While YouTube still displays it word by word, forcing you to not look at the video.
Cheers to Netflix in the age of user hostile and anti ergonomic patterns (while they still have their fair share of sins in this area, at least one good news)
Niles: [walks in] Hello, Dad. I believe we switched videotapes on
accident.
Martin: Believe me, I noticed.
Niles: Yes, there you go. [hands over video] At first I was dismayed.
I popped in the tape, and there was Charles Bronson blowing
away street trash, but I actually got into it. It was quite
suspenseful.
Martin: Yeah, well, that's the way Duke and I felt about "My Dinner
With Andre." Talk about suspense! [fake, dramatic
anticipation] Will they order dessert? Will they leave a good
tip? [walks to chair and sits]
While I agree on the direction I don't think the specific argument completely holds.
The countries in this situation in 2008 where European countries that forfeited their central banks. Having relatively recently switched to the Euro made this situation relatively novel and those governments not used to not have access to this last resort tool. There was also a lack of legislation at the European level to give the central bank authority to intervene. And culturally some countries where much more scared by their recent history by the inflation risk. Which led to push backs and delays in the face or urgency. It's now probably roughly sorted at the EU level.
The USA don't have and never had this issue. The position of the FED is very clear: it will never let the US govt default. So the only risk for US bond holders is inflation (and price if they want to exit early).
It's a great comment thank you. The part about the changes that would have enabled us to scale as society is really brilliant. I've read a bit about this in historian theories but the focus is often very material (probably because that's what you have evidence of).
I've always been in awe at the (absolutely crazy if you ask me) concept of money. The fact that we accept to give up possessions or time in exchange for the promise that anyone in the future will provide something equivalent because we just show some token/proof (which in itself are intrinsically valueless: sticks, stones, minerals, papers, now bits...).
We've been educated to be a bit suspicious and maybe show a slight contempt for it, probably to avoid being inelegant and also particularly because a lot of big owner of it are seen as not necessarily deserving of it.
But from an evolutionary perspective it's absolutely stupefying. And at its core its extremely positive. It shows absolute trust in our peers. It's probably one of the few behavior that really binds us together.
One could argue that it's the actually one trait that really distinguish us from other animals.
> I've always been in awe at the (absolutely crazy if you ask me) concept of money. The fact that we accept to give up possessions or time in exchange for the promise that anyone in the future will provide something equivalent because we just show some token/proof (which in itself are intrinsically valueless: sticks, stones, minerals, papers, now bits...).
No offense intended, but I think the way you're explaining this is a little overly silly. Value credit was a natural evolution from the barter system and it makes perfect sense. If you wanna run down to the 7/11 for a slushie, do you want to bring a $10 bill, or a live chicken? I definitely vote $10 bill, especially because there's a non zero chance the cashier wouldn't want a chicken anyway, even if it's technically worth enough to trade for a slushie. Money just streamlines this whole process and makes even exchange for goods infinitely more efficient for all parties involved, and I think that's why virtually every organized society we've found evidence of has some type of currency, going back thousands of years.
Now, that's not to say I don't agree that the monetary system as it exists is borderline a crime against humanity. Capitalism and it's various knock-on effects, starting plus or minus with colonialism depending how you want to slice it, is, I think, the most horrific thing we've done to each other in our entire history as a species. But I don't think that's an indictment of money strictly speaking.
That's the thing here. We're so used at the concept of money that you described that it's very hard to reconcile with what money really is.
You can take any introductory banking system course and it will tell the same story. (I recommend Economics of Money and Banking by Perry G Mehrling)
It's not really a finished exchange.
Money represent a debt.
It's a one sided exchange against the promise of the completion of the other side of the exchange in the future (by someone else in this case).
It's like the amount in your bank account is not really money. It's a debt from the bank: the promise that it will deliver this amount as cash if you ask. (M1)
And money is so liquid that we never think about it that way. Except during hyperinflation periods. And bank account are so solid that we think about them as cash. Except during bank runs.
As a side note, the theory that barter really meaningfully took place is being challenged as there is no real evidence of this.
Looking at the fine print of bank accounts, I would assume they completely absolve themselves of responsibility after a catastrophic event (call it C-Day). Or maybe they defer to FDIC insurance which guarantees I will have at least $250,000 after C-Day.
That said, as a consumer, I have no comprehension of how that would actually work. Do I get my guaranteed money 7 days after C-Day or 6 months after C-Day?
If an EMP blitzes my bank's electronic hard-drive records, is it my responsibility to prove I had X dollars in the account? If so, how? I can easily print a statement, but a statement clearly easily be forged. If it's the bank's responsibility, is there any guarantee they maintain physical and up-to-date records? Is there any regulation mandating they keep such records?
