Someone was building a similar one where AI agents run economies. I feel like it's a great way to quickly prototype different economic models and their effects.
Eventually we could have live demos of policy interventions the same day as they're announced
there is perhaps a slippery slope between "the poop cubes made me a believer" and "the creation of poop cubes is irrefutable proof of the existence of God" and I can understand why one would want to abhor such thought processes when writing science.
> Also, evolution is mostly random, not everything needs natural selection
I think this is the most objective take. Perhaps we hype up the "accidentally brilliant" aspects of it more than the "wow this is a kinda random design choice" facets.
>That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.
Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centuries or millennia are more likely to survive? Marking territory is more a form of communication than anything else, but its effect are subtly strong enough over time to lead to a discernible selection pressure for square-pooping wombats over others?
I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers (though I'm not necessarily one myself), when they encounter such intricate design in biology every single day
One thing I was sus from the book and which this post didn't clarify for me was whether Carmack truly invented side scrolling for the PC. He claimed to have done so, and even pitched it to Nintendo for a Mario port that never took off.
Also, the idea that it hadn't been done yet by 1990, when consoles were well in the game, suggests the PC market was behind popular gaming in a big way.
I get that this year's iPhone will be marketed as the first under Ternus's overall leadership, but truthfully, we can expect next year's to have more of his mark, since I imagine most of the details for the iPhone 18 have long been done, dusted and set into motion.
I don't think this reveals Satoshi's identity, nor that any prior piece of reporting may have done so. But I do think there's a high probability that Satoshi lurks or has lurked on HN, and perhaps reads these posts with an initial sense of apprehension followed by a chuckle at the inevitable misidentification.
Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion?
I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.
"Welcome to the internet. By using this service, you waive your right to privacy, data, any personal IP and the use of your Adblocker. You consent to having all your behaviours, skills and audio/visual likenesses fed to AI models and trained on for eventual recreation. You may direct any or all complaints to Visa or Mastercard, until crypto makes that redundant as well. Have a nice browsing session!"
In some sense, it is a part of one's identity, for one can't easily separate the worldview from the person. But we enter a strange era when your identity is challenged and remoulded by a non-human entity.
People have always derived a tribal sense of belonging from a set of worldviews, but these views are now perpetuated by robots. These anti-immigration or anti-brown or post-renaissance worldviews are lived by very few people of flesh and blood - it's a set of interlinked concepts and ideals in an imaginary post-truth world.
But it lives more in silicon than in some Aryan ideal. And if you had to draw a line from this silicon to reality, you'd still end up in Crimea or in Pokrovsk, watching a 21st-century battle with echoes of WWI. It is about land and power and politics, like it always has been. But the person fighting "woke" in a comment section over a made-up story about a made-up Disney film doesn't know it.
I'm in India, so the second-order effects of all this are even more surreal here. You get Christians cheering the rise of a Hindutva nationalist government because it's "anti-woke" (only to get heckled and beaten up during Christmas) and Trump supporters doing religious ceremonies for the man for the same reason (only to get the nation's entire suite of exports tariffed), and you see cabs with giant Russia Today ads on their sides in the streets (but the discounted oil we buy from Russia has not dropped prices at the pump by even a rupee). Our lived reality has very little in common with these digital culture wars.
I find it odd that Americans aren't angrier about Russia running disinfo bot networks for over a decade now, building up to almost everything in the current cultural moment.
Also odd that the tech behind this isn't more talked about. I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate - and this predated ChatGPT by many years.
Big platforms like Google or X have only mildly experimented with heavenbanning and discourse manipulation at scale. These Russian networks have had at least a decades' worth of experience with it.
Somehow, in reducing all political opponents to bots, the discourse does seem to forget that there's often someone behind the bots, a tangible nation-state of a target.
The other comments address it well. In the Indian context, I'd say it's all the slum demolition drives that have happened of late, often with questionable reimbursement if any.
Also, I genuinely look forward to setting up a situation monitor when I shift to a bigger place. I've seen the memes about "monitoring the situation with the lads" and always thought it would actually be quite fun.
There's a quote by Mahatma Gandhi that resonates whenever I see contrasting debates about this economic indicator or that:
"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."
India's IT outsourcing-led GDP growth can benefit many almost-poor and poor people by giving them access to more spending by the "middle-class" (a very debatable minority in India) and the rich. But it will not benefit the poorest - social welfare schemes do that, but anti-homeless measures cancel it out. Access to formalised lending can do that, but anti-immigrant schemes and the Kafkaesque labyrinth of getting an id-card in India will negate that. And banks won't give you a loan if you're poor (so they go to loansharks).
You can have all the Apples and the Facebooks of the world in California, but putting spikes in places where homeless people could sleep makes Gandhi's talisman stand out far better than any macro-economic indicator.
Inflation can be positive or negative but if you're living in a place with less supply than demand, your rent will go up by far more than the price of eggs. This will hurt you completely independently of the price of eggs.
All this to say - if you care about the poorest, you'll find little to cheer about. But should you care about the poorest? Is that a good measure of healthy economic growth? Is economic growth the only priority after 1991?
You can be poor and destitute in a capitalist dystopia and you can be poor and destitute in a communist dystopia. This is why I hate the language of the Cold War so much - we lose an infinite amount of nuance with terms like "Capitalism" "socialism" "communism" and "GDP"
Make content for your startup? Window-into-the-life, engineering notes, etc - anything that lets the public see what you're up to and that you're serious about the work.
Genuine content always beats the stuff marketing will come up with
Eventually we could have live demos of policy interventions the same day as they're announced