So the advice here is (from my understanding, not a tax lawyer) sound, but it is "unsound-adjacent" -- so a lot of people will start from this basic understanding and then go off into crazytown.
So like influencers get to hear other influencers explaining this "you can reinvest your profits and then you won't have profits" type of advice... but then they will put it right next to unsound advice about "by the way, a great way is to invest in a "business" trip to Greece to sail the Mediterranean, it is "team-building" between you and your spouse and kids who are all employees of your little influencer company, oh by the way you should buy fancy watches so that you can show them off in your videos, and get a very expensive hairstylist to do your hair -- as long as you make a video about it!"
And it's like, no, the tax courts actually have procedures they follow to determine if those things are personal expenses or business expenses and 90% of the advice that you hear here are some form of tax fraud.
But from the point of view of a company, as the tax year comes to an end you hopefully have extra money left in the bank, now you can either use it to buy things that the company needs and thus grow the company, or you can hold onto it where if you're a C-corp the government will take 21% of the year-on-year delta, or you can pay it back to the shareholders as a dividend and they pay 15% capital gains tax on it. (And of course you don't have to dump the whole account into just one bucket, you can choose how much goes into each of the three.) And when it gives the advice "pssst, you should probably reinvest most of it," that's a standard practice explicitly sanctioned by the government.
Like, the whole point of open source is that this thread is not a thing. The whole point is "if this software is taken on by a malevolent dictator for life, we'll just fork it and keep going with our own thing." Or like if I'm evaluating whether to open-source stuff at a startup, the question is "if this startup fails to get funding and we have to close up shop, do I want the team to still have access to these tools at my next gig?" -- there are other reasons it might be in the company's interests, like getting free feature development or hiring better devs, but that's the main reason it'd be in the employees' best interests to want to contribute to an open-source legacy rather than keep everything proprietary.
The leadership and product direction work are at least as hard as the code work. Astral/uv has absolutely proven this, otherwise Python wouldn't be a boneyard for build tools.
Projects - including forks - fail all the time because the leadership/product direction on a project goes missing despite the tech still being viable, which is why people are concerned about these people being locked up inside OpenAI. Successfully forking is much easier said than done.
I had a lot of trouble convincing people that a correct Python package manager was even possible. uv proved it was possible and won people over with speed.
I had a sketched out design for a correct package manager in 2018 but when I talked to people about it I couldn't get any interest in it. I think the brilliant idea that uv had that I missed was that it can't be written in Python because if is written in Python developers are going to corrupt its environment sooner or later and you lose your correctness.
I think that now that people are used to uv it won't be that hard to develop a competitor and get people to switch.
That's unintentionally hilarious -- some of us remember 15-20 years ago when flaky support for wireless devices was the biggest reason people would decide Linux wasn't ready for desktop yet and avoid switching from Windows to Linux. (Well, Windows to dual-boot -- Windows users were never fully willing to let go of the video games angle at the time.)
It is hilarious. When I installed SLS 1.0 I had to assemble the machine to match the drivers available. 92 or 93. I vaguely remember I needed a SCSI hard disk.
Remember that most machines back then were Ethernet, not WiFi.
First wifi device I used was a PCMCIA card from Lucent, claimed 2mbps speeds. Still have it somewhere. I don't think I ever got Linux or BSD to work.
FWIW I like to explain it to folks like this: ignore all of your moral baggage around licensing and just focus on the fact that licensing is a legal tool of art that pretty much only becomes relevant in the context of threatening lawsuits.
BSD-type stuff is very simple because it says "here is this stuff. you can use it as long as you promise not to sue me. I promise not to sue you too."
Very simple.
GPL-type stuff is intrinsically more complex because it's trying to use the threatening power of lawsuits, to reduce overall IP lawsuits. So it has to say "Here is this stuff. You can use it as long as you promise not to sue me. I am only going to sue you, if you start pretending like you have the right to sue other folks over this stuff or anything you derive from it. You don't have the right to sue others for it, I made it, so please stop pretending and let's stop suing each other over this sort of thing."
Getting the entire legal nuance around that sort of counterfactual "I will only sue you if you try to pretend that you can sue others" is why they're more complex. And the simplest copyleft licenses like the Mozilla Public License have a very rigid notion of what "the software" is, so like for MPL it's "this file is gonna never be used in a lawsuit, you can edit it ONLY as long as you agree that this file must never be used by you to sue someone else, if you try to mutate it in a way that lets you sue someone else then that's against our agreement and we reserve the right to sue you."
Whereas for GPL it's actually kind of nebulous what "the software" is -- everything that feeds into the eventual compiled binary, basically -- and so the license itself needs to be a little bit airy-fairy, "let's first talk about what conveying the software means...", in various ways.
The interesting thing here is that as far as the courts are initially ruling, these from-scratch reimplementations are not human works and therefore are not copyrightable, which makes them all kind of public domain. Slapping the MIT license on it was an overstep. If that's how things go then Free Software has actually won its greatest sweep with LLM ubiquity.
