antasvara

It's a spectrum.

Walmart makes a coffee mug for like $2. Louis Vuitton will sell you one for $385. But there's an entire class of coffee mugs in the middle, where you're paying more than it "should" cost, but less than you would for status signaling.

An example is this mug [1]. It's $18, so it's not even close to being a status symbol. It's also a little nicer than a Walmart mug. But I'd be hard-pressed to argue that it's 6x as nice like the price would imply. I suppose you could consider it a luxury good? But in my mind, it feels weird to lump it in with a Louis Vuitton mug.

Playdate feels like it sits right in the middle of the spectrum? I dint think the price is being marked up for status related reasons. But they probably could have made something similar in functionality for a lot less money. It's just a product that's nicer than it "needs" to be.

[1]: https://www.notneutral.com/collections/siblings-lino-mug-10o...

>You can't 'blame' the AI, as it can't be held accountable.

Seems like more of a semantic distinction IMO. Yes, I can't technically "blame" the AI because it's not accountable. But what word would you suggest for "I had [X technology] handle [Y task] and it failed to perform that task?" I can't "blame" my router if I lose internet and it prevents me from jumping on a Zoom call, but it's also true that the router failed to do the thing it was supposed to do.

I don't know, it feels like "reading a claims summary and classifying the type of claim" should be the bread and butter LLM use case? Not that executives are blameless for pushing AI everywhere, but we should also be able to "blame" AI for doing poorly at a task it's supposed to be good at.

An exclusive theatrical window is one of the big reasons to go to a movie theater: you want to see a movie before it's available on streaming. Removing copyright seems like it would harm theaters pretty significantly.

I think the point is more "why is the outcome of an event like an election considered a commodity" and not a question of the value of event contracts?

Like, why would the same agency regulating wheat futures also be responsible for regulating event contracts? I know the simple answer is that Congress said they should be, but conceptually it's a bit odd.

It's humans from other banks/funds bidding on the block of stock. As far as timing, for this situation it's basically overnight for regulatory and price reasons. Regulatory because there are legal margin requirements for levered positions and you can't handle the price going much lower, and price because if you had to sell this on the open market you'd keep selling shares for less and less.

So JPMorgan/Goldman prepare all the info on the book and start calling institutional investors after the market closes. The funds and banks prepare bids, there's some negotiation, and the block is finalized before trading opens the next day.

Speed does matter, but you're only calling investors you know "can" close the deal (i.e. they'll have enough capital to buy it all that day/night). So it's more of a price question than a speed one at that point?

And really, nobody wants the downward spiral of a fire sale in the tech sector. Someone will make money on that chaos, but it's a lot of risk when you can lock in a discount with the block trade.

They might not have known it was SA specifically. That being said, they definitely knew a large fund with leverage was buying these stocks. The mechanism here (and I'm not an expert) is:

1. SA wants to buy stock with leverage. You do that through a major bank via total return swaps. Essentially, SA pays X% of the value on $100 of stock (for 4x leverage you'd pay $25) plus an ongoing financing fee (call it 5% a year), then you get the return/loss on that $100 of stock. SA was in these agreements with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.

2. The bank, because they don't want to actually hold that risk, goes out and buys $100 of stock.

3. Citadel and others see JPMorgan buying lots and lots of this stock. That's confusing, because normally JPMorgan wouldn't be making a huge directional bet on a stock. They deduce that a large fund is buying the stock.

4. Citadel starts widening their spread (the difference between what they'll buy a stock for and what they'll sell it for). They hedge some of this as best they can, or temporarily live with the risk.

5. SA, the highly leveraged fund buying volatile stocks, inevitably blows up because volatile stocks swing around in price. A dip causes margin calls.

6. JPMorgan or Goldman need to sell the stock fast, because SA is close to dipping below their required margin (i.e. SA paid $25 for $100 in stock exposure, the stock drops to $90, JPMorgan asks for more money because the stock went down by too much).

