GreedClarifies

"indicator of wealth"

Maybe. I think it is an indicator of multiple things, one being wealth.

Another thing that comes to mind is of someone that needs to signal, badly, that they have wealth. Some people may be interested in those signals, but I hope/guess not too many.

PS: I'm all for people having wealth and spending it on things that make their lives better, but conspicuous consumption/Veblen goods/positional goods seem like some kind of ancient software in humans that hopefully will pass in time.

Your statement hinges on the definition of "fully".

I'll simply counter by saying that the value created by these AI technologies is immense and given that value it will likely be intergraded into society very quickly.

One of the defining characteristics of LLMs is that their knowledge bases are shockingly wide. Anyone who has played with GPT (or similar) has experienced that the width of its knowledge is beyond most if not all humans.

Medicine, and in particular diagnosis, is particularly difficult due to the width of knowledge required due to the span of possible diseases.

It completely makes sense that GPT, or similar, would simply be better than doctors at diagnosis in time, and it is very plausible that the time is now.

This is fantastic news for humanity. Humanity gets better diagnosis and we don't put high IQ people thought a grinder that is medical school and residency to do a job which is not suited to human cognition.

It's an amazing win.

"Not to mention the socio-economic impact of who is chosen and who isn't."

Yawn. The most boring and lazy complaint to this technology that I can imagine.

If we can edit, then in time there is no reason why the technology will not become affordable for the vast majority of the population.

Not to mention that water being either "13.8°C, or 14.8°F" at similar times is laughable.

I suspect that they are taking some point in time and comparing it to average temperatures, which is beyond comical. What a farce.

"Regan's illegal war in Nicaragua"

Ok, huffingtonpost.

"which actually make the problem so much worse"

I'm sorry you haven't made that case at all. All you have done is listed the costs of the "term limits" side, you haven't listed any of the benefits. A couple off of the top of my head:

1. Seats would be up for effective election more often allowing for democracy to perhaps function more effectively. Perhaps there would be more of a market of ideas instead of cults of personality.

2. Less time for legislators to establish "ties" (corruption) with regulators, business leaders, party leaders, and others in power.

I'm failing to see how the stock market is taking this as a signal that Meta will no longer pour money down the VR hole.

We live in a weird world!

FAANG is the best job a person can get out of college. The pay and benefits far outstrip what one can get from startups.

"Tesla is apparently also an overhyped luxury company"

From a practical perspective Teslas are simply better daily drivers than other cars.

Whether their price premium, wrt gas powered cars, is justified is a judgement call. I would say yes, but YMMV.

Novo Nordisk must be a huge fan of the food pyramid. A company riding the wave of humans eating themselves to death.

The world is an amazing place!

"this action will hamstring DeepMind in bureaucracy."

I'm sorry but I fail to see the problem with this. DeepMind has made very impressive demos and papers, but they have yet to add one dollar of revenue to Google's bottom line. Further they have drained billions from Google.

Google has to, somehow, get completely out of the research paper game and into the product game.

Papers have to have little/no impact on perf going forward. Other than a small windfall to goodwill they are a misalignment between the company's goals and those of the employees.

Products Google, products. Unless Larry and Sergey want to turn Google into a non-profit research tank. Which would be fine, but likely with substantially lower headcount. Even they aren't that wealthy.

CPB gets almost 500M/year from the federal government. 50% of CPB's budget goes to public radio stations. Budget of NPR is 300M.

I'm going to say that any claim that NPR's public financing is very low (1% or 5%) is either malicious splitting of hairs or outright lying.

Our relationship starting getting rocky around 2005, and they completely lost me about the same time.

Who has more "power" in the arrangement seems to be a function of the business cycle. Employees, in tech (we are on hackernews), had far more power 1-2 years ago.

Why does there need to be a law here? Why don't employees say: "If you want a non-compete you have to pay me $X/hr more" or conversely if non-competes are common : "you can pay me $X/hr less if there is no non-compete".

That this doesn't happen, and that there isn't a wiley entrepreneur out there figuring out that "if everyone would take X less for non-compete job, I'll offer then X/2 and make bank!". Since this doesn't happen, this means that employees don't care much at all.

Yes. I agree.

I think this is the root of the problem. They do not attempt to compute a price.

I've never fully understood the market failure here.

Let's assume no Monopsony. Let's assume no collusion by employers, since this is explicitly illegal, indeed it did happen, but the tech firms were slapped on the wrist for it.

Why do employees not attempt to strike out those portions of their contract? Why does no entrepreneur create a tech company with one of the innovations being a no "non-compete" clause and using that to woo employees?

My guess is that employees do not actually dislike non-complete clauses that they would accept a lower wage in compensation for no "non-compete".

Ha. So many words instead of "for the money".

Assuming that (a) we can sequence embryos reliably, (b) we identify a large number of genes that are considered favorable, and (c) we come up with a way of creating large numbers of embryos (eg: artificial ovaries) then the "quality" of the child in such a future will, generally, be dependent upon that amount the child's parent were willing to spend to find their best possible child.

Do you want a one in ten baby, a one in a thousand baby, or a one in a million?

The price will be proportional to the number of embryos sampled, on average. Since this is a competitive process, no matter how low the price per unit decreases the amount of spend, as a percentage of income/wealth will stay constant.

This is unbelievable. SVB had services that others did not provide (in particular taking risky assets to secure loads or lines of credit). Those who partook in those services had to know that they made the bank more risky.

Who comes up with these kinds of policies? My god. The moral hazard is unreal.

This is the correct take.

There are reports that, on a mark to market basis they were insolvent since September 2022.

It is very plausible that sooner or later we remove HTM accounting.

Agreed, it is all tribalism now. Painful.

Also, I love my car driving me around. It's the reason I bought it and it is amazing.

I agree that selecting an embryo will become inexpensive.

However, the game will be to select the "best" embryo. This becomes a game of numbers where, on average, the quality of the embryo will be a function of the size the pool of embryos and this will be a function of how much the future parents spend.

"err on the side of attributing magic to the process"

I think that is due to LLMs being somewhat magical. I think that the wolfram article "What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?" captures this beautifully.

It almost certainly will become really cheap to do this in the future.

OTOH, selection of embryos, by it's nature, will always be expensive.

No kidding.

Most people complain since they like to complain.

Many people complain about the distributional effects. What they fail to see if that the alternative technology: selection of embryos has a far greater distributional impact in the limit.

... but they like to complain.

I don’t understand the “very long time, if ever” comment. It seems like we are close to something that people find useful today. Why such a long time horizon?

Oversight by whom? Who is qualified? Random people in the civil service? It seems far beyond them.

Your example is illustrative. Absolutely don’t want the only LLMs capable of finding exploits in the hands of the NSA/some-TLA. I want it in people’s hands so reports can be made and software fixed.

I do wonder if tech companies are opening the door to competitors with this neutering of LLMs.

Assuming that we have a free market, I assume this will come down to what consumers want.

My guess is that people want “her” and they want “her” to have a personality, but they will want it to be compliant.

My mistake! That's what I get for reading the comment but not putting it into the context of the post.

It isn't that people want EVs they want truck form factor EVs. And yes, Tesla has failed on providing that.