491–496 of 496 posts
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I am not aware of any mechanism to ensure that everybody has a roof over their heads and 3 square meals a day besides direct payments to the poor.
Welfare and SNAP may be imperfect, but they seem to be working.
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> What is the point of a job if not the results? The idea is to not fret over results and give your best with dedication. E.g. An athlete shouldn't be worrying about their results while playing and should focus on the play. > How can you be responsible for your actions but not the consequences of your actions I only mentioned control of consequences not responsibility. It doesn't mean you are absolved of responsibili…
Yeah, I think GP is right and this all feels like word play to me. Let's say you're making your ideal wood chair for your living room. You're "fretting" over getting the arms, legs perfectly aligned, surfaces smooth, identical chamfers, etc. But fretting is bad and makes it hard to get anything done so you stop. Then you end up with a roughshod chair. You shouldn't "fret" too much, but you also shouldn't "fret" too l…
A better analogy isn't so much a chair made by yourself, but say you're making a chair for a competition. The only thing you can control is your actions. What's out of your control is whether or not some other guy who's an absolute veteran is also planning to compete (making you likely to lose), or if almost no one else joined the contest (much higher chance of winning.)
Another example is in the workplace.
You control what efforts you put in.
But your promotion (or even firing!) depends on a ton of other things. If the company's doing poorly, they may not promote you even if you did a great job. Conversely, if the company desperately needs a new senior person and you're the closest fit, even if you just did a mediocre job, you may get selected.
What's common in both cases is - doing a better job is more likely to be better for you. But there are no guarantees you'll win/get promoted, so don't be attached to that outcome, but only your efforts/labour.
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It's not particularly bold, it's just a fact. It only seems bold because our society is still flooded with Marx-era propaganda. Poor people in 1920 would agree with me. We know this because in this era Marxist ideas were already quite old, well known and widespread. He argued for what was effectively a UBI or very generous welfare system under a different name. He predicted the poor would rise up as capitalism drove…
As an Irish person, I want you to explain to me how "left wing" the British were when they had us export our food at gunpoint.
The British never forced anyone in Ireland to export food "at gunpoint".
I hit this with my multi-agent system — 8 agents sharing a JSONL knowledge graph. Parallel writes caused a race condition: two agents read the same file state, both write back the full graph plus their additions, second write silently obliterates the first. Sometimes the file ends up with a half-written JSON line that breaks every subsequent read.
I patched it with an async mutex and atomic writes, but the real lesson was that I was fighting my runtime. On the BEAM, a GenServer processes messages from its mailbox sequentially — there's no concurrent access to serialize because the execution model is already sequential per-process. Supervision trees handle the crash case: child process dies, supervisor restarts it in microseconds, auto-repair runs on init, agents resume with clean state. Each process is ~2KB with its own heap, so you can run thousands with full isolation.
At 69 agents the coordination and fault tolerance problems get significantly harder. The BEAM was designed for exactly this — Ericsson ran millions of concurrent processes on telephone switches with nine nines of uptime using these patterns 40 years ago.
Wrote up the full story (race condition mechanics, supervision strategies, real code): https://dev.to/setas/why-erlangs-supervision-trees-are-the-m...
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Forget UBI and AI. They are distractions. Today it's very unclear that even just existing welfare schemes are sustainable. Political parties can buy votes with welfare and they do, so it's an unstable configuration. Europe is full of countries with this problem. A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10…
Money is a social construct, not some kind of physical quantity subject to conservation laws, and can be and is introduced into the economic system all the time. The real question is really would introducing more money or a UBI cause social disruption by e.g. disrupting price signalling by high inflation or changing incentives to work so less goods and services that people actually value are produced.
I hit this with 8 agents sharing a JSONL knowledge graph. Parallel writes caused a race: two agents read the same state, both wrote back a full graph, and the second silently overwrote the first. I patched it with an async mutex and atomic writes, but the real lesson was that I was fighting my runtime.
On the BEAM, a GenServer processes its mailbox sequentially, so this class of shared-state bug largely disappears. Supervision trees also give you the part agent demos usually skip: when something crashes at 3am, it comes back clean instead of corrupting the rest of the system.
That ended up being the more important property than raw agent count.