7. Citadel offers to buy all of the stock from JPMorgan. Because they're doing it in one big block, JPMorgan doesn't lose money selling on the open market (once you start selling, each successive sale is for less money because there are more people selling than buying). Citadel is compensated for this by getting a discount to the asset value (the stock is worth $90, Citadel gets to buy it for $81).

So Citadel didn't do anything to "set up" SA. But because they're hyper-aware of market dynamics, they would have known that someone is going to need to sell stock if the market takes a turn on these names.

Even in the optimistic case where SA did have alpha, the position sizing was way out of whack. Based on the volatility of the stocks they were buying, the Kelly Criterion meant you'd need to expect a 900% annual return on the stock before leverage to justify being 4x levered.

What guys like Leopold either don't understand or understand but ignore is that being right directionally and being right on market timing are two different skillsets. When you've juiced a stock by 800%, the existence of alpha pales in comparison to your vulnerability to the stock market.

Just to jump in: Citadel buying this portfolio says nothing about how Citadel feels about the stocks. It's the bread and butter of large HFT hedge funds; if you see someone that has to sell stock, you leverage the fact that you can buy all of it to get a discount versus the asset value. Reports are saying that Citadel was able to buy the portfolio for ~10% under the market value, all at once. That's a no-brainer because you both get a discount and avoid driving the price down by buying small pieces over the course of a week.;

If I were a betting man, I'd bet that Citadel was also selling to Situation Awareness while they were on the way up. At some point, SA had juiced their stock prices so much that no "rational" investors (those that have a view of the stock based on some amount of fundamentals) would be on the other side of the trade. It's retail investors, bandwagon investors, and Citadel-caliber funds. This situation (over-leveraged company blows up due to some volatility) happens all the time in commodities trading, which is where Citadel started.

Sure, a college student can tell you if a company is making or losing money. But there are ample examples of "good" companies crashing because they didn't react to shifts in the market, which requires projecting into the future.

Blockbuster was good until it wasn't. Sears was good until it wasn't. Barnes and Noble was good, then it fell apart, and now it's good again. The lesson to learn is that by the time your financials say things are taking a turn, you're a year to multiple years late to start fixing the problem.

> a "good" CEO is just one that keeps their hands off the levers of power, doesn't rock the boat or fuck anything up, and quietly lets a good company perform

How can you tell if a company is good? Because trillions of dollars are spent by banks, private equity, hedge funds, and others truing to figure out if a company is "good."

> By that measure, you might as well save yourself the executive compensation and potential for disaster by just not having a CEO at all

Sure, but somebody is still making the decisions the CEO would have otherwise made. Maybe it's a good thing that the power isn't concentrated in one person; I'd be open to that. But you now have to trust that each department head is making good decisions. That's fine if they were already making good decisions, hit it's disastrous if they weren't.

From the financials, it's a little of both?

Memory is the acute issue causing their struggles; their most recent quarter saw a gross margin of 4.5% (that's revenue minus the direct cost of producing the cameras, divided by the revenue). That's a hefty fall from their previous margin of ~31%. This contributed to their operating loss of $57M in the last 3 months.

Thag being said, they haven't had a positive quarterly operating income since the last quarter of 2022, even when the margin was higher than 4.5%. So it's not like they were succeeding before the memory crunch, just losing money slower.

>the ones who don't want it enough will go away, and the ones that do will want it enough that it's worth your while..

Counterpoint: if you think you need to pay for my attention, that's a negative signal for what you're asking me. If I'm giving 10 vendors a shot at my business, I'm not going to pay money for the right to give you that opportunity?

On the other side, the only person paying $5 to ask me something is probably someone getting a lot of no's elsewhere. That, or what I offer is so valuable that people are willing to pay for it. But that's not most people.

The paradox is that the person most likely to do extra work is the person you want to hear from least. If someone felt the need to pay (for example) $5,000 to talk to me, it's probably because they don't feel they have a chance of getting my attention otherwise. I'd also never pay someone 5 grand if I'm the one offering them something.

A Captcha isn't 5 grand, but I think the same principle applies. If I'm putting a request for proposal to 10 vendors, I'll probably disqualify the one that makes me verify that I'm a human. It's not like I'm short of qualified companies.

