Highwaymen still have those fast horses, up on the lawless mountain passes... ;)
Readit Newssebastianz commented on But what if I want a faster horse? rakhim.exotext.com/but-wh... · Posted by u/saeedesmaili
sebastianz commented on What if we made advertising illegal? simone.org/advertising/... · Posted by u/smnrg
I think a market without advertising is sufficiently "alternative reality" that it's difficult to say what it would look like. The giant incumbents are only giant incumbents because of ads to start with.
In a world without advertising, our entire cultural approach to consumption would necessarily be different. Maybe it would be as you say. But, maybe we'd be more thoughtful and value-driven. Maybe objects would be created to last longer, and less driven by a constant sales cycle. Maybe craftsmanship would still be a valued aspect of everyday goods.
Why would it be difficult to say what it would look like? Humans and markets exist for many thousands of years. Advertising in its current form for a couple of hundred. Just look back in time, there were markets then too :)
sebastianz commented on What if we made advertising illegal? simone.org/advertising/... · Posted by u/smnrg
>If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.
Most consumers don't do extensive research before making a purchasing decision, or any research at all - they buy whatever catches their eye on a store shelf or the front page of Amazon search results, they buy what they're already familiar with, they buy what they see everyone else buying. Consumer behaviour is deeply habitual and it takes enormous effort to convince most consumers to change their habits. Advertising is arguably the best tool we have for changing consumer behaviour, which is precisely why so much money is spent on it.
Banning advertising only further concentrates the power of incumbents - the major retailers who decide which products get prime shelf position or the first page of search results, and the established brands with name recognition and ubiquitous distribution. Consumers go on buying the things they've always bought and are never presented with a reason to try something different.
A market without advertising isn't a level playing field, but a near-unbreakable oligopoly.
> A market without advertising isn't a level playing field, but a near-unbreakable oligopoly.
Why would it be an oligopoly any more than it is now? You go to a shop (in your city, or online), trust their curation, and buy something. If it's garbage, next time you will pick another shop or curator, or discuss with your friends / colleagues. Repeat until you find a place with satisfactory curation.
Why would this dynamic be bad? Why would I as a customer be better served by banners shoved in my face by the producers with the highest pockets?
sebastianz commented on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy... · Posted by u/belter
I don't know that I agree with this. The US is too large a market to ignore, and this is effectively raising the profit margin for local production. Foreign companies will either move some portion of manufacturing to the US (for the domestic market), or cede the market completely, and I don't know that they're prepared to do that (well, maybe Chinese ones are). Factories have a long lead time, so even if this is abolished at the end of his term, they'll be locked in with sunk capital costs. The main reasons not to do this are a) abandoning the market, as mentioned, or b) you think you can hold out long enough until the political landscape changes.
If the people aren't there, wages will rise until they show up. Most labor shortages aren't an actual shortage of labor, unless you genuinely can't produce that skillset domestically, or your labor market is so tight that no one is unemployed; rather, they're a shortage of wages. Pay enough, and someone will do the job. This is especially true for low-skilled work. There is not, and never will be, a shortage of cleaners, for example, because anyone can do it, so as long as there are unemployed people and the wages are good enough, someone will do the work.
And even if these jobs aren't in running these factories, they've still got to be built. Money is a powerful motivator, so I have no doubt they will. Companies will bleed because of this, but there are clear benefits for the US working class even if they're paying more. The gamble is obviously that the benefits outweigh the negatives of higher prices overall. Modern economics says no, but modern economics also believes in service-based economies, and that countries should only produce what they're good at, which, eventually, becomes a repudiation of the nation state. No country wants to buy bullets from an enemy, even if they're cheaper, and the web of infrastructure and industry necessary to maintain a defense industry mandates that at some point, you abandon the theory. Which is to say: I don't know, but I'm also skeptical that economists do.
> If the people aren't there, wages will rise until they show up. [...] There is not, and never will be, a shortage of cleaners, for example, because anyone can do it, so as long as there are unemployed people and the wages are good enough, someone will do the work.
While this might be in a theoretical and pedantic way true, sometimes you do not have the economic context to provide those larger wages, so there will technically be no "shortage" - but just because the jobs themselves will disappear.
