lasfter (u/lasfter) - Readit News

lasfter commented on Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself? spidermonkey.dev/blog/202... · Posted by u/pdubroy

Adrock · 2 months ago

Can you please link to your thesis? This sounds very interesting.

lasfter · 2 months ago

Here it is:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

lasfter commented on Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself? spidermonkey.dev/blog/202... · Posted by u/pdubroy

ctenb · 2 months ago

This is a cool example of how specializing a generic algorithm to a specific subspace can yield much better results. This is quite often the case in my experience, but we often don't bother utilizing properties that are specific to our problem space, and just apply the generic algorithm out of convenience (and because it is often good enough)

lasfter · 2 months ago

I wrote my thesis on this! Application-specific system design can get you orders of magnitude performance improvement, as well as better scalability/fault tolerance properties. I focused on graph analytics, but it's reasonable to think it applies more broadly.

Definitely true that application-specific design is often not worth the investment though. Chasing that 1000x improvement can easily cost you a year or two.

lasfter commented on Capitalism and Cozy Games blog.glyph.im/2024/01/a-c... · Posted by u/earthboundkid

pcthrowaway · 2 years ago

If social programs don't provide luxuries, but just essentials, people are still going to want luxuries, and there can be markets around those. I'm not convinced that communism or even complete socialism are better than what I've described, which I think is somewhere between demsoc and socdem, but not entirely those things either.

We haven't really seen socialism/communism without a high degree of authoritarianism, which I also don't really like, so I'm inclined to support working towards socialism democratically rather than trying to overthrow the government in a bloody revolution.

I do think we need a radical rethinking of the role of state in this in order to make it work though; ideally the state and worker collectives benefit from advantages that make it difficult for the capitalists to steamroll over them on the market, which over time leads to the weakening of capital. An example would be high property taxes for people/businesses owning a house that isn't their primary residence, which would go to fund social housing.

lasfter · 2 years ago

> We haven't really seen socialism/communism without a high degree of authoritarianism, which I also don't really like, so I'm inclined to support working towards socialism democratically rather than trying to overthrow the government in a bloody revolution.

And we haven't had capitalism without rampant homelessness, corruption, systemic violence, exploitation of the global poor, and various other forms of avoidable misery. The status quo is bloody too, just not for people like me (and I assume like you).

> I do think we need a radical rethinking of the role of state in this in order to make it work though; ideally the state and worker collectives benefit from advantages that make it difficult for the capitalists to steamroll over them on the market, which over time leads to the weakening of capital

I want the same thing, but my understanding is that you can't get the state to align with workers against capital because capital will always outcompete workers at amassing resources simply through scale. One capitalist can extract surplus value from many many many workers at once, and use that value to buy more workers, to the ultimate end of buying the state through lobbying and funding campaigns.

Is there some way we don't end up back where we began?

lasfter commented on Capitalism and Cozy Games blog.glyph.im/2024/01/a-c... · Posted by u/earthboundkid

abvdasker · 2 years ago

It always strikes me as a little confused when criticism of Marxism focuses on the utility of markets and not the existence of private capital (only the latter is incompatible with socialism). A common Marxist critique of social democracy is that it allows for the accumulation of incredible wealth in the hands of a small number of people who invariably use that wealth to try and end social democracy.

lasfter · 2 years ago

The confusion is the system working as intended I think. It is taught from a young age that Marxism/socialism is about annihilating freedom and personal property, while capitalism rewards hard work etc etc.

So you get these well-meaning posts about how maybe life would be better if we could keep personal property and freedom and progress as a species, but lose the alienation from labour, coercive pressure, and basically everything else that literally defines capitalism and perpetuates what is bad about our system.

I had the same blind spot for most of my life, but at some point it dawned on me that everything I like about the current system is compatible with socialism, but the changes I would like to see are incompatible with capitalism.

lasfter commented on Capitalism and Cozy Games blog.glyph.im/2024/01/a-c... · Posted by u/earthboundkid

pcthrowaway · 2 years ago

Despite having capitalism, we still have many good social programs that help many people.

There is lots of bad stuff too, but the social programs can (theoretically) minimize the negative impacts of capitalism.

If everyone has access to food, shelter, transportation, health care, and mental health care (regardless of whether it's gourmet food or luxury shelter), people as a whole are going to be much better off than they currently are, and it will very much weaken the ability of capital to compel people to do things they'd rather not.

I'd argue there would still be problems with such a system, but it's leagues better than what we have now.

lasfter · 2 years ago

If everyone has access to food, shelter, transportation, and health care, in what ways would we even still have capitalism? Like, what happens to landlords? Will we fund this stuff with heavy taxation on the wealthy? Will defense budgets be cut?

