It happens to all empires. They all amass huge gains from hard and soft power allowing for extremely cheap imports which in turn result in immense quality of life gains for it citizens, but as things settle and the decades go by, newer governmental generations don't understand what, exactly, those expenses are for, and start seeing them as just that, expenses, nothing more. So they cut back on what they see as useless fat, and next thing you know, they're falling and someone else is grabbing all that power for themselves. It happens over, and over, and over again. Now it's the US turn, with China likely being the up-and-coming empire.

I wonder if this move to slightly soften the Great Firewall will intensify as China becomes the world's major power. They use censorship for fear of internal rebellion, which is almost a national sport in China, but there's some chance, small as it may be, that with China being Number One, and the population Super-Hiper-Mega-Happy with the CCP as a result, that the government's extreme fear of "them" miiiight fall enough for free speech not to be so suppressed. So, who knows? If this experiment proves not to cause the kind of disruption they so utterly dread, it might stick. Though I'm most likely wishful thinking.

(y) #4

I can't think of a single other country that claims to be civilised that has a tax code so complicated you need vast amounts of software and a high-power computer just to file what is properly owed.

TLDR version: The system is engineered to be too complex for humans, which is the mark of a very very badly designed system that is suboptimal, inefficient, expensive, and useless.

Let's pretend for a moment that you've a tax system that taxes the nth dollar at the nth point along a particular curve. We can argue about which curve is approporiate some other time, my own opinion is that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay on what you earn. However, not everyone agrees with that, so let's keep it nice and generic and say that it's "some curve" (which Libertarians can define as a straight line if they absolutely want). You now don't have to adjust anything, ever. The employer notifies the IRS that $X was earned, the computer their end performs a definite integral between N (the top of the curve at the last point you paid tax) and N+X, and informs the employer that N+X is the money owed for that interval.

Nobody actually does it this way, at the moment, but that's beside the point. We need to be able to define what the minimum necessary level of complexity is before we can identify how far we are from it. The above amount has no exemptions, but honestly, trying to coerce people to spend money in particular ways isn't particuarly effective, especially if you then need a computer to work through the form because you can't understand what behaviours would actually influence the tax. If nobody (other than the very rich) have the time, energy, or motivation to find out how they're supposed to be being guided, then they're effectively unguided and you're better off with a simple system that simply taxes less in the early amounts.

This, then, is as simple as a tax system can get - one calculation per amount earned, with no forms and no tax software needed.

It does mean that, for middle-income and above, the paycheck will vary with time, but if you know how much you're going to earn in a year then you know what each paycheck will have in it. This requires a small Excel macro to calculate, not an expensive software package that mysteriously needs updating continuously, and if you're any good at money management, then it really really doesn't matter. If you aren't, then it still doesn't matter, because you'd still not cope with the existing system anyway.

In practice, it's not likely any country would actually implement a system this simple, because the rich would complain like anything and it's hard to win elections if the rich are paying your opponent and not you. But we now have a metric.

The UK system, which doesn't require the filling out of vast numbers of forms, is not quite this level of simple, but it's not horribly complicated. The difference between theoretical and actual is not great, but it's tolerable. If anyone wants to use the theoretical and derive an actual score for the UK system, they're welcome to do so. I'd be interested to see it.

The US, who left the UK for tax reasons (or was that Hotblack Desiato, I get them confused) has a much much more complex system. I'd say needlessly complicated, but it's fairly obvious it's complicated precisely to make those who are money-stressed and time-stressed pay more than they technically owe, and those who are rich and can afford accountants for other reasons pay less. Again, if anyone wants to produce a score, I'd be interested to see it.

(y) #3

I doubt it can be done for even ten billion. I mean, sure, you can get a spaceship into orbit and point it out Mars. We've done that enough times now. But putting people in that ship and having them arrive at Mars without them being irradiated corpses, that's where the money will go. And then you've got to get them down and back up out of a non-unsubstantial gravity well, and again, get them back to Earth without them being irradiated corpses.

No way any of that can be done for ten billion. Ten billion is the number the project manager feeds to Congress hoping they'll buy the sunk cost fallacy when you come back five years later with a bill that's three or four times that high.

I think the hard part is surviving on Mars for any extended length of time without suffering severe radiation-induced illnesses. Heck, surviving even getting their and back has the same issue. We've basically never gone further than a week or so's round trip to the Moon, with only part of that outside of Earth's magnetic field. Now you're talking years (at least 2.5 years round trip), and while for no other reason than the sheer awesomeness of humans walking on Mars, there are vast technical and biological challenges. Any kind of shielding is going to add significantly to the spacecraft's mass, and we still build these things on the ground, even if we build them in modules.

None of it is impossible, but the costs, even for a nation like the US, are enormous, and ultimately will require more than just stripping NASA's other resources (which add enormous value on their own). With Trump basically, through intense idiocy, ignorance and malice, fucking the US economy over, those huge expenditures are going to take more than just turning NASA into the Mars guys at the cost of everything else.

