For a summer program, I, along with some other kids and a teacher were supposed to build a robot --- since none of us know how to solder, we instead used the money to purchase a computer, modify a nice Rubbermaid trash can and a lazy susan and some drawer slides to hold it along w/ a few accessories (notably a Cognivox voice recognition unit), calling it CTC-1 (Computerized Trash Can mark 1) --- an Apple ][ was selected over the other options (a TRS-80 Model III and an Atari 800 were the other possibilities).
Bought a copy of _Apple Machine Language_ by Don and Kurt Inman, and did BASIC programming (having previously started w/ whatever BASIC was on the HP 3000 at the local college where a gifted and talented summer program allowed access.
Then, there were rumours in _Byte Magazine_ that Apple was making a new computer, and one day, in the copy of _Newsweek_ in the high school library there was a _16-page_ advertisement (which I pulled out and kept w/ my _MacWorld_ magazines --- had a full run of the first couple of years, but I'm getting ahead of myself....)
Graduated, enlisted, began training, then on leave at home that Christmas took out a huge loan and bought basically one of every Mac related thing in the store, including the bag to carry everything in (excepting the ImageWriter printer) --- used it for years, eventually getting HyperCard, playing _The Manhole_ (Where Alice would have gone if Alice had had HyperCard, a precursor to the game _Myst_) as well as buying a copy of _Through the Looking Glass_, the only game Apple ever made. Got out and went to college studying graphic design, using a variety of Windows computers (drove all the way to the state capitol to buy a copy of Adobe Type Manager for Windows 3.0), and then was gifted a NeXT Cube by my brother-in-law. Also bought a Newton MessagePad 110 and used it w/ the NeXT using a serial link to transfer data. And, I bought an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint, which had a Wacom EMR stylus which paired well w/ the Wacom ArtZ tablet connected to the Cube.
A copy of OPENSTEP 4.2 for the Cube was the last thing I bought from Apple until I bought a copy of Mac OS X Public Beta.
A thing which I hoped for, for a while was that they would use the NeXTBus and make a motherboard for the NeXT Cube which would run contemporary software....
A great way to vicariously experience all this is to read:
Ages ago, I worked at a flexographic print manufacturer, once, when a new hire had made a large plot on Kraft paper (which was moderately expensive/difficult to source and a nuisance to switch to/from), it turned out a circle was on a non-printing layer (why Adobe Illustrator allows that is a separate discussion --- Freehand's printing everything which is visible and not printing anything invisible or on the background is correct) and came to me asking help in re-loading the Kraft paper and in explaining to the folks who were concerned about money and so forth.
Instead, I troubled the lead stripper for a compass and ruling pen and got a bottle of fountain pen ink (fortunately, the circle was black, and that was a colour I had in my ink rotation) and showed the trainee how to use a compass w/ a ruling pen to create a circle with a desired stroke thickness in ink --- their low-budget graphic design program had totally skipped over any sort of physical media, going straight to computer usage....
Great that you knew that - but that doesn't mean it was worth it for the kid to learn.
There is more interesting/useful things in life to learn than you will live. Just becoming a brain surgeon, heart surgeon, anesthesiologist, and other somewhat related medical specialties will take you to retirement age without ever leaving school. That is despite the overlap, we haven't even start to make you any form of engineer, musician, or any other the other interest fields there are out there.
We as a society have to look at things like manually drawing as hobbies you can learn if you want that should be put in a book just in case someone wants - but otherwise not taught. There is nothing wrong with what you knew how to do, but there are more important things to teach kids and we need them to move on to the real world not learning everything.
Yeah but not everyone has the same priorities within those sliders. For example strength is something that has many different types. Tensile strength, compression strength, shearing etc.
You use different infills to optimise for each type. This differs per model. An AI can surely help optimise it but it won't always know which one to prioritize, it requires knowing exactly what the printed model will be used for.
The same with aesthetics, usually you care about one specific side. And for ease of remove, are you willing to use support interface material? That makes a lot of difference.
I think this comment actually makes the case for highly custom LLM modifications to software. If you have priorities, you express them to the model and let it figure out how to maximize the UI for your needs.
Statement of fact with my interpretation --- folks should verify the fact and read what he has written and come to their own conclusions.
While I'm grateful Autodesk stepped in and kept TinkerCAD afloat, I'm relieved Sketchbook escaped their clutches, and am glad I never got involved in Fusion 360 so as to suffer from their on-going "rug pulls" --- which of these are a result of his influence, I've not found a need to discern.
Vibe coding only seems to work, insofar as it does when the training data includes multiple exemplars of solutions to a given problem.
