botacode

Yes, this. I got 50k and will never be made whole for my acute or lifelong pain.

I had an ace attorney who told me there were no assets to recover beyond the insurance settlement at the minimum limit provided.

My health insurer at the time later tried to take the settlement from me via predatory collections tactics, and I was only able to keep it due to California state laws that protected me if I wasn't made whole (I wasn't hit there but am a citizen of the state).

Most accidents are caused by folks on the lower end of the SES spectrum so a very large number of victims end up like me.

You also don't hear that much of our stories because the dead and the maimed often tell no tales / it's unpleasant to hear. Many settlements also require silence.

Great article that concretizes a lot of intuitions I've had while vibe coding in Elixir.

We don't 100% AI it but this very much matches our experience, especially the bits about defensiveness.

Going to do some testing this week to see if a better agents file can't improve some of the author's testing struggles.

A hacker seeking to change a political system-- independent of alignment-- would be well advised to take an approach that is almost the exact inverse of this project's.

The research on getting people to change political attitudes or engage in pro-social political behaviors says that public shame, especially amongst their friends/communities/families, is the most effective lever available.

So, instead of making a list of everyone who believes in $prosocial_behaviors_and_policies create a publicly searchable, and verifiable database of folks engaged in $anti_social_behaviors_and_policies that are destructive to the their communities.

Better transparency into where everyone stands helps to prevent toxic policies and rhetoric that poison the commons and allows communities (teammates, employers, friends, and family-- both present and future) to then apply social pressure or the threat of ostracism in order to generate meaningful change.

There's a reason that bad actors (of all stripes and political affiliations) fear transparency! It's a highly effective tool for aligning behavior with societal/community values.

Getting a 403 when I try to read. Anyone have a backup link?

This is a really cool small scale experiment. More of this type of work is need so we can have fairer and more transparent search options.

I'd be curious to see the sensitivity of the ratings to things like rater composition (is it a quirk of Redditors they like Bing better?) and search topics.

Also makes me wonder how much of the ratings rank to do with a decline in quality (or diversification/drift away from the Redditor vector) of Google's own search raters (the index is heavily influenced by manual rating).

Counterpoint 1: the gitlab founder going "founder mode" on his cancer: https://centuryofbio.com/p/sid

Counterpoint 2: the findings that happiness doesn't really level off in an S-curve shape (i.e., fewer diminishing marginal returns than expected to wealth) https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-43605-001.

"Is there a growing class divide in happiness? Among U.S. adults ages 30 and over in the nationally representative General Social Survey (N = 44,198), the positive correlation between socioeconomic status (SES; including income, education, and occupational prestige) and happiness grew steadily stronger between the 1970s and 2010s. Associations between income and happiness were linear, with no tapering off at higher levels of income. Between 1972 and 2016, the happiness of high-SES White adults was fairly stable, whereas the happiness of low-SES White adults steadily declined. Among Black adults, the happiness of low-SES adults was fairly stable, whereas the happiness of high-SES adults increased. Thus, the happiness advantage favoring high-SES adults has expanded over the decades. Age–period–cohort analyses based on hierarchical linear modeling demonstrate that this effect is primarily caused by time period rather than by birth cohort or age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)"

Nope! Startup founder who happened to be visiting Taiwan at the right time.

The Googlers had way better views XD

They kept most folks pretty far away, you needed a pass or to work in one of the offices to get really close.

I was also terrified when ppl would engage with him directly lol

To be fair here (and I say this as someone who's had a spinal fusion as the result of being mowed down by a distracted driver) car ownership is so incredibly subsidized from an insurance perspective that any increase in prices should be described as the removal/reduction of a subsidy.

If the damages/externalities caused by cars were internalized by the system car ownership would already be unaffordable for most. We just choose to sacrifice/maim X-number of humans every year so folks can continue to zoom around and structurally increase sprawl/pollution (which in turn have their own massive un-internalized costs).

All of us pay for these subsidies via significantly higher healthcare prices.

