Imagine a society where one person produces all the value. Their job is to do highly technical maintenance on a single machine that is basically the Star Trek replicator: it produces all the food, clothing, housing, energy, etc. that is enough for every human in this society and the surplus is stored away in case the machine is down for maintenance, which happens occasionally. Maintaining the machine takes very specialized knowledge but adding more people to the process in no way makes it more productive. This person, let’s call them The Engineer, has several apprentices who can take over but again, no more than 5 because you just don’t need more.
In this society there is literally nothing for anyone else to do. Do you think they deserve to be cut out of sharing the value generated by The Engineer and the machine, leaving them to starve? Do you think starving people tend to obey rules or are desperate people likely to smash the evil machine and kill The Engineer if The Engineer cuts them off? Or do you think in a society where work hours mean nothing for an average person a different economic system is required?
For something to be deserved, it must be earned. What do these people do to distinguish themselves from The Engineer’s pets? If they are wholly dependant on him for their subsistence, what distinguishes him from their god?
To derive an alternate system you need alternate axioms. The axioms of our liberal society are moral equality and peaceful coexistence. Among such equals, no one person, group, or majority has the right to dictate to another. What axioms do you propose that would constrain The Engineer? How would you prevent enslaving him?
Hey, dude. How does someone earn value once automation does all the work? Earning the right to a share of the resources when resources are derived from automated labor is such a thoroughly pathological concept that I'm not sure we're communicating on the same planet.
Same way everyone has earned value from the beginning of time: negotiate with others. We are all born naked and without possessions. Everything we get, from the first day of our birth, is given to us by someone else. Our very first negotiations are simple, we are in turns endearing and annoying. As we grow older they become more complex. All I’m saying is that these interactions should be maximally voluntary and nonviolent.
> For something to be deserved, it must be earned.
Eeeeeerrrr, wrong! This is garbage hypercapitalist/libertarian ideology.
Did you earn your public school education? Did you earn your use of the sidewalk or the public parks and playgrounds? Did you earn your library card? Did you earn your citizenship or right to vote? Did you earn the state benefits you get when you are born disabled? Did you earn your mother’s love?
No, these are what we call public services, unalienable rights, and/or unconditional humanity. We don’t revolve the entire world and our entire selves solely around profit because it’s not practical and it’s empty at its core.
Arguably we still do too much profit-based society stuff in the US where things like healthcare and higher education should be guaranteed entitlements that have no need to be earned. Many other countries see these aspects of society as non-negotiable communal benefits that all should enjoy.
In this hypothetical society with The Engineer, it’s likely that The Engineer would want or need to win over the minds of their society in some way to prevent their own demise and ensure they weren’t overthrown, enslaved, or even just thought of as an evil person.
Many of my examples above like public libraries came about because gilded age titans didn’t want to die with the reputation of robber barons. Instead, they did something anti-profit and created institutions like libraries and museums to boost the reputation of their name.
It’s the same reason why your local university has family names on its buildings. The wealthiest people in society often want to leave a positive legacy where the alternative without philanthropy and, essentially, wealth redistribution, is that they are seen as horrible people or not remembered at all.
> This is garbage hypercapitalist/libertarian ideology.
Go on then, how do you decide what people deserve? How do you negotiate with others who disagree with you?
> examples above like public libraries
I agree! The nice part about all these mechanisms is that they’re voluntary.
If you’re suggesting that The Engineer’s actions should be constrained entirely by his own conscience and social pressure, then we agree. No laws or compulsion required.
You sure seem to know a lot about what people 'deserve' so I'm not sure I can hope to crack the rind of that particular coconut but I will leave you with this: Humans, by virtue of being living, thinking beings deserve lives of fulfillment, dignity, and security. The fact that we have, up until present, been unable (or perhaps unwilling) to achieve this does not mean it's not possible or desirable, only that we have failed in that goal.
Everything else, all the 'isims' and ideologies are abstractions.
> Humans, by virtue of being living, thinking beings deserve lives of fulfillment, dignity, and security.
You wanting people to have that doesn't mean that people deserve to have that. Fundamentally, no one deserves anything. We, as a species, lived for a hundred thousand years with absolutely nothing except what we could carve off the world by ourselves or with the help of small groups that chose to work with us. Everything else since then is a bonus (or sometimes a malus, but on average a bonus).