As noted elsethread, there's only one geometric kernel which is decently far along and opensource and it's over 1 million LOC --- I doubt it's being included in any training data, and I doubt that an LLM could regurgitate such a large project which would then compile w/o errors and then work as expected --- the number of tokens required to get such a project to an initial state is a marked hurdle as well.
It would be nice if folks would learn from the lessons of the past, and work out how to avoid the mistakes which caused the bad times --- a co-worker and I were unique for having a story/tradition out of the Great Depression, the story was of my grandfather taking his year's tobacco crop in to Richmond in his truck, what it sold for wouldn't buy gas to drive it back home, so he sold it and walked back (a trip I re-created on my bicycle when I was young, my first century), the tradition is that Christmas gifts are described by a riddle, and when gifts are opened, the entire family gathers in a circle, the recipient reads the riddle out loud, and everyone makes a guess (opening presents is an all-day affair).
Maybe folks would be more careful of their money or the economy if there were more oral traditions along those lines --- one of my wife's aunts just passed away, a child of the Depression, her home was filled with home goods and food stuffs purchased when on sale beyond any reasonable expectation of her individual use, but all perfectly organized and ready to prevent future need.
Yeah, it was a big con to get folks to think that what seemed to them a huge amount of money meant that they were participating in a meaningful fashion.
I've never gotten anyone who is educated in economy/finance to provide a reasonable answer to the questions:
"Is the world economy large enough to support a meaningful number of people regularly investing in it, arriving at an amount able to support a comfortable retirement, and then draw said money out on a regular basis? What percentage of the population can be supported thus? What is to be said to that percentage whose participation would exceed the capacity of existing financial markets?"
I've traveled quite a bit, and I'm well aware of both poverty in the U.S. and in other countries --- that's part of what informed my query --- what is the end-game for capitalism as many countries of the world go into steady state or even negative population changes in the future?
Are you asking what the living baseline would be if there was some kind of global socialist government, and everyone was cut an equal slice of the global income and global resource pie? It would be pretty hard to dial that in because there are so many intertwined factors. But we could be pretty confident it wouldn't land near current first world standards.
No one knows what the end game of capitalism looks like, because we landed on the system because it is largely self-regulating and has worked well for carrying society forwards for the last 400ish years. Everything else has done poorly and kind of sucked.
I disagree. We've seen the endgame of capitalism a few times, and every country decided that was not right. Hence we introduced socialist policies. Like antitrust policies, social security, and nationalized Healthcare (among other necessities).
Meanwhile, I'm not sure if we've truly seen an endgame socialist policy. Captialism seems to turn into imperialism and break that up before seeing the endgame there.
The fentanyl addicts drying in the Sun on Tenderloin's sidewalks beg to differ. What a ridiculous statement. There is less poverty in the US, but extreme poverty isn't any easier here.
Also you missed the entire point of the comment you responded to.
Well, in part you are asking about the world economy. Most of the world doesn’t have 401k retirement vehicles, good access to financial markets, or the spare funds to save at all, whether it’s in stocks, bonds, or other investment vehicles.
So the reason you haven’t gotten an answer is because your question doesn’t make much sense.
A 401K is just an investment in indexes linked to your pension, there's nothing stopping everyone putting their own money into an index themselves. The question makes sense, how many people could the market support if everyone was investing and not spending.
> A 401K is just an investment in indexes linked to your pension, there's nothing stopping everyone putting their own money into an index themselves
This is mostly incorrect.
A 401k in the United States is a tax-advantaged investment account. You can buy shares of individual companies, you can purchase index funds, you can leave it there as cash, buy gold, or just about anything you want or you'd expect to be able to purchase using a brokerage account. Depending on the route you take (Roth or Traditional) you can realize tax savings now or at a later point. 401k Accounts are programs offered by your employer as well [1].
One of the many reasons the OP's question doesn't make sense is because not every country in the world has a 401k program.
[1] There are other programs for individual owners or for those who have an employer that does not offer a 401k.
People can invest in markets without a 401k with more options (plans commonly have only a handful of funds available) and less fees (both admin fees and inflated fund expense ratios). And you may pay more taxes with a 401k than otherwise depending on your future tax rate (which is unknowable).
The only pure advantage is employer matching if you have it and stay employed long enough for it to vest.
>how many people could the market support if everyone was investing and not spending.
I think the more salient question is how many people could the market support if everyone was consuming and not producing.
Not producing as in the goods and services that people want such as clean toilets and food and nursing home care. Or not producing the kids who will go on to produce the aforementioned goods and services.
An overabundance of investment without an outlet would just decrease yields. Hypothetically the yield could go negative.
