SR2Z

That point is around 1960.

Yes, healthcare is better with MRI machines. I know lots of people who needed MRIs to confirm subtle issues and who were forced to wait at great personal cost because even US availability numbers are not good enough.

> Needless imaging is a massive cost drain in the industry.

So is over prescribing antibiotics, seeing a doctor for a cough, etc. Access to antibiotics and PCPs is still a good thing.

If Europe's aristocracy is dying, it's so their kids can take over.

The median income of a French household puts it in Alabama (Alabama is wealthier). If you truly believe that the US is a capitalist hellscape where only the fittest survive, Americans are more than fit enough. It's not even like rent is affordable in Europe; young people feel the same squeeze but with far less opportunity.

Europe regulates itself out of the competition. If you're OK with living in a stagnating economy while youth unemployment stays above 15%, sure - but let's be clear that you've still got billionaires and unlike in the US they actually succeed in using the government to protect their monopolies.

IMO Europe is facing most of the consequences and getting almost none of the benefits.

American billionaires are self-made (70% became billionaires during their life) where in Europe 70% inherited it. The powerhouse companies of the European economy are stagnant and the families which held them 100 years ago have a great chance of still holding them.

Are tech billionaires obnoxious? Yes, undoubtedly. I'd take them in a heartbeat over having a more permanent aristocracy.

Airbus and Boeing are neck and neck - but both rely on American jet turbines, either directly or through joint ventures.

The US has orders of magnitude more satellites thanks to SpaceX, including American direct-to-satellite networking.

Medical imaging is another example of where the US wins on scale alone. MRI machines are extremely common here, almost twice as many per capita as the OECD average.

Europe has lots of talent but a really horrible regulatory environment. That's why it's not a "powerhouse" and is instead almost always stuck in second place.

Some CEOs are engineering leaders. Some are not. The difference IMO will matter more and more as LLMs infiltrate deeper.

The "broken windows" approach would imply that the status quo got worse without good reason, and that bringing it back on track is accountable for growth.

Healthcare isn't like that. Human beings are born dying, it's not like the healthcare expenses could be avoided. It's not clean-up fees, it's genuinely productive economic activity by keeping people healthier for longer.

It's a civil issue because the criminal case doesn't exist; training an LLM is fair use.

You can brew alcohol with atmospheric yeast, yeast on the surface of fruits, etc., and you could just as easily hide drugs in toothpaste.

That might be their explanation but IMO it doesn't make sense.

That whole town (Bentonville) is essentially run by Walmart.

Language is a tool for abstraction, and AI is just an imperfect tool for working with language.

In the sense that "down the stack" is well-captured by existing language, AI is absolutely moving programmers up the stack. I can describe my goals using high-level abstractions, and the low-level implementation is somewhat constrained by that.

How well constrained it is depends on how well I described the problem and the quality of the model - much like how good human-written code is depends on how clearly the authors were thinking when they designed the structure.

Western countries with freedom of speech have ALWAYS been open for information warfare.

Governments and special interests have always spread propaganda, and they've frequently made criticizing it illegal.

Most people still end up believing some version of the truth. The ones that don't would likely never have believed the truth.

Nations should not coddle their citizens. People should be trusted to hear information and choose to believe it or not - that's a key aspect of our shared humanity and a fundamental human right.

We need hard math for statistical construction of probable cause.

Probably a public model, which is independently vetted against actual detentions, needs to show a 99% probability of an actual crime being committed for police to make a stop like this.

The opportunities for abuse are simply too high.

Having a frontier model is worth something beyond just inference costs, I'm sure. It seems likely that the labs will maintain at least a small lead.

I think that prisoners should be fed normal food which makes them feel comfortable. I'm not saying that it needs to be luxury meals, but there isn't a good reason for prisons in a free country to feed their prisoners bad food.

It's Vegemite, FFS. Not caviar.

DeepSeek announced that each GPU they have makes about $38 an hour in revenue during off-peak times. That's $331k a year, and DeepSeek is cheap.

I think that it's not only possible but likely that the frontier labs are profitable on an ongoing basis, and it's mainly the research and capex which make them look like impending disasters.

