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Cake day: December 25th, 2023

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  • What you are describing is neoliberalism in its base form. If you want to dice deeper I to it I suggest Saez instead of some 16th hundred philosopher. (I’m not too familiar with Lockes work, this is more about time than profession or person).

    The reason why taxation works different than contract agreements is basically:

    Taxes are used as normalization tool, both in the fiscal as well as the social sense.

    In general you have three categories of tax: based on purchase, based on possession and based on income.

    Most modern countries use all three in a combination. The reason why it’s not purpose linked is simple: you can’t organize it.

    To give an example: How much worth does a future tax payer? And who benefits?

    Based on the answer to that question you’d either tax consumption (because future tax payers will keep cost low), income (because production facilities for future tax payers is taken from the workforce) or possession (because future tax payers are the foundation of generational transfer).

    And on top of that comes the big question of social normalizing effects: even very conservative counties tax higher incomes higher than low incomes to improve the overall Gini coefficient, i.e. achieve a bit of wealth distribution. Now you’re fully in “opinion” country though: How much should society pay for its weakest or unluckiest?

    And because it’s not yet complicated enough there’s one very simple element coming on top: “what can we get away with?”. Rules, especially if taxation, are only meaningful if they can be enforced.

    German highways for example have a dedicated tax for heavy transports for using those roads exactly the model you’ve described. 50 years ago that would’ve been technologically impossible to realize there.

    Now using a sidewalk as an exame and it becomes messy. Because the people directly using them would be the obvious choice. But what about the shops closeby which profit from foot traffic? What about the reduction in micro plastic pollution because those people don’t use cards (which produce about 1/3 of it). What about my body weight? I’m fat and will damage the ground a very tiny bit more than someone who’s half my weight. And what about paramedics using it? The rulebooks and exceptions will be either: broad and easy to abuse, broad and they will exclude many people from using the infrastructure or narrow which brings both at the same time.

    To come back to your example: you pay for school because it’s the one institution that makes sure that our economy will work a few years down the road, having new consumers and taxable incomes which are needed for me to continue, well, existing. And you do have a verbal agreement: “I’m choosing to stay in the place I am”. This binds you to its laws, including taxation.

    Now if you argue that you’d just want to keep what’s yours then usually just looking one generation back already makes that break apart: where did your parents income and education come from, what social structures did they benefit from, etc.

    But: All of this is not intended as “taxes are good as-is”. A) I have no idea what your frame of reference is and B) it’s not in my opinion. But it’s complex. Really really complex because the whole system changes depending on reference timeframe, social norm and the societies past and present goals.



  • This got way longer than expected but the tldr is: foreign exchange is super complex and depends on a lot of factors which don’t matter to you as money user. I tried to give a few examples below.

    Plus: You’re mixing up two very different concepts:

    Fiat evaluation and purchasing power.

    First, money;

    “More worth” is a natural instinct but doesn’t reflect how the money market works: it’s a question of how much of that money is in circulation as well for example:

    1107650 CHF Million 19396,90 USD Billion

    (Source tradingeconomics.com ).

    So while it’s the CHF is slightly over value when compared one to one the picture is different when you look at total money available. Then you look at production capacity, glue creation and supply and demand for those currencies. All of this will flow into the price.


    The minimum wage discussion is a completely different one: here you need to compare minimum wage to the purchasing power of the area you are looking at and take into consideration how the tax and financial situation changes to be able to compare it.

    There’s for example concept called big Mac index which is a crude way of showing the difference: how much does MacDonald’s charge for their bullshit? They are everywhere and quite good at finding a acceptable local price.

    If you want to dive deeper a key word to look for is the Gini Index with which the wealth distribution is quantified. I’m not good enough to explain it well though.


    Now for the colors: design of money is the job of the nations (or unions) main bank to decide usually. The US seem to have the creativity of a washed down rock while others are more creative.

    The Euro money for example is designed with guardrails by each member country but color, size and form are fixed and optimized to be easily recognized even with various visual impediments, which I personally really like.




  • That’s the problem though: scientific discourse is actually killed by “both sides”, the conspiracy nutjobs overwhelmed is so much that even common sense discussions around rare edge cases are easily disregarded as “delving into conspiracy”.

    To be clear: I’m not blaming you individually but the fuckers who poisoned all discussions to the point where most of us assume bad faith from anyone and anything using the internet. :(

    For this example: This is not about conspiracy but about strain management. Until the flu vaccine is produced and distributed we know if the bet this year which strains will dominate actually came true.

    For me it’s not a question. I’ll get them anyway - but some people react very strong to the vaccine z having dlu symptoms for up to five days (still not terrible compared to the real thing - but if science already tells us that there’s little to no protection it’s becoming a calculation).




  • In case you wanna give it a shot: I gave writing samples of myself from chat and emails to a self hosted LLM, telling it to extract the writing style deviations, key elements, common phrases, symbols, patterns, etc. Then gave that as a “answer it this style” system prompt expansion - works like … Quite okay. Still need to go over it or course but it doesn’t sound like marketing bullshit but conveys what I want.

    Completely agree with your general assessment though! They’re getting better but the marketing machinery is crazy in their claims.








  • I tried more “niche from a popular perspective”. You’re right, especially alpine is in the background of a lot of docker containers but rarely an end user who just want their desktop environment knows them.

    For nixos I’ve not yet seen anyone in the enterprise world pushing for it - there it’s still all about containerization and orchestration in cloud environments, using that as reproducibility layer. That might change though with data sovereignty discussions going on.


  • I can see where you’re coming from! Specifically this community though I’ve not seen it a lot - you’re completely right though, the more native one becomes the more one is confronted with it.

    I’m still struggling with the slowness of things (e.g. a quick endpoint change) and I can’t get my head around reason error messages “fluently”, i.e. I have to think about what the errors want to tell me instead of resolving it - a bit like old python stuff really.

    And then there are the edge cases … It took me a long time to change the config the very first time while offline - which makes sense from a model perspective but from my user brain it was just … wrong :D

    Perhaps I should switch my clients as well to get more exposure…



  • If you are truly serious: this is not how hallucinations work. It’s really best to think of it as “fancy auto complete”. The hallucinations happen when the next token is too disconnected from what we as humans would call as “belonging together”. But it’s all math after all.

    Limit the k value, tube down temperature and cut off context size and the issue of hallucinations is a non-topic for “transcribe and summarize”.

    You get into what I’d call “stupid” territory like you’re describing.


    Your second point I fully agree with and is the reason why I’d ask the doc directly. To give the personal anecdote: the transcript itself helps me to focus on exactly the topics you’ve described: who’s confused? Where was agreement? Where did people just not speak up?

    A specific hallucination example I see every other day for example are tasks: that thing “thinks” that “we should” or “you must” are always tasks and outcomes which is utter bullshit - but I know that and using the transcript part helps me focus on the important part, the humans.