roenxi

It's a highly speculative investment in a company that, based on current trends, relies heavily on technology which doesn't exist yet and that experts in the field aren't sure what it will be used for. It lost 42 billion dollars last year.

I'm not even going to say it is a bad investment, it might be a once in a lifetime opportunity. But if the current public information isn't enough to dissuade a buyer then that investor is sophisticated enough that they can wait 2 more quarters after the IPO before buying.

That's pretty interesting, because with the Bonsai 2 quantisations it is quite achievable to get Qwen 27B running at 50 t/s on reasonably priced gaming machine [0]. Which in turn suggests that Fable 5 coding performance can be achieved locally with a bit of clever harnessing.

Although the same harnessing should also improve Fable's performance. The important thing here is the cap for local performance looks like it could be quite high.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... suggests 16GB VRAM, 32 GB system.

I think it is more that the common words in the language are the scaffolding (like hedging with "I think...", "like" for setting up an example) and the subject of the scaffold is normally unique and highly context specific.

Looking at the first Frieren example:

"Live without [fear]", "Live without [bread]", "Live without [sunlight]", "Live without [honour]". The common words are more than enough to set up a generic sentence for lack of something but then what someone lacks can be literally any object, concept or verb. There are a lot more than 500 of those in the world.

Yeah and those ideas have a common thread to them - making other people's lives worse with no obvious gain to anyone. People should stop with that and spend some time thinking about how to make the situation better instead. Somehow modern society sprung up in place of barbarians living in caves and it wasn't by vigorous protest. The trick seems to be capital investment, clever application of science and accumulating reliable data. A lot of negotiation and tolerance of people who believe other ideas too. Violence did happen and in some small amount is probably useful but people go waaaay over the top in trying to use it as though it was a productive force. It nearly never works.

What this woman is allowed to do makes up a complex topic; there are arguments in all directions. But if her scheme for improving the world involves foremost delaying some people's lunch then she should put some time into coming up with a better plan. Ginning up attention by being unusually petty isn't going to be the path to world peace and prosperity.

> Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain

They don't have "domains", they are career politicians. It is nice when a politician has some experience in the topic they're legislating on but the system works by having generalists who bow in whatever direction winds are blowing the most money from.

It is not possible to be an effective career politician by having firm principles or technical expertise. It requires a near total dedication to politicking. If they happen to have knowledge of a topic it is coincidence because the number of political topics is large and the number of politicians is comparatively small.

> The wearable would see the increased heart rate when a person is moving with a heavy backpack versus moving without one.

I'm sure it would notice the heartrate was up, but how is it supposed to translate that into energy consumption? Eg, my heartrate is 80 bpm. How much energy am I burning in an hour? There isn't enough information to say, even if we add in data points like a gps measure of my velocity and elevation change.

This comment confuses me. Why would we expect calorie burn to be related to steps and heart rate? How could a wearable measure energy expenditure? What if someone was wearing a heavy backpack? The energy to move the backpack has to come from somewhere but the wearable can't tell that the person has one.

One of the problems with highly judgemental writing is it does become a bit challenging to pick out what the argument is. I think there are probably some good points in here but I'm too distracted by the style to focus on them.

> "I'm not here to remind you that DHH is a shameless fascist"

While fascist is a vague word I don't think he's using it properly; and it means that all the other times he asserts something it needs extra interpretation to figure out what situation he's describing. As far as I can see [0] facism to him might even include things like free speech absolutism.

[0] https://davidcel.is/articles/the-dhh-problem

It's difficult for a politician to do something that isn't political, so I think we can let them off the hook for making symbolic gestures.

However, putting legislation up for a vote is not puffery. Establishing what parties vote against and why is actually an important part of what the opposition does. Otherwise they may as well not turn up.

That's a terrible argument, the IRS taking an interest in obscure finances is usual. Can't escape from the tax office by trading in obscure things.

Monero is, time of writing, #12 on the coinmarketcap leaderboard [0] and less than 1% of the crypto space by market cap. It's hard to complain about that being called obscure; anyone who gets a feel for crypto by looking at a top 10 coins list isn't going to see it.

Although it is a technological miracle. That coin specifically might do poorly in the long term so I'm not about to call it an investment, but I think it's quite possible that Monero holds a probable entry in the history books in 150 years time.

