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kbrisso commented on Exile Economics: If Globalisation Fails   lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n... · Posted by u/mitchbob
churchill · 16 days ago
I read the book referenced - Robert Lightizer's No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America's Workers - and it was eye-opening, if somewhat misguided.

In it, the author blames China's industrial ascent for America's deindustrialization, the hollowing out of cities like Detroit, the fentanyl crisis, the looming challenge to American power in the Pacific, the intimidation of America's allies, etc. Basically: China bad, turned into a political doctrine.

My rebuttal is simply a rehashing of what I said in an earlier comment [0] which is simply logical, no matter how you see it:

For most of human history, everyone lived at a subsistence level because we all had to farm our food, bake our bread, sew our clothes, build our own houses, etc.

Specialization is what makes the luxury and wealth of the modern world possible: you do one thing all day long and convert it to cash, then exchange value with people who do other stuff to get what you want. And since they're operating at scale, they can build more houses, make more stuff, etc. that you ever can if you did it yourself. So, you pay less for more stuff.

International trade simply takes it to the next level. For instance, the average American will not bend over to pick cocoa beans for chocolate for even $100k/yr. Many of you will argue, but all I'll say to you is that there's a reason agricultural work is referred to as back-breaking work. There's also a reason why farmers have the highest rate of suicides. Even if the American eventually agrees to do it, the cost will be so prohibitive that buying chocolate will be out-of-reach for everyone but the rich. Abundance ended; the end.

If you believe China is stealing American jobs by making things cheaper an at scale, then tractors stole farmers' jobs by making it easier to consolidate; cars drove much of the horse rearing business into bankruptcy; mobile phones have driven countless industries into extinction, but we're not trying to regulate them out of existence. Why does the logic fail when a nation of 1.5b wants to make stuff cheaply and send it to you for affordable prices? How does it hurt you?

I have this belief that one of the reasons why inflation has been under control despite the QE experiments undertaken by the Federal Reserve, ECB, etc. is because of the impact of 600M Chinese workers, leaving their farms to work in manufacturing, making products cheap enough for the average Westerner to afford, despite dumb government fiscal policy.

If you take that away, your political system becomes even less stable and you have to keep reaching for ever more outrageous stunts to stay relevant or get voted into power.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866645

kbrisso · 16 days ago
Free trade along with capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other economic theory/system. It's not perfect but you can't deny it's impact.
kbrisso commented on Show HN: I built a Privacy First local AI RAG GUI for your own documents   github.com/kbrisso/byte-v... · Posted by u/kbrisso
unstatusthequo · a month ago
How are you dealing with documents that exceed the context window? Chunking an db vectorization? One issue with some approaches is the Paragraph 40 that references Paragraph 6 in a document but the LLM doesn’t really have direct capability to “remember” that reference.
kbrisso · a month ago
I chunk the documents and use Elasticsearch to store the vectors. On a laptop with 8GB of GPU I can have a pretty large context window and not hallucinate.
kbrisso commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
kbrisso · a month ago
Byte-Vision is a privacy-first document intelligence platform that transforms static documents into an interactive, searchable knowledge base. Built on Elasticsearch with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) capabilities, it offers document parsing, OCR processing, and conversational AI interfaces.

https://github.com/kbrisso/byte-vision

kbrisso commented on They're Close to My Body: A Hagiography of Nine Inch Nails and Robin Finck (2020)   thewhitereview.org/featur... · Posted by u/herbertl
keiferski · 5 months ago
I always saw TDS as a concept album in the vein of his later, more recent soundtracks. It feels more coherently atmospheric in ways earlier albums didn’t, to me.

With Teeth is actually where I think he went too far into “regular rock music” territory, with the result that it sounds generic and flat to me.

kbrisso · 5 months ago
With Teeth is his first sober album. He wanted the stripped back rock feel so it would sound different from the previous.
kbrisso commented on Ghost artists on Spotify   harpers.org/archive/2025/... · Posted by u/greenie_beans
kbrisso · 8 months ago
I don't like Spotify's business model. This is why I use Deezer as my streaming service. Deezer pays the artist more and has Hi-Fi streams. Streaming is killing the music industry and quality because it pays crappy royalties.
kbrisso commented on Trump wins presidency for second time   thehill.com/homenews/camp... · Posted by u/koolba
kulahan · 10 months ago
This is the part that blows my mind consistently. The number of people screaming “WHY would ANYONE vote for him?!” and then not even considering trying to find out is a true bummer.
kbrisso · 10 months ago
Why do people vote for him? America is a closet racist country and the education system obviously doesn't produce critical thinkers. The south is poor and Trump will make them money again some how - they believe that. Trump will make grocery prices' go down and create many magnificent jobs. Trump will make interest rates go down and loans cheaper. He will deport all the Mexicans so the black or white people can fill the jobs.Trump is a populist con man who conned his base. No public company or start up will ever hire a CEO like him. I call this political entropy. This is the decline in America in my view. It's a sad day and I will just stick my head in the sand and hope we make it through.
kbrisso commented on Chain-of-thought can hurt performance on tasks where thinking makes humans worse   arxiv.org/abs/2410.21333... · Posted by u/benocodes
haccount · 10 months ago
Language seems to be confused with logic or common sense.

We've observed it previously in psychiatry(and modern journalism, but here I digress) but LLMs have made it obvious that grammatically correct, naturally flowing language requires a "world" model of the language and close to nothing of reality, spatial understanding? social clues? common sense logic? or mathematical logic? All optional.

I'd suggest we call the LLM language fundament a "Word Model"(not a typo).

Trying to distil a world model out of the word model. A suitable starting point for a modern remake of Plato's cave.

kbrisso · 10 months ago
Bingo, great reply! This is what I've been trying to explain to my wife. LLM's use fancy math and our language examples to reproduce our language but have no thoughts are feelings.
kbrisso commented on The science behind on-the-wrist blood pressure tracking   empirical.health/blog/app... · Posted by u/brandonb
wil421 · a year ago
Why do you have to do it so often? Why do you even do it if you’re not on meds? Third, what would you even do if it’s high?
kbrisso · a year ago
I don't check my blood pressure every day. Maybe twice a month or when I feel like crap. I also check my glucose. Why? I believe if I keep myself in check I will keep myself out of the hospital as I age. High blood pressure and diabetes are two things I can manage. I don't want to be on meds unless I absolutely have to. Exercise and these tools allow me to figure out what I can eat and not. I'm not obsessed with my health or a health "nut". The upside is I don't get sick that much and feel good.

u/kbrisso

KarmaCake day73March 28, 2018View Original