alzamos's comments

Very interesting how on "downsampled 32x + interpolated" it sounds like the singer is harmonizing with herself

Francesco Mazzoli’s blog on https://mazzo.li/archive.html. His blog has topped HN a few times with various low-level/linux topics, some deep dives into algorithms etc.

While I understand the narrative you're proposing, what I brought with my source was a collection of evidence where pharmacological innovation happened at an unaltered rate pre and post patents in e.g. Italy and Switzerland. While I understand the hypothesis of "Pharma innovation, due to high costs of entry, only happens (or is greatly improved) when guaranteed a monopoly", it doesn't seem to be backed by the data.

I agree with you in principle though - if all that were stopping us from achieving a cure were a 40 year patent, I would support your 1-day monarchy in a heartbeat.

Chapters 9 and 10 of the book cover this in more detail if you're interested (very self-contained).

Then why is it that when pharma patents were introduced in countries that didn't have them, the rate of innovation, TFP, R&D-as-%-GDP didn't increase? I brought a source to this debate, if you have sources showing that increases in patent scope, length, or introduction of patents increased pharamacological innovation I'd love to see it - I'm going down this rabbit hole now and am collecting info.

Another interesting one is [1] where they asked readers of the BMJ to vote on the top 15 most important medical milestones. Of the 15, only the contraceptive pill and Chlorpromazine had anything to do with patents.

In [2] the "Chemical and Engineering News magazine" collected a list of top pharmaceuticals (46 total). To quote the book I linked:

> Patents had pretty much nothing to do with the development of 20 among the 46 top selling drugs [..] . For the remaining 26 products patents did play an important role [..]. Notice though that of these 26, 4 were discovered completely by chance and then patented (cisplatin, librium, taxol, thorazin), 2 were discovered in university labs before the Bayh-Dole Act was even conceived (cisplatin and taxol). Further, a few were simultaneously discovered by more than one company leading to long and expensive legal battles, however, the details are not relevant to our argument.

Regarding the cost of drug trials, they cover this well in Chapters 9 and 10, I found it quite interesting.

Regarding how else companies make money without being granted temporary govt-backed monopolies, Chapter 6 covers both the theoretical and real-life examples.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/medical-milestones [2] https://pubsapp.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8325/8325list.html

Worth mentioning that the evidence says that patents don't have an effect on new drug creation/inventions. Evidence is collected here http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht..., pretty neat to know that Italy/Switzerland had a patentless pharma industry until quite recently.

Having said that, I think you're right that under this system, research/capital definitely gets directed in a different way.

Very happy to see someone else thought of this too.

I see the endgame as one in which services just expose documentation to their APIs and the AI figures out, based on your request, what to call and how to present the results to you based on pre-set preferences.

The responsibility of discoverability also would shift from the UI/UX person to the AI.

The potential obstacle here is that a lot of companies make their money from the UI/UX used to deliver their service on top of the service itself e.g by adding dark patterns, visual cues, collecting usage pattern data and showing you ads.

I recently got this phone, and it really sparked joy.

It does everything I need to function in 2024 (messaging people, navigating cities, managing tickets, NFC payments etc), while not tempting me into the dark/addictive side of smartphones.

Only problem is mine seems to be defective. After some time of usage everything hangs and I need to restart it, sometimes 4-5 times a day. Other people I know don’t have the issue. Luckily they’re cheap!

Indeed, “stop all progress” and “accompany progress responsibly” are two different approaches.

This may be tangential - but I’d like to point out, that while the Luddite movement may be painted as espousing the former, my readings have actually suggested the latter. In “Writings of the Luddites” they very much state that they have no problems with the machines, just that they wanted them not to be used in “dishonest” ways. Of course, movements of moderate sizes will include a spectrum of ideas so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the first camp were in the mix, but it’s worth noting!

A good book on this topic was Acemoglu’s “Power and Progress”.

Lots of illuminating examples of how technological progress immediately made life worse for many people, until a revolt/change came about to prevent exploitation/share the newfound efficiency gains etc.

A few memorable anecdotes off the top of my head:

- In one instance, during the Industrial Revolution, they quoted a letter from a lord (owner of a coal mine) who said mines would stop being profitable if children were banned/restricted from working in them. Some new parts of mines accessible thanks to advances in dredging technology were narrow, very suited to children’s small bodies, and digging the tunnels to the size of an adult cost too much. There was a complaint that some children were suffering brain damage due to chronic sleep deprivation and being forced to push mine carts in tunnels with their heads.

