polynox's comments

"In as much detail as possible, describe what is happening when I enter https://google.com into the browser and hit enter"

The Libor scandal is not an issue?

I have come back from week long international trips, having arrived by plane on Monday or Tuesday, and by Thursday someone will ask me what I did last weekend, and I'll draw a blank, and the social pressure of not having an answer and not wanting to pause for a whole minute to exercise my memory to reconstruct the last week will make me say something like, "nothing much, you?". It's that by the second or third day of being back in my routine, I forget what it was like outside of that routine, feel so immersed in it day-to-day, so unless I remember that I did have a disruption I won't really remember anything...

That is the goal of Vanilla OS! https://vanillaos.org/

I agree and you are correct that concept of legibility was central, however going from the text now I believe that James takes specific issue with joint combination of both the exercise of state authority as well as the blindness that is implied by high modernism. Starting on page 88:

> I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, ... The second element is the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving those designs. The third element is a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist those plans.

I believe my comment still stands, in responding to not the book but the author of the comment, in that framework I'm describing, assuming the thesis of the book is true, then the second element is not met by the mere publication of software. Rather it is the foisting of such software upon users that is the act of power or other covert means by which choice is restricted such as controlling the bounds of publication or else the centralizing nature of capital investment in software that by sheer bad luck it turns out that perhaps we just end up with a few pseudo monopolies because software as a capital expense is ... well, expensive to develop.

It is not the "dispassionate dividing of the world into rigid categories" necessary in order to implement software that is morally or ethically problematic, it is the imposition of those rigid categories upon society at large, perhaps by itself or perhaps merely just the conflation of the separation between the categories that gets incorporated into the design as a subconscious or even conscious choice to reify the categorical differences that is the problem. It is not the knowledge itself that is the problem, it is how that knowledge gets incorporated into an overly simplistic and heavy-handed approach to act. Indeed that is the very thesis of the Seeing like a State book.

To take the first example of scientific forestry that replaced the local control over the land in which the categories were the species of plants as an example, it was not the factual knowledge about the species of plants, which is an observation about the true nature of reality, it was the decision to use that fact about the distinction between the plants and decide to separate the plants geographically to uniform monoculture plots rather than allowing them to be mixed together (and, in the process, in fact destroying things that they did not understand, the ecosystem) that is argued to have been the cause of the scientific forestry failure. The plots were just fine before and after the knowledge about what plants were where and what the different types of plants there were became known; it was the act of separating the plants into the monoculture plots. The knowledge was a necessary prerequisite to do so, but it was not sufficient, and I don't know if I could believe that accurate knowledge of actual pre-existing categories that correspond to the actual universe could by itself be wrong. Certain plants really are different than other plants, species actually exist. What you decide to do with that information is up to you, but I don't know if I could support the suppression of the acquisition of knowledge merely because it might (but also might not) be used in ways we disagree.

If they had merely studied the plants, that would not have been wrong. If they had created a map of where the plants were, that also would not have been wrong in my view. It was when they decided to change reality that the moral implications attach, in my view. They could have mapped out the plants and divided the map into categories: "there are oak trees here and not here", or "there are strawberry bushes here, and not here", and that is "dividing the world into categories" (namely: presence or absence of certain plants in certain locations), but that is merely the true expression of factual reality. It was how they decided as a separate step, "let's make all the strawberry bushes be in the same location" which incorporated many smaller actions like "let's move this strawberry bush from here to here" or "let's remove all the plants we have not specifically identified, as we (falsely) believe that they are not essential" in which reality was actually changed, and thus the moral or ethical implication attaches in my view. Those who act have a duty to act responsibly, to do no harm, and so on, and the duty scales with the scope of the action, and perhaps there is a scope of action which by itself is too large, the standard or duty of care too impossible to satisfy due to the sheer complexity, for any one person or collection of people to rightfully possess what would be obligatory in my view to have the permission to act.

I would also not view the mere publication of software as action per se either. In your example, it is the utilization of the marketing channels to push the software onto users with or without their knowledge, to exercise editorial control over what software may or may not be used on one's supposedly own device, and so on that the duty applies. If someone publishes a program that divides the world into categories, but no one uses the program, it doesn't matter how wrong the program is. The program can have a field for skin color that is literally black and white for the purpose of calibrating an algorithm that divides pixels into skin-or-not-skin, for example to cut out the background, and yet if no one actually uses, much less is forced to use the program then the mechanism of distinguishing between skin-and-not-skin being incorrect and not for example a scalar or some other model does not harm anyone. It's just an overly simplistic program, a piece of text, an incomplete idea, a reflection of a categorical distinction that does not exist in reality but only in the mind of the programmer and in the software, but if no one ever uses the software let alone is forced to use it, who possibly can be harmed by it?