I'm sure they wouldn't mind marking it as public domain. MIT is just the go-to license for things like this since it forces other people to notify others it came from an MIT repo if substantial parts of the original repo was used.
Hopefully this does well just the way it is, but you might also want to tag the title with "Show HN:" next time? It gets you featured on a separate part of Hacker News that some of us like to visit.
With a slide rule you can start from 92200 or so, long division with 9.22 gives 9.31 or so, next guess 9.265 is almost on point, where long division says that's off by 39.6 so the next approximation +19.8 is already 92,669.8... yeah the long divisions suck but I think you could get this one within 10 minutes if the interviewer required you to.
Also, don't take a role that interviews like that unless they work on something with the stakes of Apollo 13, haha
The only framework we have figured out in which LLMs can build anything of use, requires LLMs to build a robot and then we expose the robot to the real world and the real world smacks it down and then we tell the LLMs about the wreckage. And we have to keep the feedback loops small and even then we have to make sure that the LLMs don't cheat. But you're not going to give it the opportunity to decrease the wealth tax or increase the income tax so it will never get the feedback it needs.
You can try to train a neural network with backpropagation to simulate the actual economy, but I think you don't have enough data to really train the network.
You can try to have it build a play economy where a bunch of agents have different needs and different skills and have to provide what they can when they can, but the "agent personalities" that you pick embed some sort of microeconomic outlook about what sort of rational purchasing agent exists -- and a lot of what markets do is just kind of random fad-chasing, not rationally modelable.
I just don't see why you'd use that square peg to fill this round hole. Just ask economics professors, they're happy to make those predictions.
The metagame within 1kbwc is that at the end of play people generally vote on which new cards to keep for seeding the next game, and which to discard. So you get a rush of joy if everybody liked your card and wants to keep it.
For an example of metagame play, one deck developed Angry Sheep, Sleepy Sheep, a bunch of sheeps, plus some rule card of "if there are more than five sheep, the person with the most sheep wins." People liked those, so they kept them. Then someone created a different card called the Sheep Herder, all of a player's sheep get stacked under the Sheep Herder, which passes one player to the left every time a sheep is played, so it slowly goes around the circle vacuuming up sheep. People liked this but started making Angry Goat, Sleepy Goat etc. so that they could have an alternate victory condition. Which led to the Goat Herder card that goes to the right as new goats are played. The meta-joke then reached its peak with the Herder Herder, which picks up Herders and moves them around the board, dropping the things that they are herding as it moves.
The key to 1kbwc is that anyone can at any time create a card that says "I win the game" but that is no fun, not unless someone has a card called Counterspell that says "play me at any time to discard a card that some other player is playing, before it takes effect" etc. The metagame of 1kbwc allows the deck to become its own story and the players of the many rounds after rounds of it, are rewarded as the storytellers.
> anyone can at any time create a card that says "I win the game" but that is no fun [..] The metagame of 1kbwc allows the deck to become its own story
Yep exploring this question collaboratively is of course the real activity. Depending on your perspective it's barely recognizable as a game, or it's the ultimate / only game. Also kinda related here is Carse on finite and infinite games and Wittgenstein on language games[1,2]. It is "only" philosophy, but also feels ripe for more rigorous treatment
Presumably a good theoretical treatment would try to look at how games and their meta's are related: how the number and stability of rules changes the richness of interaction, enjoyment, flexibility in strategy, average duration and tolerable length of game-play, etc
I'm not entirely sure what algebraic property you would prove with this, but you probably could prove something about it. The issue is that they have repeating continued fraction representations, and large numbers in the continued fraction correspond to very good rational approximations, and so you'd find that a bunch of these chosen at random have pretty good rational approximations, which assuming the denominator is co-prime to 10, probably means that it explores the space of digits too uniformly? Something like that.
The approach I was thinking of is that you'd prove normality or the lack thereof, a notoriously open problem for virtually all irrational roots. Continued fractions might be fruitful, but I suspect you'd eventually run one of the many other open problems in that space instead.
So like influencers get to hear other influencers explaining this "you can reinvest your profits and then you won't have profits" type of advice... but then they will put it right next to unsound advice about "by the way, a great way is to invest in a "business" trip to Greece to sail the Mediterranean, it is "team-building" between you and your spouse and kids who are all employees of your little influencer company, oh by the way you should buy fancy watches so that you can show them off in your videos, and get a very expensive hairstylist to do your hair -- as long as you make a video about it!"
And it's like, no, the tax courts actually have procedures they follow to determine if those things are personal expenses or business expenses and 90% of the advice that you hear here are some form of tax fraud.
But from the point of view of a company, as the tax year comes to an end you hopefully have extra money left in the bank, now you can either use it to buy things that the company needs and thus grow the company, or you can hold onto it where if you're a C-corp the government will take 21% of the year-on-year delta, or you can pay it back to the shareholders as a dividend and they pay 15% capital gains tax on it. (And of course you don't have to dump the whole account into just one bucket, you can choose how much goes into each of the three.) And when it gives the advice "pssst, you should probably reinvest most of it," that's a standard practice explicitly sanctioned by the government.
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