Viewing profile — jlebar

I mean, I would say that preventing 40% of disease (depending on what you're measuring, etc etc) is not marginal. I guess I'd turn it around and ask, if 40% is marginal, what numbe…

It's an amazing fact of mathematics that even a vaccine that has relatively low efficacy can completely neutralize transmission if enough people in a group take it. This is especia…

Parent poster is saying that even though the effect on an individual is low relative to other vaccines, the effect of a whole group taking the vaccine is actually very high . This …

> Generally, trace compilation is a dead end and has been abandoned repeatedly. JAX is a tracing compiler! (I know, I know, it sits in an extremely different part of the problem sp…

> Whenever I read about formal specs it always seems to me like “write the same tests just in a different way”, or worse, “write the same implementation but in a different way”. [.…

Author here; I'm happy to answer questions, take criticism, etc etc.

> The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs As I said, when farming became more effi…

> Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite …

> Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local …

> There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth. I wou…

> Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't. In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand. In a world where there's a …

> I want to go toward a future that looks good and fair for regular people. Do we agree that moving towards a future that's somehow "more advanced" as compared to the present (i.e.…

OOC, which past exactly do you want to go back to (and presumably stay at)?

All companies (and indeed individuals) rely on and benefit from various public goods, such as roads, law and order, and an educated populace. They pay for these public goods throug…

As a former engineer and manager at Waymo I can say with the confidence and sincerity of firsthand experience that this is not the case. People at all levels of the company think d…

I am not saying that there should be no regulations on monopolies. We are discussing a very specific market intervention, namely the proposal to > systematically [use] a pricing st…

> Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. OK but the market intervention being discussed here does not create a free(er…

> Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful. Sure, but OP is advocating that we should "systematically [use] a pricing structure that charg…

> Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds. We don't do this for gasoline (in most cou…

> having a Waymo dropping off clear of the bike lane sounds good, until the exiting passenger accidentally doors a cyclist who isn’t prepared for that possibility. Note that Waymos…

> (Most) cyclists are rude and act like they own the road. I would bet you an arbitrary sum of money that 51% of cyclists are not rude and don't act like they own the road. (Same f…

It's a matter of taste, but I much prefer the workflow in the tool I hacked together for this, https://github.com/jlebar/git-pr-chain . In the tool I wrote, you have a single branc…

Assuming this is a serious question, here are some ideas you could read about! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigilantism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law - https://en.wikipedi…

Got to hand it to this guy, this page loads FAST.