To me, the pitch is take whatever you wanted to do with traditional technology and run a distributed lottery game for cash and prizes on top of it.
A database with a game show component for cash and prizes.
People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered.
There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.
IMO the whole idea is basically bullshit when applied to everyone as a blanket statement.
I know I would not be a good parent. I know I would resent the kid. It is bizarre to me too when someone who is married says this. Marriage isn't happening either for me so I 100% would be paying child support to a woman I absolutely resent too.
On the contrary, I think people who have children can not imagine the freedom that you have with never having children after 40. Children cost a fortune in currency and opportunity cost. I don't have to help with home work, pay for someone's college, pretend to have fun at some boring kids baseball game. Most of all though I have to live my dreams myself because there is no kid to live them through instead.
There is simply no way I would have lived the life I have if I had children. The valuation between the two situations isn't even close in my mind. I suspect there is a huge amount of coping and denial on the part of parents because once the kid is on its way, what else are you going to do?
Someone stealing a billion dollars is committing a far worse crime than someone that murders me.
The problem I have with this is imagine what a statistical poll would be if you posed the question "would you spend 20 years in jail for 1 billion?"
There is a good percentage that absolutely would sign up for that, obviously a much different result than "would you spend life in prison to get a billion dollars".
I think a more interesting question would be around risk of getting caught. Like, would you do it if you had a 10% chance of getting caught and going to jail? 20%? 30%? 50%?
Maybe more useful if hierarchical relationships exist but I just love treemaps in general. I love the way they can make the most of that given screen space. A bar chart would not be able to fit in that screen area because there has to be empty space in a bar chart.
Totally agree. What is hard to see right now in business is talked about by Charlie Munger in Poor Charlie's Almanac.
What you describe will save your company money because you are an early adopter but in the long run, everyone is going to do these kind of things and the savings will be passed on to the consumer.
Munger mentions this talking about a textile business they had. The new more efficient machine wasn't going to make the business better but just end up passing savings on to the consumer so they actually sold the business.
Management wouldn't have prioritized that project for engineering because it would have cost too much and have uncertain benefits given the cost.
This is all massively deflationary and certain highly prized skills that cost $120k a year per right now, will be $20 bucks a month in 2024 dollars someday.
Agreed. I think many businesses are finding use cases like ours. They're just not on HN disclosing it all.
I've said this many times but the only thing stopping me from using GPT4 API for everything in my life is inference cost - both context window limitations and cost per token. I would try to feed everything into GPT4 if I could.
Inference will be solved one day.
The cost to serve a website today is probably millions of times cheaper than in 1998. Heck, Cloudflare literally gives you unlimited bandwidth for your website for free. It's that cheap today.
When inference cost is much higher today and the cost to do inference is as cheap as loading a website today, I think the world will be profoundly different.
Yeah, the central park 5 were innocent but everyone was racist in the 80s if that is the standard. All those poor kids were doing was beating random people, stealing from them, and knocking them out and leaving them for dead to whoever might come along. But they weren't rapists.
Yes, and Trump was happy to judge before any facts came out (also well before the city settled for $41M), based apparently on (a) what he thought had happened, and (b) how he thought the justice system ought to work; most people in the 80s would not have done that.
Yes, Trump judged, and about 95% of society at that time did as well.
And the CP5 almost certainly were out there assaulting strangers in the park. What they (probably) didn't do was rape the lady. They just knocked her out so that someone else could come along and rape her.
In Peter Thiels 2013 book he describes successful founders and extreme personalities as having similar characteristics. It’s hard not to make similar observations about Musk (super genius, who is an idiot).
The social dynamics are too powerful to perceive anything real about them.
But supporters are not going to unite with haters to kill Trump, either literally or figuratively. Sure, Trump has a lot of the characteristics, but the way Girard says the scapegoat plays out is not going to happen with Trump. Even if he loses the election - even if he winds up in jail - a significant chunk of the country is still going to support him. He's not going to be universally condemned and unite everyone by their rejection of him.
Girardian theory describes the kinds of people who have scapegoat potential. It doesn’t prophecy that every insider/outsider will get killed, but that they have or are a sign of mimetic energy.
We are experiencing capulets vs mortigues.
Girard is also describing ancient origins. He argues the effectiveness and violence of scapegoating is reduced in modern context.
My theory is that any hegemons (lacking significant exterior scapegoat possibilities) sooner or later divide into factions.
When I was growing up in the States, there was a significant overlap between the left R wing and the right D wing. Since I left the Old Country, it seems (from afar) like that overlap has disappeared, and maybe there's even unoccupied space where the middle used to be.
If you are low balling yourself on salary in a cheaper cost of living area you can't compare yourself against someone in San Francisco who is good at negotiating and bragging about it online.
I don't have kids, I find children to be annoying at best but even I can not imagine not paying teachers so much as to make it a prestigious job that is tough to get.
From just a purely economic perspective, it seems like a trivial investment given the higher order effects.
Instead, we are going to suffer the higher order effects in the opposite direction.
Just insane but we seem to be getting really good as a society at making dumb decisions.
A database with a game show component for cash and prizes.
People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered.
There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.