[vinnyvichy]

Wanted to address your question about decentralization of the supply chain. We can't decentralize computer manufacture at the moment because there are too many specialized processes and materials in VLSI & beyond, many of which are secret/not published for no good reason. Okay I consider rent seeking not a good reason :) (Think Bell Labs vs post Bell Labs era) you saw the video of that kid making chips at home? It isn't remotely like cooking meth, AI isn't going to help. What is needed is radical simplification of chip design down to the atomic level.

Beyond the chip level, tech becomes more decentralizable -- soon you will replicate many Shenzhens in India, but at that point you hit the diffusability of polymer and metalworking tech.

No reference here, but money diffuses faster than technical knowhow, that is the issue, that's why markets seem like magic.

See the quartz growing video I linked, I'm surprised that I'm surprised that this almost stone age but highly used tech is largely "secret" compared to random JavaScript tricks.

[gvicino]

Let's hypothesize that from tomorrow, the knowledge to produce everything at home "DIY" becomes available because it's free (and even today this is increasingly true as the concept of patents is decidedly in crisis). We now possess all the possible knowledge to do everything ourselves. However, one thing remains missing for us to become self-sufficient, and it will always be missing regardless of the economic or political systems, as it remains a finite resource: time.

We can afford to imagine new systems and models because we have significantly more time than our predecessors. We have more time than our ancestors because we are highly specialized, and we exchange this specialization on a local and international level for services, goods, and raw materials.

In the scenario you propose, would we have the time to search for raw materials, study to understand how to process them, create the objects and tools we need, and simultaneously dedicate ourselves to other things (i.e.: while we are doing all of this, we need to attend to children, family, and the fulfillment of basic needs such as food, leisure, sleep, illness, etc.)

In my opinion, it isn't possible. I would more readily understand forms of anarcho-primitivism in which people decide to return to nature and primitive values, either forcibly (which might be feasible) or voluntarily (which seems highly unlikely). At least these do not violate the spatial-temporal limits in which we live :)

Friend, I love being as independent as possible, fixing things by myself and maintaining a garden at home, but I'm aware that it's just a hobby. It's a hobby I can indulge in because for other needs, there are others in the market to lend a hand. If I were to have a toothache tomorrow or if my glasses were to break, in a fully decentralized model like 100rabbits, I'd be in trouble :) Or perhaps, I'm still missing some pieces of the puzzle they propose.

[082349872349872]

> or if my glasses were to break

was that a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last reference?

I think your reference to time as a limiting input may be very close to the objection I'm groping towards in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39844527 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34160852 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952298 ?

[vinnyvichy]

Thank you! Keep them objections coming, especially if they have a geometric or siliceous slant. Helps me to focus :)

On second thought, these are more than enough lol

Just a quick and dirty counter-objection-- to satisfy a Grothendieck model as well as yourselves, perhaps in the decentralized future, your glasses get fixed purely as a side effect of research on silica?

So,really, the problem could be, as you implied, success in silica research is very random (Poisson?), but the need for silica manipulation is some other unfortunate mismatched distribution? You would think Russell already worked that out!

I.e. why are you guys unhappy. You're already getting well-paid for managing!! (For my part, my other research feels like a rachet and not a controlled spiral into nothingburger, which is what I have to label the unhappy ones)

Of course the tongue-in-cheek way to improve morale is to improve research until it feels more like labour :)

EDIT: Less tongue-in-cheek guess is that interacting time-utility functions (i.e. connected "counter-rachets") are poorly worked out,or at least, not grokked by the unwashed masses (but very well understood by your Grandma)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-utility_function

[082349872349872]

Not sure I understand the ratchets, so continuing with the theme of broken glasses:

Not so long ago (200 yr? 300 yr?) almost all people spent a significant fraction (2/3+?) of their time just keeping themselves fed. We've automated enough of that that even with distribution, etc. the time budget for keeping oneself fed is now actually dominated by eating (~1/7) and not by production (~1/20?).

So, 200 or 300 years in the future, will we have done something similar to other physiological needs? other safety needs? (note here that many aspects of keeping oneself fed in prior centuries involved long-lead time skills that are no longer necessary because we produce and distribute food in an entirely different manner)

Upon reflection, the broken glasses scenario is not so dire: distribution of new lenses (produced in bulk) according to Rx is low-enough skill that one might imagine easily finding volunteers who schlep packages for the variety of social contact it affords. The toothache would be more difficult, because there treatment (currently) requires specialised knowledge. (and fixing the lens-making machine might be easy enough if one takes the "DEC repairman" attitude of parts are cheap, time and knowledge is expensive, so just swap old parts for new until it passes the self-test again?)

[vinnyvichy]

Not sure if good faith is good enough to get me rate-undelimited, but here goes (:

[e.g. Maxwell's] Ratchets are part of the firmware debug, ideally a debug should be irreversible, yes?

Sorry about the TUFs, it was a lagniappe for gvicino (--assuming you've already seen my previous rant on it.) some (most?) have the form of a reverse rachet: discontinuity+monotonic. I surmise that it would be a good entity with which to model complexodynamic (economic) agents ("peers") trying to debug (cooperate with) one another.

(Each assuming an epsilon of bad faith in the other peers?)

For glasses, unbreakable or, in 30 years time, self-healing teutonic glasses.

EDIT: main problem with today's deployment finance ("VC"): it monotonically moves complexity/brittleness (eg cloud is arguably simpler than locally-served wares as a business model, but not as a technology) -- but not S-Sophistication.

The lust for funding software comes from the seduction of centralized simplification. The business of deploying atoms has no moat besides the violent one.

[vinnyvichy]

My attempt at drawing out the experts at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41167865

Resulted in this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/th...

  The FDA never approved it in the US, although thalidomide did make its way to the US market. It's the perfect example of seen-versus-unseen. There are probably lots of examples of benefits that unapproved drugs could provide but we don't see them, while we do see the effects of the bad drugs that the FDA did not approve. I favor looser FDA regulations, but if my side doesn't even know the history of the #1 argument against it then we should just give up.

Anyways.. in my mind, mRNA does really rhyme with anarchist-primitivism*, so y'all might want to check if FDA is supervising a market failure or not.

*Due to my bounded rationality, I shudder to discuss the technical reasons, with,uh, people who have not thought about it..

But your grandma probably knew that... AMP is a OTC supplement and GMP is a common food additive . (Compare with their d variants)

[vinnyvichy]

Hello. Thank you for engaging in good faith and friendliness..

I'm not sure what is this "scenario" that you think I'm proposing ;)

You seem to like spending time on HN, as do I :)

Are you a resident of Trieste, by any chance? rOtfl

Let me stress, anarcho-primitivism isn't the label I would like to have thoughtful people put on my "scenario", haha!

I will outline my "scenario" more carefully, promise! I realize what I have written here so far is still ripe to be misunderstood. Sorry!

But I also have a job (,i.e. something equally crucial to the delicate art of time management) and that takes a lot of quality time as well ;)

(Did you notice that rearchitecting finance is the top priority in my "scenario"? money=time=money?)

Thank you for taking time out to formulate these important questions.