I feel like you're ignoring the size of each of these impacts.

Sitting around a campfire once a month will likely increase your cancer risk. But it increases your cancer risk way, way less than smoking a pack of cigarettes every day.

Similarly, the World Health Organization is confident that smoked meats increase cancer risk. But that makes no statement about how much more likely you are to get cancer. I'm confident that eating undercooked chicken raises my risk for salmonella; I'm equally confident that eating a raw and expired piece of chicken also raises my risk of salmonella. But I would not say that each of those raises my salmonella risk by the same amount.

See the difference?

> This person probably had the best diet in the world and received top tier care, so how did he end up with something like that?

If you lower your chances of dying of every common thing, your relative chance of dying of a rare or incurable disease goes up. If I cured every disease but cancer, my odds of eventually dying of cancer would be very high.

>What else would this be but intelligence? Imagine if your AI didn’t know what words mean and couldn’t do math and you still tried to make the assertion that it was just as intelligent.

Counterpoint: If I don't teach a kid to read and then ask them to do a test that has reading as a requirement, I can say two contradictory things:

1. This kid isn't intelligent. 2. I don't know what this kid's intelligence is; I gave them a test on something they weren't taught.

What you're describing is in line with 1. That's completely fair and definitely part of what I'd consider intelligence.

This paper is making a statement more in line with 2. I've seen similar conclusions elsewhere; the theories are things like "education is less and less aligned with what IQ tests measure."

In the context of fitness, I feel like 2 is more in line with what we'd be thinking about?

Is there a reason you expect IQ to be unbounded? Feels like there are physical constraints, at which point you're sampling from a truncated normal distribution (or similar).

The abstract quite literary cautions against the way you're interpreting the data. The relevant quote:

> Notably, these gains do not uniformly translate to a rise in underlying GMA, suggesting the presence of domain-specific improvements and test characteristic changes over time. Conversely, the observed decline is primarily due to decreases in word comprehension and numerical reasoning tests, also reflecting specific abilities not attributable to changes in the latent GMA factor. Our findings further challenge the validity of claims that changes in the general factor drive the Flynn effect and its reversal. Furthermore, they caution against using these scores for longitudinal studies without accounting for changes in test characteristics.

My understanding is that Musk doesn't have a controlling share of Tesla. So by the letter of the law, a SpaceX acquisition would qualify as a change in control (because we've gone to a new majority owner).

>What would it mean if SpaceX buys Tesla though? Does the combined market cap count? That would be wrong.

I took a look at the proxy statement as they have it outlined in this [0] document (Proposal 4). As currently formulated, Musk has 12 operational goals (like ship 1 million robots or hit 50 billion EBITDA) and 12 market cap goals. These need to be paired together for the shares to vest; so, if he reaches the first market cap number, he also needs to fulfill an operating goal for the first set of shares to be earned. These earned shares vest in ~5 years.

This comes with a huge caveat. If Tesla changes control, those operational goals go out the window and his stock award is based solely on market cap (along with the shares immediately vesting). The share price for this is the greater of:

1. The last traded Tesla price prior to the acquisition, or 2. The per share price outlined in the acquisition.

The "easiest" way to take advantage is to IPO SpaceX (which he did), pump up the market cap, acquire Tesla for a sizable premium, and vest as much of the stock award as you can. It means you get to avoid the operational goals entirely and vest a bunch of Tesla (but soon to be SpaceX) stock.

[0]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000110465925...

True, but "a better apple" is unequivocally less impactful than "you no longer have to walk to the river any time you want to drink a glass of water."

I think it's easier to see if you think in 20 year increments. The difference between 1920 and 1940 is way larger than the difference between 2000 and 2020, and I don't think it's particularly close. Going from "antibiotics haven't been discovered" to "antibiotics become widely manufactured" in 1945 is a huge difference, just as one example.

