Every shareholder of an arms company (or holder of an index tracker), is betting on war too.
This mechanism is stupid, corrupt and driving extreme behaviour.
But betting on war is not new, and I find it abhorrent that people will hand wave away the military-industrial complex as an essential component to modern civilisation while calling individuals making bets on war horrible names.
It's just scale and semantics, not core differences to my eye.
> It's just scale and semantics, not core differences to my eye.
Is this meant to be an excuse that justifies this gambling behavior? Children’s hospitals also gain a profit from the suffering and death of children, yet we would find it pretty abhorrent if people started betting on how many children died at the Mayo Clinic. Yet, it’s only scale and semantics.
This sort of scheme was banned in the UK - the place where bookmaking was invented, and many of the largest global brands are run from (albeit technically trading from Malta or Gibrlatar) - a few years back.
Why? Well... suicides. You're going to start seeing gambling-related suicides in the next couple of years, if you haven't already.
If you can learn anything from the UK, learn this:
- VIP schemes kill people
- Online casinos and video slots kill people faster than sports betting do
- The industry will always "self-regulate" to the point where its still harmful, but palatable enough that law makers will look the other way to keep the tax raised from it coming in
I have skin in the game (I write code that profitably trades on sports betting exchanges), and think it's possible to make gambling a healthy and fun thing to do, but the American market is ~5-10 years behind the UK market, and I can see it's going to get ugly before it gets better (not that the UK market is perfect yet, either).
$93 billion over 13 years doesn't feel like a great deal for a program that has started to align around a single person's ego, when most of the US is struggling to make ends meet.
I think Artemis will be cancelled by the end of the year, unfortunately. If the heat shield doesn't hold up as some observers fear/have warned, perhaps by the end of April.
> $93 billion over 13 years doesn't feel like a great deal
So, around 7 billion a year?
We are at around half of the total Artemis cost just one month after the Iran invasion. One week of this war finances one year of the Artemis program. Do you think that's a better deal?
Compared to the military spending, that doesn't even register. Maybe you should be mad about that.
We handed out 300 billion in cash payments alone for COVID stimulus, this is not that crazy especially if you factor in the knowledge and skills put to work and retained.
One is real cash going into the hands of ordinary people for everyday purchases, which has proven (in various studies) to have helped parents/families and the financially struggled.
The other is "knowledge and skills" that seem remote and detached from people's lives.
As someone whose life isn't affected much by either of these, I would choose the stimulus every time.
The money was not vaporized by aerospace companies, it's largely spent in US on salaries, subcontractors, etc. Not against stimulus but to call out the amount in comparison is reasonable.
To turn around the famous quote: "Amazon's margin is someone else's opportunity". :)
The Amazon flywheel is all about reducing costs to consumers. The moment that stops happening, consumers can get caught by offers elsewhere, and the flywheel can start to go backwards.
Outsource things that aren't valuable to you and your core mission. Do the things that are valuable to you and your core mission.
This applies at a business level (most software shops shouldn't have full-time book keepers on staff, for example), but applies even more in the AI age.
I use LLMs to help me code the boring stuff. I don't want to write CDK, I don't want to have to code the same boilerplate HTML and JS I've written dozens of times before - they can do that. But when I'm trying to implement something core to what I'm doing, I want to get more involved.
Same with writing. There's an old joke in the writing business that most people want to be published authors than they do through the process of writing. People who say they want to write don't actually want to do the work of writing, they just want the cocktail parties and the stroked ego of seeing their name in a bookshop or library. LLMs are making that more possible, but at a rather odd cost.
When I write, I do so because I want to think. Even when I use an LLM to rubber duck ideas off, I'm using it as a way to improve my thinking - the raw text it outputs is not the thing I want to give to others, but it might make me frame things differently or help me with grammar checks or with light editing tasks. Never the core thinking.
Even when I dabble with fiction writing: I enjoy the process of plotting, character development, dialogue development, scene ordering, and so on. Why would I want to outsource that? Why would a reader be interested in that output rather than something I was trying to convey. Art lives in the gap between what an artist is trying to say and what an audience is trying to perceive - having an LLM involved breaks that.
So yeah, coding, technical writing, non-fiction, fiction, whatever: if you're using an LLM you're giving up and saying "I don't care about this", and that might be OK if you don't care about this, but do that consciously and own it and talk about it up-front.
> Outsource things that aren't valuable to you and your core mission.
When you outsource the generation and thinking, you're also outsourcing the self-review that comes along with evaluating your own output.
In the office, that review step gets outsourced to your coworkers.
Having a coworker who ChatGPT generates slides, design docs, or PRs is terrible because you realize that their primary input is prompting Claude and then sending the output to other people to review. I could have done that myself. Reviewing their Claude or ChatGPT output so they can prompt Claude or ChatGPT to fix it is just a way to get me to do their work for them.