If you look at poor countries or regions, there is garbage, dirt and dilapidation everywhere. Clearly there is - in a practical way - a need for cleaners, but by your definition there is no "shortage" - because they cannot afford to pay anything for those jobs.
sebastianz commented on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy... · Posted by u/belter
But a large degree of the exception was being excepted from being blown to smithereens during WW2, which is the kind of opportunity that doesn't usually come around twice.
> doesn't usually come around twice.
There is a _2_ in WW2 :)
Sadly looking at history these "opportunities" come around quite regularly.
sebastianz commented on The Demoralization is just Beginning geohot.github.io//blog/je... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
Arguably, the economy just is. It has no purpose, other than what it does[0].
It's not like anyone designed it, or has any control over it. Some people are in position to make adjustments, nudge some aspect of it towards a desired goal or away from undesirable one, but there's only so much they can do - it's all strongly path-dependent.
Put another way, the shape of the economy is just an exercise of descending down the gradient. Any individual or group has very little control over this, and major changes to the economy basically only happen when war or technological inventions reshape the entire gradient.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Many countries in the former soviet block would very much contradict this take.
Entire economies were indeed planned and designed, and their shape was controlled and changed at will. Individuals and groups had control, and did do major changes, including but not limited to forced resettlement and labor camps.
You can of course argue that this ended almost universally in failures, but people did try, and the amount of control over economies is very much a spectrum.
sebastianz commented on The Demoralization is just Beginning geohot.github.io//blog/je... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
I actually grew up in one of these, and I fully agree.
Yes, my country was significantly larger and more influential a century ago. It even was an empire, with an emperor and all! But no, I don't feel like the average person born back then had a better life than me.
> I don't feel like the average person born back then had a better life than me.
This is true for (almost) anywhere in the world. Everybody has a better life _on average_ than 100 years ago.
> It even was an empire, with an emperor and all!
But the fact that your country was the capital of an empire a century ago is a large reason for why it is richer now, and generational wealth was indeed passed on.
This perhaps is visible if you look at countries that used to be subservient to yours, in empire times. Are they not - relatively - still poorer than the former empire capital?
sebastianz commented on In Defence of 'Productivity Crap' nicky.bearblog.dev/in-def... · Posted by u/nickybearblog
That’s me. I wing it. I do this because I believe productivity as such is not a virtue.
I’m interested in creative breakthroughs, not maximizing any predictable or conceivable variable.
> I’m interested in creative breakthroughs, not maximizing any predictable or conceivable variable.
Most jobs and tasks in life don't need any "creative breakthroughs". The article is discussing scheduling, task prioritization and management. Fix this bug, implement this feature, schedule this doctor's appointment, do the dishes, buy toilet paper. No breakthroughs needed for those, creative or otherwise :)
sebastianz commented on Does current AI represent a dead end? bcs.org/articles-opinion-... · Posted by u/jnord
> No they can't because they make stuff up, fail to follow directions, need to be minutely supervised, all output checked and workflow integrated with your companies shitty over complicated procedures and systems.
What’s the difference between what you describe and what’s needed for a fresh hire off the street, especially one just starting their career?
> What’s the difference between what you describe and what’s needed for a fresh hire off the street, especially one just starting their career?
The fresh hire has the potential that after training and working for a while to become a much more valuable and reliable senior.
As to “why”: I’ve been coding for 25 years, and LLMs is the first technology that has a non-linear impact on my output. It’s simultaneously moronic and jaw-dropping. I’m good at what I do (eg, merged fixes into Node) and Claude/o3 regularly finds material edge cases in my code that I was confident in. Then they add a test case (as per our style), write a fix, and update docs/examples within two minutes.
I love coding and the art&craft of software development. I’ve written millions of lines of revenue generating code, and made millions doing it. If someone forced me to stop using LLMs in my production process, I’d quit on the spot.
Why not self host: open source models are a generation behind SOTA. R1 is just not in the same league as the pro commercial models.
Which frameworks & libraries have you found work well in this (agentic) context? I feel much of the js lib. landscape does not do enough to enforce an easily-understood project structure that would "constrain" the architecture and force modularity. (I might have this bias from my many years of work with Rails that is highly opinionated in this regard).