Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US.
That is where it actually makes sense to deploy windmills, and people will continue to put them there even if subsidies end.
It makes sense for the area, the amount of wind, the serviceability of the deployments, etc.
Off shore has always been politically contentious because it's much more dependent on subsidies, it's a battle for/against rent-seeking.
One party is in favor of this particular kind of rent-seeking and the other party isn't (they will be in favor of a different kind, no doubt).
The subsidies are necessary for these deployments to make financial sense, and if they went away, then it would just be a bad place to put a windmill.
There is no national security issue, there is no real case for energy infrastructure either. This use case needs government money to make sense, and is therefore sensitive to political fluctuations.
> Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US
Idk what you mean by that. I pulled up a map and saw dots all over the place. They are concentrated on the east coast because you can’t build fixed on west coast (has to be floating) but they are pretty much anywhere on the east coast.
Why do you say it's rent seeking? Offshore wind is efficient, turbine blades can safely be much larger giving 3x the output, turbine arrays have unobstructed space giving twice the capacity factor. It's more efficient than onshore.
You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?
Because that's what economists call it when you get something for nothing, as is the case with any subsidy.
I'm not going to argue this point; interested readers can look up how these energy projects are financed.
Windmills that are privately funded, including debt and risk show you where it actually makes sense to put a windmill.
> Offshore wind is efficient, turbine blades can safely be much larger giving 3x the output, turbine arrays have unobstructed space giving twice the capacity factor. It's more efficient than onshore.
Not going to argue with any of this, although you left out maintenance costs, and larger blades means more value at risk.
I'm not convinced that your efficiency calculation is measured in dollars and not windmill hours.
I would caution any engineer types reading from pressing their nose too close to the details of a particular energy technology.
Instead, it's better to focus on the business plan or economic shadow that a particular energy project leaves.
Dollars go in and energy comes out.
A bunch of money has to go in up front, then trickles of money slowly over time, and occasionally spikes of money have to go in randomly.
In exchange there is a modest, predictable flow of money out, which eventually is larger than all the in-flows in the bull case.
The question to ask is: how much in and out of dollars and of Joules at each point in time?
How does that compare to hamsters on wheels, people on bicycles, and lighting things on fire?
> You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?
This was never a stated premise, and my post starts with the opposite sentiment.
It's worth mentioning that career conversations with your manager are always bullshit.
How could they not be? Your manager's incentives are to keep you around, keep you productive, and keep you inexpensive.
It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do.
Why would you reveal any information about your long term plans to such an adversary?
If they realize that the company cannot provide what you are looking for then they may not want to invest more resources in keeping you around, or keeping you happy.
If they realize that you find some sort of intrinsic reward in certain work, then they might put you last for raises, because the money could help them more when spent on other people.
It's best to selectively reveal only your immediate short-term goals, only at the current company, and only as part of an ask.
Always make them pay for information, if you are going to reveal what you want, then they need to reveal whether they intend to help you or hinder you in getting it. Slow answers, non-answers, pushing to next quarter, etc. All signal that they intend to hinder.
It's rare to get an honest, fast "no".
Comments like this make me feel very lucky to have the job and manager I have! If the situation is as adversarial as the one you're describing, are you perhaps missing out on the fact that when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum? That you and your manager are actually on a team (assuming you're in a big company), basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?
> when people trust and genuinely support each other it's not zero sum
This is a clear non-sequitur.
Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people, or how they feel about each other.
If the situation is zero-sum, and one party doesn't realize, or is too trusting of other parties, then they just lose.
And they might not even realize that they lost, or that the situation was zero-sum to begin with.
> basically at the same level in terms of power and influence?
Obviously not true, unless you can truly ignore your manager and still be successful at the company, then they have power over you.
If they control more resources than you, or have more face time with people who do control resources, then they probably have more influence than you as well.
This whole comment reads like a sucker who doesn't know they are being scammed.
> This is a clear non-sequitur. Whether or not the situation is zero-sum is dictated by the situation not by the actions of people
Yes.
But a first-line manager more often than not is just another human being caught in the system rather than a total drone. They have their own agency distinct from their org's, and you can consider trusting them, up to a point.
Trust me, your situation is more common than not. Having been an IC for most of my career and then a manager and back to being an IC again, I can say that OP is way off base. Managers are incentivized to make sure that their reports can grow and can be promoted. When I was a manager, all my colleagues were perpetually diligent about making sure that we were fostering a great working environment for everyone.
