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Wikitag Contributions
Due to an apparently ravenous hunger among our donor base for having benches with plaques dedicated to them, and us not actually having that many benches, the threshold for this is increased to $2,000.
Given the clear mandate from the community, when do you plan to expand Lighthaven with a new Hall of Benches, and how many benches do you think you can fit in it?
I think it's more that learning to prioritize effectiveness over aesthetics will make you a more effective software engineer. Sometimes terrible languages are the right tool for the job, and I find it gives me satisfaction to pick the right tool even if I wish we lived in a world where the right tool was also the objectively best language (OCaml, obviously).
This economist thinks the reason is that inputs were up in January and the calculation is treating that as less domestic production rather than increased inventories:
OK, so what can we say about the current forecast of -2.8% for Q1 of 2025? First, almost all of the data in the model right now are for January 2025 only. We still have 2 full months in the quarter to go (in terms of data collection). Second, the biggest contributor to the negative reading is a massive increase in imports in January 2025.
[...]
The Atlanta Fed GDPNow model is doing exactly that, subtracting imports. However, it’s likely they are doing it incorrectly. Those imports have to show up elsewhere in the GDP equation. They will either be current consumption, or added to business inventories (to be consumed in the future). My guess, without knowing the details of their model, is that it’s not picking up the change in either inventories or consumption that must result from the increased imports.
https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/03/05/understanding-the-projected-gdp-decline/
During our evaluations we noticed that Claude 3.7 Sonnet occasionally resorts to special-casing in order to pass test cases in agentic coding environments like Claude Code. Most often this takes the form of directly returning expected test values rather than implementing general solutions, but also includes modifying the problematic tests themselves to match the code’s output.
Claude officially passes the junior engineer Turing Test?
11But if we are merely mathematical objects, from whence arises the feelings of pleasure and pain that are so fundamental?
My understanding is that these feelings are physical things that exist in your brain (chemical, electrical, structural features, whatever). I think of this like how bits (in a computer sense) are an abstract thing, but if you ask "How does the computer know this bit is a 1?", the answer is that it's a structural feature of a hard drive or an electrical signal in a memory chip.
Allowing for charitable donations as an alternative to simple taxation does shift the needle a bit but not enough to substantially alter the argument IMO.
Not to mention that allowing for charitable donations as an alternative would likely lead to everyone setting up charities for their parents to donate to.
The resistance to such a policy is largely about ideology rather than about feasibility. It is about the quiet but pervasive belief that those born into privilege should remain there.
I don't think this is true at all. There is an ideological argument for inheritance, but it's not the one you're giving.
The ideological argument is that in a system with private property, people should be able to spend the money they earn in the ways they want, and one of the things people most want is to spend money on their children. The important person served by inheritance law is the person who made the money, not their inheritors (who you rightly point out didn't do anything).
I only had time to look at your first post, and then only skimmed it because it's really long. Asking people you don't know to read something of this length is more than you can really expect. People are busy and you're not the only one with demands on their time.
I would advise trying to put something at the beginning to help people understand what you're about to cover and why they should care about it. For the capitalism post, I agree with most of what you said (although some of your bullet points are unsupported assertions), but I still don't know what I'm supposed to take out of this, since ending capitalism isn't tractable, and (as you mention in regards to governments) non-capitalism doesn't help.