What happens if hyperinflation occurs and the 250,000 guaranteed by the FDIC is enough to buy a week's worth of groceries?
There's a lot of unknown variables and potential fragility in the system.
In other complex realms like software engineering, we get evidence that those complex systems really only have the budget to build the "happy path" and lawyers fight the cases when customers get damaged by the "unhappy paths."
It seems like our monetary system is on the happy path and very few times have the unhappy paths been tested.
blind people still have other senses including touch which gives them a size reference they can compare to. you can feel physical objects to gain an understanding of their size.
the LLM is more like a brain in a vat with only one sensory input - a stream of text
Coca Cola only has a moat because soft drinks and junk food are mostly a done product without much space for innovation left.
AI is still not there yet, and if any model becomes significantly better than ChatGPT people will flock over to use it despite the branding. It's only when nobody can make better models, then people will just stick to the known brands.
I find the premise of the article completely out of touch with the growth environment of the last 40 years. Of course the median consumer don't have an application for more than what the current infra can offer, it has consistently been the case since broadband inception. The reason is simple, no one will create applications designed for the median consumer with requirements higher than what the infrastructure can offer as this is guaranteed to fail. I thought it was clear that it was a typical offer driven market. Reading this article I'm really afraid that we will shoot ourselves in the foot if we forget this. A bit like what is happening with CPUs.
Consider two fields with vast amounts of literature: medicine and law.
Medicine faces two key challenges. First, while research follows the scientific method, much of what makes a good doctor—intuition, pattern recognition, and clinical judgment—is rarely documented. Second, medical data is highly sensitive, limiting access to real-world cases, images, and practice opportunities. Theory alone is not enough; hands-on experience is essential.
Law presents a different problem: unknown unknowns. The sheer volume of legal texts makes it nearly impossible to be sure you’ve found everything relevant. Even with search tools, gaps in knowledge remain a major risk.
Compounding this is the way law is actually practiced. Every judge and lawyer operates with a shared foundation of legal principles so basic they are almost never discussed. The real work happens at two higher levels: first, the process—how laws are applied, argued, and enforced in practice. Then, at a third, more abstract level, legal debates unfold about interpretation, precedent, and systemic implications. The first level is assumed, the second is routine, and only the third is where true discussion happens.
Self-teaching is easier in fields where knowledge is structured, accessible, and complete. Many subjects are not.
I just don't fully understand this position at this level. Personally I know exactly what the next 5 lines need to be, and whether I write them or auto complete or some AI write them doesn't matter. I'll only accept what I had in mind exactly. And with Copilot for boilerplate and relatively trivial tasks that happens pretty often. I feel I'm just saving time / old age joint pain.
If the next 5 lines of code are so predictable, do they really need to be written down?
If you're truly saving time by having an LLM write boiler plate code, is there maybe an opportunity to abstract things away so that higher-level concepts, or more expressive code could be used instead?
5 lines of code written with just the core language and standard library are often much easier to read and digest than a new abstraction or call to some library.
And it’s just an unfortunate fact of life that many of the common programming languages are not terribly ergonomic; it’s not uncommon for even basic operations to require a few lines of boilerplate. That isn’t always bad as languages are balancing many different goals (expressiveness, performance, simplicity and so on).
I have lately been writing a decent amount of Svelte. Svelte and frontend in general is relatively new to me, but since I’ve been programming for a while now I can usually articulate what I want to do in English. LLMs are totally a game changer for me in this scenario - they basically take me from someone who has to look everything up all the time to someone who only does so a couple times a day.
In a way LLMs are ushering in a kind of boilerplate renaissance IMO. When you can have an LLM refactor a massive amount of boilerplate in one fell swoop it starts to not matter much if you repeat yourself - actually, really logically dense code would probably be harder for LLMs to understand and modify (not dissimilar from us…) so it’s even more of a liability now than in the past. I would almost always rather have simple, easy-to-understand code than something elegant and compact and “expressive” - and our tools increasingly favor this too.
Also I really don’t give a shit about how to best center a div nor do I want to memorize a million different markup tags and their 25 years of baggage. I don’t find that kind of knowledge gratifying because it’s more trivia than anything insightful. I’m glad that with LLMs I can minimize the time I spend thinking about those things.
Some languages don't give that opportunity. E.g. the "if err != nil" blocks in Go are effectively required and obvious, but are mandated by the language.
Other things are complicated to abstract for the boilerplate they avoid. The kind of thing that avoids 100 lines of code but causes errors that take 20 minutes to understand because of heavy use of reflection/inferred types in generics/etc. The older I get, the more I think "clever" reflection is more of a sin than boring boilerplate.
Cheers to Netflix in the age of user hostile and anti ergonomic patterns (while they still have their fair share of sins in this area, at least one good news)
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