I’m careful like this to a point, but you can establish trust with managers. Most decent cultures don’t favor hoarding good employees how you’ve described.
> It's ridiculous to think that helping you build a successful career, which likely doesn't involve them or your current employer for very long, is something that they would do.
This is a very short term perspective. If I am a good manager to you, you are much more likely to stay because that’s an important relationship & you are benefiting. If it means you move on because I helped you gain the skills/confidence you needed, great, maybe sometime down the road you can help me when I’m looking for me next job or refer my next awesome employee. But who cares, at least neither one of us had to be miserable.
You always have to be _cautious_ but don’t let relentless cynicism keep you from good useful professional relationships that can actually help you.
This is technically true, but metaphorically false.
Most readers, especially the younger crowd, are likely to be too trusting and not correctly recognize fundamentally adversarial relationships, like with their boss, with HR, with lawyers whom they don't pay personally, etc.
Especially when those people present the relationship with a faux version of the same naivety that they intend to prey upon.
The only people you can trust at a company, are people who have demonstrated that they value your relationship more than the company's relationship.
That's not impossible, but if they really need the salary, then the odds are stacked against you.
It's certainly nice to pretend that everyone is nice and trustworthy.
In fact, most people will hold it against you if you don't sufficiently pretend to be trusting.
Universal insincerity is part of the human condition.
To me a direct HR person is much less trustworthy than a manager with whom you’ve established a good track record. The manager’s behavior is incentivized completely differently depending on the company - sometimes it’s legitimate to manage towards the employees success and sometimes lose them. As a manager I had a director say something similar, that we are often just stepping stone on somebody’s career.
Whereas HR is a risk mitigation function whose purpose is to minimize the company’s exposure to lawsuits, and I stay miles away from them unless it’s absolutely necessary to engage. They can do other things on top of that function that are very helpful, but they are not there to help.
There are a lot of fictions at work. Still we all have our own risk profiles, and if we are lucky we can afford the risk of an honest conversation with our boss. That’s not the same as pretending everybody is trustworthy, it’s making a bet based on the specific situation at hand.
If your advice is “young people be careful, managers, supervisors, and HR are not your friends”, I totally agree.
Quality is not rewarded at most companies, it's not going to turn into more money, it might turn into less work later, but in all likelihood, the author won't be around to reap the benefits of less work later because they will have moved onto another company.
On the contrary, since more effort doesn't yield more money, but less effort can yield the same money, the strategy is to contract the time spent on work to the smallest amount, LLMs are currently the best way to do that.
I don't see why this has to be framed as a bad thing.
Why should anyone care about the quality of software that they don't use?
If you wouldn't work on it unless you were paid to, and you can leave if and when it becomes a problem, then why spend mental energy writing even a single line?
Because nothing can beat productivity of a motivated team building code that they are proud of. The mental energy spent becomes the highest reward. As for profit, it _compounds_ as for every other business.
The fact that this is lost as a common knowledge whereas shiny examples arises regularly is very telling.
But it is not liked in business because reproducing it requires competence in the industry, and finance deep pockets don’t believe in competence anymore.
I find doing my job as best as I can intrinsically rewarding. Even tho I am getting paid peanuts and have to give more than half of those peanuts to my government. I'm that kind of sucker.
Not everything is about money. Have you never wanted to be good at something because you enjoy it? Or do something for the love of the craft? Have you heard of altruism?
This exactly.
You have to be honest about why you are building something. If the answer is that you actually want to use it, then yes, quality and maintainability are important.
It might even be a good idea to use no AI whatsoever.
But if you are building it because doing so is in the long chain of cause and effect that leads to you being fed and having shelter, then you should minimize the amount of your time that is required to produce that end result.
Do you get better food, and better shelter if the software is better? It would certainly be nice if that was the case, but it's not.
> Not everything is about money.
Except for your job, which is primarily about money. Making it take less time, means that you have more time to focus on things that really are not about money.
By investing in quality on your job, your job will be easier and take less time. In software, you won't be called in to resolve that incident over the Thanksgiving weekend, and you won't be asked to debug why your system broke after someone committed 10k line diff without any review and without tests.
Be selfish! But be smart! On top of getting the best result for you, this gets the best result for the business too! And businesses know it, and even if they don't reward it proportionally, they do reward it with bonuses and seniority promotions.
Most people spend maybe 1/4 of their working age life at a job working for someone else. Why would you deliberately sabotage that by checking out mentally and waste all that time on sub-standard work? How do you expect to earn a promotion? You can produce good code at work and even better code at home for yourself. Deliberately producing slop at work will not help anyone.
