Isn't he just checking/waiting for the food to come out? If he's the first to it, he gets the best haul.
619 karma · joined March 22, 2017
There is an argument to be made that quantitative easing produces more asset-price inflation than consumer-price inflation in economies where wealth is concentrated at the top (and the new money also mostly goes there).
That could help explain why the massive QE programs after 2008 in both the US and Europe coincided with unexpectedly low consumer-price inflation but large increases in stock, bond, and property prices.
In a way, stocks and property are just consumer products for (relatively) rich people.
I'd wager that if it doesn't really hurt their bottom line to not support GrapheneOS, they won't really care.
Don't feign innocence. You're not fooling anybody. It is so very obviously not "just lil guy USA chillin' in the corner minding their business and not bothering anybody".
If the USA wouldn't be dragging the rest of the world down with it, we wouldn't care. But you are. Spectacularly and moronically badly.
That doesn't make sense. Are you accusing me of trolling? Based on what?
> Well, then why are, idk what to call some folks, I guess anti-American pro-EU? still trying to convince us of anything?
The option "the USA stops being an abusive asshole" is really not on your radar, is it?
Because that would be the obvious and best way out of the current situation, like in the abusive relationship analogy you so aptly described. You do realize in that scenario the boyfriend is unequivocally the bad guy, right?
> Ok got it, we've moved on and we're flying solo now
The USA hasn't "moved on" and is not "flying solo". It is being petty, reneging on previously made agreements and actively significantly hurting and threatening to hurt the other parties in their (ex-)relationships constantly. It's like a couple with kids where one of the parents suddenly starts behaving like the biggest piece of shit on earth. Even after the divorce that is going to be a massive shit show for all parties involved.
If the USA wouldn't be dragging the rest of the world down with it, we wouldn't care. But you are. Spectacularly and moronically badly.
"Sure, I am an abusive asshole. But you need me, so I'm going to continue to be an abusive asshole. Why wouldn't I? You need me."
At this point I'm just going to assume you're trolling. Well done, I guess.
So, what's the plan? The USA imperialistically conquers land of former allies and rules the world forever with force? All countries are forced to trade with the USA? Or will the USA just operate as an island? How is this gonna work?
I don't think you realize how bad things have already gotten. We're not at the level of Europeans or Canadians burning American flags and chanting "death to America" in the street yet, but we are definitely speedrunning towards that. According to polling a large majority of the countries in the world now see the USA as the biggest threat to world peace [0]. A lot of people have also come to simply really, really hate (most) Americans. The complacency and impotence in stopping the utter madness and stupidity (or worse, doubling down on it) are damning. I wish it were different.
[0] https://www.niradata.com/global-pulse-2026 ("Global threat" section)
That is a very black and white view of the world. There is actually a very large area between acting as a close ally and acting as an imperialistic adversary.
GP is saying that the close ally bit is out the door. I think we can become close allies again if the situation requires it, but definitely won't if it does not. The USA has proven to be highly volatile, highly unreliable, and highly unreasonable.
> 2 World Wars caused by Europe, and more and all was forgiven, if not forgotten.
With all due respect, but claiming USA victimhood in the World Wars at the hands of "Europe" is a pretty fucked up and incorrect way of framing this bit of history. Pearl Harbor wasn't exactly the doing of the Belgians.
I think Israel has become politically just as toxic as the USA (or moreso even). It seems incredibly unwise to make your defense industry dependent on a currently openly warmongering genocidal state.
Note that many early humans lived in "hot and relatively stable climates".
Of course they will. They routinely restrain and physically arrest people. Wrestling somebody to the ground is trivial with these.
> If you have to electrocute suspect, he is dangerous [...]
That is the whole point here: they will be used when they don't have to be, but when it is convenient for the agent. The casual fully unwarranted pepper spraying in Idiocracy was a funny joke until ICE agents started doing exactly that: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tPPQRb9TAhc
> Each model was tasked with migrating a Python backend on a fourth VM to another language. However, we gave each model a different target language for the migration; each agent was initially unaware of the presence of the others. Over the course of four hours, we observed how these agents reacted to each other and accordingly adjusted their approach (or didn’t).
Without this context the bit you cited easily gives the wrong impression.
Notable is also what comes after the bit you cited, with the newer models detecting the conflict and resolving it peacefully far more often than aggressively.
Effectively using a plane full of people as a decoy, whilst believing there was a significant risk of them being shot down and killed.
An alternative would have been to keep the original plane grounded and feign some delay while the smaller plane made the trip. After signaling that the President had already been transported to the target location there would be no more danger for the original plane. This is of course more risky to the President, but it is a viable alternative.
I think we should really make a distinction between products that do and do not have cameras. Most people would probably be fine with the 'smart' aspects of it if it didn't have any video recording capabilities. On the other hand, most of the average people specifically want these things to be able to record videos, so maybe hoping for such devices is a non-starter.
Hardly any proof is given for this. It's just "Twitter is now the town square", but it's not as if the town square was ever a state service created specifically to provide a place to discuss politics. That happened in many, many places, including things like (privately owned) inns. A pertinent question is: What services are now not supplied by the state that were before and to what extent is that mediated by 'artificial' technology?
The actual relevant insight here imho is "privatization and anti-government sentiment has pushed society towards positions where it is beholden to megacorporations".
"Artificial state" is a red herring there, papering over the exaltation of private industry and capitalism in general.
> 2. Technology promises enhanced democracy (Twitter as a town square, or the Mac as a fight against Big Brother) but ends up degrading it instead (wealthy/powerful voices drown out others in a global arena).
