TikTok didn't work for me because of the young dancing girls. Yes, I clicked "like" on some of them, because they ARE cute and put in the effort. Doesn't mean I want to see young dancing girls all the time. TikTok showed me stuff and since I liked it, I clicked like. So TikTok shows me more of the same stuff, and not the other stuff which I might also like.

So I guess you have to be super disciplined to get a nice TikTok feed? Or just try it long enough? Or it only works for women, because they may click less on young dancing girls?

Yeah that's a problem with all of these things. They scrape SO much data, they seem to do SO many nefarious things... and still, if I ever look up a dishwasher (a once every half a decade purchase), amazon and google will forever assume I'm HUGELY into dishwashers. It seems their fancy profiling algorithm is "last in, first out".

Same with youtube - I want to be able to occasionally watch something without it assuming I want that ALL the time, to exclusion of everything else. Yes, I checked out a video on how to change the filter on my laundry machine; yes I needed to fix my snow blower. These things are not my life now! <slap my face emoji>

Basically, I'm stunned how unsophisticated and unhelpful these algorithms are to me as a consumer, though I suppose they are effective to company who wants to drive "Engagement" without caring any further than that.

P.S. And now that I have kids, oh boy are these systems ever confused :D. If I stop to show my kid something on my phone, that's all I'll see for next 3 weeks.

Lol. Assuming you’re not trolling, I’d say yes, you have to be aware that any signal from you (including time spent watching each video) is analyzed by TikTok.

So what? I don't know what you are implying? So you never like videos of young women dancing? You go on TikTok and are very disciplined to only click on videos with CSS hacks or something?

I uninstalled it for two days, so I really don't have a guilty conscience of secretly liking young girls or whatever. It was ultimately just annoying.

Would be a fun idea for a short story perhaps. An AI goes rogue trying to optimize its reward function, and humans lose hope to be able to stop it. In the last minute the AI figures out how to hack itself and enter the maximum reward, and mankind is saved another time.

But what is the “maximum possible reward”? Does a limit exist? Or is it now consuming all possible resources to develop storage and compute resources to grow that limit…

I imagine a paperclip factory with trucks driving in loops in front of a scanner that is over counting them as they drive past.

Deleting the reward function ends the game.

It could also change the way its reward function is being computed.

If there is one thing that Marx was right about it is that once the accumulation of capital ends, capitalism itself breaks down.

Just listen to all the people kicking and screaming that interest rates should be increased or that 0% interest rates are wrong and negative interest rates (which represent decentralization of capital) shouldn't even exist. There are consumer protection offices advocating that accounts shouldn't be charged negative interest rates even though it only applies to accounts with more than 100k€ in checking accounts. Imagine the horror of getting a certificate of deposit for one whole month. Instead, some banks have decided to just charge monthly fees which is incredibly regressive because you would need 25k€ in your account to exceed the monthly fee at -0.5%. Meanwhile if you have millions on your account you pay the same fee, ah yes, subsidize the rich.

I don't think capitalism was at risk of breaking down from the banking fees.

Capitalism rewards and thus incentivises such behaviour though. Rich people have more freedom and power than poor people.

That would be true in any system, for example strong people have more power than weak people, intelligent people would have more "freedom of thought" than stupid people, ruling politicians would have more power, and so on. In capitalism however, you only have power if you give people something they want. In socialism for example, being "rich" would just mean being a part of the ruling elite, but you would still have people who are "rich" and have more power than others.

And nothing in capitalism says you have to value buying a yacht higher than anything else. There is also no rule that says capitalism should have no laws whatsoever.

Power is also a good thing, for example being able to cure cancer or feed people is a power.

Natural power imbalances are fine, I don't advocate for the world of Harrison Bergeron. Ruling politicians and wealthy people are not natural power imbalances.

Power is something you have over another person, ie the ability to violate their preferences. That's an inherent negative. Presumably the power to cure cancer is something the patient would consent to, and thus not the kind of power I'm talking about.

Capitalism has led to the kind of voluntary transactions where child slaves are paid just enough to not starve so that mining companies can extract cobalt to sell to electronics manufacturers. While the idea of voluntary transactions sounds nice in the small, it plays out pretty badly writ large.

