Usually, you can. But occasionally you get mildly defective tools that require some directory to exist, even though it's empty. It's easier to add a gitkeep than fix them.
You can. But this makes intent clear. If you clone a git repo and see build/ with only a gitkeep, you are safe to bet your life savings on that being the compiled assets dir.
There may be other directories. I think it's useful to be able to see the entire directory structure of a repo when you check it out, and not just after running some scripts.
Well, they would likely have to lower their profit margin because the demand is reduced by the higher prices. Fewer purchasers will want to/be able to buy the item at the higher price. The supply and demand curve will find a new equilibrium, but it isn’t like the sellers are going to sell the exact same quantity of items with the price exactly increased by the tariff amount.
That assumes that demand is meaningfully elastic, that suppliers have room in their margins to absorb it, and that they're willing to. That is obviously not the case for a lot of things.
Products with inelastic or less elastic demand we can skip over because it's pretty self explanatory.
Products like the random cheap widgets a lot of us would buy from random Chinese sellers are often high volume low margin products with a lot of competition. Think about stuff like a USB->TTL serial board that's basically two connectors, one cloned chip, and a few supporting components on a single layer PCB. Hypothetically this is an ideal case for free market economics and these things should have already been basically as cheap as they can be at every step in the chain.
For less competitive items, particularly lower volume specialty items, a vendor may also decide that it's just not worth sacrificing profits in other markets by letting them know there's room to come down. A lot of the independent hardware designers I've been wanting to buy things from sell out every batch one way or another so they just don't care, demand exceeds supply even if demand from the US is reduced. Others have decided the volatility of the situation just isn't worth it with the risk of products getting delayed or additional charges added resulting in chargebacks and lost products and have simply stopped selling to the US altogether.
> What will the economy consist of when there are no more paychecks? Thus nobody buying anything.
It could be possible to have high GDP with low paychecks… it basically means the entire economy mostly consists of the wealthy few buying and selling things to each other. It is easy to see how that could happen if more things become automated.
You could imagine a world where there are only two people who own anything, and the entire economic productivity is generated by robots owned by those two people creating things and selling them to the other person, who uses those things for their robots to work with. You could produce tons and tons of things with no workers, and the GDP would keep growing.
Of course, the high GDP doesn’t mean everyone is fed and sheltered. Having a functioning and growing economic market is required for capitalism to serve its purpose of providing for the citizens, but it isn’t the ONLY requirement. If the form capitalism takes as we move into the future is one that stops providing for enough of its citizens, it won’t be able to sustain itself. I think there are things we can do to shift our capitalism to do a better job of providing for everyone, but there are a lot of forces fighting against that.
> It could be possible to have high GDP with low paychecks… it basically means the entire economy mostly consists of the wealthy few buying and selling things to each other.
A similar thing happens when people talk about "total debt" in an economy. I like to bring up the scenario of 3 people trading a shiny rock around in a circle. Each time seller doubles the price and agrees to defer payment.
In this way, three kids can spend recess at school running the nation's average household debt to near-infinity! There are a few flavors of GDP calculation, but I expect it could yield some similarly odd results.
In both cases, the map is not the territory, and the metric is indirect/imperfect.
Capitalism works due to the "free market" which maps a large number of producers to a large number of consumers in an efficient way. When the market ceases to be sufficiently free, capitalism starts to falter. It may be regulation, it may be monopoly, it may be monopsony, it may be dysfunction of the judiciary system that fails to protect property rights, etc.
A system of only two parties trading the entire economic output of a country would be utterly un-capitalist, more like two kings trading in products of their kingdoms. No doubt that any social institutes would have been subjugated by these two parties.
> an efficient way. When the market ceases to be sufficiently free
I want to highlight that the freedom of the efficient market is not the same as the freedom of participants, and that in certain specific ways they are inherently opposed.
Contrast these two kinds of promotion:
1. "Our X system is the most efficient and our best chance for abundance, we proved it with math! ... Because "correct" prices are discovered through public prices where all transactions are open market transactions with public prices. I
2. "Our X system is the free-est because nobody's telling you what to do with your stuff! Economic liberty! ... Because two consenting parties can make all sort of private deals with secret or preferential prices and and non-disclosure agreements.
I feel there are certain blocs--sometimes certain individuals--that act as if both are equally and simultaneously true, despite the inherent contradiction.
> And the safest way to do identity is to have it be destructable and remakable on the fly.
