adampunk

That’s right. And use taxes can and should be calibrated to not just collect money but achieve public policy objectives. If the real marginal cost were close to 10 cents a page, we might be able to argue that funding the system other ways would be more distortionary but it’s not. We have decided with lots of static file services (including Supreme Court opinions) that the right use tax is 0, because zero-cost access is a desirable quality in itself.

Right, but 1: We already pay for the fixed costs and 2: the real marginal cost--however you want to measure it--is still closer to 0 than 10 cents.

The problem is threefold: the true marginal cost of a PACER page is closer to 0 than 10 cents; the fixed cost (building an electronic record system) is already paid by the public; and the complication of a price discrimination mechanism would drive up that marginal cost rather than capture true willingness to pay.

This trilemma shows up whenever we try to meter public goods in this fashion. We could, in theory, price public transit or water or what-have-you by evaluating willingness to pay and charging each person that value. However, in practice the invasive monitoring necessary to do so is an enormous burden. We can sort of spread this out with municipal services by (as you noted) replacing trunk lines/pipes with a general fund and asking individuals to pay for the last mile, but that mostly works because the real marginal cost is measurable and not near 0. Further, for utilities, the willingness to pay has good proxies: the end of the last mile is at a real house that isn’t going anywhere. For PACER I doubt that’s the case.

$$$

The AI wouldn’t care obviously but I thought we’d find less maximally ironic engagement bait to be made by machines. I think I didn’t have enough imagination.

I’m continually surprised by just how many “AI is ruining X” posts are obviously AI-written. Just not a genre of writing I predicted would appear.

There’s also no evidence for it aside from “stars go up too much” and “my social circle isn’t talking about it”, so that could be a reason!

It's not protestware, it's a special military operation.

Don't be obtuse.

Willingness to play.

It is similar to the problem with the neutron bomb. On the surface the idea of the neutron bomb (a bomb which kills humans via hard radiation but leaves infra intact) is not “worse” than a regular nuclear weapon. The dead die the same way and the living envy them. What CHANGES is the use calculus. I might not want to bomb an industrial valley if doing so destroys the thing I am trying to capture. However, if I have a bomb which kills the people living there and spares the factory, I might pull the trigger.

Similarly, it is cheap (relatively) to indiscriminately launch weapons at a distant place. It is extraordinarily expensive to send human troops in. They need food, water, and generally have families that expect some of them to come home. If putting a rifle on an autonomous vehicle works, then a ground invasion becomes cheaper.

It’s a puff piece written by someone who didn’t know (or didn’t care) they were being managed.

I mean you confused the 737-max problems with the general notion of automation, so...

2 things. First, landing a plane is abnormal! You're shedding a huge amount of energy and you're transitioning from a state where you can keep flying due to your speed to one where flight is impossible as you lower speed. That's an abnormal state to put an aircraft in, regardless of how often it happens. Second, what exactly is the level of automation you're saying is not necessary? Should we rip out radar systems that mark glide paths?

And you contend that autopilot makes that situation more dangerous? Do you have any support for this?

Landing is an abnormal situation for an aircraft which we make SUBSTANTIALLY less dangerous through intense automation. Do you want to rip out automated landing systems?

The crew and the plane are a single system. It is meaningless to imagine pilot “skill” without the plane. Further, we killed so many pilots in the 20th century through impossible workloads which we have now automated, it’s almost cruel to be wistful for it.

I know this is an analogy to AI, but I wish we would dispense with this idea that there’s some appropriate level of machinery which was reached just a hair before right now. There is no appropriate level of machinery, no point at which the nature of the system itself will unambiguously say “that’s enough.”

No wonder Ed is such a hit with this crowd.

You didn't bother to read the article or learn about the subject but you feel qualified to put "journalism" in quotes?

Even in the US which lags behind in this area it would be obscene to claim that grocery cashiers aren't being actively replaced. That's just not connected to reality. Most grocery stores I've been in have essentially 1 open lane with a human where there used to be a half dozen. You might as well say that airline ticket agents haven't been replaced.

This is cool! Thanks for building it.

What's the point of reading someone's writings on a subject where you know they're not typically correct? How would we know what we 'learn' from Ed is right?

"a sales manager making a bad call when images are not available"

It seems nearly impossible to imagine that to be the case. I'd have to disregard the kinds of manipulation entirely. What sales manager would create a whole western block sequence by copying, rotating, and flipping a single element?

That remains to be seen.

I was talking to a Claude Opus 4.7 chatbot about low-discrepancy sequences and made the mistake of framing a thought experiment as "deceiving" a vendor who owns a scrambler by making a hard to scramble low-discrepancy sequence generator. Admittedly that sounds sketchy but the conversation up to that point--without the explicit framing--was about the same subject just shorn of metaphor. With the framing I got a refusal message that likened my request to Dual_EC_DRBG!

>I am here to light up the dark path you are unknowingly walking, like lamplighters who used to light street lamps for those brave enough to walk the night alone. What the light reveals has a name: Qwen 3.7 Max.

I sure am glad we left idolatry behind.

Ok, but it's a freak show tho! The title promises circus freaks and two are on display, with their freakiness aired out for all to see. There's some "aren't we the villain here" hand-wringing but it's hard to take that seriously in an article that's organized around the display of two freaks!

Wow you’re on a whole roll today!

Ok, how come your little comprehension examination didn’t grapple with the main point: that they said they could not have made the changes they merged in themselves? Surely pointing out that the commits were small cuts AGAINST your whole argument. For a more complex project where vibe slop might not be appropriate (again, wild thing to say), the potential input from outside is more valuable, not less.

I missed the part where you weren’t going to belittle the contributions.

And replaces them with the famously environmentally friendly launch vehicle business.

Whole lotta bike shedding going on in this thread.