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The gamblification of everything is just another stepping stone on the path to the financialization of everything. Many of our best and brightest dedicate their lives to “financial innovation”. It’s sad.

Indeed. Imagine a future where all news have a permanent “place your bet on this event! No money? No problem! 36 month financing plan available” banner in the side. You’ll first just have to purchase some stable coin that the broker mints. Automatic wage garnishment if you default.

You won’t have to buy stable coins, you’ll just pay with your credit cards. This is basically sports gambling applied to the sport of news. I bet they’ll use the same kind of emotional manipulation too: “Real republicans (fans) bet here.” You’ll be watching a political debate and then you’ll have a “the DraftKings Minute” debate analysis segment which is like three guys that don’t know anything about politics screaming about odds.

This sounds exactly like the timeline we are in.


Gamblification is very, very different from financialization.

It’s the financialization of outcomes.

Who does it though? I feel that many people that gamble are the ones that feel "they know better" and they don't see any better way to use their money. Having a part of the population with those attributes seems the root cause of the issue, rather than the specific mechanism they use.

A financialization example: Somehow some company's stock became the go-to for investors that had continuous expectations just for the stock, and not about actual company health. And the company chose to prop up the stock quarter per quarter, instead of investing in long term development, until it crashed.

This is somewhat similar to dangers of gamblification I guess. Where the expectations of the investors (gamblers) start shaping the decisions of the professional management of the company.


Some of it is, but Polymarket is a horse of a different color.

The exporters care because tariffs cause the demand curve for their products to shift to the left. As a result, the exporter can either choose to lower prices or sell fewer items. If they choose to lower prices, then that means the cost of the tariffs has “passed onto them.”

A market with only two players isn't much of a market.

TBF on the LLM side we currently have 4 big players, and a bunch of smaller ones. Plus a healthy bunch of open models, lagging ~1y behind SotA. The best thing for us consumers is that it stays this way. Any of them winning would be bad in general.

Or nowadays, any number of players.

Now that market data is made available by brokers and decisions can be colluded based on such data.


If you can read fast enough, grepping is probably faster than waiting for a compiler to tell you anything.

Faster for worse results, though. Determining the source of a symbol is not as trivial as finding the same piece of text somewhere else, it should also reliably be able to differentiate among them. What better source for that then the compiler itself?

Yeah, especially for languages that make heavy use of type inference. There’s nothing you can really grep for most of the time… to really know “who’s using this code” you need to know what the compiler knows.

An LLM can likely approach compiler-level knowledge just from being smart and understanding what it’s reading, but it costs a lot of context to do this. Giving the LLM access to what the compiler knows as an API seems like it’s a huge area for improvement.


It depends on the language and codebase. For something very dynamic like Python it may be the case that grepping finds real references to a symbol that won’t be found by a language server. Also language servers may not work with cross-language interfaces or codegen situations as well as grep.

OTOH for a giant monorepo, grep probably won’t work very well.


Trade deals with poorer countries usually hurt the working class of the richer countries and benefit the wealthy. It's basically freedom to perform labor arbitrage.

What happens if the person who wrote the code went on vacation? What happens if the code is many years old and no current team member has touched the code?

Understanding code you didn't personally write is part of the job.


I agree that understanding legacy code and code by other people is part of the job, but I don't see how these points are related.

> What happens if the person who wrote the code went on vacation?

They get yelled at, because shipping code at 5 pm on Friday and then leaving for vacation is typically considered a "dick move".

> What happens if the code is many years old and no current team member has touched the code?

Then the issue probably isn't caused by a recent deployment?


It's not as simple as it might seem at first glance. People often go into their basement and think "wow, it's cool down here. If only I could make my house this cool." But, as soon as you moved the air from your basement to your house, the air in your basement would be replaced by ambient air and would take time to be cooled by the Earth. And so you quickly realize you need a lot of thermal mass and an efficient way to move heat in order to keep up with removing the heat from your house.

The story of their shutdown is really quite crazy.

The shutdown was initiated by chancellor Gerhard Schröder. After killing Germany’s nuclear sector, he signed off on Nord Stream 1 as he was on his way out of office. Just after leaving office, Gazprom nominated him for the post of the head of the shareholders' committee of Nord Stream AG. Russia later nominated him to be on their largest oil producers board.

This guy basically sold out Germany’s energy independence for Russia.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der


That guy is lucky the bar for "Worst German Leader Ever" is very high.

There should be a law that lawmakers can only be scientific people when it comes to science, i.e scientist's and engineers not humanities or arts majors. These people take decisions which are absolutely absurd. The entire western world has stockpiles of plutonium which is not going to be used for anything other than mutual self destruction. Because of these anti nuclear activists types the western hemisphere has trillions of dollars energy locked in the plutonium bombs, that could have been used in Fast breeder reactors and would have benefitted humanity.

The (second) decision to exit nuclear was made by the Merkel government. Merkel is a physicist with a doctorate.

And the appointment is made by a jury of their technical peers rather than a politician who can cherry pick someone who's ideologically aligned.

> There should be a law that lawmakers can only be scientific people

Nope. Merkel was a scientist but she caved to the green's pressure to keep her coalition. Also she spent a decade of surplus in millions of refugees from Middle East and neglected infrastructure.

"Merkel obtained a doctorate in quantum chemistry in 1986 and worked as a research scientist until 1989" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel

"Policy Reversal: In May 2011, just months after extending reactor lives, Merkel's government announced a total phase-out of all nuclear plants by 2022."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631586#46632118


WoW, i stand corrected. Though my actual point was that now we have Plutonium and it cant be wished away it cant be put in silos, even if we lock it up in silos sooner or later say in a few centuries when people will forget about it those silos will leak and threaten humanity. There is no better way to get rid of it than spent it away in fast breeder reactors. It will threaten humanity sooner or later.