Speaking only for my particular circumstances, the company is the vehicle that I use to do it for myself since it provides specialized facilities and equipment I wouldn't have access to as an individual or a founder. That I get paid for it is merely icing on the cake.
Certainly it's more conspiratorial to assume that his death had something to do with his research, or that he was secretly a some kind of Walter White character?
Being politically outspoken on an issue which is contentious in that area, and which has caused violence before seems like the most plausible explanation that I have heard so far.
No, it’s just sticking to the publicly known information. Not listing something isn’t saying it’s not a factor, it’s just literally going with what the police were saying: they didn’t have any information about the motive yet.
"User" generated content on the internet is mostly bots, HN included.
Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.
Too radical is in the eyes of the beholder. Most of the most intelligent people I know, people who rather carefully analyze their own beliefs, tend to have at least a few things that they are extremely outside the Overton window on. It's not particularly hard to see why: if you apply even a surface-level analysis of the world around you, a lot of stuff is "we all believe X because we've always done X that way".
On the flip side, there's plenty of just very dumb people out there. I play enough games that involve VOIPing with others that I can confidently state such.
>Opinions that seem too radical or stupid to be believed are often bots, or NPC humans repeating bot content that they read somewhere else.
You forget to mention trolls. The best way to handle a NPC propaganda parrot is to deliver them an even more foul piece of propaganda and observe .. vs disagreeing with them, that they would enjoy.
It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies.
Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge.
The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility.
Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility.
Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It's likely to be an Ethereum L2.
That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers.
It's just one use case that we don't yet have the technology to properly address.
The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions.
These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before.
Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers.
It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.
If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down.
Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.
> I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.
Why is it so popular for someone in tech to assign everyone else the task of thinking up something useful to do with technology x they think is cool?
> It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.
Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.
> Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.
There was a period of ~1000 years where you could also make this argument against some high-minded guy advocating for democracy.
> Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.
These technologies can be used by people to coordinate amongst themselves whether the outgroup likes it or not.
If you google "network state" you will find things that you might like, and things that you might not like.
It's not up to you whether other people create these things.
You can only control your own participation.
Cryptography is really the study of incredibly rigged games, games that one side almost always wins, even when both players play perfectly.
If human society is a game where humans try to coordinate with other humans to be better off, sometimes at the expense of other humans, then distributed ledgers have totally changed the meta.
> If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.
The problems with the technologies is that the "robust database" guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.
Remove the currency from a blockchain and you have a merkle tree. (To be even further unfair, considering currencies in aggregate, blockchains are always a merkle tree. How many forks of Bitcoin are we up to now?)
Merkle trees are incredibly useful, and yes a sort of robust database. I use git every day, but I have to respect that git branches and git forks are real phenomena and coordination of branches/forks always a real ongoing concern when working with git. Not a lot of institutions want a "robust database" which is easily branched/forked. You still need a coordination engine to keep the tree a "chain" somehow. The currencies for better and a lot worse (given how many seem isomorphic to scams) are the coordination engine that still seems most (distributed/transactional/"robust") useful to making a "blockchain" out of a merkle tree.
> The problems with the technologies is that the "robust database" guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.
I agree that economic incentives are important for robustness, but I don't agree with this use of the word "currency".
The tokens have value in that they can be used to write to the ledger.
That is the consumer aspect of the token, you can give it up in exchange for the ability to edit the ledger.
The producer aspect of the token is that if you help participate in running the network, you can earn tokens, to edit the ledger yourself later.
The tokens have to store value (ledger write access), and there needs to be a market for them, because the producers can't use them all themselves.
Just because something can store value, in this case the specific ability to write to the ledger, doesn't mean that thing is suitable as a currency.
Copper ingots let you make cat6 cables, the are objectively valuable, but we don't use them as a currency.
And as the world found out over the last decade, the distance from store of value to functioning currency is significant.
The store of value is sufficient to run the networks though, you don't need the tokens to work as a currency, and I think that has been empirically proven.
The Ethereum mainnet is unlikely to disappear for a very long time, but Ethereum is also unlikely to ever be widely used as a currency.
The takeaway is that you should have as much of these tokens as you are likely to need for writing to the ledger.
If you hold them in Coinbase and never use them to operate the ledger then you are participating in the speculative overvaluing of the tokens.
I think something I disagree with in trying to split the hairs between "token" and "currency" is that it can be a distinction without a sharp difference.
