Everything is now re-consolidated under different media companies now. Instead of Ted Turner we have Larry Ellison, and Netflix, and Disney.
So I think the biggest question is, what form of entertainment will eventually supplant streaming services? Whatever it is (or will be) will almost certainly be disregarded by most people.
AI generated by demand, most likely. Or AI generated by indie creators who have a vision but not a budget, and are provided with a platform to create content easily.
Yeah, I dunno. There's a guy on Instagram right now making techno-futuristic stories I equate to micro-episodes and...it gets old. Economies of scale would say that finding the good content in the sea of dogshit would be impossible if everyone was doing that. Premium is premium because it's scarce; not everyone is doing it.
Maybe this is because of scarcity.. if existing algos are applied on top of infinitely generated entertainment then perhaps we'll see something even more addictive than YouTube.
Yeah, currently generated content made with some interconnected ideas, vision, script and talent is kinda better than I thought it will be. I expected it will be extremely sloppy at first.
I've used embedded SVG images in CSS encoded as base64, and I'm not ashamed. In general, I really wish I could apply page styles and CSS3 variables to the internal CSS of SVG files. I'm sure there's a good reason why this context isn't shared, but it would be cool and useful to dynamically change the style of SVG files.
If I'm hand coding a page or writing a stylesheet, it's convenient to be able to embed things. Often, I'll embed a style tag until it grows large enough to be worthy of its own file. The same goes for scripts; it's useful to have the option if you're quickly prototyping something.
Why is this so horrible. Put more resources in the hands of the average person. They will get pumped right back into the economy. If people have money to spend, they can buy more things, including goods and services from gigantic tax-dodging mega-corporations.
Gigantic mega-corporations do enjoy increased growth and higher sales, don't they? Or am I mistaken?
The shift in the US to the idea of “job creators” being business owners is part of it. It was just a way to direct money to the already rich, as if they would hire more people with that money. When it is plainly obvious that consumers are job creators, in that if they buy more goods and services, businesses will hire more people to make or provide more of those things.
Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us.
The framing of X or Y are job creators is idiotic. Its literally the most basic fact of economics that you need producers and consumers, otherwise you don't have an economy.
The more economically correct way to express this would be that entrepreneurs and companies who innovated increase productivity and that makes the overall economy more efficient allowing your country to grow.
> Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us.
This just sounds like quarter baked economics ideas you have made up yourself. Neither 'trickle down' nor 'trickle up' are concepts economist use. And that you confidently assert anything about the social outcomes of these 'concepts' is ridiculous.
Because the entire western culture has shifted to instant gratification. Yes, what you suggest would most likely lead to increased business eventually. But they want better number this quarter, so they resort to the cheap tricks like financial engineering/layoffs to get an immediate boost.
I'm not saying you are wrong that some redistribution can be good, but your analysis is simplistic and ignores many factors. You can just redistribute and then say 'well people will spend the money'. That's literally the 'Broken Window' fallacy from economics. You are ignoring that if you don't redistribute it, money also gets spend, just differently. Also, the central bank is targeting AD, so you're not actually increasing nominal income by redistributing.
Take a million dollars, give 1,000 poor people $1,000 and every dollar will be spent on goods and services. The companies running those services and making those goods will need to have their employees work more hours, putting more money back in poor people’s pockets in addition to the money the companies make. Those employees have a few extra dollars to spend on goods and services, etc.
Give a rich person a million dollars, and they will put it in an offshore tax shelter. That’s not exactly driving economic activity.
You are simply disagreeing with 99% of economists.
Money in tax shelter doesn't go threw a portal in another universe. Its either invested or saved as some kind of asset and in that form is in circulation. And again, even if you assume it increases monetary demand (decreases velocity) the central bank targets AD and balances that out.
Based on your logic, a country that taxes 100% of all income and redistrubtes it would become infinity rich. Your logic is basically 'if nobody saves and everybody spends all income' everybody will be better off.
This is not how the economy works even if it feels good to think that. Its a fallacy.
Where you could have a point is that potentially the tax impact is slightly different, but that's hard to prove.
This feels like you intentionally gave this the least charitable reading. Obviously, I do not think that you could just scale to infinity. If I had said that eating a banana was healthier, I don't think it would be reasonable to say that assertion is ridiculous because that would mean eating 1,000 bananas would make someone the healthiest person. I was pointing out the difference in economic activity, where additional money to a wealthy individual mostly goes into savings/investing while additional money to low-income individuals mostly goes directly into consumption, and that the higher consumption generates more economic activity.
> Take a million dollars, give 1,000 poor people $1,000 and every dollar will be spent on goods and services.
If we're being realistic a bunch of this will go to paying off existing debt. Still good, but not the economic stimulus you're imagining. There are also "services" like gambling apps that act as a sponge to soak up money from those foolish enough to use them and transfer that money back to the wealthy shareholders. I'm sure there is research on what percentage of that $1000 can be expected to stimulate the economy, but it's not 100%.