It is a self correcting problem. If the yields are too low people can spend it on hookers and blow before dropping it into a money shredder. The yield shouldn't drop much below the premium for the time preference of money.
Investment for retirement…in theory at least, should go to projects that will create more goods and services in the future to actually support that retirement. It isn’t about the economy being large enough today, but growth so that it is larger enough tomorrow when you do actually retire.
Any investment alternative, like a private or public pension, works under the same principle. Even traditional retirement plans depended on investing in having lots of kids to take care of you in old age.
The problem is, in the past, the on-going increase in payouts was covered by increasing populations --- much of the world is now at a stable, or even negative population change state for the foreseeable future, so that well is going dry --- the passing away of the Baby Boomers in the U.S. represents the larges transfer of personal wealth in human history, and a lot of it is going into geriatrics/nursing homes --- what happens as the nursing homes empty out and there aren't sufficient folks to keep them operational?
Thats the old fashioned plan: have lots of kids to fund your retirement. Today, we are investing in AI, automation, and robots, which is similar if you think about. We don’t need a population increase if robots are doing the work instead. China is a good example of making these investments aggressively right now to deal with their demographic cliff.
That's a nice idea, and if such devices aren't used to further concentrate wealth for their owners, that would work --- the problem is, LLMs and the robotics which they facilitate look to be the first major technological advance where the enlarging of the economy which they afford does not bring about a commensurate increase in the number of jobs.
There is theory and then there is practice of course. But at least if you are invested in the market as part of your retirement, you are technically an owner of some small share of it.
Which brings us full-circle --- what percentage of the population participating in 401-K or similar investment structures _and_ cashing out at retirement age will the economy support?
You are probably going to be OK if you are invested. If you aren't invested (no i money to invest or you save money under your mattress for poor returns), then I really don't know. It is definitely going to be a problem, maybe we will have figured out a social safety net by then (speaking as an American, and speaking in a very cynical tone).
The market is partly a Ponzi scheme where more people buying inflates the price, regardless of the underlying value. The modern stock market is not focused on dividends (anything but), so there is no'real' return from the actual companies to the shareholders. (Buybacks could be considered similar to dividends).
There is still an element of real economic growth underlying the stock market, but passive investing, derivatives and market manipulation have largely decoupled the stock market from the actual economy.
At least that's my opinion.
I think the answer to your question would be yes IF:
* The world economy keeps growing
* There is a fair distribution of the return on the world economy (which there isn't)
Yes. Fundamentally goods and services at time you retire must be produced by someone. If there is less people producing that means that labour will get more expensive. Or then you must really kick down that population. And well if they don't take it well you might have no retirement...
The stock market is a very large Ponzi scheme. 401Ks are indexed Ponzi schemes. Once the ultra wealthy can disconnect their wealth from any one country, using crypto tokens. The stock market and 401Ks will probably crash. You usually want to do this on a generation that has no real voting block. So it will probably happen when GenX starts retiring.
Bought a copy of _Apple Machine Language_ by Don and Kurt Inman, and did BASIC programming (having previously started w/ whatever BASIC was on the HP 3000 at the local college where a gifted and talented summer program allowed access.
Then, there were rumours in _Byte Magazine_ that Apple was making a new computer, and one day, in the copy of _Newsweek_ in the high school library there was a _16-page_ advertisement (which I pulled out and kept w/ my _MacWorld_ magazines --- had a full run of the first couple of years, but I'm getting ahead of myself....)
Graduated, enlisted, began training, then on leave at home that Christmas took out a huge loan and bought basically one of every Mac related thing in the store, including the bag to carry everything in (excepting the ImageWriter printer) --- used it for years, eventually getting HyperCard, playing _The Manhole_ (Where Alice would have gone if Alice had had HyperCard, a precursor to the game _Myst_) as well as buying a copy of _Through the Looking Glass_, the only game Apple ever made. Got out and went to college studying graphic design, using a variety of Windows computers (drove all the way to the state capitol to buy a copy of Adobe Type Manager for Windows 3.0), and then was gifted a NeXT Cube by my brother-in-law. Also bought a Newton MessagePad 110 and used it w/ the NeXT using a serial link to transfer data. And, I bought an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint, which had a Wacom EMR stylus which paired well w/ the Wacom ArtZ tablet connected to the Cube.
A copy of OPENSTEP 4.2 for the Cube was the last thing I bought from Apple until I bought a copy of Mac OS X Public Beta.
A thing which I hoped for, for a while was that they would use the NeXTBus and make a motherboard for the NeXT Cube which would run contemporary software....
A great way to vicariously experience all this is to read:
https://folklore.org/0-index.html
there's even a story on the game:
https://folklore.org/Alice.html
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