The US penny is a copper (plus specific additives) ingot. It's value as a currency has directly shifted with the cost of copper, to the point of a desire to end the production simply based on copper prices. Copper is still a commodity with commodity markets (and futures markets) and its fungibility to trading is sometimes currency-like.
(Plus we can get into deep weeds discussing things like the Gold Standard where the commodities in the not-so-distant past have been directly tied to currencies. Arguably that is a bad idea, but just because it is a bad idea doesn't mean that it isn't a common or recurring idea because the distinctions are so close to few differences. You can cross-reference the South American experiments with a "Bitcoin Standard" currency even.)
When I say "the currency mechanisms", I certainly mean "the token mechanisms". They are the same, from my perspective. The difference between "currency" and "token" in a cryptocurrency sense doesn't seem to mean anything to me (unless you are explicitly narrowing to "non-fungible token", but that's a different discussion and as far as I can tell you are not), it is a distinction without a difference. Especially in the context of how much cryptocurrencies are and are not isomorphic to scams. In my view Artificial Scarcity (inc., but esp. Premining tactics), Proof of Work, and Proof of Stake all have aspects that are isomorphic to scams, that can be indistinguishable from scams. With present technology/math I do not see a way to build tokens that have any value without those systems. Whether you call those "currency mechanisms" or "token mechanisms" isn't a meaningful distinction when talking about the parts of blockchain tech that are most problematically isomorphic to scams.
> Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.
People have been saying this for nearly a decade and many people with a great deal of motivation have failed to find any that worked and couldn’t be done better with traditional databases. It’s past time to ask if there’s actually any gold in them hills.
IME, these discussions always reduce down to one set of irreconcilable differences:
Does a government have the legitimate right to impose taxes on its people, and to sanction criminals (and criminal activity) via control of the Financial system?
Anti-crypto people say yes (and in fact the government has a responsibility to fight tax evasion).
Pro-crypto people seem (I’m not one of them) to say no, that people have the right to access to technology to evade these government functions.
I think this is a huge misconception.
I certainly don't view this issue as grounded in 'rights' or what governments should or should not do.
It's entirely an issue of what people can and cannot do with this technology.
It's a game with sides, and the concern should be that the technology has made playing for one side much easier than playing for the other.
The technology has unlocked total freedom of association, and I don't see a way to reign that in, other than restricting access to computation and the network for the entire population.
As long as the average voter wants personal computing to continue, I don't see a way that a government could get the necessary control to shutdown one of these systems.
The government has never been able to enforce all laws even close to 100% of the time. Internet copyright violations never went to zero, and never can. But there is a ceiling on how far any large, organized profit-seeking group can go with it.
In the case crypto, there are lots of things they could do to limit the impact. They can forbid government regulated banks (or any corporation) from engaging with it. They can limit all the points where could you, in volume, convert in and out of the normal currency system.
So, obviously, the use of crypto can't be forced to zero, but that's not really an interesting point.
The question is, does crypto have, on balance, a legitimate use in developed liberal democracies? Or should these states suppress it?
No one is going to run a database for you unless you pay them.
If you want to write data to an existing public ledger, then you are going to have to get some of the token that allows you to write to that ledger.
Paying for a token to use the ledger is not speculative, it's pragmatic.
Holding the token and not using it to write to the ledger is speculative, and encouraging people to do that in order to make money yourself is a scam.
If you pay AWS to host Postgres for you, are you being scammed?
You might be if someone convinces you to invest in Postgres credits that you never use.
But if you actually use Postgres, and it's cheap, and you are glad to pay for it, then it's not really a scam.
I think more of the promise of these technologies is in private ledgers, where the traffic is confined and the system could even be run altruistically.
For example, a university club or a town could coordinate elections using this technology.
They don't have to pay to use a public ledger if enough people in the group can run nodes themselves.
Everyone who cares about the result of the election is incentivized to participate in the network just to know the result and ensure its authenticity.
They aren't processing transactions for random users, they are coordinating using the latest technology with people who they want to coordinate with.
Or the university could pay 3$ per year to host a DB that all clubs can use.
I’m sure you can imagine a make believe world where no one has money and everyone cares and is tech savvy and yet no one can be trusted at the same time, and in this world somehow blockchains are useful.
I don’t know if you’re just old and out of touch or just being facetious so I’m not gonna bother explaining to you in detail why you’re wrong, but fyi there’s these things called part time jobs and internships people do in university so they have money.