Look up what happened to the Michigan laws/policies that required drivers to actually pay for insurance that would compensate accident victims for their death and suffering. It was lobbied/voted out of existence almost immediately because the costs are simply too high, and we love our cars.

An extremely dark pattern.

This, combined with the recent changes to how 'Ads' are displayed in the iOS store (almost unrecognizable from non-advertised apps at this point since they dropped the background) suggest that Apple is getting more and more aggressive about juicing it's users for revenue in tasteless ways.

We had the privilege to watch at first from the SE corner of the building and later as he climbed by the the observation deck on the 89th floor. Hair raising stuff I'll never forget.

The _actual_ threat to the programmer as a career has little to do with AI and a lot to do with the looming decline in global growth which will continue to destroy opportunities for devs to thrive.

To frame this in terms of falsifiable-ish predictions as the article requests (won't add numbers cause I don't have time to research).

- Dev productivity will improve with AI, but there will be fewer programming jobs because there will just be lower growth overall with the coming debt-overhang slowdown.

- The fraction of un/under-employed programmers as a percentage of total devs will continue to increase. We're at an all time high for number of devs worldwide and this will continue until the economy structurally re-adjusts.

- Employment in the sector will see even more "insider" vs "outsider" dynamics with a resurgence in the relative value of connections and seniority.

FWIW none of these are novel, just aggregated

Investors and markets have regularly rewarded layoffs and will continue to do so as growth stories become fewer and further between. AI (incredible though it is as a tool) is just the fig-leaf/cover for this transition to be framed as a growth and efficiency story that ennobles insiders even further. The implication will be that some devs are just more skilled at using these new tools/being insightful about business and therefore their continued employment is justified while the outsiders are just unskilled. While this will be true for a small percentage (as it is now!), it will be really mostly be access/restrictive guild dynamics at play driving the shift.

Intelligence is correlated with experimentation and drug usage (and generally do-what-you-will with your body political attitudes).

Some discussion on the phenomenon here:

"We know that intelligent people have more self-control and make better decisions in general — they’re less likely to play the lottery, more likely to follow medical advice, less likely to die in accidents. As a consequence, they tend to flourish in an environment free of normative constraints. They may experiment with drugs without ever getting addicted. They may dabble in polyamory without wrecking their marriage. They may coast on their achieved identity, dismissing traditions as stifling or unnecessary."

- via: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/why-are-intelligent-people-...

It's nice to have a lot of small web content laid out like this! Some suggestions to make discovery more palatable:

- 1-2 sentence summaries for the content. most titles are not sufficiently descriptive and clicking on something un-interesting a few times is a sure fire way to get folks to churn

- checks for included feeds that they are correctly configured and the resources load in-browser (not download a random file to my computer)

Your response is very dismissive in that it doesn't engage with any of the other parts of my comment that provide a lot of nuance and analysis for the issues presented.

My description, and appreciation, for these types of tools and their trade-offs comes from reading about their early proposals. I don't trade or engage with any of them in their current form.

Recommend reading early work on them by Phillip Tetlock, as well as the many criticisms and responses that came about at the time and basically covered all of the ground we're retreading today in these discussions.

I am broadly in favor of the existence of prediction markets. They are powerful tools for forecasting complex events that can help enrich and empower folks from across a range of backgrounds.

The article has two core points, but fails to go deep enough in addressing either. This leads to a _somewhat_ incorrect scapegoating of prediction markets rather than acknowledging head on some more core issues with the state of American journalism. Bullet (1) addresses this core issue while bullet (2) tries to suggest some ways in which these prediction markets can better harnessed to serve the interests of journalists and readers/viewers. IMO the first point is far more important than the second to understand the broader challenges.

1. The centralization and roll-up of American media has led to a dangerous monoculture where truth and accuracy risk being compromised by pressure from big business as well as politicians.

This is by design. It is important for folks to recognize that these are systematic efforts to denigrate and marginalize critical/skeptical voices by individuals with tremendous amounts of wealth and power. A prime non-journalism example of this is the persecution and harassment of short sellers (like Andrew Left) in public markets.