8-bit. 16KiB of RAM. BASIC as the programming language. 640x256 resolution in 8 colours.
I could make that thing sing in an hour. It was hard to get it to do much, but then the difficulty was the fun thing.
By the time we got to the early 2000s and I could buy something with more RAM, CPU and storage than I could ever reasonably max out for the problems I was interested in at the time, I lost something.
Working within constraints teaches you something, I think. Doing more with less makes you appreciate the "more" you eventually end up with. You develop intuitions and instincts and whole skillsets that others never had to develop. You get an advantage.
I don't think we should be going back to 8-bit days any time soon, but in the context of this post, I want novices to try and build software on an A18 chip, I want learners to be curious enough to build a small word game (Hangman will do at first, but the A18 will let them push way, way past that into the limits of something that starts to feel hard all of a sudden), to develop the intuition of writing code on a system that isn't quite big enough for their ideas. It'll make them thirsty for more, and better at using it when they get it.
> Working within constraints teaches you something, I think.
It absolutely does. But every system has constraints; even when provided with massive resources, humans tend to try things that exceed those resources, as evidenced by Parkinson's Law of data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
It was worse than you remember. You could have 640x256 in monochrome, or 320x256 with 4 colours, or 160x256 with 16 colours (which IIRC was actually 8 distinct colours plus 8 flashing versions of them).
The game Elite did something extremely evil and clever: it was actually able to switch between modes partway through each frame, so that it could display higher-resolution wireframe graphics in the upper part of the screen and lower-resolution more-colourful stuff for the radar/status display further down.
Switching modes like that was common practice on the Amstrad CPC (which used the same 6845 video chip), but as time went on, people also learned how to change the base address of screen RAM part way through each frame. This gave you super-smooth hardware scrolling for the main game area while still retaining a static score display. Unfortunately it came too late in the machine's history to be used for more than a handful of games, but demo coders used it extensively (and still do).
I hear you, having learned programming on a machine even more constrained by the BBC Micro. But learners today are more likely to "Siri, build me a Hangman app."
I’m waiting for somebody to come and tell us about the time they punched cards by hand, one hole at the time, and then threw coal in the furnace to have the cards interpreted by a steam-powered computer.
Great example of allowing perfect to be the enemy of good.
If major advanced economies are able to move their entire grid away from coal, it means the entire grid globally can move from coal.
"Ah", the critics say, "but manufacturing is so much more complex!"
Really? These are not countries without manufacturing. They have data centres stacked with the latest generation of Nvidia chips, electric rail, major capital cities, populations of millions...
... and of course, China agrees and is trying to move towards decarbonisation of their grid.
Yes, it'll take time, but it'll take even longer if you never start.
Coal is so deeply irrational. Only when you plug your ears and scream can you block out comprehension of the massive local externalities that make it inefficient compared to other energy options. It is cheap to setup with minimal access to highly skilled professionals so it was a good option to bootstrap economies until recently when solar, wind and NG have become easy to access and cost competitive. It's perfectly reasonable to have a phase out timeline to avoid under utilizing paid-for infrastructure, but it is a dead technology.
Just this afternoon I was reading an account of one of the earliest known betting ledgers, the "Betting Book" at White's, a private member's club in London. In the 18th century, one of the most common bets taken up by members was which Lord or nobleman would outlive another. One bet had a note under it that the wager was not settled up by the bettors because the subjects both died of suicide within a few months of each other.
I say this as somebody who regularly travels around EMEA and the US: there is airport security at the same or higher level all around the World, and yet fewer people travelling in those countries seems to have the same level of problems.
My hot take is that its almost certainly a recruitment and training issue: there seem to be just enough bad apples getting through and not having poor behaviours trained out of them to mean the self-reported "these guys are idiots" numbers are higher than in other parts of the World.
Yeah, it is security theater, but other countries are way more relaxed than the US, especially small airports with few international flights.
When i was ~17, i had a friend with a false leg, with metal in it. We were late to our plane at a Moroccan airport (Agadir i think), we burst through the scanner gate that started beeping. He looked at the agent, tapped his leg, the agent made a "you can go" sign and we managed to get to the plane without any issue. I have seen very similar scene at Porto, it might be the mediterranean temper but i really think it has more to do with airport size (Lisbon airport agents seems more thorough)
This mechanism is stupid, corrupt and driving extreme behaviour.
But betting on war is not new, and I find it abhorrent that people will hand wave away the military-industrial complex as an essential component to modern civilisation while calling individuals making bets on war horrible names.
It's just scale and semantics, not core differences to my eye.
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