Imagine you have a home on Airbnb , your guest sends you a payment, but its not directly to you, the payment goes through the payment rails stipulated and controlled by airbnb. This amounts to what is often 25-35% of your listening fee (payment charges, visa network, listing fee, etc, etc.) This is the middle men crypto is supposed to replace.
Only a trustworthy network can replace the current system, it must be something public, immutable and participatory , otherwise it will just centralize back to the above scenario, regardless of any intent. Essentially crypto is network code, it creates the primitives on transmission. And thus anyone (really anyone) can run a node and get a reward for supporting this security model. That's not a scam or even just pragmatic, its literally how money operates, as a incentive/disincentive mechanism.
People forget the early stock market was filled to the brim with scams, the original intent was good, but it attracted bad actors piggy backing in its lack of regulations, and it took years to clean-up, one can make an easy argument that's its still filled with fraud.
In your example crypto would only replace the visa network. Most of the fee you are playing is to Airbnb for getting you the client in the first place.
Correct, but these fees are trending up and not down, its not uncommon in this space to see payment fees hitting 15%. Removing the primitives of payment requirements, rails which are hard to build and practicably a monopoly, would free the state, this would power end-users instead of building more monopolies.
Actual payment fees are hitting a couple % max, all the rest is platform fees which are orthogonal to how you are paying. If you sell something through airbnb, they will get a cut no matter how you pay.
Credit card fees are a great deal for consumers even when they are added as a surcharge or there is a cash discount. Not having to deal with cash AND being able to dispute transactions are significant benefits.
What do you think about zcash? They seem to have solved the private transactions problem, have a better anonymity set than monero (and are accepted at exchanges) and are actively working on faster consensus.
IMO the hard problem here is PoS consensus with the private transactions.
It seems like the stakers have to come up from the depths of privacy to participate in consensus.
Maybe there is a way to do private staking, but that makes the network very difficult to understand and build confidence in.
So I don't see upgrading to faster consensus to be a small incremental improvement, it's fundamental.
A separate issue is that both Monero and ZCash are not post-quantum secure, while many of the new zkSTARK VMs are.
The ledger lives forever, and state actors will eventually decrypt the transactions if the cryptography can be broken.
At that point it seems like it's better just to build the currency product in one of the zk VMs.
In Zcash a quantum attacker could include invalid transactions with forged proofs, but I'm not sure they could actually break Zcash's privacy properties?
I'd need to review the design details more to say for sure, but e.g. from what I recall Pedersen hashes are used in the commitment tree, but not for nullifiers. Those use blake hashes (which are plausibly post-quantum secure), IIRC.
There's also the underlying prover layer, but many proof systems actually have information-theoretic zero-knowledge properties (assuming a suitable source of randomness), even if their soundness guarantees are based on assumptions like DLP.
Distributed ledgers were not a Bitcoin invention. Proof of Work was - largely a waste of electricity. There's no reason why SWIFT or any other institution can't have far more efficient real-time payments. It's already the case in most countries (UK & EU).
Distributed technologies have largely been useful to actors that wish to remain anonymous (Napster, Tor). Money transmission probably shouldn't be (if we want to avoid scams as a society).
Anonymous cash is good, but BTC is not really digital cash either - it doesn't work in a warzone without internet for example. Any real alternative to cash would have to work offline. And any real alternative to bank transfers would have to be regulated.
I'll do you one better in your prediction : there will be a global decentralized 24/7 multi assets marketplace built on something like Hedera in the next 10 years.
The only thing I could think to build on blockchain is electric utility metering / settlements data, but I fear I'd be laughed out of the room at this point
Bitcoin, and really all crypto 'currencies' were never meant to be currencies at all. Maybe a couple naive people who created them originally believed that, but it was never the goal.
They are speculative assets for gambling with. They have been since day 1.
> Bitcoin, and really all crypto 'currencies' were never meant to be currencies at all.
To be fair, there is a significant amount of disagreement about what a "currency" is supposed to be, and there is a large subset of people who believe that the desirable traits in a currency are exactly those things that make it function well as a speculative asset (notably, on average over a long time, value with respect to goods is at least flat and preferrably increasing) while simultaneously not thinking the things that another large group of people sees as desirable for a currency (e.g., lack of extreme short-term volatility) are important.
I can't speak to the original designer of Bitcoin, but I wouldn't be surprised if it and most cryptocurrencies were designed to be currencies, just by people who have a very specific (and, IMV, wrong) idea of what a currency ought to be.