2. Prediction markets are not being described / addressed with sufficient uncertainty. The article touches on this, but fails to go so far as to suggest a fix. Prediction markets should, as the editors/implementers at orgs in the article suggest they do, serve as another data point rather than the whole story.

They should be addressed with the skepticism applied to any source (a lot of "journalists" don't even do this anymore though) with the source, values and market depth questioned.

Editorial standards need to be improved to accommodate this (don't report on very thin markets, acknowledge high amounts of uncertainty, signs of manipulation, and provide a bit of market structure analysis education to readers. All of this is more feasible than ever with good analysis tooling that can be re-appropriated from what professional market analysts (and gamblers) use to assess their odds.

If journalists want to add market information to their reporting then great, just do it responsibly instead of yeeting some number from strangers on the internet.

--

Fight back by voting with your dollars and speak up in favor of the truth. Boycott garbage sources and platforms that are trying to one-shot your friends/parents and support strong investigative and local journalism with your money. Talk to your friends and family and encourage them to do the same. Voting with your dollars and presence is one of the most powerful tools you have in our heavily market based society.

An underappreciated point here is: fund/subscribe your local papers. They are willing to do work and investigations that national outlets just don't have the capacity or stomach for. The more concentrated/centralized journalism is the higher the risk it can get censored/leveraged.

Absolutely, it is an embarrassment that we design systems that continue to neglect this fact and, worse still, we judge and punish folks who have to interact with them at the "attention" end for mistakes.

In some critical attention places it is possible to "engineer" a bit more reliability into human systems with crutches like shifts and incentives (the military sometimes succeeds at this for mission critical applications), but in most it is a failure of system designers and software developers.

The order is wrong here:

Governance creates markets -> markets create innovation. These things have feedback loops into governance, but the tail ultimately does not wag the dog.

Engineers-- especially in the Bay where discussion of such is written off as mental illness-- often dismiss politics and governance as nonsense subjects that lack rules and are run by the mob/emotions. The reality however, is that these societal constructs have their own "physics" and operate like a (very complex and challenging to study) system just like everything else in the natural world.

The attitude itself is of course something has been designed and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.

All LLM-search tools are slathered in ads already via LLM-SEO hacking.

The only difference here is that they will be providing a direct paid channel in this case and will get a cut instead of paying for compute. If it's responsibly disclosed it may even lead to a net more transparent shopping experience for the average user.

My limited understanding here is that usage loads impact model outputs to make them less deterministic (and likely degrading in quality). See: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...

There are companies out there re-building / replicating the graph as we speak. Think they have to wait until it has a strong network effect / tipping point dynamic before it can come out publicly as such though.

Nitpick:

$1m Bodily Injury limits are sometimes available for auto policies. Many providers also don't offer over $300k, only some do the $500k option!

Having been exposed to this only after starting an insurance startup, risk shifts like this in the insurance markets can be a big deal.

We see the problem first hand at Coverage Cat (S22) where we help a lot of folks find alternatives to FAIR coverage through with better access to surplus insurers.

We should all prepare for insurance premium, and maybe tax, hikes for the foreseeable future!

Amen. It is a tremendous place.

Coverage Cat | Senior+ Software Engineers | CA/TX (Remote) | Full-time

Coverage Cat is building the AI-native insurance brokerage. Want to make it so that millions of Americans get better financial outcomes, the insurance industry is more transparent, and policies are easy to understand?

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We look for senior engineers that want to own and build products end to end, gather the data our customers need, and provide tools for them to make the best decisions. You'll build new features from concept to delivery, identify the biggest problems our customers face, and deliver solutions that help people save money and protect the things they love.

More details and application link here: https://www.coveragecat.com/careers/engineering/software-eng...

Actually, "quality-of-work" and "time-you-share-it" are both necessary to get on the flywheel of product improvement.

Folks who obsess over only quality of work in a vacuum and don't put it in front of users end up building vaporware or non-scalable products.