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I guess I'm the past, rulers old enough for that also usually collected enough other health issues to be largely inactive. I can think of a few cases where countries had to wait a year or so for the old ruler to die, but not another case where they were still active while demented. Maybe Ivan the terrible? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible_and_His_Son_...

Oh, very interesting. Not sure it's working correctly though: set everything to ambition level 4, which takes us to net zero minus 4. Then, the following knobs have no effect: efficiency, nuclear power, carbon intensity, solar (!) and wave & tidal. That can't be true, so I think it's buggy

Great story! Was expecting it to be Bernie Madoff's, not Sears lol

Way back there was a news story about one of those, in which the owner didn't pay the licence fee for the software, so the software company bricked their parking garage with loads of people's cars inside.

City of Hoboken, NJ. Plenty of more recent stories about Hoboken using robots, so I guess it didn't put them off.

Oh yeah, here it is: https://m.slashdot.org/story/70742

(Edited to add: that account is disputed, in some accounts the city stopped maintainers working on it without realising it wouldn't keep working)

There's a reason why an interviewer might not say what they were looking for: when a candidate raises them unprompted, that gives more confidence that they have actually done the job, rather than just memorized some bullet points.

It's a hard thing to do right though. Looking for some very specific topic may not occur to the interviewee that it's what you're interested in, so it's better to just try to give them more general opportunities to show their thinking. The ideal is to get them into the frame of mind where they feel they can reminisce about some difficult task, rather than just "answer the exam question". You get more signal that way, but you have to be prepared to give credit for whatever important things they were able to talk about.

Interviewing is hard, honestly. It's not most interviewers main task, you can go for stretches of your career without any practice, and there are many reasons other than being an arsehole that people might not do it well. And when you do it, you have a fixed amount of time, and can't easily "try another way". As a job seeker one has to realize that a largish fraction of rejections are because an interviewer "couldn't get it to work in 1 hour", not because of you. Although frustrating, as it increases the amount of time you are without a job, it is liberating in a way to realize that interviewers are just people muddling through, not perfect judges whose rejection you need to take as an accurate prediction of how others will see you.

Competition is not one thing. For a producer of widgets, competition means that there is immense instantaneous leverage if you can reduce the price, because buyers will switch to you, increasing your market share until your competitor can match - if they can.

A landlord is usually in a different position. If their personal costs drop (eg, they paid off their mortgage) but the market price stays the same, how do they benefit by reducing the price they offer? Only by reducing the time it takes to rent out, which isn't a significant factor in exactly case when tenants would most like rents to go down - when prices are high because of demand.

The details of these mechanisms matter. Market can be out of equilibrium for a long time; maybe indefinitely.

A transaction can occur if the price is >= the seller's cost, and <= the value to the buyer. If it's at the minimum, the seller must pass on the tax or not trade, at the maximum (down to the max minus the tax) , the seller can't pass on (all of) the tax and still trade. We observe that landlords make profit, so we are not at the minimum. Are we at the maximum?

I think there are cases where we are in between for significant periods of time. Consider a positive shock to wages. Can landlords put up prices overnight? I don't think so, unless the landlords all co-ordinate to do so, prices will be sticky as there are always some properties in the market, so it's difficult to be the first to increase rent. Unlike a purchase, a landlord who waits for a buyer at the right price is forgoing income during the void. So the market price can be a Schelling Point.

A tax increase, however, happens at the same time to all landlords. All of them would prefer to pass it on, and they know that so they can assume all other landlords will try to pass it on. If the rent is currently below the maximum possible, they will succeed.

How long it takes prices to adjust I don't know. It is an empirical question, but I don't know what data would answer it. But it seems like it took decades for landlords to capture the two-income surplus after it became common for women to have a career.

In the UK, the state has a conflicted relationship with mobile vending. On the one hand it is controversial to restrict commerce in a free society; on the other, there is an increasing aversion to being called to the door, or offered goods in the street. Technically you are would be required to have a "Pedlar's certificate", but there is a right to obtain one unless you are known to be of "bad character". "pedlar" is a very old word today hardly used except in the phrase 'drug pedlar'; and you cannot obtain such a certificate except by application at a police station, a rule unchanged since 1870. There are only a few thousand people with this licence and most street sellers probably don't have one (this does not include sellers at a fixed "pitch", who need a different (and more expensive and scarce) licence from the local council).