[0] https://coinmarketcap.com/

Absolutely. It's a very effective system for quickly concentrating all the owenership of ice cream machines in the hands of the people who are best at deciding when, where and how much ice cream is needed as measured by profits - even if they personally don't have much when they're starting out. And if there is a better measure than profit I'd like it to be proved up in a country I don't live in because those experiments usually result in ice cream shortages.

The concentrated ownership results in graphs a lot like the one in the linked article.

Assuming we're talking about the US, printing money and giving it to wealthy people has been a big contributor to the failure of the last few decades. The US has made a broad-scale effort to disable every form of market-based feedback that tried to replace the leadership class with more competent leaders. If they'd stopped with the upper class welfare then the 1% probably would have less money, but giving them the money then organising to tax it away again is a strategy that is both bizarre and unlikely to be effective. It's too complex and arbitrary.

If we're talking globally, Asia ain't failing. They're big on producing lots of real stuff. Minted a lot of new billionaires.

> The primary benefit of massive wealth is power. It's an intangible, but it's very real. It can't be dismissed as paper wealth.

I mean, sure. The follow up thought is after that power has been taxed away then someone else is going to need to be taxed for the raw resources that are needed. If welfare checks start being paid out with intangible benefits it'll lead to loud complaints. That gets to the heart of the problem with taxing the people with truly enormous amounts of wealth, they mostly have power, which isn't much use to someone who needs food and shelter. The tax burden has fall somewhere in the logistics chain that produces the houses and the food (although maybe a long way upstream).

> Distributing from the person who owns the ice cream machine to the person buying ice cream puts the money in the hands of the person far more likely to spend it quickly

I'm not going to disagree with that, but I will point out that this is why they couldn't afford the ice cream machine in the first place. Consuming the seed corn is a road to eventually having no corn.

There is an economic optimum amount of ice cream production and there isn't any reason to believe it isn't being hit under the current system. It isn't obvious if the need is for more or less ice cream machines. Moving ownership of the machine around doesn't obviously change the amount of ice cream produced; and its owner isn't consuming the machine. But a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy is pulling all those levers on the assumption that making random changes in ownership has to help. It probably won't.

There is a certain tautology to "tax the rich" - a country can't exactly tax the poor. The poor have no money. Taxes on poor people are more about the principles of fairness and to some extent transparency than because they have the financial resources to contribute meaningfully.

It'd be interesting to do the same graph by real consumption. I bet it'd be much more equal - most of the wealth is tied up in systems that keep the country ticking over and are only providing paper benefits to the owner. Which is why I say "transparency" - once you track what happens in real terms, "taxing the rich" almost certainly becomes "everyone ends up with less". If you take real resources away from the person who owns the McDonald's ice cream machine in real terms I have a hard time seeing how it won't come out of the lifestyle of the dude buying icecream. The person getting the money wasn't consuming anything real.

> ...or chinese models are benchmaxxed...

It is hard to tell what people are trying to say when they use undefined words with no particular meaning. This doesn't seem to change the relative position of the Chinese models much. The Chinese are a month or few behind and the state of intelligence is so volatile that the top 10 will be completely different in 6 months. I'd expect it to still be a mix of US and Chinese models with the US models leading.

If he is that does seem like a reasonable claim. There is precedent in concepts like citizenship, for example. Property rights. Inheritance. A lot of things give people advantages purely because that is how the legal superstructure works without reference to any inherent imbalance in economic or social power.

darth_avocado is implying that he'd rather use a different index to measure inflation. Which is reasonable, this game where "real" doesn't mean real is not helpful. I've been seeing "real" growth in my gold holdings for years but mysteriously enough the weight hasn't changed. And while I'm ranting it drives me mad that we're supposed to pretend exponentially increasing prices are "stable", that is about as unstable as prices can get without starting a mathematics degree.

I doubt there is a compelling argument why people should have to use CPI as the comparison index. I'd consider any investment that only matched CPI to be losing value for example; they should be tracking something one of the monetary aggregates.

There is probably more to it than that. If the platform can censor the content then it is capable of identifying it and so can choose not to display a Nestle ad. That would be a more palatable solution for the ad platforms and also probably acceptable to most companies. If users want to watch something on a platform what do they care? The article makes a good case that this is something more like Operation Choke Point or the itch.io deindexing where the financial system is being mobilised for political ends.