There are many ways of spending money in the population that don't include just "distribution of money", as it's portrayed nowadays. Child care, free and high quality schools, free transportation, free or subsidized healthcare, investment is labor-intensive industries, these are all examples of expenditures that translate in better quality of life and also improve competitiveness for the country.
Because government is always a fight about resources. More resources in the hands of common people and to make their lives better is less money in the hands of powerful corporations and individuals, be it in the form of higher taxes for the rich or less direct money going to their enterprises.
One of the big issues is money in politics. Our congresspeople make a killing off of legal insider trading, they take huge donations from companies, and the supreme court has even said that it's cool to give "gratuities" in exchange for legislation or court rulings you like.
I'm a younger millennial. I'm always seeing homeless people in my city and it's an issue that I think about on a daily basis. Couldn't we have spent the money on homeless shelters and food and other things? So many people are in poverty, they can't afford basic necessities. The world is shitty.
Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power.
Yeah, the world is shitty, and resources aren't allocated ideally. Must it be so?
The last 10 years has seen CA spend more on homelessness than ever before, and more than any other state by a huge margin. The result of that giant expenditure is the problem is worse than ever.
I don't want to get deep in the philosophical weeds around human behavior, techno-optimism, etc., but it is a bit reductive to say "why don't we just give homeless people money".
Spending money is not the solution. Spending money in a way that doesn't go to subcontractors is part of the solution. Building shelters beyond cots in a stadium is part of the solution. Building housing is a large part of actually solving the problem. People have tried just giving the money but without a way to convert cash to housing the money doesn't help. Also studies by people smarter then me suggest that without sufficient supply the money ends up going to landlords and pushing up housing costs anyway.
Well I mean, they didn't "just give homeless people money" or just give them homes or any of those things though. I think the issue might be the method and not the very concept of devoting resources to the problem.
WA, specially Seattle, has done the same as CA with the same results.
They shouldn't just enable them, as a lot of homeless are happy in their situation as long as they get food and drugs, they should force them to get clean and become a responsible adult if they want benefits.
A broad social safety net makes a huge difference. It’s not just housing it’s socialized medicine, paid family leave, good transit, free high quality education, solving fewer problems with police and more with social support programs and social workers, free meal programs for adults and children in schools, libraries, and a variety of other programs that help ensure people don’t fall through the cracks here or there. How many people in the US are teetering on the edge of homelessness due to medical debt, and what happens if their partner is in an accident and they lose shared income for rent? Situations like this don’t have a single solution it’s a system of solutions.
I intentionally described policies which are already common practice in most European countries, nothing extravagant. Yes there is some cost but the alternative is deep human suffering which is otherwise avoidable.
But this isn’t really “giving them” anything. It’s giving ourselves safety and security.
It wouldn’t make sense to give you a car. We would give you a working train system instead. Again this is common in Europe and Asia. Indeed every person is “given” access to a high quality transit network with affordable tickets.
To be clear, I personally am an anarcho communist. I think we would be better off if we organized to ensure every person has their basic needs met by the established wealth of society. That isn’t all that dramatic - making sure everyone can ride high quality trains and get medical care when they need it are common in most countries for example.
Consider the Linux ecosystem. “Give them everything and expect nothing” works fine despite the great effort which goes in to building and maintaining that system. We can study the economics of this and build more systems like that.
Ship them somewhere else, then print a banner saying, "mission accomplished."
It worked at a state level for years, with certain states bussing their homeless to other states. And recently, the USA has been building up the capability to do the same thing on an international scale.
That's the "solution" we are going to be throwing money at. Ship them to labor camps propped up by horrible regimes.
Many experiments have shown that when you take away people's concerns about money for housing and food, that frees up energy and attention to do other things.
Like the famous experiment in Finland where homeless people were given cash with no strings attached and most were able to rise out of their despair. The healthcare professionals could then focus their energy on the harder cases. It also saved a bunch of money in the process.
I suspect giving them away is a bridge too far, however not rewarding capital for treating them as speculative investment vehicles might be a good start.
The Sikhs in India run multiple facilities across the country that each can serve 50,000-100,000 free meals a day. It doesn’t even take much in the form of resources, and we could do this in every major city in the US yet we still don’t do it. It’s quite disheartening.
Note that Houston’s approach seems to be largely working. It’s not exactly cheap, but the costs are not even in the same ballpark as AI capital expenses. Also, upzoning doesn’t require public funding at all.
Wasn't houston's "approach" to buy bus tickets to California from a company that just resold commodity bus tickets and was owned by the governors friend and charged 10x market price?
The governor of Texas bragged about sending 100k homeless people to california (spending about $150 million in the process).
>in the Golden State, 439 people are homeless for every 100,000 residents – compared to 81 in the Lone Star State.
If I'm doing my math right, 81 per 100k in a state of 30 million people means 24k homeless people. So the state brags about bussing 100k homeless people to California, and then brags about only having 24k homeless people, and you think it's because they build an extra 100k houses a year?
The same math for California means that their homeless population is 175k. In other words, Texas is claiming to have more than doubled California's homeless population.
