don't think it's a societal problem; it's just a direct result of capitalism. and while capitalism causes all sorts of huge problems, it might also be the best of the options we've got
Recently I had the realization that a lot of people see economy as something completely decoupled from society. Capitalism is both completely unrelated with people and the result of people's innate desires. The UBS discussions are a funny one for me. Capitalism is supposedly the best way to manage limited resources, but we would still need it in a supposed utopia where recourses are in abundance. I confess that I don't have the knowledge to understand the reasons for that.
> I confess that I don't have the knowledge to understand the reasons for that.
You want the technical, mathematical, reason for that? The short version is that for society as a whole, prices are information. How many fields should be filled with grain plants? How many with flowers? How many factories should make cars? Phones? Tv furniture? How much fuel goes to heating? How much to transporting old people to the hospital and back?
I hope that can explain, if "society" gets that information more than a tiny bit wrong ... very bad things will happen. VERY bad things. People will die, lots of them, and quickly, if you get it wrong.
I hope it also makes it clear that for society as a whole, money isn't a "real" limit. Rather it's a tool that makes the actual limits clear. If we make 50% more bread, how do we make that not affect how many heart surgeries can be done?
Capitalism has many advantages, the strongest of which, in my opinion, is that it simply imposes a cost on lying. You can lie about production, about prices, but it'll cost you. It is resilient against the bane of so many other systems: it is extremely resilient against people trying to sabotage it, because everyone has an incentive to undo or bypass sabotage. In other systems like communism or slavery the people doing work have an extreme incentive to lie, and the only break on that is violence against workers. But the state fundamentally has no idea if you're lying or not, so that violence will be mostly random. It can't be directed against the people actually causing problems in society.
Thanks for taking the time to answer, I really appreciate that. About the pricing, isn't that the same as managing scarce resources? In a supposed AGI utopia, why would society still need it? To be clear, I get your point. I'm not against capitalism, I just don't get why it would be needed when resources are unconstrained
Gridmatic | Product engineer + data engineer | 175-235k + equity | Cupertino, CA (hybrid)
Hi HN! We’re an energy + AI startup that applies modern deep learning and optimization to improve the use of renewables and grid-scale batteries to deliver cheap, clean energy to commercial/industrial customers. We also do energy trading and battery optimization.
Roles:
- Data engineer: we're hiring our first data eng! Looking for a startup-minded SWE to work on both ingest and transformation of datasets that power our best-in-class ML models for energy forecasting.
- Product engineer: our energy sales have been growing rapidly and we want to 10x it from here, which involves building a lot of tooling to make sales more automated. This tends to be backend/data heavy, but will also have some frontend (NextJS/React/Typescript).
If you're interested in making a real-world impact on climate/energy, or if you know someone that might, please email me and include a one sentence description of the most impressive thing you've built: kevin@gridmatic.com
What sticks out to me most is that humanity consistently fails to weed these creatures out and regulate society. It's a bug in our social software; we seem to like these broken people rather than recognize that they're a liability.
This isn’t a bug. It’s the driving force of our capitalist society. We are not trying to weed them out. We are trying to encourage them. It’s pretty simple, when they get rich, so do all their investors.
I don't know if it's guaranteed to work, but the strategy is real. I know Notion won vs. competitors in the space because they focused on consumer first, and consumers then brought Notion into their workplaces.
I am amused that you think IT is going to respond to an unmanaged LLM tool that operates outside of the LLM policies all serious enterprises have set up by now and say 'wow, that is cool and maybe we should buy in to this!'
What is going to happen is that the emplyee who tries to sneak OpenAI into our org is going to have two meetings set up by the end of the day, one with IT to ensure the whatever tool they installed is burned out with fire and one with HR to ensure they know the company policy and acknowledge that another fuck-up like this is a firing offense.
Isn't that exactly how the iPhone won though? As another commenter said, once the cool gadget becomes a must have for executives, IT will be told to find a way to make it work.
I think Prisma does type-safe ORM really well on the typescript side, and was sad it doesn't seem to be super supported in python. This feels sort of similar and makes a lot of sense!
+1, very polite way of saying it. of course there's a difference between the two posts. open source is interesting but not enough with a financial app, since it's all about trust + usefulness.
landing page needs to look good and communicate the value prop super effectively. If it doesn't look good you'll lose people's interest in about 2 seconds.