Also, as much as it sounds nice to declare such things as goals, deserved or not, it is indeed impossible, and probably not desirable, since, for starters, you can't even define what those things would be like. Those aren't actionable, they're at most occasional consequences of a system that is working to alleviate scarcity of resources.
Unfortunately, we're nowhere near that replicator.
These examples aren’t generally voluntary once implemented. I can’t get a refund from my public library or parks department if I decide not to use it.
The social pressure placed on The Engineer is the manifestation of law. That’s all law is: a set of agreed-upon social contracts, enforced by various means.
Obviously, many dictators and governments get away with badly mistreating their subjects, and that’s unfortunate, shouldn’t happen, and shouldn’t be praised as a good system.
I think you may be splitting hairs a little bit here and trying really hard to manufacture…something.
Slavery was (is) also an agreed upon social contract, enforced by various means. What makes it wrong? You clearly have morally prescriptive beliefs. Why are you so sure that your moral prescriptions are the right ones? And that being in the majority gives you the right to impose your beliefs on others?
What if you are in the minority? Do you just accept the hypercapitalist dictates of the majority? Why not?
Law is more than convention. What distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate law?
The only way for people who disagree axiomatically to get along is to impose on each other minimally.
The problem is that the US constitution was written before people realized that the natural consequence of that type of constitution is a two party system. You cannot have a viable third party in the long run because it will necessarily weaken one or the other existing party and that party will then absorb it.
So no you have a situation where the government can have split brain: some parts of the legislative branch can be party A and other parts can be party B and the president isn’t tied to either.
From what I understand when the US “brings democracy” to another country we set up a parliamentary system and that system is widely seen as better. You cannot form an ineffective government by definition, though you can have a non-functioning government that is trying to form a coalition. These types of systems tend to find center because forming a coalition always requires some level of compromise. Our system oscillates between three states: party A does what they want, party B does what they want, and split brain and president does what he wants because Congress has no will to keep him accountable.
What I would like to try is a combination of parliamentary system, approval voting, and possibly major legislation passed by randomly selecting a jury of citizens and showing the the pros and cons of a bill. If you cannot convince 1000 random citizens that we should go to war, maybe it’s not a good idea.
> The problem is that the US constitution was written before people realized that the natural consequence of that type of constitution is a two party system.
The two party system is a consequence of using first past the post voting, which the US constitution doesn't even require. Use score voting instead, which can be done by ordinary legislation without any constitutional amendment, and you don't have a two party system anymore.
A party is a thing where multiple elected officials band together in a persistent coalition. The section you're quoting from only applies to a single elected office in the whole country. Are only two parties are going to run candidates for President when there are five or more parties in the legislature?
On top of that, that section applies to how the votes of the electoral college delegates are counted. It doesn't specify how the electoral college delegates are chosen, which it leaves up to the states. There are plenty of interesting ways of choosing them that don't result in a structural incentive for a two-party race.
> The section you're quoting from only applies to a single elected office in the whole country. Are only two parties are going to run candidates for President when there are five or more parties in the legislature?
I don't think it's a coincidence that every US state is structured as a smaller mirror of the federal government.
It's not a coincidence because they adopted their initial constitutions at around the same time or based them on the existing states that had. But we're talking about the electoral college and none of the states use something equivalent to that to choose their governor.
Using score voting instead of FPTP for state-level offices would be a straightforward legislative change in many states and still not require any change to the US Constitution even in the states where it would require a change to the state constitution, which is generally a much lower bar to overcome than a federal constitutional amendment.
US "parties" are giant coalitions compared to the "parties" in parliamentary democracies. You're solving a problem that doesn't exist.
Change the American voting system tomorrow and legislators will belong to different nominal parties that end up forming precisely the same coalitions.
Love him or hate him, Trump is a great example of this - in 2016, Trump effectively formed a new party focused on anti-immigration and protectionism, which rapidly grew to dominate the "conservative" coalition. But those other parties, ranging from libertarians to the Chamber of Commerce (highly pro immigration and highly pro free trade) parties are still there in the coalition.
> Change the American voting system tomorrow and legislators will belong to different nominal parties that end up forming precisely the same coalitions.
