but that’s not science, right? Dawkins and his ilk cling to science as a cure for religion yet if we are to believe that our absence of understanding of consciousness means computers can be conscious then our absence of understanding of the universe means god may exist.
“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
They're an anthropomorphic avatar of everything that is wrong with the business of technology. They're the broken promises of technology with a face. The promise of technology that we've all bought into is a better world, a world that lifts people up, instead we've got these dumb little robots that drive around making it even harder for people to survive. If we lived in a world where everyone's basic needs were met, these little robots would make you feel different.
Deliveries use hands because humans have hands, not because hands are a prerequisite for deliveries. Last mile is already “solved” with the little robots that drive around cities, no need for hands. Humans are useful because of our brains, because we can adapt to almost any situation for very little cost. Humanoid robots will remain a novelty until the cost is reduced far beyond what is plausible.
How do we define common? I’ll bet that in 5 years, the average person, even in somewhere like SF, will not see a humanoid robot during their every day life.
> Last mile is already “solved” with the little robots that drive around cities, no need for hands.
And yet we haven’t seen widespread adoption because they can’t handle stairs, steep slopes, streets without sidewalks, sidewalks with mud, or a hundred other real world challenges
We haven’t seen widespread adoption because they can’t hope to compete with human delivery drivers on cost. The cost to DoorDash and Uber Eats of a delivery driver is nothing upfront and a few dollars per delivery. The cost of a delivery robot is thousands of dollars upfront and more per delivery. Stairs aren’t even in the top 10 problems these robots face, they’re more than capable of delivering to most customers already.
School meal funding would not cost more than $55bn or even close to $55bn. California’s program, subtracting initial implementation cost, was close to $1bn to feed ~10% of U.S. public school students 2 free meals per day. $55bn couldn’t fund a free school meal program indefinitely but I am sure the ongoing costs of the drone program could, this $55bn isn’t a one time cost.
Almost every high volume service on the internet is write a little, read a lot, and when there are writes, they're relatively small, a few bytes into a database that can fan out. GitHub is very different: constant writes, large files, it is under far more pressure than the systems the rest of us build. And then, as the article says, vibecoding happens, and suddenly they're receiving 30x the volume of expensive operations. GitHub are responsible for many of the performance improvements made to Git over the years, Git scales today because of work GitHub did, but that work was never intended to scale to volume of today.
Even as recently as 18 months ago, Lovable appeared, seemingly overnight, and caused huge problems for GitHub because they were creating repositories on GitHub for every single Lovable project, offloading the very high cost onto GitHub, hundreds of thousands of repositories. A couple of years before that, Homebrew used GitHub as a de facto CDN and that was a huge problem, too.
Nowadays it is easy to imagine how we can scale out a service like Twitter or YouTube or Facebook because everything has been done before, but that's not true of Git, Git hasn't ever scaled like this before, there are very few examples of service with GitHub's characteristics.
Personally, I’m sympathetic. We know that GitHub did a huge amount of work over the last decade to make Git scale, which has benefited us all. These new scaling challenges are real challenges, 30x growth would be a nightmare for any system that was already pushing the limits of what was possible, I think we are being far too hard on GitHub, they deserve a little grace.
GitHub's scaling issues are caused by their own vendor-lock approach and monopoly. Yes, of course _their_ goal is to be even bigger and even more all-consuming, so _they_ have to deal with the scale. Why a user would be sympathetic to that?
The user (and not a big tech monopoly) answer to scaling issues is almost always to stop scaling and start federating and interoperating.
For all the negatives about github I agree. They offer a lot of free stuff, and LLMs seem likely to put massively increase their costs with no guarantee they'll be making money off it. I can't think of many (any?) large businesses which could scale up to meet so much new demand without some significant growing pains along the way.
SSO, access tokens, secrets are all bound to the Organization level - if you work on multiple Organizations you have to log in separately... You also cannot have nested Organizations.
I assume you’re being sarcastic but just in case: the goal of single payer healthcare isn’t to spend the least amount of money on healthcare. The goal of single payer healthcare is to guarantee everyone a minimum quality of life. You can believe that the minimum quality of life includes the option to engage in unprotected sex and sky diving.
I’m not being sarcastic. If you live in a society that chooses to force people to pay for other’s healthcare costs, you must support banning high risk behavior.
Not out of frugality. It’s a simple issue of fairness. 5% of the healthcare consumers will result in 95% of the costs. Why is it fair that the 5% that choose to engage in high risk behavior are subsidized at the expense of the 95% that choose not to?
What is this comment? Yes, society curtails behaviors?
We wear helmets and seatbelts?
Insurance is entirely about paying a small amount so that the costs of being on the wrong side of bad luck doesn’t pauper your citizenry. A single payer system wildly reduces the amount that has to be paid, while increasing service outcomes since now you can negotiate with drug companies.
I would happily pay for that kind of system as well, because I am happy to ensure that the rest of the nation is better off.
But… wait… what? Based on you what you say… why do you put money into an insurance system? It sounds like you want to make the most rational choice, but you are working off of a model of insurance that doesn’t make sense.
The maximally effective version, with the least cost, and greatest coverage is one that distributes costs across the largest pool of individuals. Which is a single payer system.
I put money into an insurance system to diffuse risk away from myself.
> The maximally effective version, with the least cost, and greatest coverage
It would be even more effective to just enslave a bunch of people and force them to pay for my healthcare, but I don’t advocate for that because it’s immoral and unfair.
You are already paying for other people's healthcare costs, whether it's private or public!
If you pay for home insurance (you kind of have to unless you own your home outright or are renting), you're paying for other people's fire or water damage. And one day they might pay for yours.
If there's a lot of fires or water damage, everyone's costs go up.
It's not a perfect analogy because of factors that affect individual policies, such as the replacement cost of the home, moving next to a fireworks store, moving into a flood zone, etc. You pay more when your home is more at risk.
1. Many landlords don’t require tenant’s insurance.
2. If you choose to get a mortgage you have to pay for homeowner’s insurance yes. You have the option to not get a mortgage if you prefer.
Notice how in both of the above, there is no third party forcing me to pay for anybody’s bad choices.
He’s welcome to pay for home insurance if he likes. That doesn’t mean I’m forced to pay for it. It’s like saying that I’m forced to pay for other people’s education because the Starbucks provides it as a benefit. Not really lol
Society is by definition “forcing” people to carry the burden of other’s choices. You’re drawing an entirely arbitrary line at direct taxation. Why is it “fair”? Because society isn’t zero sum. We each give and take in different ways.
Your perception of drug users is woefully out of date. The most “valuable” members of society by your metric (contributing tax dollars) are using a lot of drugs. The U.K. upper middle class are snorting so much coke.
Personal anecdotes and bias. I’ve never met anyone successful who regularly consumes drugs as serious as cocaine. At worst it’s marijuana, with minor experimentation with harder substances in college or on special occasions.
"Regularly" is doing a lot of work here. Plenty of rich and successful people dabble in drugs. People with any level of wealth who can function normally in society while habitually and regularly using any substance are pretty obviously much less likely to develop a habit in the first place.
Not habitual and not anything harder than marijuana no.
I don’t believe that I have little life experience, I live in a wealthy part of the United States and my circle’s median income is in the 300s, so I think I have a pretty solid impression of the type of habits successful people engage in and don’t engage in
“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
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