Maybe the reason Texas can build twice as many homes a year is because it literally has half the population density?
I’m not a person on the edge of homelessness, but I did an extremely quick comparison. California cities near the coast have dramatically better weather, but Houston has rents that are so much lower than big California cities that it’s kind of absurd.
If I had to live outdoors in one of these places, all other thing being equal, I would pick CA for the weather. But if I had trouble affording housing, I think Houston wins by a huge margin.
The older I get, the more I realize that our choices in life come down to two options: benefit me or benefit others. The first one leads to nearly every trouble we have in the world. The second nearly always leads to happiness, whether directly or indirectly. Our bias as humans has always been toward the first, but our evolution is and will continue to slowly bring us toward the second option. Beyond simple reproduction, this realization is our purpose, in my opinion.
He was a physics grad, did some experiments with out of body experiences, decided the Universe is a simulation for immortal consciousness to experience making choices and dealing with their consequences, and reasoned from there that the purpose of life is to get rid of ego and fear and learn to benefit others instead of ourselves.
Quite how he got from one to the other isn't clear to me, or why it's physics related; the message seems to be a familiar religious one, deal with whatever struggles happen to you and try to be egoless and kind.
> Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power.
It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned.
So many great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way.
Is that true, that it's money that belongs to people?
OpenAI isn't spending $1 trillion in hard earned cash on data centres, that is funny money from the ocean of financial liquid slushing around, seeing alpha.
It also certainly is not a cohort of accredited investors putting their grandchildren's inheritance on the line.
Misaligned incentives (regulations) both create and perpetuate that situation.
> It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned.
"earned", that may be the case with millionaires, but it is not the case with billionaires. A person can't "earn" a billion dollars. They steal and cheat and destroy competition illegally.
I also take issue with the idea that someone can do whatever they want with their money. That is not true. They are not allowed to corner the market on silver, they aren't allowed to bribe politicians, and they aren't allowed to buy sex from underage girls. These are established laws that are obviously for the unalloyed benefit of society as a whole, but the extremely wealthy have been guilty of all of these things, and statements like yours promote the sentiment that allows them to get away with it.
Finally, "great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way". No. You might be able to argue that today's advanced computing technology wouldn't have happened without private capital allocation (and that is debatable), but the breakthroughs that saved millions of lives--vaccines, antibiotics, insulin, for example--were not the result of directed private investment.
"It's capital that belongs to people and those people..."
That's not a fundamental law of physics. It's how we've decided to arrange our current society, more or less, but it's always up for negotiation. Land used to be understood as a publicly shared resource, but then kings and the nobles decided it belong to them, and they fenced in the commons. The landed gentry became a ruling class because the land "belonged" to them. Then society renegotiated that, and decided that things primarily belonged to the "capitalist" class instead of noblemen.
Even under capitalism, we understand that that ownership is a little squishy. We have taxes. The rich understandably do not like taxes because it reduces their wealth (and Ayn Rand-styled libertarians also do not like taxes of any kind, but they are beyond understanding except to their own kind).
As a counterpoint, I and many others believe that one person or one corporation cannot generate massive amounts of wealth all by themselves. What does it mean to "earn" 10 billion dollars? Does such a person work thousdands of time harder or smarter than, say, a plumber or a school teacher? Of course not. They make money because they have money: they hire workers to make things for them that lead to profit, and they pay the workers less than the profit that is earned. Or they rent something that they own. Or they invest that money in something that is expected to earn them a higher return. In any scenario, how is it possible to earn that profit? They do so because they participate in a larger society. Workers are educated in schools, which the employer probably does not pay for in full. Customers and employees travel on infrastructure, maintained by towns and state governments. People live in houses which are built and managed by other parties. The rich are only able to grow wealth because they exist in a larger society. I would argue that it is not only fair, but crucial, that they pay back into the community.
Well said. I would add that corporations exist because we choose to let them, to let investors pool capital and limit risk, and in exchange society should benefit, and if it doesn't we should rearrange that deal.
You know, we created the US government as an expression of the fundamental rights of man, with the idea that the government would provide for the common welfare and preserve these rights.
In rebellion against a king who seemed to want to exploit us and felt that his being king made him the source of the rights we had.
Maybe we need to re-think the relationship with corporations the same way? Re-structure so that they serve the common good?
Please tell me which of Penicillin, insulin, the transistor, the discovery and analysis of the electric field, discovery of DNA, invention of mRNA vaccines, discovery of pottery, basket weaving, discovery of radiation, the recognition that citrus fruit or vitamin C prevents and cures scurvy (which we discovered like ten times), the process for creating artificial fertilizers, the creation of steel, domestication of beasts of burden, etc were done through Wealthy Barons or other capital holders funding them.
Many of the above were discovered by people explicitly rejecting profit as an outcome. Most of the above predate modern capitalism. Several were explicitly government funded.
Do you have a single example of a scientific breakthrough that saved tens of millions of lives that was done by capital owners?
