As opposed to posting on HN complaining about reddit, which is where the real money's at? Nah, this shit was dank enough to make it into popular culture. We have:
1. The shamelessness absurdity of using "market is up" to deflect from a pedo scandal
2. The fact that the market said "nope" and tanked immediately after Bondi tried to lean on it
It has been funny to watch the rise of "China is beating us" rhetoric against the steady backdrop of "mercantilism is obsolete/bad" dogma, because the elephant in the room is that China has been running a textbook mercantilist playbook.
Looks to my uneducated eye like China has been enforcing competitive markets internally, with consistent economic policies. Meanwhile the US has stopped enforcing antitrust altogether and keeps violently changing its mind about economic policy every four years.
And then externally Chinese policy is oriented around suppressing the value of its currency, which is basically a monopolist's tactic--artificially lowered prices in order to crowd out competition.
I think that's mercantilist-ish, but kind of a modern version?
It's definitely the opposite of what the US does, the currency is the world reserve and therefore drives the price of the dollar above what it would be without trade, which I guess makes exporting from the US much more difficult?
Anyone who is an expert in global economics please correct me here :)
I mean they did execute a wealthy banker a couple years ago. So I think the mercantile class occupies a different place in society there than in America
It's not exactly stuff of "wet dreams of the ownership class" to say that of the possible white collar careers, software engineering is pretty hard to beat in terms of salary vs work you need to put in.
This is a story of other careers having salaries pushed down relative to inflating essentials and the resulting economic surplus being squeezed into asset portfolios. It's a story of rich people getting paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are and soaking up more than 100% of economic growth for the last 50 years. Not a story of software engineers working for a living and getting what would have been a blue-collar salary for it.
Average salaries for software engineering seem higher compared to other professions because the jobs are mostly in the most expensive to live cities. There's no swe jobs in smaller towns but they're jobs for e.g. accountants.
The open source tooling got quantization support 3 years ago! It was a lesser type of quantization, but more than enough to prove that the savings just go to bigger models.
Not enough to diffuse liability. 15 years ago when recommender algorithms were the new hotness, I saw every single group of students introduced to the idea immediately grasp the implication that the endgame would involve pandering to base instincts. If someone didn't understand this, it's because
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair
Also, if I was a corporate simp conspiring to destroy Linux, this is exactly the type of stupid hill I would try to bait the open source community into dying on. If they add a stupid compliance feature that everyone bypasses in practice, there isn't much I can do, but if they insist on openly flaunting the law I can go to war.
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