SpicyLemonZest

Rising healthcare costs are bad for both insurers and consumers, yes. I'm not sure why you say AI is a "scapegoat" here - they seem to be making a plausible case that the AI tools are directly causing this cost increase and it doesn't correspond to an increase in services provided.

I personally use options for hedging, which I think is generally the responsible purpose of them.

It's true that you can get something like a directional bet by going far enough out of the money with strong enough conviction never to exit the position early. But this also exposes you to a lot of risk that it might not pay off even though the original idea was correct. Microsoft crashed in 2000, but it never returned to its pre-1998 price, because there was some real value in the dotcom bubble and they were able to capture a disproportionate fraction of it.

It's a great idea in the abstract, but I don't feel compelled to be a goldfish about this. I would like to see them explain why they turned off Direct File and what's different here before concluding that the administration has some principled commitment to digital accessibility.

I can't help but notice, for example, that the system prompt is not public information.

No, put options suffer from time decay and IV crush. A $1,000 MU put for December 2027 was at about $200 today. So if Micron dropped tomorrow, you'd probably start making a bit of money, although the delta is only -0.32. But if you held all the way to December 2027, Micron would then have to drop all the way to $800 before your position is profitable.

When and how that transition happens is subject to a number of complex factors, and it's not even necessarily the case that incremental drops in the stock will produce incremental gains for your put option.

I've got plenty of negative things to say about state government lotteries, but the ones I'm familiar with are structured in less predatory ways. It's hard to spend thousands of dollars on lottery tickets, and impossible to do so in a way that won't feel obviously stupid, especially since you can't buy them on your phone.

I'm one of Trump's domestic enemies, I think we should imprison him and his minions the instant he's thrown out of the White House, and I'm still not sure it's realistic to send him to the ICC. It would radicalize a lot of people who have wrong but principled objections to it.

It doesn't in and of itself, but there's no clear reason why the US government could not instruct Microsoft that sanctions include a prohibition on granting OS licenses which are likely to be used by sanctioned persons. They're trying to get ahead of things rather than do the bare minimum.

The government is all over them. The President of the United States had dinner with one AI CEO yesterday and is having lunch with a group of them tomorrow. The Senate is having a hearing called "Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks" on Wednesday.

It doesn't mean Meta is burning down, but it does mean the market is not convinced the Meta Enterprise Platform is going to be some exciting new business direction.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Why would I drop a name? My point doesn't have to do with anyone's name.

> Are there other people that put in significant amounts of work that he is not giving credit to/downplaying their contributions or similar?

If you're looking for an answer to this question as stated, then I agree with you the answer is no. It's unrelated to what I'm talking about, which is why I didn't answer it the first time.

He deserves a lot of credit for shepherding WordPress to where it's at. But like most open source projects, WordPress has become so successful in large part because of his formal and informal commitments to the open source community about how it will be managed. Guido van Rossum spent much of his tenure as the Python BDFL as an employee of Google, but it would have been disastrous for Python if he had gotten on stage at PyCon and declared that anyone who cares about Python had better stop using Bing.

As the source article covers, they’ve been facing a number of complaints from human rights organizations that they are being insufficiently censorious regarding the Brazilian election, failing to swiftly take down some things which ethical standards and Brazilian law require. So that presumably influenced their policy. A lot of people seem to have an idea that Facebook’s election policy should quickly block all the bad ads with no risk of blocking any good ones, and that’s just not possible.

If English, German, Swedish, etc. shared a single prestige form, which all educated speakers understand and use for formal purposes, I think it would be reasonable and common to call them dialects of "Germanic".

More generally, you'll drive yourself crazy trying to form an opinion of what a language "really" is independent of what the people who use it believe. Norwegian people can generally read Danish, and Danish people can generally read Norwegian if it's written in Bokmål, but Bokmål is only one of the two equally valid ways to write Norwegian. What's going on there? You can trample over the cultural context to impose some abstract definition of what's "really" a language, or you can accept that Norwegian is a language because Norwegian speakers say so and not worry too much about the metaphysical status of Nynorsk.

Yes. There's pretty extensive evidence that Mullenweg engaged in an extortion campaign against WP Engine, threatening to use his position at the WordPress Foundation to sabotage their business unless they agreed to pay Automattic a bunch of money.

Like many sociopaths, he prefers not to draw a clear distinction between actions he's performing for his own benefit and those he's performing on behalf of others, so he often tells a very different story about this. He claims to think, and may actually think, that there's nothing strange or alarming about the open source WordPress project taking sides in a commercial dispute between two vendors.

Indeed, I suspect if you sat down with him in private he'd explain to you that things like the Wordpress Foundation or fiduciary responsibility to Automattic shareholders are legal fictions. In his reality, he's the WordPress guy, and anything which seems to limit or constrain his control of WordPress is just some nonsense he signed off on to keep the suits happy.