I was referring to the statute, in that you shall capitalize R&D. That's not just the plain language of the statute [1], or how the Congress who passed it interpreted it [2], it's the plain language as the IRS describes it in Pub 535 [3]:

> Research or experimental expenditures paid or incurred in tax years beginning after December 31, 2021, must be charged to a separate specified research or experimental capital account and amortized ratably over a 5-year period ... The expenses cannot be deducted in full in the current year.

> Research or experimental expenditures, as used in section 174, are research and development costs ... you incur in connection with your trade or business [..] The costs related to developing software are treated as research and experimental expenditures.

Nothing contradicts this plain meaning. Rev Proc 2023-11 [5] just reiterates that yes, all software development is included in R&E expenses:

> 2.02 (5) Section 174(c)(3) provides that for purposes of § 174, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software is treated as a research or experimental expenditure accounted for under the required § 174 method.

And yes, no deduction is allowed:

> 2.02 (1) As amended by § 13206(a) of the TCJA, § 174(a)(1) provides that in the case of a taxpayer’s specified research or experimental expenditures for any taxable year, except as provided in § 174(a)(2), no deduction is allowed for such expenditures.

The sad part is that it's not even that much money. The Joint Committee estimates [4] that it will gain about 12 billion per year on average, but most of that is front-loaded into TY22 and 23. So they force larger companies like Google to hand over their cash so they can collect the float on it or whatever, and they don't care it will fuck over all these startups. They probably modeled it in.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174 [2] https://www.jct.gov/publications/2018/jcs-1-18/ [3] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p535 [4] https://www.jct.gov/publications/2017/jcx-67-17/ [5] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-23-11.pdf

Whether you can shop around to find someone who can tell you what you want to hear is unrelated to the mixed fact and law question of whether it is a defensible position that software development salaries must be capitalized.

It’s a cash flow issue, not a tax rate issue.

Shall means shall, as in it’s mandatory.

I would not complain about a free open source tool because they don’t do a good job of marketing it.

Security teams don't bear the costs of reduced productivity from saying no, but bear all the blame if they make a wrong decision to approve something. So they're heavily incentivized to say no.

Like many principal-agent problems, it requires someone appropriately situated to weigh the costs and benefits.

If that doesn't happen, it gets borne by someone, usually shareholders who pay in reduced profits and eventually capital destruction as these companies get ossified and disrupted.

I'm not sure what your argument is exactly. They haven't transferred the depositors' balances to new banks, they've simply issued them IOUs (receivership certificates). From what is known about the balance sheet of SVB, it will probably be between 8 and 10 years before those IOUs are replaced with dollars. You can't pay employees, the FTB or the IRS in receivership certificates. To say that it will be "no big deal" and that there will be a "minimum amount of disruption" is simply an assertion based on no evidence.

A previous thread [1] discussed Section 174 (mandatory capitalization of R&D expenses). An introduced bill does retroactively reverse it (See (d) Effective Date).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34627712

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

That's fair. A car that is in a collision is always at best as good as a car that has not been in a collision, whereas that's not the case with an employee who was terminated.

I was trying to get at where you don't need to trust someone else's judgement of something, you can just ... go look yourself. Or hire your own expert. Because why do those other things if they don't actually change the outcome?

It can both be true that most of the people who were laid off were done for "performance reasons" and also that it's not rational to reject a candidate because of a "red flag" like being laid off, at least if you are doing any evaluation of candidates yourself. After all, the prior company could have been wrong? Or they value different things?

What a disgusting but revealing story. By saying "being laid off is a red flag" they are loudly signaling that actually they have no way of measuring interview performance and are just trusting the former employer's judgement? So why even bother with the interview then?

It would be like if someone is selling me their car and I run the car history report and see it was in a minor collision but was repaired. I look over the car and see the repairs were done fine. In fact I bring out a mechanic I trust and they tell me that yes the repairs were completed with high quality and everything is great with the car, am I really justified in calling myself rational if I reject the car anyway because of some metaphysical spookiness I think inhabits cars that were in collisions before?

So you would refuse to fund Google (Larry and Sergei being PhD students at Stanford at the time) because they "[have] no business experience"?

I think what makes your definition confusing or misleading is the concept of dual sovereignty.

Under the concept of dual sovereignty in a federal system (such as the United States, Russia, Canada, or India), conduct can be legal or illegal under each of the sovereigns independently. At least post-Lochner era there are many laws that are in this scope.

An example that might test your definition would be recreational use of marijuana which is legal in some states but illegal federally. It would be at best misleading to say that "US law permits the recreational use of marijuana" even though it meets your definition.