It was the same clergy (or rather parts of it) that used the printing press to great success.
Martin Luther used it to spread his influence extremely quickly for example. Similarly, the clergy used new innovations in book layout and writing to spread Christianity across Europe a thousand years before that.
What is weird about LLMs though, is that it isn't a simple catalyst of human labor. The printing press or the internet can be used to spread information quickly that you have previously compiled or created. These technologies both have a democratizing effect and have objectively created new opportunities.
But LLMs are to some degree parasitical to human labor. I feel like their centralizing effect is stronger than their democratizing one.
Everyone who tells the story of the reformation leaves out that Martin Luther also used this new technology to widely disseminate his deranged anti-Semitic lies and conspiracies, leading to pogroms against Jews, a hundred years of war across Europe, and providing the ideological basis for the rise of Nazism.
I well remember what happened in 2008 (caused by government's deregulation by the way, not "technocratic managerialist", whatever it means).
Despite the severity of what happened, jobs rapidly recovered and were around the same pre-financial crisis levels (and well above US averages) in a matter of few years and workers earnings were at or above 2008 levels (inflation adjusted) by 2016.
All in all, as severe 2008 was, I don't see how free market economy made it more, rather than less severe. It's at best an opinion.
"Caused by government deregulation" could also be phrased as "not prevented by regulation, while caused by financial markets".
The rest of the market recovered quickly once the government re-arranged debt and prevented a full collapse.
But the lesson was that private debt was accumulating too quickly on a shaky basis, catalyzed by financial markets making the issue orders of magnitudes worse. Rapid private debt accumulation is still not discussed enough today for my taste.
From a contemporary standpoint these categories are basically just ideologies. There has been a steady shift in economics towards empiricism, dynamic modeling and so on since a while now. Ideologies always have glaring blindspots, so their predictions and perspectives never really match up with reality.
With Blow the devil is simultaneously in the details and at the meta level.
For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles.
I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.
I enjoyed the Witness for a while but I bounced off it pretty hard in the Mountain. It wasn’t until I watched a let’s play on YouTube that I learned there was a film room, a hidden cave complex under the mountain, a time trial, and other optional secrets. I can absolutely understand a certain type of gamer liking this but for me Talos Principle (both 1 and 2) is peak puzzle genre.
That said I’ll probably buy this game if it comes out next year.
I found them quite boring since they are all repetitions on the same theme - just drawing lines on a square. It could have been a mobile game. The world doesn't feel connected to the puzzles, and the exploration aspect of it could have been a completely separate game. It feels like two games glued together, which is IMO not a good design.
It's also not a game that's very demanding from a technical performance perspective, and really has very limited numbers of active entities / animations, so why should I care about his opinions on game architecture or anything else?
> People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if/else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn't care about logarithmic complexity.
Both Blow and Muratori would likely advocate for the this type of code to some degree.
The irony is that parents feel like their kids are safer and more sheltered when they restrict their movement, while the opposite is true.
There was never a time in history where kids would be targeted and manipulated by corporations as today. The digital phone is a marketing gadget that brainwashes us to constantly interact with it. In extreme cases, every aspect of our lives is being scored, monetized and compared. Everything has become a hyper individualized hustle.
To make it a bit tropey, a sheltered kid is much more susceptible to people luring them out of their safe space with promises of excitement and Things Their Parents Would Not Approve Of.
Of course, the data (e.g. teen pregnancies) shows that this isn't a universal / statistically provable truth, but still. It makes sense in my head.
Switzerland taxes wealth instead of capital gains (except for professional investors).
In some ways taxing wealth is quite simple, because wealth is already meticulously recorded via contracts and owners go out of their way to estimate the magnitude of their wealth for example to borrow money or for other financial and economic obligations.
Another approach would be to tax capital gains at the same rate as income and introduce additional top brackets. I have a hard time to find a good faith reason for capital gains to be taxed less than labor.
But there are enough other ways where it's really hard and unsolved. Imagine someone bought an $X irreplaceable ancient urn to hold the ashes of their parents.
How do you calculate the $Y "wealth" inside that non-fungible urn on their mantelpiece today? How can one determine which "I would buy that for X" statements are falsely low or falsely high?
> owners go out of their way to estimate the magnitude of their wealth for example to borrow money
I have no inherent problem linking one voluntary claim of wealth to another conclusion of wealth... But what happens when someone wealthy who doesn't actually need any loans applies for them while presenting themselves as a pauper?
Or cases where someone seeks a loan and their rationale is "I may have negative net worth but you'll be made whole because you're first in line", as opposed to "I have high net worth"?
> I have a hard time to find a good faith reason for capital gains to be taxed less than labor.
Consider a small company of AcmeCo with 1-10 workers all dedicated to the art of Acme'ing, each taking tiny wages (but accepting shares) because they believe in the mission and want to launch the company.
On a technical level, anything they (might) get would be capital gains, but clearly it's not the same as passive rents with no labor behind it. It's closer to deferred wages.
Capital gains are risky to generate. Many investments completely fail and when that happens, investors get very little tax relief.
If you increase capital gains tax, the more risky ideas will no longer be viable investment vehicles even though some of them would have been successful. Across the entire economy, the net effect will be less innovation, stagnation, and loss of power relative to foreign countries.
Tax rates are carefully tuned to maximize tax revenue without unduly disincentivizing production. To change them purely based on vibes would be catastrophically stupid.
> Capital gains are risky to generate. Many investments completely fail and when that happens, investors get very little tax relief.
You seem to conflate and misunderstand a few things here. For one, capital gains are paid out from profits, so they leave the company's budget and are not part of investment.
Secondly, holding stock and stock trading has been immensely profitable, relatively low risk and require little if done reasonably and over long periods.
More and more studies are affirming that simply buying index funds and holding them over long periods is _less_ risky than buying bonds.
> Tax rates are carefully tuned to maximize tax revenue without unduly disincentivizing production.
They reflect power relations and tax competition more than anything.
> To change them purely based on vibes would be catastrophically stupid.
Not based on "vibes". The people who actually generate wealth are workers and consumers, not stock holders.
> Please don't vote.
We should mutually respect our rights to vote even if we disagree.
> Many investments completely fail and when that happens, investors get very little tax relief
I don't really believe it. Investment is always incentivized by tax breaks and other political gifts. But once things turn bad it's the citizen's turn to pay for it. Fire all staff? We pay for unemployment. Pollute the soil? We pay for cleanup. Empty the water table? Guess who's gonna depend on the state for clean water...
> To change them purely based on vibes would be catastrophically stupid.
Please tell that to every neo liberal in my country. Reducing taxes on the rich seems to be their passtime, while every time some kind of capital gain is mentioned, everyone and their dogs become experts in economics and can tell you it's folly.
Martin Luther used it to spread his influence extremely quickly for example. Similarly, the clergy used new innovations in book layout and writing to spread Christianity across Europe a thousand years before that.
What is weird about LLMs though, is that it isn't a simple catalyst of human labor. The printing press or the internet can be used to spread information quickly that you have previously compiled or created. These technologies both have a democratizing effect and have objectively created new opportunities.
But LLMs are to some degree parasitical to human labor. I feel like their centralizing effect is stronger than their democratizing one.
reply