embedded machine learning research engineer - georgist - urbanist - environmentalist

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • The raison d’être for RISC-V is domain-specific architecture. Currently, computational demands are growing exponentially (especially with AI), but Moore’s Law is ending, which means we can no longer meet our computational demands by scaling single-core speed on general-purpose CPUs. Instead, we are needing to create custom architectures for handling particular computational loads to eke out more performance. Things like NPUs, TPUs, etc.

    The trouble is designing and producing these domain-specific architectures is expensive af, especially given the closed-source nature of computer hardware at the moment. And all that time, effort, and money just to produce a niche chip used for a niche application? The economics don’t economic.

    But with an open ISA like RISC-V, it’s both possible and legal to do things like create an open-source chip design and put it on GitHub. In fact, several of those exist already. This significantly lowers the costs of designing domain-specific architectures, as you can now just fork an existing chip and make some domain-specific modifications/additions. A great example of this is PERCIVAL: Open-Source Posit RISC-V Core with Quire Capability. You could clone their repo and spin up their custom RISC-V posit chip on an FPGA today if you wanted to.


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@sopuli.xyzMonopoly
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    2 months ago

    It also had a second rule set where a land value tax was implemented, and the winning condition was when everyone made a minimum amount of money.

    A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements upon it.[1] It is also known as a location value tax, a point valuation tax, a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or a site-value rating.

    Some economists favor LVT, arguing it does not cause economic inefficiency, and helps reduce economic inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6] Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have advocated this tax because it does not hurt economic activity, and encourages development without subsidies.

    LVT is associated with Henry George, whose ideology became known as Georgism. George argued that taxing the land value is the most logical source of public revenue because the supply of land is fixed and because public infrastructure improvements would be reflected in (and thus paid for by) increased land values.[7]

    It’s just a stupidly good tax policy, and we should be implementing it in more places.

    !justtaxland@lemmy.world





  • Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.

    For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.




  • I moved from California to Montreal a few years back to study, and now I’m staying for good. I tried duolingo on and off for far too long, but I found it super uninteresting and hard to remain committed to.

    Best strategy I’ve found is called comprehensible input. The idea is to find books or other reading material that you can get the basic gist of when reading, despite not understanding every single word and phrase and grammatical construction. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself able to understand, which is also very motivsting!

    Also, make sure it’s material that actually interests you. The idea is it’s better to read extensively, reading things that actually interest you to some degree and keep you mentally engaged, than to just really intensively study a much smaller amount of (less interesting) material.

    This actually mirrors how we acquire languge. The idea is to intuitively understand French by having seen a lot of it rather than to basically memorize French. You ultimately want to be able to glance at a sign, for instance, and just know what it means without having to translate in your head.

    Some resources I found useful were these French illustrated books in Dollarama, but even better is a series of books designed to be comprehensible input by Olly Richards. He’s a native English speaker and polyglot who has written a bunch of graded readers that gradually increase in vocabulary and difficulty. He has several books for French, including beginner short stories, intermediate short stories, beginner conversations, intermediate conversations, climate change, WW2, and philosophy. The nice thing is he actually does a good job of making the stories and content interesting to an adult learner, unlike the children’s books at Dollarama.

    Even his beginner books might be a little too advanced for your level so far, though, from what you say. If they are, it’d be best to find some material at a lower level that you can understand a little better. After all, if it’s too hard for you, it will make the process much slower and less enjoyable, which will make it much more likely that you quit. You could even simply try googling “french comprehensible input” to try to find material suitable for your level.

    One last resource is the government of Quebec offers free in-person courses for immigrants and many French learners. They are part-time, and they offer multiple options for hours per week, so you could pick what works best for you. It would be worth checking to see if you might qualify for those courses once you move here.




  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    8 months ago

    Honestly, Adam Smith gets a worse rap than he deserves because all the rich people abused his ideas to peddle unregulated, free-wheeling capitalism. Even Smith knew the inherent danger of privatization and monopolization of land and rampant rent-seeking.

    Kinda like how Nietzsche’s sister exploited and misrepresented his work after his death to further the Nazi cause.

    It seems to be a common thing with a lot of the classical economists that they all recognized (and wrote quite a bit about) these problems of monopolism and rent-seeking, but wealthy elites cherry-picked their books to serve their own economic agenda.


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    8 months ago

    You speak a lot about “means of production” for someone who has not once uttered a single word of concrete, tangible solutions in this entire thread. I’m out here posting sources, data, policies, and actual solutions that would measurably improve people’s lives, while you’re here larping online, doubling down on your bigotry against sexual minorities, and doing zero praxis.


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    8 months ago

    It’s a libertarian who had his land taken by agribusiness.

    Certainly one of the takes of all time.

    fursona

    I’m no furry, but this is honestly very rude and condescending towards people with that kink. Not sure why you thought that bigoted, conjured-from-thin-air jab was necessary. Maybe don’t be a bigot towards sexual minorities online?

