Software developer and artist.

  • 4 Posts
  • 77 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Sure, it’s advantageous in the short-term. I think this is where we misunderstand each other. What I’m trying to say is that under normal circumstances, individuals aren’t maximizing their output. They are just living as part of the community, following the unwritten rules and benefiting from that. (In the prisoner’s dilemma, this would be choice A).


  • If this is how everyone would act in their daily life, you would see crime, theft and abuse on an unimaginable level. No, people don’t always do what benefits them “at every individual point”. We are social creatures, acting as a community where the individuals benefit from working together. Although this has been successfully undermined by capitalism and other hierarchies.

    This whole concept is also called, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, one of my favorite thought experiments because it shows how being rational can result in everyone being worse off.


  • Yes. The “tragedy of the commons” is a myth.

    Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

    This is factually false, because the land will be destroyed and individuals don’t benefit, not even in the short term. Commons work great (see open source software), but capitalism and power structures abuse and destroy them for short-term profit.


  • Interesting viewpoint, but I think the applications aren’t at fault: The operating system should ensure that the user has control of the computer at all times. I think you need to do three things to achieve that:

    1. Limit process RAM usage, so the system never has to swap
    2. Limit process CPU usage, so the system never stalls
    3. When drivers / the operating itself crash, revert into a usable state (this one is probably the most complex one)