The US is extremely partisan right now and the partisanship is strongly aligned with the two major parties, not the individual coalitions that make them up. And with two parties you get polarization, because then it's all about getting 51% for a single party rather than forming temporary coalitions between various parties none of which can do anything unilaterally.
A different voting system allows you to have more than two viable parties, which changes the dynamic considerably.
Coalitions are pretty static in most parliamentary democracies except sometimes when forming governments post-election.
The 51% is for the coalition, not the party. That’s what you’re missing. CoC Republicans for example have temporarily sacrificed their immigration policies to retain legislative influence - and they are a check on the Trumpist wing passing whatever anti-immigrant legislation they want, because they too cannot act without at least tacit support from the CoC wing.
The “major party” is from a systems perspective no different than a European parliamentary governing coalition.
> Coalitions are pretty static in most parliamentary democracies except sometimes when forming governments post-election.
The "except when forming governments post-election" is a major difference. It also presumes that a coalition in the legislature is required to persist for an entire election cycle rather than being formed around any given individual piece of legislation. You don't have to use a system where an individual legislator or party can prevent any other from introducing a bill and taking a vote on it.
In less partisan periods in US history, bills would often pass with the partial support of both major parties.
Moreover, the US coalitions being tied to the major parties makes them too sticky. For example, the people who want lower taxes aren't necessarily the people who want subsidies for oil companies, or increased military spending, but they've been stuck in the same "coalition" together for decades.
Suppose you want to do a carbon tax. People who don't like taxes are going to be a major opponent, so an obvious compromise would be to pass it as part of a net reduction in total taxes, e.g. reduce the federal payroll tax by more than the amount of the carbon tax. But that doesn't happen because the coalition that wants lower taxes never overlaps with the coalition that wants to do something about climate change. Meanwhile the coalition that wants lower taxes wouldn't propose a carbon tax on their own, and the coalition that wants a carbon tax to increase overall government revenue gets shot down because that would be extremely unpopular, so instead it never happens.
All countries have these problems which vary by the local political environment and history. Multiple European countries are facing particularly absurd varieties of these dilemmas because of their refusal to form coalitions with the second or third largest party in their country.
Again, it seems like the flaw is in trying to form a long-term coalition instead of just passing the bills that have enough support to pass when you put them up for a vote among all the people who were actually elected. Why should anyone have to give a crap what someone else's position is on immigration when the bill in question is on copyright reform or tax incentives for solar panels?
The coalitions do a pretty good job of representing people’s pre-existing positions. People aren’t not voting for copyright reform because their party said so, but because they agree with their party. Party discipline in the US is not nearly as strong as in most parliamentary systems.
You started out strong but fumbled in your second sentence.
> CLI means you can pipe the output of your program to things like sed and grep and any other program.
No, that's not a prereq for a CLI. "CLI" means "command-line interface", that's it. Vim's command line is still a command line even though it's totally disjoint from the UNIX shell and the entire process model. Even primarily graphical apps can expose a command line in the UI. Think of the VSCode command palette, for example, copied from SublimeText.
(Though all the examples cited here are editors, there's no reason for it to be restricted to that. Indeed, even more graphical apps should sport command lines inside them.)
If anything a CLU, a Command Line Utility would be the best thing to call the small programs that both van be run as one offs from the command line and have their output piped to other Command Line Utilities... I don't know why the term isn't being used more. CLU keep it simple. CLIs are a catch all from every single CLU up to MidnightCommander, Zork, Mosh, and OpenCode.
1. Kaiser Permanente healthcare strike sidelined 28,000 workers. The strike ended on February 23rd.
2. The severe weather resulting in two major snow storms made it so that lots of businesses were simply closed for a few days. This meant they couldn’t be properly surveyed.
It still is not good, but the magnitude of how not good is worsened by specific one-time circumstances. Make of that what you will.
Does that matter if the headline is conclusive of the article result? Financial Times is a costly subscription. Furthermore those details, while interesting, do not change the outcome of the article.
The issue isn’t 5.4 > 5.2 etc. It is that there is a second dimension which is the model size and a third dimension which is what it is tuned for. And when you are releasing so quickly that flagship your instant mini model is on one numerical version but your flagship tool calling mini model is on another it is confusing trying to figure out which actual model you want for your use case.