    You know those words in that order are talking about slavery right? The ownership of labor in private hands?

    Just because you say it confidently doesn’t make it true. Read a little bit about the factors of production. Here, private ownership of labor means the value of your own labor is yours, rather than taxed away (such as via income taxes) or otherwise expropriated by the state.

    And yes, of course I’m skipping over a lot of nuance in the difference between communism and socialism, but this is the highest level distinction. Much like there’s a heck of a lot different between humans and E. coli, but the highest level distinction is that one belongs to the domain bacteria and one belongs to the domain eukarya.

    You said yourself you support private capital.

    And I also said I support social ownership of land and natural resource, either directly with government leases or indirectly via taxes, which is very much not a capitalist/libertarian viewpoint by any stretch of the imagination. Very convenient of you to leave out that half, isn’t it?

    And considering Georgism diverges from capitalism at the highest level of categorization, well, let’s just say your pet theory that “georgism = capitalism” falls rather flat. To continue the biological analogy, it’d be like if you said the domain archaea is actually just a subset of bacteria based solely on the fact that you had pre-decided that you think bacteria and eukarya are the only two domains of life. Or if you said all fungi were actually plantae because you pre-decided that you think plantae and animalia are the only two kingdoms of eukarya.


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    8 months ago

    Very bold opinion on the categorization of an entire economic ideology for someone who, far as I can tell, literally never heard of it until today.

    I’m not sure if you’re aware, but one of the most basic ways to categorize economic ideologies is based on who owns what factors of production, i.e., who owns land (including natural resources), labor, and capital.

    Broadly speaking, communists believe in social ownership of all three, socialists in social ownership of land and capital, and capitalists in private ownership of all three. Within this framework, Georgism falls squarely on the belief that land should be socially owned (either directly by the government and leased out kinda like Singapore does or indirectly via “full” taxes on land, negative externalities, severance, etc.), while labor and capital ought to be privately owned. Thus, it is equally incorrect to describe Georgism as either socialism or capitalism, as it is simply neither.

    Unlike libertarians, neoliberals, and capitals, Georgists view monopolies and private ownership of land as basically satan. That’s a pretty dang big difference.

    How would you feel if I attempted to reduce down the wild complexity of leftist ideologies – everyone from syndicalists to market socialists to distributists to demsocs to Marxists – into “lmao a bunch of Pol Pot supporters”? Pretty silly and reductive, isn’t it?


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    8 months ago

    Lol what?

    You keep on trying to put me into little ideological boxes so you don’t have to engage with a new-to-you economic ideology.

    And for the record, libertarians are dumb af and almost uniformly oppose the Georgist vision of land. And carbon taxes. And severance taxes. And unions. Andl YIMBYism. And IP reform. And so many other Georgist ideas that neoliberals and libertarians typically hate.

    It’s especially funny because libertarian types love to call us land commies. Clearly we can’t simultaneously be libertarians and land commies…


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    8 months ago

    Your thing, neoliberalism

    Except I’m not a neoliberal. Total strawman.

    Rather I’m a Georgist:

    Georgism, also called in modern times Geoism,[2][3] and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that, although people should own the value they produce themselves, the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society.[4][5][6] Developed from the writings of American economist and social reformer Henry George, the Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.[7][8]

    Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property). Any natural resource which is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of land monopoly involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair, and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value, arguing that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes (such as on income, trade, or purchases) that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue to the people by means of a basic income or citizen’s dividend.

    For reference, several historians credit Henry George’s publication of Progress and Poverty as defining the start of the Progressive Era:

    Progress and Poverty, George’s first book, sold several million copies,[1] becoming one of the highest selling books of the late 1800s.[2][3] It helped spark the Progressive Era and a worldwide social reform movement around an ideology now known as ‘Georgism’. Jacob Riis, for example, explicitly marks the beginning of the Progressive Era awakening as 1879 because of the date of this publication.[4]


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    8 months ago

    It’s difficult, yes, but our society has fought and won battles against vested interests before. Good policy can be fought for and achieved, as evidenced by basically every successful country on earth.

    I just want to advocate for good policies in this thread so that we can solve some of our problems. In my experience, a lot of people can identify that there is a problem with the landlording class, but many people don’t know a whole lot about the underlying reasons why this dynamic exists or what we can do policy-wise to fix it.

    the parasitic relationship between landlord and tenant

    This is also part of the goal of land value taxes. If we all can agree that landlords’ hoarding and monopolization of finite land is what allows them to extract unearned profits from the rest of us, the land value tax is the mechanism to reclaim those rents. The idea is to turn landlording – a position of power and privilege with access to economic rents – into mere property management – a regular job where you earn income based on the labor you do in maintaining properties.