Why is trash an "enormous externality"? Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.

> Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.

Yes, but making them deal with it would create a massive incentive to either reduce the amount of rubbish they make, or to make it recyclable/processable.


It's an externality because the entity that sold it to you doesn't have to pay the consequences of dealing with the trash. OP said "dispose of it properly," which could mean a lot of things, all of which are better than leaving it on a beach.

Trash disposal (to regulated landfills, not beaches) is enormously inexpensive and increasing the cost of every item through a laborious return program doesn't improve anything.

Nearly all the plastic humans have made still exists.

The great garbage patch in the Pacific is growing fast. The plastic is ending up in everything. We need to do better.

Make less waste. Use less plastic.


> Nearly all the plastic humans have made still exists.

And it just doesn't matter. It's a tiny amount of mass / volume.

> The great garbage patch in the Pacific is growing fast.

Ocean plastics are almost entirely a consequence of (particularly Indonesian) fishing net waste, not Western consumer products disposed of in managed landfills. The "great garbage patch" is also very much overstating the scale of the problem; it's a slightly higher plastic density region of ocean.


> And it just doesn't matter. It's a tiny amount of mass / volume.

Are you sure? It’s getting into food. We are eating it and drinking it, and it’s getting more prevalent.


It's not getting there from competent landfills, and there are many many competent landfills. An elaborate return program wouldn't do better.

Go on, give us some numbers.

Because 7Bn people multiplied by a few kg/year doesn't seem trivial to me, but sounds like you can prove it.


The main thing about plastic is that it’s made from oil, and oil already exists in the ground. Putting it back into the ground is basically neutral minus the pollution involved in manufacturing.

Right, but there's ground and there's ground.

Geological strata vs shallow landfill sitting above aquifers and subject to near-term erosion.

Disposing of this stuff in deep mines seems like it'd be fine, unfortunately we haven't yet, at a society/economy level, found the discipline to do so. Presumably after a few mya of heat and pressure it'll be indistinguishable from other petrochemicals (which aren't particularly nice to begin with).


I don't think disposing of stuff deep in mines would be a good idea as it would be easy to contaminate the ground water. Modern landfills are generally well engineered and don't contaminate the surroundings too badly.

It doesn't go "back in the ground" though, does it? It gets scattered all over the ecology. When you take something that was buried deep and scatter it all over the surface - especially when that something is oil - that's usually considered an ecological disaster. Deepwater Horizon, the worst oil spill in history, has had catastrophic effects on the local wildlife, and it is still dwarfed in scale by the amount of plastic annually strewn to the four corners of the Earth.

7 billion kg at the density of water would fit in a cube 200 m on each side.

All the plastic ever produced could be stuffed back into one medium size coal mine. There are thousands of such mines and they are already ecologically disruptive.

It's a large amount when you think about the logistics to move it around the world, but a small amount compared to the total amount of stuff we take out of the earth.


We've produced 6-8 billion tons of plastic/plastic waste and its bulk density is much lower than water

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-plastics-productio...


It should be at a minimum stored safely. How and why are the environmental effects not a factor for you?

Regular trash is already stored safely.

The great pacific garbage patch disagrees.

As mentioned in the other thread, ocean plastics have nothing to do with landfill-disposed trash. They're mostly fishing nets waste, and at that, mostly from mismanagement by a handful of poor countries.

I'll assume good faith here and that you were simply unaware of the origins of the so-called great garbage patch, but in future discussions I think it would do your arguments some credence not to bring up ocean plastics in response to discussion about landfills.


It's not "normal competition" to be displaced by immigrants in your own country. Allowing that is simply allowing the capitalist class to assault and weaken the labor class.


And that is why elimination of the H1-B visa program has support from the left.


Exactly, I posted this quote elsewhere, but it's relevant here too:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/trump-presidentia...:

> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,

>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.

>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.

>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.

This is 100% the result of capitalist class overreach. They're fine with fucking over other people, but oh my how they whine when their interests are threatened. If they don't want to drive the country into the ground, they need to stop being so greedy. At the very minimum, the have-nots will eventually make sure they can no longer stay aloof from the pain, even if that means everyone is a little more worse off.


>It's not "normal competition" to be displaced by immigrants in your own country

Is it? It's just free market deciding you are not needed. What's the problem with that? Are you against the free marker or something?


Nah, these are all just taking points to be used when it's convenient, discarded when it's not. You can't expect internal consistency.


Yeah, having to compete with institutional capital for house ownership here is fine, but them having to compete with people from a country where they speak foreign languages is not fair. The duality of libertarian thinking.


I am against free market absolutism. I also think it's unrealistic to expect humans to put up with any and all examples of large foreign influxes that disrupt a person's local life/culture, as much as it would be nice for everybody to just be compatible with each other.


> Yeah, having to compete with institutional capital for house ownership here is fine, but them having to compete with people from a country where they speak foreign languages is not fair. The duality of libertarian thinking.

Any libertarian that's not extremely wealthy is stupid and was duped by propaganda.

Also there's an important difference between "institutional capital buying houses" and immigration: the former is all invisible lawyers in the background (you'd have no idea without investigative journalism), and the latter can be much more palpable to your average guy on the street. IMHO, an extremely important parts of how present-day elites maintain power in our current capitalist system is how they use diffuse responsibility and misdirection to deal with threats to their interest.


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