Literally the last thing on the internet you can complain about is Steam. PC gaming would be the biggest cluster fuck in the world- if not fairly dead / super niche.
You would need to install 12 front-ends like Steam that would be hot trash and have a handful of games and be the most miserable shit ever. You wouldn't have sales, reasonable game prices, or family library sharing (this would be absurd to any other company).
Steam is a prime example of when a monopoly ends up to be the best for the consumer.
Well, you don't "stop using Steam" unless you don't care about playing most games released in the last 10-15 years. But the premise is solid, given that GOG has no DRM. Steam did get DRM "right" though.
My problem with Steam are the casino tactics Valve inject into their own games and the platform. That is an entire gaming industry problem however. At least Valve do some good things with the dirty money.
On the contrary, you could swap the database rather easily compared to traditional REST+SQL backends.
Migrate data to another GraphQL DB and join its GraphQL schema to the supergraph. The only pain point could be DB-specific decorators, but even those could be implemented at the supergraph level (in the Federation server) if needed.
Even migrating to a non-GraphQL DB is feasible: you could just write your own resolvers in a separate GraphQL server and join that to the supergraph. But that would be more of a ecosystem lock already :)
Really, any manner of SQL database is more of an ecosystem lock than a GraphQL database behind Federation.
You have a point, but I think the situation can be framed as a question of "what people want" by modelling the decision better. (People under a dictator sometimes do revolt, but often don't.)
The choice people have is not between a dictator and no dictator, it's between a dictator and a period of instability and chaos, possibly including bloody fighting or even famine, the outcome of which is (a) completely uncertain even in the unlikely event that you know that ~everyone wants the dictator gone and (b) might be that the dictator's forces still come out on top, or that someone even worse is installed into power.
guessing tokens (or something similar) i think humans grasp at more than 1 type of straw.
Edit: no ok i get u. ensemble learning is a thing ofc. maybe me n other poster reasoned too much from AI == model..but ofc you combine em these days. which is more humanlike guesser levels. (not nearly enough models now ofc)
Without doubt, LLMs know more than any human, and can act faster. They will soon be smarter than any human. Why does it have to be the same as a human brain? That is irrelevant.
They are implemented on an entirely different substrate. But they are very similar in function.
The training process forces this outcome. By necessity, LLMs converge onto something of a similar shape to a human mind. LLMs use the same type of "abstract thinking" as humans do, and even their failures are amusingly humanlike.
>Or more precisely, that you could be rationalizing what is essentially a random process?
You mean like our human brains and our entire bodies? We are the result of random processes.
>Sucks for those of us who are stuck in the now, though
I don't know what you are doing- but GPT5 is incredible. I literally spent 3 hours last night going back and forth on a project where I loaded some files for a somewhat complicated and tedious conversion between two data formats. And I was able to keep going back and forth and making the improvements incrementally and have AI do 90% of the actual tedious work.
To me it's incredible people don't seem to understand the CURRENT value. It has literally replaced a junior developer for me. I am 100% better off working with AI for all these tedious tasks than passing them off to someone off. We can argue all day if that's good for the world (it's not) but in terms of the current state of AI- it's already incredible.
It might not be a junior dev tool. Senior devs are using AI quite differently to magnify themselves not help them manage juniors with developing ceilings.
Well I'm part of a small few person team- I had a junior developer helping me who left. And I literally don't need someone like him anymore because I can do anything that he was doing via AI faster and better because it's under my control. I can have a 20 minute conversation and code revision that would have taken days for someone junior to code and would have probably been not done right (by 'right' I mean how I want it to be done, not necessarily wrong)
To think the same isn't happening all over the place and will only continue is ignoring just how powerful this tech is.
And when you are out sick, can AI do his role? When you are on vacation, can AI do his role? When you leave, can AI at least help define/interview your replacement, like he could have, even if he's too junior to step into the role?
There is so much else that people do. So many details that are just being ignored because of short term 'gains' that justify ignoring so many details.
You aren't taking what he said seriously. The junior could also get sick, present management issues, etc.
If this person plus a junior represented "1.3 engineering knots," he's saying... "actually, I'm still 1.3 engineering knots without him."
When this person leaves, they go find someone else who is 1.3 engineering knots. The junior represented .3, without the 1., it doesn't matter that much. Headcount strategy shifts.
If your company can treat people as cogs this way, your company has zero value add/domain knowledge. A company's value is what it value adds, what domain knowledge/expertise it has, or cheapest price. If all you have is cheapest price, you will lose over time. You will be undercut. You won't have the domain knowledge to adapt, to see future changes coming down the path.
So the company you talk about is already in the entropy vortex. It has no momentum. It has no future. It just hopes it can keep doing what it is doing now.
Hard disagree on this. The gap between the levels of statistical significance you get in economics vs physics is massive. They're not at the same levels of inevitability. The predictive power of the laws of physics vs the laws of economics is vastly different.
>The laws of economics have the kind of inevitability you expect from the laws of physics
Absolutely not- that is ridiculous.
Let's take "supply and demand" for example. Supply and demand only applies when you assume greed and capitalism. In a different social construct, the traditional supply & demand completely falls apart. But the problem is economics is presented as some sort of fact of nature. It just reinforces survival of the fittest instead of society that helps everyone.
Increasing prices because of demand is not the law of the land- it's a greed of humans that you normalize and make acceptable.
China works as a society to truly try to help their people. They invest in their country and people. That is why they are prospering. It's not just "catching up".
The US for example doesn't take care of it's people. They do the absolute bare minimum in the name of illusionary "freedom". The only people who are free are the rich.
