I was of that mindset until I learned how currencies and central banks work. The government doesn't need our tax money. US dollars aren't a fixed resource. With fractional reserve banking and interest rates, central bank controls how much new money is entering the economy. Taxes are a way to take some money out of the economy. However the economy runs warm at 2-3% inflation on average. Economy can technically run without any taxation if inflation is kept under control, and productivity of goods and services is going up.
State and city institutions get loans just like we do, sometimes at lower interest rates than individuals can. During covid, loan rate was lower than inflation. That is essentially free money.
It's a complex subject. We've been all told that US debt is a massive timebomb that will explode, however many other countries have higher debt:gdp ratio.
I'm not saying one shouldn't pay their taxes. I'm saying don't pay more tax than you need to. US govt can create money out of thin air either via congress approval or fed interest rate.
It's an interesting point, but "US govt can create money out of thin air either via congress approval or fed interest rate" has spectacular knock-on effects that you'd need to wilfully ignore. I recommend David Graeber's `Debt: The First 5,000 Years` for some good reading on the subject.
The way we build computers can’t simulate quantum fields. Just means our computers are limited.
Doesn’t mean the universe isn’t a simulation.
Everything you perceive is through the brain. Brain could be in a jar receiving the same neuron signals, it wouldn’t be able to know if it is in a simulation or not.
There is no way for a program to know if it’s inside a virtual machine or not.
There is no disagreement about that. But the simulation hypothesis claims that is is more likely that what we perceive as reality is a simulation, run by someone else, than that we are in "real" world.
I think it is worse hypothesis than even Drake's equation - there, at least we know all factors, we just have no idea what their value is and with sample size of 1, the current uncertainly is like 40+ orders of magnitude. That still brings us closer to "is there inteligent life in universe" answer than we ever got with "is this universe a simulation".
Okay, bummer. No support for quantized datatypes yet and from the docs I cannot see anything that mentions fast brute force search. I personally don't need an index. But I see that https://github.com/unum-cloud/usearch which is used by duckdb-vss in turn uses https://github.com/ashvardanian/simsimd which should make a really fast exact vector similarity search possible. Am I missing something here?
Oh right, duckdb being columnar is the ultimate brrr factor for such a brute force vector similarity search. But doesn't using a HNSW index completely forfeit this potential advantage?
State and city institutions get loans just like we do, sometimes at lower interest rates than individuals can. During covid, loan rate was lower than inflation. That is essentially free money.
It's a complex subject. We've been all told that US debt is a massive timebomb that will explode, however many other countries have higher debt:gdp ratio.
I'm not saying one shouldn't pay their taxes. I'm saying don't pay more tax than you need to. US govt can create money out of thin air either via congress approval or fed interest rate.
reply