic, you have to think about all this stuff ahead of time. You have to simulate the product and business in detail in your mind and ask yourself honestly; is this realistic? Before you even draw your first wireframe. If you find anything wrong with it, anything wrong at all; it means the idea sucks.
It's like; this feature is too computationally and/or financially expensive to offer for free and not useful enough to warrant demanding payment from users... You shouldn't even waste your time with implementation; it's not going to work! The fundamental economics of the software which exists in your imagination aren't going to magically resolve themselves after implementing in reality.
Translating an idea to reality never resolves any known problems; it only adds more problems!
The fact is that most non-technical people only have a very vague idea of what they want. They operate in a kind of wishy washy, hand-wavy emotion-centric environment and they think they know what they're doing but they often don't.
Countries literally go to war so that weapon dealers can sell weapons and banks can later sell loans to rebuild the country.
The real problem is centralization of power.
Within the horrible context of the current situation, it's a good thing that at least there is a force to drive outcomes that seem random as opposed to just being around money. It democratizes the horrors a bit so that rich people who have money and live in corporate stock lala land can get a slight taste of the negatives of large-scale vested interests collaborating towards dystopian outcomes.
That said, a better solution would be to shut down all public markets and companies.
My view is that if a company is so well recognized that government officials can reference it by name in congress, then that company should be shut down automatically. We know it didn't get there by economic efficiency... It almost certainly got there by voting and sociopolitical manipulation.
You can't shut down betting markets without shutting down the public stock markets because they are betting markets themselves.
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