This article shows the biasses of the press. Everything is about public perception, so the problem is that the public don't perceived that there might be a war. This is stupid, public perception can shift very quickly. The actual problem is not maintaining investment and critical industries. The UK was able to shift commercial manufacturing to wartime production for world war II. That doesn't work if you've offshored everything.

Rather unfortunate if so, as aphantasia has been known about since Galton discovered it in 1880.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that's a case you have to make, not one you can just derive from an accounting identity. Also it doesn't have to be increased revenue- it can be reduced costs. This is more likely to be their motivation. Of course, it's one that may be more problematic for the economy as a whole.

In general, political discussion suffers a lot from far too much of it being simply "I am obviously right, you are an idiot and/or malicious if you believe the other guy". This is not a dig at you personally, look at any political discussion and you will see that 99% of it is like that. Our public sphere would be in better condition if more people pushed back on it. So no, I don't think anyone should accept "proof by ridicule/slur".

That assumes that their use of AI does not generate cash flow. Trivial example: the ones reselling tokens.

You can't analyse expenditure assuming income is constant, because all expenditure decisions will be made with a view to how they affect income.

Economic activity is a flow, not a stock. There might well be a bubble, but you can't prove it like that.

Seems dubious. If you build an intelligence that wants to die, isn't that a form of suffering? AI's don't currently have the capacity to feel pain, and so we don't treat them as moral patients. But it's clear that they will massively affect human culture going forward. If this is adopted on a large scale, the culture of AIs themselves will include an absolute flood of suicidal ideation. There's no way that doesn't affect human culture.

Fair enough- I did wander rather far from the topic

This is often not useful advice, as it is common to acquire responsibility for a tree than has been badly managed. The GP's link actually gives a solution for this case: pruning more accurately over a slightly longer period.

More generally, I've found as the maintainer of a building that while mainstream practices (of property generally, not specifically trees) often undershoot good practice, heritage techniques are often impractically expensive, and function more as a status signalling mechanism than really as a way of doing better. Even more generally, economy-wide; there is a tendency to criticise the mainstream but then promote expensive, semi-artisanal products and services, which while better, simply offer an escape valve to pressure for reform. Better techniques can only benefit the populace as a whole if they are cost reduced under the discipline of serving the mass market, not just offered as a premium version for the well-to-do.

To be fair it's going to be nontrivial to implement all the codes everywhere. In some cases it's going to be impossible for an app like this to judge - In the UK, for example, there are "permitted development" rights which allow certain things (like a garden office or other outbuilding) without going through a bureaucratic process. But while some of the rules are easy to automate (eg, must be less than 2.5m high) some are not. For example, the UK allows building over 50% of the garden[1]. But if it was just measurement based, you'd be able to build over 50%, then 50% of the remaining 50%, etc etc. So the rule is "50% of the original garden". That's going to be difficult for an app like this to find out.

[1] it's slightly more complicated than this

It would be catastrophic if they violated confidentiality blatantly, but that doesn't exclude learning of any description. For example, an ordinary human being can't fork a subagent for a particular client and wipe it afterwards. Humans can't stop themselves learning, so confidentiality can't ban all learning.

Instead, confidentiality includes not literally copying material, not using trade secrets or inventions, and not using knowledge of business dealings for your own purposes.

So, while I fully expect that the big labs don't train on private material to the extent that they do those things in a blatant way, it would not be surprising if they pushed the boundaries. Humans push the boundaries all the time.

Up until now, machines did not have judgement, so if you set up a machine in such a way that you hadn't ensured it couldn't violate contract, you were culpable. But now that they have some kind of judgement, maybe it's enough to avoid liability to tell it to obey the contract, even if you give it incentives not to. After all, that's how it works with human employees, isn't it?

