The Netflix deal with Obama for $50M and book deals for $65M are a bit blatant. Certainly a $8B crypto rug pull is far worse by a few orders of magnitude. I think it’s weird that these are the new standards, I really hate presidential politics. Perhaps Jimmy Carter was the least damaging and he was forced to give up his family farm.
One difference is that the few on the right that I know (I’m sure a biased sampling) think that what Trump did is wrong but those on the left seem to have forgotten all about Obama’s deals or worse they think that its kosher.
Maybe you can explain why the Netflix deal is corruption? The deal was signed after he was out of office (2018). Did he or people in his administration create policy that benefited Netflix in exchange for this deal? Was there any sort of quid pro quo? Where is the abuse of office?
The ability for Netflix to operate as it does is entirely dependent on banks lending it vast sums of money, the same banks that staffed the Obama admin who continued the bailouts. Corruption doesn’t have to be a direct quid pro quo, that’s the standard needed for bribery, I did not suggest Obama was bribed. Because it’s in the interest of the corrupt to hide their practices the general way of avoiding it is to avoid the appearance of impropriety, and on that standard I believe Obama has failed.
There's a difference between favors and corruption, there has always been. It's something called regulations. We the people must tolerate a certain amount of favors, but there's a line: You cannot accept these favors while in office, particularly so when the exchange involves a public good or decision. You must sell your peanut farm before you hold office. You can't accept a plane from a foreign government in exchange for use of an airbase while in office. The things you do in office must be for the people. The things you do after may be immoral but they don't impact your decisions while in public service.
I don't know where this narrative comes from. He wasn't forced to do any such thing. He voluntarily put his family peanut seed business into a blind trust when elected, with his personal lawyer as trustee. He subsequently only gave up the business once he took control again after his presidency, because it was in massive debt.
I’m assuming the property was mismanaged during his presidency, which means it largely amounts to the same thing. Evidence I would be looking for would be evidence that it wasn’t mismanaged, or that if Carter had retained control that the farm still would have gone bankrupt.
In the general case it’s near impossible to find a third party who can run your family farm as well as you can, a task made more difficult if that person also has to be a lawyer.
It’s miracle drug, I’ve been on it for a few years now, it would have been sooner but usage data wasn’t available at the scale I needed before the ozempic craze. I have hEDS and part of that is ME/CFS and uncontrollable weight gain, so naturally I was looking for help with weight loss with the understanding that drugs that help with weight loss could be treating an underlying mechanisms that was causing the weight gain. Low Dose Naltrexone is another drug that also helps with weight loss and hEDS, so I was looking for more of the same. I still don’t know the underlying mechanisms but my autoimmune conditions have largely been resolved. Like cheap solar electricity, I see GLP1s as basically an absolute win. Of course people shouldn’t abuse the drug and they should also change their habits.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons I waited for usage data is that I was pretty sure people with hEDS would have an overly strong reaction, and that did happen in my case and appears to have happened with other with hEDS. I started at 0.025mg (1/20th the 0.5mg starting dose at the time) and still got temporary gastroparesis which was indeed very uncomfortable. I had done long term fasting prior to semaglutide so I had to just stop eating for a long time while the effects started to wear off. Over the first year I ramped up linearly to 1mg and I've been at that dose since.
Thanks, highly recommended. I forgot to answer, I don’t have MCAS but I do get PEM which I do believe is another form of allergic reaction. I do like to eat histamine inducing foods and I wonder if has kept MCAS desensitized.
I discovered I had PEM this year from working out. Found a trainer that is teaching me to stay in a non hyper mobile range + pacing and that is generally more manageable.
Good luck with the GLP-1. Hit me up via email if you’d like to chat more: HN username at gmail.
No, it's the worst, just fat but also because I was dieting so much I couldn't tell if I was tired from not eating enough or if I had ME/CFS. After I gained the weight people would blame my fatigue on me being fat, ignoring that I was fatigued before gaining the weight.
In the same way that CICO (calories in, calories out) is a hard metabolic rule of weight gain, eating lot of complete protein and lifting heavy things is a hard physiological rule of "getting jacked" .
It's conceivable that future drug discoveries could safely reduce the amount of lifting required. But the protein requirements will always remain.
You obviously need some amount of protein as building material, but people eat much more than that because having a big excess encourages more muscle growth.
Not really, CICO is overly simplified to complete pointlessness. It's all hormonal, if you want to gain mass you can take a myostatin inhibitor which is a class of drugs that have already been discovered. You can also eat protein and lift heavy but that's just another way of managing your hormones.
These are very new and untested in large populations, but from everything I've heard so far it seems they still won't magically make you gain muscle without lifting heavy things and eating protein. They'll just take the limiter off when you do that so you can gain even more muscle than you would otherwise.