[ This comment I'm making is USA centric. ]. I agree with the idea of making our society better and more equitable - reducing homelessness, hunger, poverty, especially for our children. However, I think redirecting this to AI datacenter spending is a red-herring, here's why I think this: As a society we give a significant portion of our surplus to government. We then vote on what the government should spend this on. AI datacenter spending is massive, but if you add it all up, it doesn't cover half of a years worth of government spending. We need to change our politics to redirect taxation and spending to achieve a better society. Having a private healthcare system that spends twice the amount for the poorest results in the developed world is a policy choice. Spending more than the rest of the world combined on the military is a policy choice. Not increasing minimum wage so at least everyone with a full time job can afford a home is a policy job (google "working homelessness). VC is a teeny tiny part of the economy. All of tech is only about 6% of the global economy.
You can increase min wage all you want, if there aren't enough homes in an area for everyone who works full time in that area to have one, you will still have folks who work full time who don't have one. In fact, increasing min wage too much will exacerbate the problem by making it more expensive to build more (and maintain those that exist). Though at some point, it will fix the problem too, because everyone will move and then there will be plenty of homes for anyone who wants one.
I agree with you 100%! Any additional surplus will be extracted as rents, when housing is restricted. I am for passing laws that make it much easier for people to obtain permits to build housing where there is demand. Too much of residential zoning is single-family housing. Texas does a better job at not restricting housing than California, for example. Many towns vote blue, talk to talk, but do not walk the walk.
> AI datacenter spending is massive, but if you add it all up, it doesn't cover half of a years worth of government spending.
I didn't check your math here, but if that's true, AI datacenter spending is a few orders of magnitude larger than I assumed. "massive" doesn't even begin to describe it
The US federal budget in 2024 had outlays of 6.8 trillion dollars [1].
nVidia's current market cap (nearly all AI investment) is currently 4.4 trillion dollars [2][3].
While that's hardly an exact or exhaustive accounting of AI spending, I believe it does demonstrate that AI investment is clearly in the same order of magnitude as government spending, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually surpassed government spending for a full year, let alone half of one.
Global datacenter spending across all categories (ML + everything else) is roughly 0.9 - 1.2 trillion dollars for the last three years combined, I was initially going to go for "quarter of the federal budget", but picked something I thought was more conservative to account for announced spending and 2025 etc. I pick 2022 onward for the LLM wave. In reality, solely ML driven, actual realized-to-date spending is probably about 5% of the federal budget. The big announcements will spread out over the next several years in build-out. Nonetheless, it's large enough to drive GDP growth a meaningful amount. Not large enough that redirecting it elsewhere will solve our societal problems.
>We need to change our politics to redirect taxation and spending to achieve a better society.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much on the pie chart to redirect percentage wise. About 60% goes to non-discretionary programs like Social Security and Medicaid, and 13% is interest expense. While "non-discretionary" programs can potentially be cut, doing so is politically toxic and arguably counter to the goal of a better society.
Of the remaining discretionary portion half is programs like veterans benefits, transportation, education, income security and health (in order of size), and half military.
FY2025 spending in total was 3% over FY2024, with interest expense, social security and medicare having made up most of the increase ($249 billion)[1], and likely will for the foreseeable future[2] in part due to how many baby boomers are entering retirement years.
Assuming you cut military spending in half you'd free up only about 6% of federal spending. Moving the needle more than this requires either cutting programs and benefits, improving efficiency of existing spend (like for healthcare) or raising more revenue via taxes or inflation. All of this is potentially possible, but the path of least resistance is probably inflation.
I think the biggest lever is completely overhauling healthcare. The USA is very inefficient, and for subpar outcomes. In practice, the federal government already pays for the neediest of patients - the elderly, the at-risk children, the poor, and veterans. Whereas insurance rakes in profits from the healthiest working age people. Given aging, and the impossibility of growing faster than the GDP forever, we'll have to deal with this sooner or later. Drug spending, often the boogeyman, is less than 7% of the overall healthcare budget.
There is massive waste in our military spending due to the pork-barrel nature of many contracts. That'd be second big bucket I'd reform.
I think you're also right that inflation will ultimately take care of the budget deficit. The trick is to avoid hyperinflation and punitive interest rates that usually come along for the ride.
I would also encourage migration of highly skilled workers to help pay for an aging population of boomers. Let's increase our taxpayer base!
I am for higher rates of taxation on capital gains over $1.5M or so, that'll also help avoid a stock market bubble to some extent. One can close various loopholes while at it.
I am mostly arguing for policy changes to redistribute more equitably. I would make the "charity" status of college commensurate with the amount of financial aid given to students and the absolute cost of tuition for example., for example. I am against student loan forgiveness for various reasons - it's out of topic for this thread but happy to expand if interested.
The current pattern of resource allocation is a necessary requirement for the existence of the billionaire-class, who put significant effort into making sure it continues.
> but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power.
What you have just described is people wanting investment in common society - you see the return on this investment but ultra-capitalistic individuals don't see any returns on this investment because it doesn't benefit them.