A currency is fungible, easily accessible, tradable and convertible with little overhead. And in order to function, above all else a currency must have stability and trust.
If people lose faith in a currency's future, then it has no real value.
If people believe a currency (or the government/system which supports it) is unstable, then it has no real value. Real world global trade and investment is done on long timetables. You can't develop a product that won't start selling for 6+ years if you can't predict how currency will behave along that 6 years.
No one had a 'wrong' idea of what currency should be. They saw an opportunity to scam people out of all their money by convincing them that gambling was an investment and that they were much smarter and more clever, and sticking it against 'the man' or 'the system' when in fact they were just being used.
There were only two notable groups in crypto: The scammers and the suckers.
The best hack for improving estimation is first never giving a single number.
Anyone asking for a single number, without context, doesn't know what they are doing; it's unlikely that their planning process is going to add any value.
I think they call this being "not even wrong".
Instead you should be thinking in probability distributions.
When someone asks for your P90 or P50 of project completion, you know they are a serious estimator, worth your time to give a good thoughtful answer.
What is the date at which you would bet 90:10 that the project is finished?
What about 99:1? And 1:99?
Just that frameshift alone solves a lot of problems.
The numbers actually have agreed-upon meaning, there is a straightforward way to see how bad an estimate really was, etc.
At the start of a project have people give estimates for a few different percentiles, and record them.
I usually do it in bits, since there is some research that humans can't handle more than about 3 bits +/- for probabilistic reasoning.
That would be 1:1, 2:1, 4:1, 8:1, and their reciprocals.
Revisit the recorded estimates during the project retrospective.
You can make this as much of a game as you want.
If you have play-money at your company or discretionary bonuses, it can turn into a market.
But most of the benefit comes from playing against yourself, and getting out of the cognitive trap imposed by single number/date estimates.
One interesting angle for me is that I am seldom given complete specs or requirements when asked for an estimate. Of course you ask questions to try to determine key information that has not been specified but often the answers are not available or fully reliable.
So any estimate has to include uncertainty about _the scope of the work itself_ as well as the uncertainties involved in delivering the work.
The natural follow on question when you present a range as the answer to an estimate is: what would help you narrow this range? Sometimes it is "find out this thing about the state of the world" (how long will external team take to do their bit) but sometimes it is "provide better specs".
This is what I do but I don't try to make it complicated with too many numbers. "2 weeks but there's a 10% chance something bad happens and it takes longer".
I have no problem if they just hear the "2 weeks" part. If they come complaining in 3 weeks I just say "we hit that 10%".
The other important thing is to update estimates. Update people as soon as you realise you hit the 10%. Or in a better case, in a week I might be able to say it's now "1% chance of taking more than a week".
I've found that these incompetent folks (mostly in management as you say) really don't want to reveal their intellectual inferiority; they are desperate to hide it.
If you started using this with your team, everyone adding value would benefit from the clarity, and the incompetent folks will just go along with it so as not to reveal their incompetence.
They aren't adding value anyways, so it's fine if they fall behind.
Obviously it would be great if this caught on, but it's not even widely understood/agreed on that read-time precision is a desirable quality in a legal system.
This is something almost everyone here takes for granted; we want the interpreter or machine to give the same result for the same input.
We want that property so we can know the run-time behavior during development.
There are judges and politicians in the US that advocate for various "interpretations" of laws including parts of the constitution, which are different from what the law literally says.
In fact they refer to the literal meaning as the "literal interpretation", implying it is one of many valid interpretations, and casting doubt on the idea of language having a precise meaning.
The crowd here knows that it is totally possible and often invaluable to work in languages with precise meaning.
Anyways, in practice this means: all the steps happened for the law to get passed by the legislature including arguing about the exact text, and instead of enforcing it as written, the judiciary enforces some slightly different but similar law.
A technology like this necessarily concentrates power in the legislature, and takes it away from the judicial system.
It concentrates legal power at write time and removes it from run/read time.
Catala is specifically for tax codes and other laws that involve formulas and calculations, not all laws, so I don’t think most of your concerns apply to it specifically. There are often complicated rules governing how, e.g. benefits or tax credits are calculated that natural language is clumsy at expressing, so having a formal language that encodes that logic seems useful.
I agree government/justice by algorithm would be very dangerous, but Catala does not seem to be that.
It’s also the case that the massive set of constantly evolving case law is akin to the most convoluted and buggy “libc” ever implemented, running on a system where random bit flips occur frequently. Any lawyer who says they know how to definitively encode an assumption is inherently making a probabilistic statement colored by their own experience and definitionally limited exposure to case law - it may be near perfect, but it exists in an imperfect runtime environment.