It might be the safest, but it defeats lot of the purpose of identity. There is a reason it is a hassle to change your email address... so many services are tied to that identity. You can change it, but you have to change every service that is relying on it as your identity, and you still have to own your old email so you can prove to the service that you are the same person.
I am not sure how you could ever avoid this problem? The purpose of an identity is to be able to tell that one request is made by the same person who made a previous request... persistence is a requirement.
This seems like solving the problem at the wrong layer? The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content. You could easily create your own forum or something and only include people you trust. You don’t need an entirely separate internet.
I was able to block them on my silly hobby domains. Most of them were already blocked to begin with from blocking other shenanigans over the years. Even something as simple as blocking anyone that does not support HTTP/2.0 takes out most bots. Adding basic-auth also stops most of what gets through. Blocking TCP-SYN with strange MSS values cuts out many before they can even touch the web daemon.
>The issue isn’t the actual network connection between people, it is the content.
>>Everyone serving a website is being ddos by AI agents right now.
You’re missing the point, the point is that while mesh networks solve a problem, it’s not required to solve the problem ”I’m tired of the Internet” or ”I’m being indexed”. You can build your own network on top of the Internet with zero new hardware required, with something like wireguard, i2p or whatever.
There's a dead comment here saying that OpenAI doesn't just DDoS the internet because it can. That's true. Any supposed DDoS is a side effect or incompetent scraping, and won't affect anything they can't scrape. Not sure why it's dead — it's important to realise this.
Edit: oh, it's probably dead because of the username
Even if it was a "network connection" issue creating an overlay network on top of the Internet (with VPN tunnels and mesh routing, for example) would yield wildly better bandwidth and latency characteristics.
You can still make that overlay network geofenced and vetted. Heck, running it over a local ISP's last mile would probably yield wonderful latency.
We need vetted webrings on the existing Internet, not a new Internet.
Reading this back and forth so far I think you’re spot on… which leads to this open question, wheres the consolidated stack that makes this accessible?
Also I think the name vetted webrings or just the vetted web is simple enough to be a movement.
There's only so much you can do to detect and block content that's AI generated. At the end of the day, the content starts with the people creating it.
Jumping to an invite only network isn't the most ridiculous idea imo.
The best solution for dealing with AI content slop flooding your eyeballs is to hang out in places small enough to be a community -- like a local area mesh network.
AI slop thrives in anonymity. In a community that's developed its own established norms and people who know each other, AI content trying to be passed off as genuine stands out like a sore thumb and is easily eradicated before it gets a chance to take root.
It doesn't have to be invite-only, per se, but it needs to have its own flavor that newcomers can adapt to, and AI slop doesn't.
You can still find the essence of community on the traditional internet in places like invite-only discords, smaller mastodon instances, traditional forums, and spaces similar to Lobsters and Tildes.
...and not on Hacker News. Too many pseudo-anonymous jerks, too many throwaways, too much faith placed in gamified moderation tools.
Potentially, but those areas are also more and more getting leveraged to further identify and profile people for targeting - see the latest Discord scandal for example.
This is technically correct but there is no harm in them setting up a mesh in the event that the internet goes down assuming they have their own backup power. The USA and EU are both extremely vulnerable to power grid overload, cyber-attack, physical attack choke-points leading to black-starts, EMP, GRB and much more. I think it's good on them for the learning exercise and hopefully they add to existing documentation.
I'd like a semi-anonymous private network. Something like: I go to local post office and purchase a sealed token. I use the token to generate a reusable “verified human credential” with limited reuses. The credential allows me to connect to the private network.
I learned about a cryptographic interaction that can support that recently (and have spent a lot of time focusing on the idea as a means of procrastination).
It works similarly to what you'd like: they sign sealed tokens you provide. Later, you can unseal a token and use it without invalidating the signature. It is mathematically too difficult for a classical computer to link the sealed and unsealed token.
You’re going to end up running down the same merry path that DRM companies do - and you can’t patch the wetware layer. Inevitably thousands of ‘human tokens’ will end up in the hands of actual humans working in call centres with 300 phones in front of them.
Perhaps, but it also, by default, excludes that entire class of authentication problems that are only manifested in a non-local network.
I love the idea.
It's also interesting in that a local mesh doesn't necessarily need to operate using the TCP/IP/HTTP stack that has been compromised at every layer by advertising and privacy intrusions.
reply