So what? It's pretty hard to tackle the root causes of anything and we are plenty happy with solutions that stop bad habits in other ways.
Should we have the FDA just ban harmful substances or do we need to educate everyone about everything eatable?
Surely education would be better, but it's just not feasible and creating a world in which you have to dodge yet another scam seems bad to me.
So? Literally the entire political apparatus depends on a few people enforcing their ideas of how the rules should be, and everyone else has to play by them.
This is an often stated postulate, but I'm not sure I agree. Sure, making money is necessary for a company to survive, but it doesn't have to be an end goal, and imho it's detrimental when it is. The goal can and should be to make a great product, create and make available something that otherwise would not exist, improve some product or process, etc - money and company itself are or should be just a means to a goal like that.
And the measure of how well you are making a great product, creating something that would otherwise not exist, or improve some other product or process is how much your customers are willing to pay you for what you are doing. If you are creating value for other people, you are making money -- money is a measuring unit that quantifies transferable value.
>No, because that falls under the fallacy that every market is a perfect market, where none is.
No, it doesn't. We live in a stochastic world, not a deterministic one, and nothing perfectly fits any speculative model. There are always outliers and edge cases, and that's fine -- the world doesn't need to perfectly adhere to any model in order for the model to be more accurate than not in the general case.
And the proposition that business profits are largely aligned with consumer interests in the general case, even despite outliers to the contrary, is very obviously true.
> the world doesn't need to perfectly adhere to any model in order for the model to be more accurate than not in the general case.
But that's my point: the world is so different from that model that it becomes inaccurate. You might be privileged enough to have a good enough approximation of a perfect market, leading you to believe that the model stands, but you are not representative of the population. Not even close to the median.
> And the proposition that business profits are largely aligned with consumer interests in the general case, even despite outliers to the contrary, is very obviously true.
I don't know why I'm debating this in the hyper-capitalistic forum that Hacker News is, but no, business profits are not. If they were, no advertising would be necessary, because products would naturally be sold. If they were, every consumer would have access to everything. If they were, no lobbying by any company to soften laws seen as too restrictive would be necessary. If they were, companies would not emit a single gram of CO2.
The whole point of business profit is to profit. Aligning with consumer interests is lucky happenstance, not a necessity. A fringe outlier, as you say. You cannot say "it is true because I see it". It needs to be backed by strong analysis.
I don't think that this is true. There are plenty of businesses that make shitloads of money off of frustrating or downright crappy products because of captured markets, constrained customers, lack of transparency, and more.
Look at something like Dark Patterns. These make a business more money by making a product worse.
Profit is what remains when you subtract operating expenses from income. Payroll is an operating expense. Maximizing profit is not strictly necessary for a business to operate.
My point isn't that a company shouldn't optimize for profit. My point is that the supposed logical conclusion stating "if it doesn't optimize for profit, then it will die" needs to be backed up by strong arguments. There are myriads of examples of companies not optimizing for profit and still surviving, and there are myriads of examples of companies optimizing for profit and still going bust.
> and there are myriads of examples of companies optimizing for profit and still going bust.
Do you mean there are myriads of example of companies who say that they are optimizing for profit, but don't actually follow through in their actions? Humans do, indeed, have a penchant for saying one thing and then doing another. But if they are truly optimized for profit, how could they possibly go bust?
It is not an unconstrained optimization problem. The constraints in which the company operates might result in a feasible region where even the most profitable point is still a net loss.
Those constraints may of course be self-imposed, like e.g. choosing a market to operate in.
> It is not an unconstrained optimization problem.
Of course not. The constraints are exactly what you optimizing against. Choosing to operate in a market that is not capable of supporting profitability is not optimizing for profitability, though. One may claim to be optimizing for profitability, but actions speak louder than words.
I guess the word illusion is misused, as in a traffic jam is an illusion because it's just too many cars on too little road.
I don't think illusion is meant like hallucinations.
But if it is meant that way, then I guess I can't be convinced anyway, since without time I can't change my mind from not believing that to believing it.
I don't think you're talking about what GP comment is.
For clarification, Bun can act as a package manager like npm (probably the case of "bun + app router + NextJS" comment), and it can act as a replacement to a node runtime a la Express on a VPS (I'm assuming this is what you mean by "yes"). But Bun currently does not implement enough of the Node API's to use Bun as the runtime for a Next.js app.
From Bun themselves: "The Next.js App Router currently relies on Node.js APIs that Bun does not yet implement. The guide below uses Bun to initialize a project and install dependencies, but it uses Node.js to run the dev server."
It would be silly to request material things as proof for immaterial things. Similar to math or ethics, it doesn't make sense to ask for material evidence that the square root of 2 is irrational or that torturing babies is evil.
The person you're responding to isn't asking for a material proof.
They're pointing out that ontological arguments are typically seen as an "argument of last resort" in a philosophical setting, and are making an (abductive) argument that the use of an ontological argument indicates a weaker position than the importance of the proof (the existence of a god) would otherwise suggest.
Please demonstrate to me a non-materialist claim that has no impact on the materialist world, and still complies with a conception of an omnipresent God
the claim (sqrt(2) being irrational) needing material evidence can be reduced even further to the number two needing material evidence. I'm not posing this either for/against your argument, just saying at some point you can doubt the existence of 2 itself. (handing me 2 items doesn't count, what is ... two?)
It works well for computer science as well. Values have types (forms) and bytes (matter). One type can be instantiated in multiple ways, for example you can have multiple integers, like 1,2,3,4 or the bytes 01000001 can represent different information, like 65 or 'A'.
The interesting thing is null, because here the distinction sort of breaks down.
But that's not entirely true, because the mapping alone doesn't give you any ordering relation or comparison options. Translating the natural numbers into bytes doesn't tell you how they should be ordered. We determine the 'form' of the order with our minds.
Could the sort be another form? Taking the article’s example, I could sort a bunch of tables by height or weight or some other attribute. That sort order then takes on a form that was not there prior to the sort. To think of it another way, after the tables (or values in CS) are sorted, the sort has been “assembled”.
I don't think so. Height and weight are sorted/ordered numerical, and numerals are not properties of the table, nor of its weight or height. The form of the relation is abstract, it's actually between the values attached and not the objects, and therefore in our mind.