It is an interesting use case to monitor because there are obvious need for something like crypto, but so that has not come close to taking hold.

It is somewhat confusing to me that more countries don't treat Meta as a political threat. China's approach to restricting access to western internet companies looks more and more reasonable in hindsight. The US tech giants appear to be politically active and becoming more and more willing to influence elections. I don't like the strategic situation of any anti-US political parties with Facebook in the mix (not a comment on Lula, about whos policies I know little).

That being said, it is a complex issue. There are countries that refuse to embrace US style free speech and so there is a natural pressure to move political speech to US-controlled media platforms as a result. The average quality of the chatter is higher.

BI is a good example of something where the benefits take a long time to show up. It has the most use at a senior management level where they can't use their every day experience to tell what is going on. But they don't make a lot of decisions over the course of a year and it often takes a few years before the impact is felt.

Yeah; whatever the AIs are doing I wouldn't call it "information dense" like the abstract does. I'd prefer the hypothesis that there are complex patterns in speech related to successfully communication information to a limited human brain and the AIs aren't complex enough to model them yet. Or the signal is being obscured somehow.

I wasn't expecting to reply, but then I realised that the last time [0] I described Trump was too charming not to tack on the thread.

> [Donald Trump] at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to --the gentle sex-- [his office], began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and haughtily than [he] had been wont … [he] arranged everything as [he himself] thought fit and according to [his] own arbitrary will.

And it has to be admitted is a fair description of the man.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680033

After Russiagate that seems like a rather generous allowance to the profession of journalism. They managed a Pulitzer-winning investigation that failed to uncover the eventual truth, which is the whole thing was ginned up out of whole cloth and everyone pushing it would like to move on from that, thankyouverymuch.

Although it is always possible that they've got something worth saying it is also entirely possible that they're just making up a story out of nothing.

> Is this the new cyber normal?

No. We're in a "brief" [0] transition period where a scaleable superhuman developer enters the scene and discovers a whole heap of bugs. Once the majority of code is written by similar systems then the tide of critical bugs being found will slow down.

The article does sorta say this but lets not bury the lede to deeply. It isn't realistic to expect new security vulnerabilities to be found at this rate, we're clearing out years of backlog and the maintainers haven't had time to deploy AI to do the software right the first time. Once the situation stabilises I'd personally expect very few public vulnerabilities because the expertise in how to assess code security is moving from a handful of experts to everyone.

> The NHS approach: close source everything.

Yeah good luck. I've seen how these systems work at decompiling and I expect they're probably going to be really good at fuzzing too.

[0] Could take a while.

Since we're stating the obvious today...

Good economic policy is largely context independent. It is almost always a good time to tax economic rents and deregulate starting/running a business. The basic formula for success has been well established for several centuries and even the Communists managed to figure it out a big chunk of that.

It is not surprising that the established government figures seem confused. If they've let the situation devolve to the point where there is a visible problem it is strong evidence that they just don't care about good economic policy. Not in the top 10 list of priorities. And to couple that with a forecast, that probably isn't going to change any time soon.

If you don't think the decision makers are considering the cost to the business (as represented in the fine) or the cost to themselves (as measured by a bonus) then whet do you think is motivating their decision making process?

Decision makers are often quite sensitive to the cost to the business, people who are tagged as causing $25 billion in unnecessary charges would need to start talking very quickly about what justifies the expense. Even in the case of Facebook that much money is more than enough to start swinging decisions.

That logic seems a bit weak, because it is saying we're already living in a world where the worst-case is happening, and we're just talking about the odds of any individual experiencing it are going up a little.

Compare it to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-... where there is strong evidence that using more energy directly leads to more prosperity. We've got much better chances to do well if we stick to using the cheapest available energy. Then people can just build over the top of any disasters that strike.

It's hard to find a coherent perspective where that makes sense. Most parents have had kids when future conditions looked far worse than they do now. The situation actually looks rosy in 50 years given the promising moves the Chinese are making in nuclear and renewable technology.

It is more likely that children are inconvenient to the lifestyles people want to lead. That is more consistent with how bad people are at long-term planning.

Seems like a tough argument to make stick. The Chinese & Indians are clearly benefiting more from the economic growth than they are suffering from the downsides of pollution. They would not swap their current environmental problems for clean poverty.

It isn't a broken windows problem as much as drawing 2 billion people out of poverty is more urgent than most other concerns.