Most of what you say is just leftist framing, like power being a bad thing, and mining companies paying minimum pay to make people dependent. That is completely backwards. You pay people because you need something they can give you (their work force, or something they own or make or whatever). If wages are low it is because of supply and demand. If you demand people should be paid more, their jobs might go away completely and they would be poorer than before.

As for wealthy people being not natural, as I said, usually you become wealthy by giving people something they want or need. That is the best thing to reward in a society.

What do you mean by "natural power imbalances", like somebody having more muscles than others? Then why can't you imagine that some are better businessmen than others, too? Was Steve Jobs just an evil guy becoming rich by exploiting his employees, or did he become rich because he made the world a better place for billions of people? Would the world have been better if Steve Jobs had been shot down at an early stage to give somebody else a "fair chance" in his place?

Ugh, I'm getting real tired of this thread, having to explain left wing arguments that are freely available to read. Just, if you want to understand what I'm saying, at least give Das Kapital a read. It lays out some of the basic arguments.

The refutations of leftist ideologies are also freely available to read. It rather seems you have run out of arguments.

Marxism wasn't a success story in the real world, either.

I haven't run out of arguments, just time to constantly refute libertarian ones. Like thinking the USSR and Maoist China were somehow good examples of Marxism when all their ideas were taken from Lenin, but whatever - I feel my point about libertarians was sufficiently proven.

Yeah, "but it wasn't real Socialism/Communism/Marxism" comes up as an excuse by leftists all the time. Of course it wasn't - because "real Socialism/Communism/Marxism" is impossible.

Lenin himself said the USSR wasn't socialist or communist, it was state capitalist. Here's the idea behind Leninism: a vanguard party (the communist party) takes over the state through revolutionary means, and directs the evolution of the economy, through state capitalism, to socialism. Russia was a feudal state when the October revolution happened, and Marx's postulation is that just as advanced feudalism gave way to capitalism, so too would advanced capitalism give way to socialism. Thus, Lenin's plan was to advance industrial capitalism as rapidly as possible in order to bring about the material conditions for socialism. That's why for example, Mao was obsessed with getting farmers to build backyard furnaces instead of actually farming crops, causing millions of deaths - because he was focused on industrialising the country. Like an idiot.

Now, that was never going to happen, because of the iron law of bureaucracy - states only ever consolidate their own power so Lenin's plan was doomed from the start. But the USSR was never socialist.

I'm not sure what you think is impossible about socialism, because if we were to legally replace corporations with cooperatives, which is not a huge jump in terms of economic law, that would be market socialism. Its happened before (briefly in the USSR before the consolidation of the bolsheviks in power for example, for example in the meaning of the word "soviet" itself) and cooperatives work perfectly well as an industrial unit.

Sorry nothing about the soviet union was capitalist. It was a planning economy, and people were not allowed to make their own fortune. Industrialization was needed either way to give people a modern lifestyle.

Coops based on voluntary participation are entirely compatible with capitalism, you can already set up a coop today in capitalist countries. Socialism is not voluntary, it forces everybody to participate. It is the most exploitative system, because everybody is supposed to only work for the common good, not for themselves. It also sets the wrong incentives which is why it usually ends in misery.

Any recommendations for Java hosting? Most PaaS I have looked at seem to have a very steep price increase from self hosting. For example Heroku presumably is 50$/month, when currently I get by with a 7$/month VPS. And the next level would already be 250$/month.

I also find it very difficult to make the transition because of the different types of units. How much RAM and how many "dynos" (whatever) will I need to get comparable performance to my VPS? Worst seems to be Google where I have no idea how much it will cost me in the end. I don't care about prices per second for all sorts of individual things (RAM, CPU, Storage, traffic - all priced by the second or other units), I just want a fire-and-forget flat fee that covers my needs with a reasonable buffer against spikes in demand.

That said, of course the price of VPS is also high with the required time for maintenance. At least it is also a learning experience.

If you never give the person the chance to decide, you are oppressing them even more. All those eggs you never fertilized make you tyrant of epic proportions.