Call it whatever you want.. but there is great benefit in having a government who recognizes that society comes first- not the individual.
Compare the social programs of China to the social programs of the US. USA has Supplemental Security Income, Medicare, Social Security, emergency rooms cannot turn away patients. There's friction, but the US definitely does take care of its _old_ people. What's the equivalent in China? I'm not saying they don't, but I'd like to know.
China has a number of social programmes for its citizens. Granted, they are all very recent and party politics has often come in the way of delivery. Most of these programmes were even only started in the last decade or so, and nearly all of them were started only from the 1990s onwards.
But the Chinese are going in the direction of massively expanding these programmes (ranging from medical care to education to housing to elderly and disability care), while the USA is actively gutting their own.
The US does the absolute bare minimum in everything you listed.
>emergency rooms cannot turn away patients
Sure but that's not real "health care".. again, it's the bare minimum.
Saying the US takes care of it's old people is sort of silly. Healthcare is through the roof. Social security is so low. Elder care is insanity expensive. People are worked far older than they should be because they can't afford to retire- especially with medical costs. Old people continue to pay property taxes on a home they might have paid off 20 years ago.
Really just do some searches yourself; it's like most other developed countries than the US.. health care, education is not insanely expensive, a lot of paid maternity leave, childcare assistance, etc. They provide the base people need.
You’re going back and forth between two concepts: society and its people. Look at the Covid lockdowns for evidence of how much China (or other Chinese for that matter) care about individuals.
That's the point. In a situation like a pandemic the rational choice is to act collectively, even if that means some inconvenience for individuals.
Ideally it means a population which is educated, rational, and mature enough to rise to the challenge with minimal prompting and direction. But if that fails, stronger persuasion becomes necessary - which may mean sanctions and enforcement.
US (and UK) individualism struggles with this, which creates a weaker, less resilient, and more dangerous low-trust high-paranoia society for everyone.
The Chinese are more used to 吃苦, which is an alien concept in the US.
You can take that too far - and arguably China has - where there's a complete lack of concern for individuals.
The ideal is a balance, and I'm not sure either culture has it.
The more a person can sense others’ situations and emotions, the easier it is for them to blend into a group, embrace its values, and even help shape shared ones. In China, people grow up with Confucius’ teaching: “Don’t impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”
I have read a book called "Chinese Characteristics" written by Arthur Henderson Smith, an American missionary, who also mentioned a similar idea: "How delightful it would be if people could combine the essence of both East and West, and walk peacefully on the narrow, thorny path of the golden mean."
Based on my own experience, Chinese society contains traditional thoughts from the feudal era, collective thoughts from the socialist period, and utilitarian thoughts brought by capitalist development, but it uniquely lacks individualism.
Lockdowns backed by force of arms were absolutely the right thing for people at the time. The New Zealand lockdowns were extremely strict and enormously successful until the government buckled and the plague ships came back in.
NZ lockdowns were not extremely strict. The government told us to stay inside and gave us guidelines and 99% of us followed them willingly. Punishment for not following was fines or a slap on the wrist. We were never forced to stay in our homes we could walk around outside. The guidelines were to avoid places where you would get in contact with people like a workplace or store.
This is so different to China welding people into their homes.
For some metric of successful. We only delayed the inevitable, and at the end of th day only rank in the middle of the pack in deaths per capita. Far behind many countries with much less strict lockdowns.
It was not the lockdowns, it was the good fortune of being an island nation coupled with a border control regime so strict it was later found to violate basic human rights.[0]
Australia went down a similar path to similar effect until the proverbial dyke burst and suddenly nobody cared about quarantine any more. The lesson here is that human nature being what it is, you can throw citizens overseas under the bus to appease the majority until they get tired of being locked in.
That shows exactly how much they care about their people. They are not willing to let individuals be selfish and ruin their society with regards to Covid.
Zero-COVID lockdown policy as was implemented was absolutely not supported by the majority of the Chinese population. And it was more about saving face than caring about people.
The initial COVID response in 2019 was to punish doctors reporting it. Such solidarity. Much caring.
This is exactly the "the idea is so good that it has to be forced" meme
The ruling group think they are enlighten more than everyone else and justified to use force/coercion to apply their will on other people (or just an excuse/scam to abuse power)
That's literally the moral justification for the Thiel/Musk/Yarvin Dark Enlightenment, and the basis of cult dynamics in general.
The idea actually works if, and only if, the ruling group has empathy for the population as a whole. Which - in spite of anti-government propaganda in the US - is at least partially possible.
It's catastrophic when the ruling ethic is narcissism and supremacism.
Then you are by definition a collectivist, which is your right to be but puts you completely at odds with western society and the foundation of the progress humanity has made over the last 500+ years.
This is a very naive view of what goes on in China. Not saying China doesn’t do anything right, but it’s far from the utopia you seem to think it is. There’s pretty rampant corruption at all levels of government and business, even to the point the central government acknowledges that repeated reforms are necessary. There are also plenty of billionaires in China who, along with the rich and well connected (often one and the same), enjoy a level of privilege and freedom unimaginable to the ordinary people. China’s social safety net has also been eroding to the point that if someone really has to depend on the state to take care of them, they’d be living a very meager life indeed.
You would need to install 12 front-ends like Steam that would be hot trash and have a handful of games and be the most miserable shit ever. You wouldn't have sales, reasonable game prices, or family library sharing (this would be absurd to any other company).
Steam is a prime example of when a monopoly ends up to be the best for the consumer.
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