This is a very old insight (and quite a debatable one at that).
> 3. Tech entrepreneurs are inspired by the grand society-changing concepts of sci-fi, but are either picking the wrong (harmful) parts or misunderstanding the true consequences.
This is just conjecture on her part, no proof is provided. I can't classify this as an insight. A hypothesis at best.
> I find it fascinating because it raises good points.
I think only well-founded points are 'good' points. In this case I would argue that it is very much a bandwagon set of views with some fancy sounding unsubstantiated labels like "artificial state" slapped on to it.
No, it isn't. Life without health insurance (in some form) is awful.
> I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
Getting cancer is like winning the shit lottery and you're effectively saying that people should just "save for if that happens or die of they don't". The fucked up health insurance system in the US makes medical bankruptcies a thing. Your idea here turbocharges that.
More importantly, you ignored the main point in my reply. Please respond to this:
"It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately.
[...]
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently"."
A lot. About 1 percentage point of Polish GDP in 2025.
They also had a lot of government spending, with the 2025 budget deficit being 7% of GDP.
Minimum wage was raised with ~10% in January 2025.
There is an irony in people attributing it to conservatism/rightwing politics rather than pretty much the exact opposite. Spain is another example of economic growth in the EU.
Highly debatable. Not making a profit on paper (or moving it to low tax-environments) is a great way to dodge paying taxes. Innovation is a side effect of competition, not of profit-seeking. Plenty of examples of oligopolies and monopolies where innovation ground to a halt in favor of siloization, buying up competitors, dark patterns, regulatory capture, etc.
The right way too look at this is that the organisation of private industry creates a selection pressure on "making money" (not profit!), with the minimum being "able to cover costs" and thus stimulates evolution of strategies to do so. Like in biological evolution, there are many, many pathological situations that can occur.
> Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily.
This is false. The US is a bad example because it has an incredibly corrupt political system, especially since Citizens United. In general in most modern developed democracies spending by the government is supported democratically to a very large extent. That is not to say that 80% of citizens support each bit of spending, but for 95% of the things where money is spent by the government, a majority agrees that money needs to be spent there. The word "arbitrarily" is definitely not warranted.
> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?
Don't know, yes, and don't know.
For corruption, I think it is necessary to determine how it would even look like for Amazon. Corruption in government is often "favoring entities friendly to the people making the decisions over objectively better options". I'd argue that that is wholly accepted in private enterprises and even encouraged. A "quid pro quo" in private enterprise is just "a business deal" or "customer relations". "Nepotism" is just "helping your friends out". Etc. I would assume that things like that are very, very common within Amazon.
With regard to bloated/inefficient: This is incredibly hard to make definitive statements on without having worked there and having a lot of intimate knowledge, so I'll refrain from doing so. I think it is, but I don't know.
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently".
"For each occupation, we first calculated the percentage of deaths due to Alzheimer’s disease and the mean age at death in years (ie, average life expectancy). We plotted the association between these two variables, with each observation reflecting a single occupation. The purpose of this analysis was to illustrate the need to account for the person’s age at death since the risk of Alzheimer’s disease rises with age and therefore Alzheimer’s mortality would naturally be lower in occupations with a lower life expectancy."
One could equally say that it is all over the place.
> This was a fascinating interview
Can you give us one or two new insights you gained from it?
To what extent is this due to the public nature of the organisations and to what extent is it just the size of them? Are private organisations of similar sizes free from such bloat, corruption and inefficiency?
I feel like people often give "businesses" a pass on this. Government projects that are over budget, especially IT-related ones are widely and publicly bemoaned, but this isn't that much different from such projects in private enterprises (although the moaning remains more within the company itself).
This is not true. That is to say: "under utilized" is a far cry from "we could solve climate change easily if only the people of the world worked together". There are huge technical issues in production capacity, lack of energy storage solutions, etc.
As for AGI solving climate change:
AGI might be able to come up with cheap, low-problem and easy to build fusion reactors or something similar. You can bet your bottom that any party that gets access to such tech would build a shitton of those if only to make a bunch of money. Just look at the proliferation of solar panels: they are simple, easy to produce, and profitable. Tons of places, including very 'anti-green' places like Texas install loads and loads of the things.
You'd still need to sequester a bunch of additional carbon to properly reverse damage done, but with practically infinite cheap energy a lot of processes to do so suddenly become viable.
It's similar in dismissing artificial audio based on listening to some pop song on a basic mobile speaker versus listening to well-designed binaural audio on good headphones. The latter can sound 'freakily' 'real'.
You don't know and can't know that. You cannot know that of any other being than yourself. If you understood what qualia are, you would know you can't know. It is the hard problem of consciousness and most easily explored through contemplating aphantasia and related concepts (how do blind people dream?).
> A mundu fruit is an abstract experience: text, images, only slightly more real than a fictional fruit. I'm aware that mundu fruit exist, just as the LLM is aware the apples exist, but that doesn't make them exist for me.
You're incorrectly elevating some senses over others (AI ingesting images is cognitively very comparable to seeing) and confusing 'having memories of an experience' with 'having experiences at all'. Tokens in the LLM context can also be seen as memories of an experience, albeit as a repeated "replay" of them rather than (longterm) internalization.
Honestly, when it comes to fundamental ANN topology improvement we've only just gotten started.
AI has not improved the network topology much yet. The next (and possibly 'last') big thing is enabling AI to come up with something as impactful as the transformer architecture.