And to think of all the wasted spermatozoids?

Let's talk again when the banks cancel his accounts because he refuses to get vaccinated, or some other nonsense.

Most Web3 stuff is shit, that much is true, but that also goes for a lot of other things.

What is synchronizing with hooks on open?

KeePass has triggers to run on open/close. Set them up to do a sync with your network share and the local database. This way every user has an up to date synced copy.

Thanks!

Didn't he also make a lot of money already? So at least also good at making money.

When Howard Hughes was at his most batshit crazy and generally out of touch with anything resembling humanity his businesses kept being profitable, perhaps once you have a lot of money it is difficult to really screw it up.

So your claim is that Altman used to be capable of making money, but is not anymore? Why?

He doesn't come across as crazy and out of touch to me.

He does not seem out of touch to you?

He recently announced WorldCoin [0]:

> To address it, we built a new device called the Orb. It solves the problem through biometrics: the Orb captures an image of a person’s eyes, which is converted into a short numeric code, making it possible to check whether the person has signed up already. If not, they receive their free share of Worldcoin.

He thinks that launching a global coin owned by VCs and collecting everyone's biometric data will make the world a better place. If that's not out of touch, I don't know what is.

[0]: https://worldcoin.org/

If you think about crypto for a bit, it is not such a far fetched idea. It tackles the issue of a fair initial distribution.

>So your claim is that Altman used to be capable of making money, but is not anymore?

No, the parent comment to yours was that Altman was out of touch.

Your reply was that he makes money, which caused me to infer that you thought he could not be out of touch because of a general belief that people who are out of touch cannot be making money.

My reply gave an example of someone that was definitely out of touch but still made money, thus showing that one cannot reason that the ability to make money proves that one is in touch.

So in response to your last comment - I don't have an opinion on Altman, I just have an example of someone who made money while out of touch. That actually would mean the opposite of what you seem to think I meant, if I thought that Howard Hughes at his craziest could make money why would you assume I thought Altman could not?

OK but presumably Howard Hughes built his empire while he was not yet crazy and incapable, so it is not a good example for what you wanted to say.

you said: >Didn't he also make a lot of money already? So at least also good at making money.

The second sentence is in the present tense. Implying that Altman is currently good at making money and thus not out of touch.

I said

>When Howard Hughes was at his most batshit crazy and generally out of touch with anything resembling humanity his businesses kept being profitable, perhaps once you have a lot of money it is difficult to really screw it up.

I shall now laboriously break this down in case you have not followed my reasoning.

when I say >his businesses kept being profitable

This implies that they were profitable before he was

>at his most batshit crazy and generally out of touch with anything resembling humanity

Thus my example is of someone who was once not out of touch and made money, but then when they became out of touch they kept making money because their businesses had reached such a size and reach that they were able to make money for him without him being 'in touch'.

I did not say one could be out of touch and go from nothing to money, I said that there was an example of someone who was once 'in touch' but became out of touch and yet they continued to make money.

The criticism of Altman here that I'm reading is that he 'is' out of touch, not that he has always been out of touch. It is in fact a common criticism of very rich people that they lose contact to daily life and the critical understanding of that life that allowed them to become rich in the first place.

Thus your response that he is good at making money is meant to show that he cannot be so out of touch after all (at least this is what I supposed your intention to be and it would seem to be born out by this conversation)

This is why my example of Hughes is a good example of what I wanted to say, which is that just because someone IS good at making money they can still BE out of touch, and not anything else.

Reading the comments again, by "making money" I did not mean earning money like the crazy guy still having an income from assets he acquired in the past, but being able to make new deals, start successful companies and so on.

But I understand what you mean. I disagree that "rich people becoming out of touch/crazy" is as likely as you make it sound. But of course it is possible.

Nevertheless, usually there is only the track record of their past to evaluate a persons authority. You can add a small discount for "may have gone crazy", and of course attribute the luck factor, but that's it.

Probably not that much after repaying other parties. His only demonstrated skill is that time he wore like 7 shirts at once at an Apple keynote.

Population has not peaked, it is still expected to continue rising to 10 Billion.