It’s not impossible to figure out but it is a symptom of them releasing as quickly as possible to try to dominate the news and mindshare.
In some cases solving a problem is about restating the problem in a way that opens up a new path forward. “Why do planets move around the sun?” vs “What kind of force exists in the world that makes planets tethered to the sun with no visible leash?” (Obviously very simplified but I hope you can see what I am saying.) Given that a human is there to ask the right questions it isn’t just an LLM.
Further, some solutions are like running a maze. If you know all the wrong turns/next words to say and can just brute force the right ones you might find a solution like a mouse running through the maze not seeing the whole picture.
Whether this is thinking is more philosophical. To me this demonstrates more that we are closer to bio computers than an LLM is to having some sort of divine soul.
Thanks for your input. The way I saw this and how it looks Knuth interpreted it is that there were some reasoning steps taken by Claude independently. Some internal decisions in the model that made it try different things, finally succeeding.
Is there any reason to keep upgrading if the apps keep doing their jobs perfectly fine? Pull in a stable version of the framework and the associated docs and stay there.
I mean today I am one of the 10,000 people learning this for the first time. But it does seem like an awkward term which seems to mean “high level government official who is likely to be corrupt” or just “politician”. Don’t really see the need for this wordplay to be honest.
Interesting, I've mostly heard it referring to individuals like Navalny or the mayor of Istanbul. I suppose it makes sense for it to refer to any random political critter.
So consider a setup where System A sends messages via a queue to System B.
Let’s say that the maximum rate of System A producing messages is 100 messages/second and for System B let’s make it 20 m/s for consuming messages. In this case it would take System A running at 1/5th capacity to saturate System B’s processing. In other words, the average rate here isn’t really governed by the average rate of queueing/dequeueing messages in a production system but by measuring the performance of each system separately and using the slower.
But this also highly depends on the type of systems you are building. For example if you are queueing log lines to be sent to the system logger in an application that only logs things occasionally but when it does there are a lot of them then you don’t really care about latency but you do really care to not lose any log lines so you make your queue as big as you can and catch up on the logs when there’s a break. In this queue you want to block when the queue is full.
On the other hand if your producer is a GPS-tracked robot driving around sending its position to a telemetry server or a thermometer reporting its temperature and this happens very frequently, then you can make your queue small and just drop the oldest or newest or random element in it. Latest update matters more than a full history as long as updates are frequent enough. Here you would size the queue based on your packet drop rate and delivery latency but also by the resolution of your GPS receiver or thermometer and expected rate of change. No point in sending a GPS update at 1000Hz since you’d have to be moving incredibly fast for each data point to not be just noise.
Sometimes a queue is also a way of helping the consumer batch some of the work. For example if the message first needs to be parsed and then processed as two steps then the event loop could fetch N messages and then parse them all at once, then pass each to a processor. By having multiple messages in a queue you are increasing the efficiency of this type of consumer, which should affect your batching strategy.
Optimizing for the network MTU when sending a bunch of messages at once could send them all as one IP packet (especially if using IPv6 which disallows fragmentation). So here you empty your queue as soon as it reaches a certain size and only read off a specific number of elements to keep the payload under a certain size. This way a queue acts as a buffer that is emptied at once. A queue with a high/low watermark could be used for this.
And queues are also sometimes very useful as synchronization mechanisms. Imagine multiple producers writing to a queue but the queue has a write lock so strict ordering of messages can be enforced. In this case whichever producer wrote their message first has its message processed first. This is very useful for serializing transactions that modify the same bit of data. But the size of the queue here could be completely independent of latency: you want to log that Bob spent $7.32 at Starbucks in the ledger of his bank account and not lose that write even if it gets processed days later. Yes Bob wants to get his coffee but at some point it is better to say that his payment was approved and hit him with an overdraft fee later than to wait on a long transaction backlog to clear.
In this society there is literally nothing for anyone else to do. Do you think they deserve to be cut out of sharing the value generated by The Engineer and the machine, leaving them to starve? Do you think starving people tend to obey rules or are desperate people likely to smash the evil machine and kill The Engineer if The Engineer cuts them off? Or do you think in a society where work hours mean nothing for an average person a different economic system is required?
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