There is conservation of energy, you're not going to gain mass without eating, but if you change nothing else and take a myostatin inhibitor or any other medication that inhibits myostatin (like growth hormones) it is guaranteed you will gain muscle.
There are many people and animals who have dysfunctional myostatin so we already know what happens when myostation is inhibited.
Growth hormones inhibit myostatin so any regular GH or GHRP will help build muscle and retain it and the effect of these have been extensively studied.
I had hired 3 junior/mid lvl devs and paid them to do nothing but study to improve their skills, it was my investment in their future, I had a big project on the horizon that I needed help with. After 6 months I let them go, the improvement was far too slow. Books that should have taken a week to get through were taking 6 weeks. Since then LLM have completely surpassed them. I think it’s reasonable to think that some day, maybe soon, LLMs will surpass me. Like everyone else, I have to the best I can while I can.
But this is an issue of worker you're hiring. I've worked with senior engineers who a) did nothing (as - really not write any thing within the sprint, nor do any other work) b) worked on things they wanted to work on c) did ONLY things that they were assigned in the sprint (= if there were 10 tickets in the sprint and they were assigned 1 of these tickets then they would finish that ticket and not pick up anything else, staying quiet) d) worked only on tickets that have requirements explicitly stated step by step (open file a, change line 89 to be `checkBar` instead of `checkFoo`... - having to write this would take longer than doing the changes yourself as I was really writing in Jira ticket what I wanted the engineer to code, otherwise they would come back with "not enough spec, can't proceed"). All of these cases - senior people!
Sure - LLMs will do what they're told (to a specific value of "do" and "what they're told")
Sure there is a wide spectrum of skills, having worked in FANG and top tier research I have a pretty good idea of the capability at the top of the spectrum. I know I wasn't hiring at that level. I was paying 2x the local market rate (non-US) and pulling from the functional programming talent pool. These were not the top 1% but I think they were easily top 10% and probably in the top 5%.
I use LLMs to build isolated components and I do the work needed to specialize them for my tasks and integrate them together. The LLMs take fewer instructions to do this and handle ambiguity far better. Additionally because of the immediate feedback look on the specs I can try first with a minimally defined spec and interactively refine as needed. It takes me far less work to write specs for LLMs than it does for other devs.
You're (unwittingly?) making an argument for using an LLM: you know what you're going to get. It does not take six months to evaluate one; six minutes suffice.
The argument I'm trying to make is that hiring a real person or using LLMs has upsides and downsides. People have their own agendas, can leave, can affect your business in many ways, unrelated to code etc, but also can learn, can be creative and address problems that you've not even surfaced. LLM will not and will not be capable of that.
With LLMs you know what you're going to get to a certain value. Will it not listen to you? No. Will it not follow your instructions? Maybe. Will it produce unmaintainable garbage? Most certainly. Does that matter for nondevs? Sometimes
> After 6 months I let them go, the improvement was far too slow.
The bit that's missing from this story is the "why" the improvement was far too slow. Was it primarily a failure to hire the right people, a failure to teach them what you wanted them to learn, a failure to understand what you needed to teach, or a deliberate lie on the part of all three of them to steal from you?
And even if their progress had been faster, now they are a capable developer who can command higher compensation that statistically your company won’t give them and they are going to jump ship anyway.
One didn't even wait, they immediately tried to sub-contract the work out to a third party and make a transition from a consultant to a consultancy company. I had to be clear that they are hired as named person and I very much do care about who does the work.While not FANG comp it was ~2x the market rates, statistically I think they'd have a hard time matching that somewhere else. I think in part because I was offering these rates they got rather excited about the perceived opportunity in being a consultancy company, i.e. the appetite grows with the eating. I'm not sure if it's something that could be solved with more money, I guess in theory with FANG money but it's not like those companies are without their dysfunctions. With LLMs I can solve the same problem with far less money.
Around 80% of my work is easy while the remaining 20% is very hard. At this stage the hard stuff is far outside the capability of LLM but the easy stuff is very much within its capabilities. I used to hire contractors to help with that 80% work but now I use LLMs instead. It’s far cheaper, better quality, and zero hassle. That’s 3 junior / mid level jobs that are gone now. Since the hard stuff is combinatorial complexity I think by the time LLM is good enough to do that then it’s probably good enough to do just about everything and we’ll be living in an entirely different world.
Exactly this, I lead cloud consulting + app dev projects. Before I would have staffed my projects with at least me leading it and doing the project management + stakeholder meetings and some of the work and bringing a couple of others in to do some of the grunt work. Now with Gen AI even just using ChatGPT and feeding it a lot of context - diagrams I put together, statements of work, etc - I can do it all myself without having to go through the coordination effort of working with two other people.