- In the period leading up to the Industrial Revolution, there were proven advances in milling and agricultural technology in England, making grain production cheaper and more efficient. However, analysis of peasant skeletons showed signs of more and more malnutrition, as well as signs of damage from work. The author says the prevalent theory is that because the margin-per-hour-worked of a peasant increased, local lords had more incentive to work them harder (not an economist/historian, so can only take this at face value). Not having anywhere else to go (indeed, in multiple instances even during the industrial revolutions, it was either illegal or difficult to change jobs), they just got worse living conditions. Additionally, peasant access to the ever-more-efficient mills was tightly controlled and expensive, to the point where peasants found it better to just mill grain by hand at home. The lords/priests promptly made this illegal and would perform periodic raids to confiscate their equipment.

- Both during the construction of the Panama Canal and in the major industrial cities of England, dense worker concentrations and poor sanitation caused workers to die in droves and decrease the efficiency of the construction/factories. In the England case, diseases that hadn’t been seen in years had resurfaced. It took a long time for workers to finally convince management/government to invest in sanitation/health/sewage, which not only kept people alive and healthy, but increased productivity and completed the canal.

Of course, a lot of this is mixed with differing hierarchies or political scenarios, and isn’t a comprehensive before->after of every advancement etc. However, it certainly put a heavy dose of nuance on the optimism behind technological advancement, and made me wonder if we could have pre-emptively enacted the necessary social/political changes which allowed for the wide-spread benefitting of technology without first going through the preceding periods of intensified suffering.

Taleb in “Antifragile” talks about this as well. However he derives a different conclusion; he speaks of a phenomenon called “hormesis” which refers to a biological response where a low dose of a harmful stressor can have positive benefits on an organism.

I’ve not looked into it personally, but I’ll relay what I’ve heard from various people who have looked into this or successfully done this.

In one case one person, as you say, did everything on their own and pays a couple thousand every year to keep the entity in the favourable jurisdiction. When asked if it was all above-board, they said it was one of those grey areas where they hoped the govt didn’t look too deeply into it, but so long as they weren’t making millions they weren’t worried about an audit.

The other cases asked various accounting companies to set this scenario up for them (one to establish a software engineering consulting company, others to set up other companies). The responses ranged from “yes we can do this, it’ll cost you 15-20k upfront, then 5k in annual upkeep” to “no this isn’t looked upon too well by the Portuguese govt”.

Currently living in the Algarve after moving to Lisbon with my partner for her studies years ago.

I know a few non-crypto entrepreneurs who came here for the NHR (non habitual resident scheme - the scheme mentioned in the article which allowed for the 20% tax cap on foreign income).

I can confirm that a lot of them were incredibly frustrated with the bureaucracy they encountered, not just when dealing with the government, but generally in everyday life. Most people have war stories related to accountants, lawyers, banks, telecom companies or landlords. The real kicker was when they realised that the 20% didn’t include social security payments, bringing most of them (those that didn’t pay hefty fees to set up companies in tax havens, and pay themselves exclusively in dividends) to an effective rate that wasn’t that far off what they’d be paying elsewhere. Needless to say the expat churn has been quite high.

Regarding Airbnbs and rising housing prices - I’m no economist but intuitively, I’ve always thought it made more sense to blame the explosive growth in tourism Portugal has had in the last decade or so (6M tourists visiting Lisbon, a city of 500k people) rather than the 10-20k digital nomads. Would be curious to know if anyone has better numbers or studies.

I’ve been curious about the dynamics around the often-cited statement “rent control doesn’t work”.

It seems that with rent control, you’d have higher demand and lower supply resulting in excess demand (both theoretically and it seems in practice). Does anyone know of any studies that:

- Analyse the effects of rent control in the presence of “vacancy-busting” measures like heavy vacancy tax/fines? (i.e forcing supply to stay high?)

- Analyse the price elasticity of the demand and supply respectively? (i.e is the excess demand mostly demand driven or supply driven?)

I grew up in Tokyo as a child and used the subway twice every day to commute to and from school. I randomly sampled a few of these and the memories and feelings it evoked are incredible. Amazing what a difference a small jingle can make to the psyche. Thank you for posting this.