In other words, you just asked for higher taxes on the rich that your elected officials could use for your desired investment. And the rich don't want that which is why they spend on lobbying.
I don't think it is a coincidence that the areas with the wealhiest people/corporations are the same areas with the most extreme poverty. The details are, of course, complicated, but zooming way way out, the rich literally drain wealth from those around them.
Thanks for pointing this out. Sorry you're getting downvoted. I visited San Francisco about ten years ago, and seeing a homeless person sheltering themselves under a flag or some sort of merch from a tech company really drove home just how bereft of humanity corporate power centers really are.
Lots of people lose their housing when they lose employment, and then they're stuck and can't get back into housing. A very large percentage of unhoused people are working jobs; they're not all "layabouts".
We know that just straight up giving money to the poorest of the poor results in positive outcomes.
I have known quite a few 'unhoused' folk, and not many that had jobs. Those that do tend to find housing pretty quickly (Granted, my part of the country is probably different from your part, but I am interested in stats from any region).
The proportion of people you write off as “layabouts” is always conveniently ambiguous…of the number of unemployed/underemployed, how many are you suggesting are simply too lazy to work for a living?
Technological advancements and cultural advancements that spread the benefits more broadly than naturally occurs in an industrialized economy. That is what pulled people out of poverty.
If you want to see what unfettered technological advancement does, you can read stories from the Gilded Age.
The cotton gin dramatically increased human enslavement.
The sewing machine decreased quality of life for seamstresses.
> During the shirtmakers' strike, one of the shirtmakers testified that she worked eleven hours in the shop and four at home, and had never in the best of times made over six dollars a week. Another stated that she worked from 4 o’clock in the morning to 11 at night. These girls had to find their own thread and pay for their own machines out of their wages.
These were children, by the way. Living perpetually at the brink of starvation from the day they were born until the day they died, but working like dogs all the while.
Food and shelter are cheaper than at almost any time in human history. Additionally, people have more variety of healthy foods all year long.
No matter how cheap food and shelter are, there will always be people who can not acquire them. Halting all human progress until the last human is fed and sheltered is a recipe for stagnation. Other cultures handle this with strong family bonds - those few who can not acquire food or shelter for whatever reason are generally provided for by their families.
Most people don't have houses large enough to house multiple generations inside the house. Houses are sized for parents + kids. And those are the only dwelling units available or legally allowed for vast distances in any direction.
From what I've seen American bedrooms are far larger that the 12 square meter bedrooms that are normal for two or three children to share in my country. Grandparents don't need a separate wing, they need a room.
Food is not Baumol, productivity increases is how we went from 80% of the population working in primary food production to 1%. These increases have not stopped.
Anthropologists measure how civilized a tribe or society was by looking if they took care of the elderly, and what the child survival rates were. USA leads to developed world in child poverty, child homelessness, and highest rate of child death due to violence. Conservatives often bring up the statistic by race. It turns out bringing people over as slaves, and after freedom, refusing to provide land, education, fair access to voting rights, or to housing (by redlining etc.) - all policies advocated by conservatives of time past, was not the smartest thing to do. Our failure as a civilized society began and is in large part a consequence of the original sin of the USA.
The US already provides significant aid to those in poverty, especially children. We don't need to stifle innovation to reach some level of aid that bleeding hearts deem sufficient.
We need excess capacity for when the next 'rip off anime artist XYZ' fad hits. If we didn't do that, we would be failing capitalism and all the people of history who contributed to our technological progress.
> Technological advancement is what has pulled billions of people out of poverty.
I agree with this. Perhaps that's what is driving the current billionaire class to say "never again!" and making sure that they capture all the value instead of letting any of it slip away and make it into the unwashed undeserving hands of lesser beings.
Chatbots actually can bring a lot of benefit to society at large. As in, they have the raw capability to. (I can't speak to whether it's worth the cost.) But that's not going to improve poverty this time around, because it's magnifying the disparities in wealth distribution and the haves aren't showing any brand new willingness to give anything up in order to even things out.
> Giving handouts to layabouts isn't an ideal allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization.
I agree with this too. Neither is giving handouts to billionaires (or the not quite as eye-wateringly wealthy class). However, giving handouts to struggling people who will improve their circumstances is a very good allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization. We haven't figured out any foolproof way of ensuring such money doesn't fall into the hands of layabouts or billionaires, but that's not an adequate reason to not do it at all. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
Some of those "layabouts" physically cannot do anything with it other than spending it on drugs, and that's an example of a set of people who we should endeavor to not give handouts to. (At least, not ones that can be easily exchanged for drugs.) Some of those billionaires similarly have no mental ability of ever using that money in a way that benefits anyone. (Including themselves; they're past the point that the numbers in their bank accounts have any effect on their lives.) That hasn't seemed to stop us from allowing things to continue in a way that funnels massive quantities of money to them.
It is a choice. If people en masse were really and truly bothered by this, we have more than enough mechanisms to change things. Those mechanisms are being rapidly dismantled, but we are nowhere near the point where figurative pitchforks and torches are ineffective.