Realistically, OpenAI and Anthropic are each probably worth ~$1T each. Anthropic can already easily justify that based on revenue alone. OpenAI isn't far off. Consider how quickly these companies are growing and the fact that they maintain a small but significant edge, I don't think the bubble is going to pop. Just deflate a little.

Nobody is a hero for lighting a historical building on fire, even if its old purpose was to help Nazis relax.

Previous generations of the 737 are among the safest jetliners ever built. The MAX will eventually end up there, too - keep in mind that aviation disasters are increasingly less common as time goes on.

This issue (wearing on the trim jackscrew and hinges) is not one that you would expect to see for many, many years. It's the kind of issue that you see on jets approaching 30 years old, and it's really hard to predict how and when this kind of thing happens.

It's not the people around him, it's the states. The US is somewhat unusual in that American federalism treats each state as inherently sovereign, but limited by the Constitution.

What the Constitution says matters. Enforcement just might have a blood price.

Google is a multi trillion dollar company. Sundar Pichai is only recently a billionaire.

The investors are the ones whose net worth is measured in trillions, and most of the individuals are invested through 401k and pension accounts.

The tragic truth is that we live in a world where open models are perpetually only a few months behind frontier models.

Opus 4.6 was "good enough." Having a frontier model is no longer a requirement to print cash with a GPU.

It's definitely why roads and parking are congested! People don't value access to roads properly, that's a big part of why driving became the default mode of transit.

The main reason why we should charge money for transit is because it makes it easier to kick off people who ruin it for everyone else. It's not important that transit covers its costs, it's important because requiring payment filters out people who don't value it.

It fucking sucks to be on a train with a homeless guy shouting threats into the air, or with a bunch of teenagers blasting music and intimidating other passengers. Once on the way back from work once, there was a guy watching porn at full volume in a car with children at the other end. Sure, you can say "call the police!" but it's much harder to place cops everywhere (purely expensive) than it is to just send out some ticket inspectors (who generally justify their own salaries).

Blue states have a higher reliance on local taxes (which makes sense when you consider that one of the things that makes them "blue" is higher taxes). Remember the drama over the SALT deduction?

But this is crazy! Property taxes have been around since the 1800s and are used today to fund local spending, the kind of stuff that the federal government is either averse to or constitutionally barred from.

The federal government wasn't spending money on schools and other services when the tax brackets were that high. That money was going to the military. Social security and Medicare/Medicaid came later, after income taxes had been reduced.

If we want to reform the federal tax system to make it more fair, there is one particularly low-hanging fruit that any politician with a brain avoids like the plague: end the separate treatment of capital gains from income. Bezos sells billions of stock each year and pays a little under 20% on all of it. The rich don't need to engage in tax evasion schemes, the system is already incredibly friendly to income from capital over income from labor.

I imagine that Chinese AI labs would be more than happy to pay for tokens to train on. If Anthropic goes and bans them as quickly as it can identify to them, of course they'll shift to using lots of cheaply obtained sockpuppets to keep getting the same data.

I doubt that an AI could do anything with these that legions of scammers haven't already figured out how to do - after all, it's not like AI set up this distillation setup in the first place :)

Nurse salaries are already pretty high in a lot of places, but imo the American healthcare system has a longstanding issue with asking too much work from doctors and nurses.

Almost nobody would say that a shift longer than 12h is a good idea for skilled work. It's certainly longer than the allowed work periods for pilots and truckers.

Yet doctors and nurses routinely work 16, 18 and even 24 hour shifts. This is seen as normal, but it makes very little sense.

Yes it was! Transformers came out of a Google lab. In the 2020 Google I/O Sundar Pichai even demoed a transformer based chatbot smart enough to larp as a paper airplane.

These things are the work of many hands, mostly privately funded, and it's indisputable that Anthropic has advanced the field.

They don't need to seek cooperation, they can order domestic blocks and come after the registrar's operations in Italy.

Well, not countries which have large amounts of immigration and robust systems to integrate immigrants.

Unless of course they elect anti-immigration populists and ruin their appeal. Then they're doomed to shrink.

Yeah, I haven't seen too many convincing arguments that the law needs reform. I am very convinced that lots of proposed reforms are self-serving and bad for society at large.