I obviously agree that social programs are necessary for a just and humane society. But I also think the opposition from military-industrial complex, energy lobbies, and rent-seekers of all stripes make it impossible to implement these programs effectively. Because at the end of the day the root of the problem is capitalism.

lasfter commented on Capitalism and Cozy Games blog.glyph.im/2024/01/a-c... · Posted by u/earthboundkid

no_wizard · 2 years ago

I resonate with this alot.

I too, am a centrist. We can have capitalism without the cruelty (and the tragedy of commons and external costs on the environment) where markets exist but have limits that don't allow it to lead into exploitation, that is the idea anyway.

Here in the USA, there seems to be a big red flag on the idea of implementing social good programs[0] like universal healthcare, UBI and many other programs. They're not panaceas, but they're a big net good increase on society at large.

Funnily enough, once Americans have these programs and they manage to seed themselves in society, they fight like dogs to keep them. Look at the protests around Republicans trying to roll back major provisions in the Affordable Care Act. Their own base shut it down, because a sizable Republican voting block is lower middle class and receive more government assistance then you might get the impression of as an outsider.

[0]: Often called social welfare, but the term welfare in US politics is heavily tainted. I didn't want to trigger preconceived notions.

lasfter · 2 years ago

You cannot have capitalism without the bad stuff unless capital's interests are best served in abstaining from bad stuff. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to set up a system that aligns the world's interests with capital's, because our lawmakers are predominantly capitalists and act in their own best interests at the expense of everything else.

When money is the name of the game in elections, the legislature, and even the justice system, how is it even theoretically possible to implement capitalism without the bad stuff? The best you can do is hope the capitalists are nice.

lasfter commented on OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon semafor.com/article/01/16... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

TulliusCicero · 2 years ago

So pushing Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991 wasn't defense? Fascinating worldview you got there.

lasfter · 2 years ago

Let's disregard that the USA encouraged Sadam to invade Kuwait and implied he would face no recourse if he did.

Would you have been okay with Russia going to Iraq's aid when the USA invaded the second time? You think it's fine if Russia not only fought American troops in Iraq, but bombed the USA as well? That would have been defense by your logic, since that's exactly what the USA did to Iraq in 1991.

Fascinating worldview indeed.

lasfter commented on Thousands of programmable DNA-cutters found in algae, snails and other organisms phys.org/news/2023-10-tho... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

pdar4123 · 2 years ago

“CRISPR-based genome editing tools developed by MIT professor and McGovern investigator Feng Zhang, Abudayyeh, Gootenberg, and others have changed the way scientists modify DNA, accelerating research and enabling the development of many experimental gene therapies.”

“Others” being Nobel laureates Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpatier - MIT and the Broad have long sought to minimize the work of these two women in the media for their own gain. Here again, a small but glaring example of their pettiness.

lasfter · 2 years ago

Small correction, it's Emmanuelle Charpatier.

lasfter commented on A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves news.umich.edu/a-surprisi... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

neuronerdgirl · 2 years ago

I'll give you that I misread bullet 2, so the total is a little over 31k. But grants that fund salaries for predoctoral scholars don't just fund the salary itself, they also cover the additional funds listed on that page. You can't partially fund a trainee on a grant. In any case, this wildly misses the forest for the trees - 1.2 mil in grants does not cover 6 years of salary plus research costs for 2 trainees and 2 professors full stop.

lasfter · 2 years ago

Absolutely, 6 years with a 1.2mil grant is ridiculous. I was just hopeful that somewhere there were PhD students making enough money to live from research

lasfter commented on A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves news.umich.edu/a-surprisi... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

neuronerdgirl · 2 years ago

Cover the two PhD students at the NIH payscales for PhD students on a standard training grant[1] ($43,894 not including benefits) and you've used up over a quarter of your budget on less than half the salary needs, completely ignoring any research costs that need to be covered on top of the much higher payscales of the professors. Plus a large number of PhD students in this kind of work make more than the states stipend above. Not extravagant.

https://osr.ucsf.edu/news/nih-update-ruth-l-kirschstein-nati....

lasfter · 2 years ago

Where are you seeing $44k? The link you gave shows payscales for postdocs, and points to another page [1] showing that predoctoral trainees get $27k.

Also, in my field and in my region, $27k is massive funding. I don't know anybody who makes that much, let alone $44k, and we also don't get tuition or benefits covered. Our TA/RA union is currently striking because it's essentially impossible to live off of funding alone.

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-23-0...