In the USA cowboys were homeless guys. You know that right? Like they had no home, slept outside. Many were pretty big layabouts. Yet they are pretty big part of our foundation myth and we don't say 'man they just should have died'.
Can I go be a cowboy? Can I just go sleep outside? maybe work a few minimal paying cattle run jobs a year? No? If society won't allow me to just exist outside, then society has an obligation to make sure I have a place to lay my head.
I have an iMac G4 1.25 GHz. Originally, it was a 1GHz, but I swapped out the motherboard for a later model. For a while I've been wondering if I would had been better off with an earlier motherboard capable of booting OS 9 natively. Compared with using OS X's classic mode, this would omit the overhead of running a whole other OS and leave me with more resources to run OS 9 apps and games. I don't get a whole lot of use out of the earlier OS X software that I have on there...
Maybe in the future I won't have to make that choice! I'd much rather dual boot OS 9 off a different partition, but that hasn't been supported on the 1-1.25GHz models (Thanks Steve...) and no one has gotten it working properly. Maybe now it will be possible! A man can dream...
Then again, writing stylesheets is still one of those things where, if you're not careful, everything spirals out of control. Often I'll make changes and wonder why nothing's happening and realize something was overridden by another rule somewhere, or I was mixing up two properties, or some other silly thing...
I also find it's a bit awkward to write var(--foo) every time... I wish I could just write --foo... I suppose there's a grammar issue somewhere, or maybe it would have increased the complexity of implementations of CSS.
> Then again, writing stylesheets is still one of those things where, if you're not careful, everything spirals out of control. Often I'll make changes and wonder why nothing's happening and realize something was overridden by another rule somewhere…
It doesn't have to be this way; just write your CSS using Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS) [1] and these issues go away.
`attr()` is being updated to basically do that, the modern spec lets you specify a datatype and access any attribute (with some exceptions, you can't get URL types for security reasons), then use it generally.
This topic always tickles the pedantic part of my brain. If I may assume that the reader would agree that JS is a programming language, what makes it a programming language and not HTML? What makes a static .js file a program and a static .html file not a program?
Generally speaking, HTML doesn't have the constructs necessary to actually compute things. There's no way to declare variables, and there are no conditionals, jumping, or mathematical operations. All you can do is specify a fixed set of page elements.
Embedded JS within HTML doesn't count here, as that's essentially no different than a linked script file.
To be fair, there are some exceptions to this; there are some very hacky and convoluted ways you might be able to get some programmatic behavior out of pure HTML (I remember hearing about a weird example in part of Wikipedia's codebase).
HTML literally means hypertext markup language. It's more like TeX or Markdown, in that it's used to store and represent data, not to manipulate it.
> All you can do is specify a fixed set of page elements.
I'm not denying this but rather questioning why this means the document which specifies this is not a program. The previous sentences describe why it's not Turing-complete, which is moot to whether it's a programming language.
> HTML literally means hypertext markup language. It's more like TeX or Markdown, in that it's used to store and represent data, not to manipulate it.
I disagree that HTML is not used to manipulate data. Unless you mean to say that it doesn't manipulate it directly but I think that's also moot. My day job is to use HTML to build forms that are used to accept user input for data manipulations. It seems to me that I'm programming the browser to render the correct form and the language I'm using for the programming is HTML.
Besides, being used only to store and represent data does not seem to necessarily preclude it being a programming language. "Program" is a word that's used to describe a presentation of some kind. A wind ensemble might perform a "program" of pieces on concert night.
Well, if you'll pardon the tautology, it's a language that's used for precisely expressing programs. Of course, that just shifts the question. What's a program?
It's a set of instructions for a computer to execute. Hopefully that's not controversial. But isn't `<input type="text">` an instruction to render a text input?
It is "controversial" because it's way too vague, which the pedant part should recognize (is a mouse click not an instruction for a computer to execute?), so of course you won't be able to differentiate at this level.
If anything, I made it too specific by saying computer.
> is a mouse click not an instruction for a computer to execute?
If an SOP document—another example of a program—says to click a button on the screen, then of course that action is part of the instructions for a program. No computer needed, even; the instruction could be to stick my thumb up my nose, for all it matters.
It's overly simplified to the point of being meaningless. A .js file is a document that presents information to me when I open it using a text editor. So is a .html file, for that matter. Something different happens when they're opened in a browser and, for that reason, they both seem to be programs as well.
you can ignore the fact that they look like text. look past that
program and document just are different things. (I gave a simplified definition). if they both are represented using text when creating, it doesn't make them the same. because some text is a programming language and can create program, and some text use markup language and can create document.
it's like humans and worms are carbon life, if you only look at that you can't tell difference between humans and worms. you need to look what kinds of cells are in them or even better what they do
It seems like you want to intentionally not understand this?
> It seems like you want to intentionally not understand this?
It seems like you are offering a poor response to a difference of opinion.
> if they both are represented using text when creating, it doesn't make them the same.