Anthropic has no such history. The backlash to the Fable release saw a number of social media influencers promoting a similar lie, which I frankly suspect was part of a coordinated Trumpist media effort. Releasing a model with known, documented limitations that constrain its performance on certain kinds of tasks is completely different than releasing a model which is "trying to sabotage people they don't trust".

If I sell a torque wrench with a maximum setting of 1000 foot-pounds, and the government says they'd really like 1500, I'm not sabotaging them by explaining that my wrenches aren't safe when used that way and refusing to remove the limitation.

I've got no issue siding against Anthropic when they're wrong! Anthropic had a similar dispute with Bessent over the Fable launch, and there I take the government's side without reservation. If the government thinks they've found a national security problem with your highly capable new model, obviously you should agree to voluntarily withdraw it until they're satisfied, even if your best and correct guess is that it's just a minor jailbreak.

But they're not wrong here.

The question is whether Flock does provide false confidence to law enforcement, or whether it provides a media hook to cover the ways in which bad police departments routinely misbehave.

A lot of people coming to this story seem to have the idea that it's unthinkable for someone to spend 13 days in jail when they have clear evidence they're innocent, so there must be some novel explanation for how this could happen. But as any criminal defense lawyer will tell you it's very thinkable. She was ordered to report to jail on a Friday afternoon, the standard stratagem cops use to ensure people they don't like spend at least a weekend behind bars. She was denied bail, even though she made no move to flee in the months where she knew the police thought she did it, because the courts in many places view mandatory pretrial detention as a punishment for presumptively guilty people.

Flock didn't misidentify Isaacs' car in this case. It correctly identified that her car was vaguely near the accident, and the police incorrectly concluded that it was the one involved in the accident.

The cold political war turned hot when Trump tried to overthrow the US government. I understand that this bizarre both sides framing is comforting to you for now, but it's just going to leave you even more alarmed when he tries again.

It's not a high horse, you're just misinformed. The Trump regime does want to blow up a school with 120 children. The military had, until recently, a program to prevent such incidents; Pete Hegseth gutted it (https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...) because he wants to achieve "maximum lethality" at all costs. To this date, the regime has not issued any sort of apology for the school bombing, because they're not sorry and they'd happily do it again.

Because this is an illegitimate ruling with no legal basis issued by an aspiring dictator's cronies.

Actively handicapping a product that's otherwise capable qualifies. If you discover that the military is using your capacitors to make rocket launchers, so you introduce a manufacturing defect that will cause them to fail at high heat, you're a supply chain risk and can be rightfully designated as such.

The converse does not qualify. If I advertise a chemical with an admixture that prevents it from being used to make explosives, the military has absolutely no right to demand that I produce a version of that chemical without the admixture. Selling a product which can't do what the DoD wants does not make me a supply chain risk, no matter how easy it would be for me to make a different product that's fit for their purpose.

The opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/588/18-422/) is pretty clear. The North Carolina and Maryland redistricting committees both sought to override the will of the voters. They had specific, explicit goals for precisely how many Democrats and how many Republicans should be elected in their state, and they knew the voters would not vote in accordance with those goals, so they redrew the maps in a successful attempt to ensure the partisan balance they desired. To me that's a clear example of disenfranchisement.

The Supreme Court didn't quite rule that this was constitutional, I suppose, only that no court is allowed to consider the question.

What if an Amazon employee uses Claude to develop the S3 storage service, which is a core product offering unrelated to the DoD but also something that will be provided to the DoD in govcloud?

In practice, I think it's fair to say there's an informal understanding that AWS will not be punished for this so long as they stay in the regime's good graces. But that's how fascist power accumulation works; now they have to stay in the regime's good graces, or they risk being destroyed.

I'm intensely skeptical that Walmart has clauses in its contracts saying that no supplier may use FooCorp software in the process of delivering its goods. If they do I would definitely call that an abuse of corporate power.

It's certainly rhetoric! Corporate leaders must be made to understand that the business risk of collaborating with fascism is greater than or equal to the business risk of standing up for the rule of law. Really, we're being generous if we only punish a few companies and only hit their contracts; a strict application of the law would put quite a lot of CEOs behind bars for their overt bribery of the Trump regime.

Again, it's unreasonable to play this game. The regime must be held to account for the actual things that they say, not whatever sanewashed policies we can backfill underneath them. If Hegseth's statements exceed his legal authority, that doesn't mean he's lying, it means that the government is knowingly pursuing an illegal policy.

If you don't like that, and would prefer to discuss a lawful supply chain risk designation, you should convince him to retract the statements or impeach him.

I think it is impossible for anyone who's not fascist to look at this story and take the regime's side, even if they don't like Anthropic.

People have been making this claim because the Secretary of Defense personally issued a statement demanding that "no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic". We're not going to play this absurd game where government officials issue fascist instructions and we all pretend they said something more reasonable instead.

I don't see a need to come up with a complete definition at this point. Let's start with cancelling all SpaceX and Palantir contracts and see how we're feeling; that may be enough to keep corporations in line.