On the other hand, when I was staffed to lead a project that did have another senior developer who is one level below me, I tried to split up the actual work but it became such a coordination nightmare once we started refining the project because he could just use Claude code and it would make all of the modifications needed for a feature from the front end work, to the backend APIs, to the Terraform and the deployment scripts.
Sometimes giving people what they want can be bad for them; management wants cheap compliant workers, management gets cheap compliant workers, and then the projects fall apart in easily predictable and preventable ways.
Because such failures are so common management typically isn’t punished when they do so it’s hard to keep interests inline. And because many producers are run on a cost plus basis there can be a perverse incentive to do a bad job, or at least avoid doing a good one.
While I agree it is unfair and it would be better if they didn’t, the reality is that there is a meta-game at a higher level and they are playing according to the meta-game rules. Part of the meta-game is to convince others to stay in the regular game sandbox which gives rise to the hypocrisy we are all familiar with. I don’t know what it would take to diminish the meta-gaming let alone eliminate it, it’s very hard to stop things that are very profitable. I also think we’re in the looting phase of corporatocracy. I think the result of this means the meta-gaming rapidly grows like a cancer to take over everything.
We have oligarchic corporatism, not democratic capitalism, though I guess that is what is meant by the phrase ‘late stage capitalism’. The problem is that we already have regulatory capture, a more powerful regulatory system leaves us with fewer ways to escape the oligarchs control.
The problem isn’t the number of regulators or how muscular they are. It’s that there’s no functioning enforcement. You can design the neatest regulatory framework in the world, but if the people meant to uphold it look the other way, you may as well print it on kitchen roll.
Take MI5. Their remit explicitly includes safeguarding the democratic system. Yet when you’ve got a government holding cosy meetings with global asset managers and, like magic, Digital ID turns into a flagship national policy nobody voted for, where are they? Nowhere. They’re busy pumping out LinkedIn-based “espionage alerts” about Chinese headhunters while ignoring policy capture happening in broad daylight. They don’t even need the Prime Minister’s blessing to investigate that kind of threat. They just… don’t.
So yes, we have oligarchic corporatism. But the real failure is that the institutions meant to keep it in check have basically checked out.
In my opinion these institutions only had stated intentions of keeping democracy in check. I think they’ve always been tool for oligarchic forces to use against the masses and each other.
To me the apparent incompetence of the SFO is better explained as a mechanism for the UK gov to double dip on bribes / campaign donations when the first one was insufficient.
I think the effective anti corruption institutional culture was built when there was competition between empires and it was in the empires interest to do so.
There is still a general perception that the UK has comparatively low levels of corruption but I attribute this to low levels of petty corruption. It is still in the interest of a corrupt state that lower level corruption is effectively policed as they are in competition. So it’s very possible that the majority of the population will not be privy to corruption while at the same time the majority of important decisions made are corrupted.
They have more scope to experiment, in my case it was a way for me to access PRP injections before wider adoption. They are paid rather orthography to treatment, they can treat other things while also giving you regular spinal adjustments - similar to the idea that researchers should be paid to teach as paying them to research will pollute the research. We need a way to continue paying dentists so they can stop finding ‘soft spots’ that don’t exist.
I dislike the quackery but traditional science isn’t free from it either. I wish everyone was rational, evidence based and disinterested (as in not having a particular interest on biasing an outcome). But the world we live in is far from that. Consider the percentage of ‘normal’ medical doctors in Germany who believe in homeopathy. A large part of that is due to the terrain school of thought in medicine which lost out to germ theory. An artifact of history rather than rational people and rational study. I’m still looking for a better way the phrase it; but it seems to me that the belief in the belief of science far exceeds the actual belief in science.
If doctors / medical researchers really were so good at research they wouldn’t have taken so long to rediscover the ancient practice of prolotherapy.
(To be fair, chiros are not unique in grifting PRP -- I've seen traditional doctors selling it too.)
> Consider the percentage of ‘normal’ medical doctors in Germany who believe in homeopathy.
I hadn't heard of this, but, yeah, that's also quackery. Wild. 32% of German GPs report "using" homeopathy once a week. The US medical system may have some problems, but at least believing in homeopathy isn't one of them.
I had a limp from an injury that persisted for 8 years before PRP cleared it up in 3 months. I would have gotten the French sucrose injections earlier but France was a far way off and I couldn’t afford it at the time. I put it in the bucket of prolotherapy not in the bucket of stem cells and on that basis it absolutely works. Being a substance derived from the patient allows it to skip over regulatory hurdles, as mentioned I would have taken sucrose but that wasn’t on offer. The evidence for prolotherapy working is extensive, far exceeding a single study.
I think the economic background has changed, in 2008 it was after a big run up in wealth so the reversion wasn’t so bad, there was some fat to cut. Since then people have been ground down to the breaking point, another 2008 wipeout will cut into the bone. I do think this time it could be different.