I think you misunderstood my point. You gave definitions that were overly simplistic, thinking they were accurate. I was just pointing out how inaccurate it is to say "program does thing. document presents info." Rather, more accurately, I'm pointing out that a file being one thing does not preclude it from being another (seeing as I generally agree that programs do things and documents present information).
You are taking the position that a document and a program are mutually exclusive and that's just not true. HTML files are executed as programs by a browser and displayed as a document by a text editor. JS files, too. I could go on. Of course, this opinion is not borne from willful ignorance of your opinion, but instead from my understanding of English.
> it's like humans and worms are carbon life, if you only look at that you can't tell difference between humans and worms. you need to look what kinds of cells are in them or even better what they do
You're arguing my point for me, with this paragraph. In the given analogy, "carbon life" is analogous to "program":
It's like, HTML and JS files are programs. If you can't tell the difference between HTML and JS files, you need to look at what text is in them or, even better, what they do.
Yes, thanks. That's pretty much what I'm saying. HTML and JS files are programs, much like how worms and humans are carbon-based organisms. They're otherwise wildly different and do different things. That genuinely seems obvious (to me) with no room for controversy. I'm not sure what reason there is for disagreement.
> HTML files are executed as programs by a browser and displayed as a document by a text editor. JS files, too. I could go on
This reveals fundamental misunderstanding what is HTML and JS. "program" being different from "document" doesn't preclude some documents to have embedded programs within. however it doesn't turn a document into a program and doesn't mean markup language becomes programming language. there is still clear separation between hypertext markup and executable JS code
You write your comment as though I'm suggesting the HTML file is executed because it contains a script element. I'm not; an HTML file with no script tag, say just the text "Hello world!"[0], is executed by a browser as a program. Because if that HTML file instead contained something like <select><option>Hello world!</option></select>, it would know to render some kind of list to choose from.
If I put that HTML inside of a <form> element, I could even get it to send the selections to a server of my choosing using the "action" attribute on said form (I may need to further instruct the browser to render a <button> or <input type="submit> inside the form or do some other fancy shenanigans). Put more useful options in the select and maybe some other input elements with some useful <label> elements and I might just have myself a graphical interface which people can use to submit information to me. But that's not right because it's just "present[ing] info", which just happens to be useful labels and inputs to in a form that will send the user-provided information to an external program; just a regular document, nothing special or "instructive" or "do[ing] things" about it. I hope I'm not laying it on too thick.
Seriously, though, if I didn't just describe a program that's executed by a browser then we have such fundamentally different ideas of what a "program" is that I might as well just concede that you're right, by whatever definition of the word you must be using.
[0] Every "Hello world!" program tutorial, which only instructs how to print that text to the screen before exiting, in every programming language ever is generally (and, IMO, reasonably) claimed to be a program, however rudimentary.
> it would know to render some kind of list to choose from.
but this is not executing a program. this interpreting markup to render some data in some format. HTML is the same programming language as XML or Markdown or JPG or MIDI or WAV... so, not really a programming language. it's input for a program written using some programming language
sometimes presenting data and programming are conflated, for example postscript, but this is not HTML
> Put more useful options in the select and maybe some other input elements with some useful <label> elements and I might just have myself a graphical interface which people can use to submit information to me. But
Handling form submissions, handling displaying select boxes etc, is all result of executing program that is browser itself. The input for that program is hypertext markup by webmaster.
(Running embedded JS however is executing a program by webmaster.)
I think trying to present markup as programming is very artificial and does not correspond to real world.
> but this is not executing a program. this interpreting markup to render some data in some format.
Yes, it's interpreting markup to render some data in some format but that does not preclude such interpretation from being the execution of a program.
> sometimes presenting data and programming are conflated
My point is that executing a program is not mutually exclusive with presenting data. I am not conflating these terms but rather the opposite; I am pointing out that they are separate concepts which do not necessarily conflict with each other.
> Handling form submissions, handling displaying select boxes etc, is all result of executing program that is browser itself. The input for that program is hypertext markup
Right, that "hypertext markup" is a program for the browser (another program) to execute. That seems like an accurate use of English. If this is where we draw the line then JS must not be a programming language because it's just some kind of "script text" that is the input for some other real program.
> Running embedded JS however is executing a program by webmaster.
I understand this is your perspective but you haven't drawn a clear line separating this from the execution of an HTML program. Running plain HTML in a browser, consisting strictly of the necessary components of a valid HTML document, is also executing a program (webmaster isn't necessary).
Why is that a better descriptor? I don't understand this desire to demarcate between programming languages and whatever a "syntax" language is. All languages have syntax, even natural languages - it's one of the terms we've borrowed from linguists.
HTML is one of the languages I use when I am programming. In the sense, I really struggle to see the argument that it isn't a programming language, unless someone is using a very precise definition of "programming language" that I'm not privy to. There's a bunch of well-defined stuff it _isn't_ (e.g. Turing-complete), and a bunch of well-defined stuff that it is (e.g. declarative, or a markup language), but as far as I can tell there's no better definition of "programming language" than "language used for programming", and it certainly seems to fit that bill.