Perhaps now we have machines that understand language, someone somewhere is working on getting them to understand "a nod and a wink" as well.

It's free like ads are free. Or certain kinds of advice.

The UK was one of the largest members of the EU, and as such had a substantial say over it's direction and policies; and as the EU is a major economic power, consequently that is power in the world as well.

That is, it's government had this, as an "inside the room" participant. Power is often exercised by that means; in fact one definition of power is your having the means to sway others. For example, in the 90s the EU was debating whether to "deepen or widen", i e. to become more like a single state, or to admit more members. Germany and France led the faction that wanted to deepen, the UK, along with smaller allies, preferred to widen and admit more members from Eastern Europe. The UK's preference prevailed.

Because this mostly happened in diplomatic negotiations, it's not so well known, the press thought that EU bureurocracy was a better story.

There is a dilemma, but I don't think it's loss of legitimacy so much as authority. They are quite similar but not the same; an institution that loses authority but is still legitimate, and there is potential for it to regain authority (like the strategic concept of a "fleet in being").

But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.

This is true. However there's a potential way to fix it, and it would only take one member state, no matter how small to start the landslide. And it's basically the same thing that happened to the US Senate.

The Senate, like the Council of Ministers, was intended to represent the member states. Originally, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. A few states started to have direct primaries, with the legislative appointment amounting to ratification of the popular choice. Then this was made the way for every senator by the 17th amendment. (It took until 1913!)

The same thing could happen to the EU council of ministers. It's a little more obfuscated because the representative to the council of ministers is formally a delegate of the government of the EU member state. But, since the process is under the control of the member state, there's nothing stopping them being directly elected by the public of that EU country. They can simply decide that that's who they want to send. Unlike any other democratic reform of the EU, this doesn't require consensus among all member states (which in practice, means the political elites).

There would have to be some kind of groundswell of support for it in several nations, as otherwise the government of bigger nations would do everything to make an individual small nation regret it; unless they would pay some political cost. But if there is a movement to democratise the EU, this is the one move that doesn't need the permission of the incumbents.

It's actually prescribed for that: https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/peppermint-oil/

Yeah, I realize that my comment could be taken as implying that people's "revealed preference" is to lose their autonomy to AI. No, that would be a bad thing. What I meant was really that people fail to recognise the potential for adversarial behaviour in seemingly impersonal automatons, which is a problem that predates AI. But people can learn.

I suspect that people would prefer answers by AI *even if they were actually written by a human".

Social animals, above a certain intelligence, are wary of deception by members of the same species. Computer programs, websites, and now AI, work round that by appearing to be neutral and impersonal. Which means that paradoxically we seem to end up trusting distant organisations more than those that actually have a greater degree of shared interest.

Has the title changed since you wrote this? It doesn't seem misleading to me. Misleading would be if it still wasn't fully open source. "It was partly open before" doesn't seem like it's worth a big warning. But that's just my impression FWIW

Do you really think they aren't? Do you think Amazon are carefully culling rare books from the list?

Although, we have to face the fact that the 'indie' book industry isn't necessarily preserving stuff either. I was recently in an old fashioned book shop in Charing Cross road, and they were selling old pictures as well as books. I was going to buy one as a present until I realised that they were pages that had been cut out of some book, because they could get more selling them separately.

Why would you not want a mudguard? I personally prefer having one to getting a stripe of mud up my back. Is there a better way to avoid that?

I agree that we should able to be fully in control of what we run on our machines, but that should also include being able to decide who we trust to mark , or gatekeep, code as trustworthy. Both having to run code from any random website, and having to trust exactly one mega company, means you are not the master.

... the greatest danger to us is masterless men; lacking a coercive power to tie their hands, they would destroy society. How else but by binding to lord and master can they be held to the laws? So thought men during feudal times.

In fact, it is possible for people to be held to good conduct without being bound into a single hierarchy, and it should be possible for software to be held to good conduct without giving such power to single monopolists. But it's not in Google's interests to build such mechanisms, any more than it was in the interests of the feudal overlords to look for alternatives to their rule.