This doesn’t mean that this isn’t a useful tool as an aid for interpretability. And perhaps we can reach a point where ambiguity in case law can “propagate” through a graph of nodes to give a range of answers to any question about a regulation - perhaps with the aid of LLMs. But until we have such a system, it can be dangerous to draw conclusions from systems like this one.
> "interpretations"... which are different from what the law literally says.
We have to remember that the letter and spirit of the law can grow apart over time, and loopholes are often gamed before that naturally happens anyway. So obviously we still need judges to keep the "spiritual" aspect of intent alive, so that evil isn't laundered through technicality.
"Literal" should really be a concrete thing, but it does feel strangely connected to a problem that has existed since Sola Scriptura, up to Gödel's theorem. I think about this everytime software and law collide. That article on "what color are your bits"[1] also comes to mind.
Curiously enough, law in the US, which inherits from Common Law, is heavily focused on the interpretation (the case law) in the courts of the written law, as opposed to the written words themselves. This is in contract with civil law, napoleonic law and Japanese law, which places greater importance on the written words themselves.
Do you really want, for example, the US constitution's write time understandings to be perpetuated forever? Their understanding of "citizen" did not include neither women nor black slaves, just to take one example. Another example is the famous question of "whether or not the right of a woman to abortion is a consitution-guaranteed federal right?" to which a bunch of very important folks gave an answer in 1973 but another bunch of very important folks gave a different answer in 2022.
Write-time understandings no, write-time language yes.
You can always change it, which is what happened in the case of women and slaves.
To be clear, changing the text is the correct way to handle that, we shouldn't have just relied on the understandings of people changing over time to fix those issues.
The famous example you give illustrates why a system without precise meaning cannot work. It can seem like it works when lots of people act in good faith, but it quickly breaks down with even a few actors play the actual game instead of some "spirit of the game".
In 1973, judges ruled one way, playing the actual game to accomplish a goal, and then everyone acted surprised in 2022, when the same tactics (playing the actual game not the spirit) reverted the decision.
I'm going to take a guess, and assume that you were in favor of the 1973 understanding and not the 2022 understanding. It would have been nice for that to have been captured precisely in some kind of specification, instead of enacted with a volatile read-time mechanism.
I don't live in the US and I'm rather indifferent to either understanding, so it would be correct to say that I'm neither in favour nor in opposition of any one of these. Being personally unaffected, I simply find it an interesting subject to observe.
With that, I still want to point out that even if we both agree that "changing the text is the correct way to handle," it's not a possibility that is even remotely practical or achievable; any meaningful progress that the US have had in the last 100 years or so was achieved solely by the means of "reinventing" the meaning of already written (and unchangeable) words. That seems to be the exact thing you seem to be in opposition of.
I have a potentially more optimistic (and simultaneously more pessimistic!) view to offer.
Some differing interpretations of the law distinguish between the lawmakers' intention vs the literal meaning (and keep in mind that language itself changes a lot in just a few centuries. The hard problem is that, in PL terms, the law is written in syntax without agreed upon semantics. So a decent step could be just using some agreed upon semantics, like we do in code! Then at least "interpreting" it would be unambiguous.
Maybe a decent analogy would be gcc vs clang might produce different programs for certain undefined behavior, and different combinations of pieces might lead to different behavior too (like race conditions), and somebody (the plaintiff/user) is asking you (the judge/compiler) to decide what's going to happen in this next loop/program/whatever.
Or maybe a decent analogy would be getting a ticket that the API is erroring in some rare user's case and having to look into the code and stacktrace to realize it's some weird unanticipated interaction between two different pieces of legacy code (150 year old law) that now interact due to a recent merge (a new law from last year), and now it's crashing, so we have to figure out how to interpret/compile/resolve this user's case.
If law was usable like code, we'd never have any of those issues, just like we never have those issues with actual literal programs. And when we do, it's just because we're using the wrong language/aren't encoding enough things in the types and semantics/shouldn't have used this niche compiler so now let's get a new interpretation from another Supreme Compiler/etc. Life would be easier \s
So it's maybe more optimistic than you, in that the run/read time power (judicial) doesn't get diminished, but more pessimistic in that I believe it because I believe that changing the language from english law jargon to some formal language doesn't actually eliminate the issues it might be intended to eliminate.
The article leaves out the fact that corporate research has gone the way of political research.