You don't need to simulate all that, at least initially. Scan in the brains of people who are at extremely high risk of stroke or other brain damage. If one of them suffers a lethal stroke, but their body is otherwise fine, you HAVE a full set of senses. You just need to install a way of multiplexing/demultiplexing the data from those senses and muscles, and have a radio feed - WiFi 7 should have adequate capacity.

Yes, this is very scifiish, but at this point, so is scanning in a whole brain. If you have the technology to do that, you've the technology to set up a radio feed.

Probably a woke lunatic who believes in a spherical earth and heliocentrism. Doubtless the Administration has a Pentecostal pastor who believes in Creationism and the healing power of CO2 to run the agency.

(y) #2

I have definitely produced useful SQL code, and indeed some pretty darned complex queries for transformations and data hygiene, but as I said, it's not a process of "dump spec into LLM model, run SQL on RDBMS", but rather a kind of meta-programming conversation. I imagine specialized LLMs might do a bit better, but I'm generally pretty skeptical of the current generations of AI building sophisticated software. I suspect where LLM's might do well is with interop code, the kind of boiler plate code that takes up a good deal of a programmer's time. That's likely why I have had some success with SQL.

My experience, mainly with generating SQL queries, is that AI inevitably gets it wrong multiple times, so what I have had to do is more of a kind of meta-programming; giving the model cues and corrections. I have created some pretty sophisticated SQL queries, but there's no way in hell I can just pop the first go-around into my code and have it run. Either it's outright faulty code that will fail, or it's just not producing the correct results.

Now SQL is a fairly limited and ring fenced language (excluding stored procedures of course). I've never tried it with a general use language, but I imagine those problems will get more pronounced. That's not to say it might not be useful for translating natural language specs into code, but if my experience with SQL is any indicator, it's going to require a lot of massaging. There's probably still productivity boosts to be found here, which will likely have in effect on the number of programmers out there, but to me, it feels more like a layer of abstraction that will require a different kind of programming, rather than replace programming.

As an example that isn't coding, I have been building models for what I expect is a government procurement next year. This involves taking previous Requests For Qualifications documents, updating them with current knowledge of government expectations, procurement rules, and so forth. Again, building these model RFQs is an iterative process, not simply one of "Take these RFQs from previous procurements, update them with this new information I've uploaded, and give me model RFQs based on these premises I will provide." My test run took about three or four hours of a kind of conversation, where I correct and shape, understanding the cues the LLM needs to produce the desired result, and the better I get at understanding not just the kind of information and cues the LLM requires, but the most effective means of "encoding" that information, the more efficient the LLM is at producing the desired results.

That sure sounds like programming to me, albeit at a much higher level of abstraction. LLM, at least where it stands, is just another platform, a very powerful one, but as with all programming languages, the larger the command set and the more complex the lexical structures, the more room for bugs, and the more subtle some of those bugs can be.

At some point this is going to reach "Open the pod bay door Hal" territory.

The Koch Brothers paid a bunch of scientists to prove the figures being released by the IPCC and clinate scientists wrong. The scientists they paid concluded (in direct contradiction to the argument that scientists say what they're paid to say) that the figures were broadly correct, and that the average planetary temperature was the figure stated.

My recommendation would be to look for the papers from those scientists, because those are the papers that we know in advance were written by scientists determined to prove the figures wrong and failed to do so, and therefore will give the most information on how the figures are determined and how much data is involved, along with the clearest, most reasoned, arguments as to why the figures cannot actually be wrong.

...Then there's an inefficiency in the design.

You should store in the primary database in the most compressed, compact form you can that can still be accessed in reasonable time. Tokenise as well, if it'll help.

The customer should never be accessing the primary database, that's a security risk, the customer should access through a decompressed subset of the main database which is operating as a cache. Since it is a cache, it will automagically not contain any poorly-selling item or item without inventory, and the time overheads for accessing stuff nobody buys won't impact anything.

If you insist on purging, there should then be a secondary database that contains items that are being considered for purge as never having reached the cache in X number of years. This should be heavily compressed, but where you can still search for a specific record, again through a token, not a string, then add a method by which customers can put in a request for the item. If there's still no demand after a second time-out is reached, sure, delete it. If the threat of a purge leads to interest, then pull it back into primary. It still won't take up much space, because it's still somewhat compressed unless demand actually holds it in the cache.

This method:

(a) Reduces space the system needs, as dictated by the customer and not by Amazon
(b) Purges items the system doesn't need, as dictated by the customer and not by Amazon

The customers will then drive what is in the marketplace, so the customers decide how much data space they're willing to pay for (since that will obviously impact price).

If Amazon actually believe in that whole marketplace gumph, then they should have the marketplace drive the system. If they don't actually believe in the marketplace, then they should state so, clearly and precisely, rather than pretend to be one. But I rather suspect that might impact how people see them.

(y)