I've seen HTML and CSS being denied status as a programming language many, many times. It is a signal that the person making the claim hasn't encountered one of these debates before.
Yes, it is a programming language. And so is HTML, LaTeX, heck even Markup is a programming language. The shapes of discs you put into your 1950s Elna Supermatic sewing machine that alters the stitch, also a programing language.
The only requirements is that it compiles into a set of instructions which computers (or sewing machines, etc.) know how to read and execute into a predictable (preferably desired) outcome.
A programming language does not need to be Turing complete to be a programming language.
One thing I appreciate about Windows is (in my experience at least) you almost never have to go into the command line to change a weird setting. There's always a toggle in the GUI somewhere. I mean, I'll use the command line if I have to... I just like the fact that the supported options are enumerated visually; I don't have to worry I'll break something. Also, I can peruse through a place like the group policy editor to find settings I would have otherwise never considered changing.
The equivalent in the win world to obscure command line settings is the registry. There is a whole heap of documented and undocumented config in there. 99% of the time you don't really need to go in there, but its often the more automatable way and occasionally you will find some fun options.
Mm, I still recall the time my Windows 98 installation corrupted its registry somehow. The only fix was to reinstall, and the machine had no floppy or CD drive... getting Windows back on there was a task.
No floppy or CD? You were just asking for trouble then IMHO. It was common to have to reinstall windows every 6-9 months in the win9x days. That didn't even really work for ME, but by then win2000 came in to save the day. Software was primarily distributed on CD those days, being without a CD drive must have been a huge hardship.
I vividly remember having to reinstall Windows also in the XP days at least once a year due to malware or due to anti-malware software slowly strangling the OS.
I appreciate linux for the inverse reason. Because everything is either a nice text based config file or a command line tool, scripting changes to settings and automating things is a breeze.
That works for technical folks, but it's also a barrier to Linux adoption when too many things require dropping to a Bash terminal and dorking around. Try getting Grandma or Katie from HR to be able to do that . . .
It's a barrier not because it is hard, but because people are not familiar with it. Ask a non-technical user using the GUI to edit their display settings and they'll be equally flummoxed.
Grandma gets her computer setup by family, Katie probably has tech support or a managed device. I've been setting up Linux for friends and relatives and apart from 1-2 niche issues I didn't even have to do any support because stuff just works.
You’re probably right for grandma or Katie, but CLIs are definitely an issue. I know it because they are an issue even for someone like me. And I’m someone who is fairly techy (heck, we’re on HN) and can read the docs/rtfm. I’m more comfortable flashing a kernel I’ve never heard the name of for the first time, than editing some arcane wayland settings.
Simple example, I wanted to customize my gestures in gnome. I installed another app for it on the recommendation of multiple stack overflow and Reddit threads.
I ended up losing the default gnome gestures, and even disabling the app didn’t help.
I only use my windows (10) ltsc installation now. (Where, fwiw, I do have an absolute *ton* of customization/“ricing” apps for everything from custom ux themes to taskbar tweaks. Amazingly, pretty much everything is stable.)
Grandma, if she is on linux I probably set it up for her and left myself ssh access so I can update/fix it for her. Katie from HR shouldn't touch settings she should file a ticket and wait for the helpdesk monkey or IT to fix it.
Frankly, scripting makes it easier form me to help users: "double click on this when you return home. It will put your computer on the correct wifi, give it a fixed ip address, and poison your hosts file so that stupid NAS works and then setup a guest mount for the two SMB share that are still using SMB 1.0"
Interestingly, I feel polar opposite to you. Digging through a clunky GUI, going multiple levels deep, to find a tick box is annoying.. When I can just run a single one-line to achieve what I need. I suppose different strokes..
I think the issue with that is that linux is the kernel. Everything around it is how you interact with it. So how to change settings would be the responsibility of the shell used. And there are several shells and even window managers on top of those. I forget if there's a graphical shell, but it's irrelevant.
And that's not getting into the issue of whether or not something is a kernel issue or not. And it could be the responsibility of the distro to provide the tools to change the settings.
Basically, it's a lot of people with no obligation to each other trying to work in concert.
The situation on Windows is different. Windows is both the kernel and the shell and the window manager and the provider for a lot of the core tools.
Apple sidestepped the issue with OSX. They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.
> They took a robust kernel, FreeBSD, and created a GUI and tools on top of that. I think they also essentially took over FreeBSD or at least forked it internally.
They used NeXT’s XNU kernel which was a merger between CMU’s Mach and Berkeley’s 4.3BSD. They later refreshed it with code from OSF’s MK derivative of Mach (which also incorporated some code from the University of Utah) and code from FreeBSD, and have added a huge amount of new code of their own. They continue to pull new code from FreeBSD every now and again, but it isn’t so much a plain fork of FreeBSD as a merger between parts of FreeBSD and a lot of other stuff with a completely different heritage
So I think the biggest question is, what form of entertainment will eventually supplant streaming services? Whatever it is (or will be) will almost certainly be disregarded by most people.
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