It exists to give cover for some decision that is unpopular, or serves the decision maker more than the company.
It doesn't actually inform decisions, it retroactively justifies decisions in the most palatable way.
If anyone actually talked to users and did what they wanted, then software wouldn't suck.
I have yet to see a way that this software is better than leading terminal emulators like Alacritty and WezTerm.
Alacritty is simple and blazing fast, WezTerm has a Lua API and is as complicated as you want it to be.
All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's clout, and maybe some interest in Zig.
Given that's the real reason everyone is talking about Ghostty (which I'm happy to be wrong about, let me know),
It raises the question: Is crowding out other projects in a space, so that a billionaire can have a side project, really something we should be excited about?
Unless the software is actually good, it seems like this is just an attention suck away from better software that could use it.
For me, Alacritty and Foot do not support ligatures, Kitty does now but I personally find the maintainers behaviour a bit abrasive. Wezterm is great but I found it noticeably slow in some (dumb) instances -- eg 144fps rendering of games, input latency and had issues on wayland at some point.
Dunno if that makes Ghostty "better" than other terminals, probably not. It just ticks the boxes of ligatures, fast, integration with wayland, simple amount of configuration to work how I want. It also seemed to have a focus on "correctness" which I appreciate. I don't use any of the tab/ssh/whatever features. I know ligatures are the new vi-vs-emacs religious war. Without that single feature-request, I'd probably just use foot. Swapping terminal also isn't that hard, it'd easily swap to something else if it gave me a reason.
I do think its reasonable to question focus on a millionaires toy with a large social presence vs other projects, helped by the somewhat --if not intentional, at least side-effecting -- hype-focused release style of Ghostty. Would it be nearly as successful if it were released anonymously at a 1.0? Probably not? Maybe? It does score highly in sort of arbitrary feature & performance benchmarks so it would probably still have a number of users without the name attached.
> All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's clout, and maybe some interest in Zig.
Nope, that's not it.
It's mostly because he noticed the majority of terminal applications were okay but not great. So he decides to address this by creating a cross-platform terminal app that's faster and more compatible than pretty much every existing terminal app. And has a native macOS UI written in Swift without compromising its cross-platform features.
Kind of out of nowhere, Ghostty is in the conversation of being the best terminal app available. "Best" doesn't mean the most features; but it nails speed and compatibility. (I’d love to see iTerm switch to using libghostty in the near future. That would be a killer combination!)
From "State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions": [1]
Before presenting the latest results, Ghostty warrants particular attention, not only because it scored the highest among all terminals tested, but that it was publicly released only this year by Mitchell Hashimoto. It is a significant advancement. Developed from scratch in Zig, the Unicode support implementation is thoroughly correct
In 2023, Mitchell published Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators, demonstrating a commitment to understanding and implementing the fundamentals. His recent announcement of libghostty provides a welcome alternative to libvte, potentially enabling a new generation of terminals on a foundation of strong Unicode support.
Alacritty is “barebones” and doesn’t have modern features like… tabs.
Wezterm fits the vim/emacs bill of “make it whatever you want”. I want something in between - iTerm2 for 2025. Stuff like secure input on macOS is something that is just nice - it behaves like a real platform app and not jsut the lowest common denominator loosely ported.
They say in the docs it’s not the best at anything, but it’s competitive in performance, features, and extensibility and that combo is a winner for me (personally)
> Alacritty is “barebones” and doesn’t have modern features like... tabs.
It does.
And the barebones complaint is literally funny (I'm mentally giggling) because Ghostty didn't have modern features like... search, literally 4 days ago
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9756
That's why I'm staying on Alacritty on my company mac.
This is a terrible comment. Everyone should use the terminal that works for them and anyone who wants to write a terminal should do so. Ghostty is great. I’ve heard Alacritty is great.
This doesn't engage with my comment at all other than to say that you personally found it unpleasant.
If it's true that Alacritty and Ghostty are both great, Alacritty must be some different kind of great because it has a large number of users due only to its own merits, and not due to the online following of the author.
Off shore has always been politically contentious because it's much more dependent on subsidies, it's a battle for/against rent-seeking. One party is in favor of this particular kind of rent-seeking and the other party isn't (they will be in favor of a different kind, no doubt). The subsidies are necessary for these deployments to make financial sense, and if they went away, then it would just be a bad place to put a windmill.
There is no national security issue, there is no real case for energy infrastructure either. This use case needs government money to make sense, and is therefore sensitive to political fluctuations.
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