Yeah, it gets weird when you start trying to compare human versus AI energy demands because you can turn a computer off, but you can't really turn a human off. Most studies indicate that humans can do 3-4 hours of high-level knowledge work in a day. An AI is not limited by these restrictions; it could do 24 straight hours of work if you wanted it to. So do we count all the energy the human burned for the remaining 20 hours of the day and allocate it to those 4 hours? Or are we just comparing "energy spent working on the task" for the AI and the human?

>The innovations aren't better versions of things we had in the past, they are more so unique new inventions. Plumbing is not electricity is not globalized food chains is not computers.

This is only sort of true. Plumbing is an improved version of a well pump, which is functionally (if not technically) an improvement over walking down to the river for a pot of water. Globalized food chains are mostly improvements on the supply chain we had (boats got faster, so things can travel from farther away places more quickly, refrigeration got added to existing modes of travel, etc.).

>Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.

I didn't mean to imply that we can't increase housing density. But I think it's clear that having 2.3x more people than 1950 means that all else being equal, people will need to settle for less land. There's just more demand per square mile.

The parent comment is quoted as:

> in one assignment I remember comparing the energy outputs between the human and robot equivalents of different tasks, whether or not the robot was humanoid in how it was designed

So I think the point in this context is relevant, even if it's apples to oranges.

This point is valid. However, lifestyle improvement rate is something that's slowing over time because of physical constraints.

For example, the vehicle mortality rate is 1.44 per 100 million miles driven. That's down 17% from 2000 (so 25 years ago). However, the change from 1975 to 2000 was 53%. That's because as we get closer to 0, it gets harder and harder to improve those rates. On this metric at least, I don't think another 25 years will result in a noticeable amount of improvement?

In the other direction, some things will become scarcer (and therefore cost more). Real estate is the obvious one; we can't create more land, and we keep having more people. Easily accessible drinking water is another; desalination is getting cheaper, but it's still way more expensive than pumping aquifer water.

And some improvements are necessarily 1 time things. You can get tropical fruits year round, but that's been widely available since the 80-90's from what I can tell. So come 20 years from now, what will people be able to buy in a grocery store that I can't buy right now?

Studies on grandmaster chess players indicate that at most you burn 10% more calories when engaged in deep thought than when you're at rest. So the energy "attributable" to an hour of knowledge work is like 10 calories (average sedentary calorie burn is like 80-100 per hour; add a max of 10% for the thinking gets you 8-10 calories). A pound of potatoes is like a buck and is about 320 calories. So you're looking at like 3 cents an hour at most to cover that energy burn. It's definitely even less; I certainly don't think as hard as a grandmaster chess player.

Then, assume power costs 20 cents per kilowatt hour (US avwrage) To match the human 3 cents per hour, you need an average of 150 watts of power drawn per hour. That's in the range of a budget graphics card, but not much past there.

However, if you sleep instead of sitting around, you can probably make AI cost competitive. Sleeping drops your metabolic rate by more, and lying down in bed (as opposed to sitting) also reduces calorie burn. Combined, you can reduce your burn by like 30 calories an hour. At the new 9 cents per hour human cost, you can afford to run a higher end graphics card at ~450 watts per hour. That puts you in RTX 3090 range.

> but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.

One notable thing we have today that we didn't have 100 years ago is a computer. Before, you could reasonably assume that recreating individual records wasn't feasible, at least not on a large scale. You can't assume that now. A 4 digit password was safe for hundreds of years, but it would be a security lability today for the same reason.

I assume (and this is a big assumption) that the US government will be focused on limiting access to the latest model, not necessarily everything smarter than Fable 5. Having access to the frontier model from a year ago (Sonnet 4.7-ish) wouldn't really help you from a cybersecurity perspective.

I think there's a world where the US funds development of the next model in exchange for exclusivity, at which point they could "release" the previous version from that exclusivity.

Your intuition is largely correct. For any given level of adaptive problem solver, approximately 55% of those people share the same literacy level (i.e. a Level 1 adaptive problem solver is also a Level 1 for literacy around 55% of the time). 35% have a reading level that's 1 up from their problem solving ability, and around 10% have a literacy level 1 below their problem solving ability.