Socialism doesn't fail because of human nature. That's hate speech that leads to genocide due to blaming innocent people for the unavoidable failure of socialism.
Socialism fails because it is fundamentally wrong about profits and free-market prices.
A profit in the free market is philanthropy because you make a profit by giving other people more valuable things than what you take from other people.
That's what money was invented for: to signal who helped other people and deserved to be helped back.
For example, you take wood from the market, harming society, which no longer has access to that wood. But then you turn the wood into a chair and sell the chair.
You make a profit if the chair is more valuable than the wood.
When you harm society, you lose money, like the money you pay for the wood. When you help society, you gain money, like the money you get paid when selling the chair.
So a profit in the free market is the measure of the net poverty of OTHER PEOPLE that you have reduced.
This is possible because value is subjective: the value of things is independent of the cost of production.
Instead, socialists believe that the value of things is the cost of production. It's called the labor theory of value.
If things were worth the cost of production, an inefficient machine that produced the same good but consumed double the energy would produce double the value, and machines should be as wasteful as possible.
Under the socialist theory of value, it is not possible to decide how to allocate resources because no matter what you decide to use the resources for, it's always the same cost.
Instead, capitalism, by trying to maximize profits, tries to convert the least costly resources into the most valuable products, and profit is the measure of the good done to society.
But profits are the very thing that socialists try to destroy the most. If somebody is helping society the most, it's by making high profits. But then socialists punish the best actor by taxing him, killing the best assignment of resources.
Also, socialists cannot know the value of things because they are always trying to distort prices. For that reason, they cannot know the cost of anything or the value of the goods produced.
If bread is the most needed thing, it is expensive because it is the most valuable. Being expensive makes the bread makers profit more, so they can take more and more resources from society to make even more bread. But then socialists limit the price of bread because "bread is too important." So the bread makers cannot profit more and increase production because the cake makers take the floor, since they had not been limited in price because cake is less needed than bread. Capping the price of bread leads to a fall in bread production and an increase in cake production.
Under distorted prices, taxes, price capping and regulation, it is not possible to decide what to produce, with what quality, using what resources, or whether to save today or consume tomorrow. Nor is it possible to identify the bottlenecks of production.
Is bread expensive because of a lack of wheat, because producing cake is more valuable than producing bread, or because there is a shortage of transport trucks or chemical plants to manufacture the packaging?
Under socialism, it is impossible to find the answer.
How unfortunate it is to be stuck on a paradisiacal island.
The game Crysis was inspired by one of those islands. Instead of complaining, she should be setting herself to invisible mode and running around shooting Koreans.
Modern CPUs have hundreds of megabytes of cache. That's more than the entire hard disk space required by Windows in the 1990s.
You could install an entire Windows system, emulated in cache of a modern CPU, including the hard disk, and modern computers are still slow, partly because the CPU does nothing while waiting for RAM to fetch data, and partly because decades of people prioritizing abstractions over efficient coding have made software totally inefficient.
Software has gotten vastly more complex over the intervening decades, and unfortunately it has historically been beyond human capacity and/or institutional time/money availability to keep everything running super efficiently.
The good news is that with LLMs, we can make software efficient again, much more cheaply!
I go to Hacker News to hear people say that LLMs will automagically make software clean and efficient again.
Then I go back to Cursor’s agent chat window and spend another day endlessly struggling to keep LLMs from inserting needless complexity and N+1 queries into the code at a faster rate than mere humans could ever hope to achieve.
I’ve been studying and working in AI for almost 3 decades now, and made at least an amateur’s study of the field’s 70-ish year history. Much has changed, including the word we use for this concept, but one immutable constant is that we have always been teetering on the brink of the singularity.
Now isn’t even the first time people got so excited about an automatic proof finder that they declared that it’s already here.
Strangely enough, one of the shortest math papers ever published is another computer disproof of a long-standing conjecture, by Lander and Parkin (1966):
"A direct search on the CDC 6600 yielded
27⁵ + 84⁵ + 110⁵ + 133⁵ = 144⁵
as the smallest instance in which four fifth powers sum to a fifth power. This is a counterexample to a conjecture by Euler that at least n nth powers are required to sum to an nth power, n > 2."
So yeah, computers have been slaughtering math tentpoles since forever ago, but I don't think I've seen so many big ones taken down so quickly. Although if Euler had been alive when the 1966 paper was published, he might've crashed out the way Terence Tao is doing now.
Which definition of singularity are you using? I'm still doing my own laundry and taking out the trash, though I could hire a human to do that job if I had the money for it.
Strangely, I paid for LTSC a year ago, installed it, but moved to Linux and found it does everything I want, even running native Windows programs. I never looked back.
Altman: You are welcome to invest a little bit of your fortune in making major software developers write more efficient code that stops wasting our RAM. Start with internet browsers and the Windows 11 app that wastes one gigabyte showing the weather.
Most of the RAM & CPU resources used by web browsers are mainly the fault of web developers who have no clue about memory management and will happily write code that uses 100% of a CPU core to do nothing.
That's mostly true. If you use a script blocker, most websites work fine, and the ones that don't usually only need one or two scripts enabled out of dozens of running blocked scripts.
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