disgruntledphd2

> They're pushing hard to do Euro bonds precisely for things like this.

I really, really wish that this was true, but basically no-one is pushing for euro bonds (even though they'd be a great idea).

> It’s a different culture with different rules

Nah, it's more that there's no Capital Markets Union, so there's just ~30 smaller pots of money scattered across each country.

> those are estimates, not data. I am asking about actual data. For example, mortality reports, piles of bodies, etc.

I think that this is an unrealistic ask, right now. Over the next 5-10 years enough time will have passed such that we can get more accurate numbers, but right now, all we have are estimates with wide confidence bounds (but narrower than they were last year).

> As for the article, this is modelling, not data (both the retrospective and the predictive). There is no direct causation being shown. You simply cannot make a claim like "X million people will die because USAID was terminated" based on this sort of evidence. It's not factual. It's not logical. Just emotionally driven claims intended to manipulate public opinion.

How would one (ethically nor not) perform a randomised trial of this kind of intervention? Like, the Lancet definitely hop on far too many bandwagons for my taste, but it's almost certain that the withdrawal of USAID will cause ~millions of otherwise avoidable deaths.

And ultimately, it's the choice of the US government and people whether or not to fund these programmes. Personally, I think that they are worthwhile, but others may disagree.

But really, you're holding the evidence required here to a very high standard, one that many things you believe would probably not meet.

If you're getting colds that often (and you're not immuno-compromised) then it might be worth getting checked out.

I was getting sick constantly, and it turned out I had chronic sinusitis, and surgery made it much much better.

(Just friendly advice, I know nothing about your situation).

This comic was made a loooooonnnnnnggggg time ago (back when I worked at Facebook). It was actually a great place to work then, but that company no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

> You guys will define "winning" so narrowly that if the Middle East continues to be volatile, that means the US must've lost. The type of victory that the US achieved in WW2 is an atypically high standard for "victory".

Sorry what, I wasn't aware that I was a member of you guys.

Look, the US invaded Iraq in GW2, they killed off Saddam very quickly, but taking control of the country and settling down all of the violence took well over a decade, and dealing with ISIS took much the same amount of time.

You can regard that as a victory, but it sure doesn't look like much of one to me, particularly as Saddam (for all his faults) suppressed the militias like ISIS who ended up becoming a major concern for the US.

In a world where the US had never invaded Iraq, do you think the region would look much different today?

> I don't really see the value of regulation requiring a certain preference, given that there are tradeoffs.

Reducing the amount of manufacturing for phones, and thus reducing the impact of the species on the environment is an extremely sensible goal, given that basically all resources are limited.

If you can do that while making things cheaper for your populace, then it's a double win.

> We didn’t need to see resignations because they were fired when the numbers weren’t good, in his opinion, previously.[1]

I mean no disrespect, but I have been following this story, as I am very interested in the quality of official statistics.

He did fire the BLS head, then tried to appoint a toady, but basically the big IB and investors threw a fit (along with some Senators) and it didn't happen.

So I regard most of the weirdness in these numbers since Covid as an artifact of the seasonality models breaking down, rather than some nefarious actions.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that lots of people want an actual right wing government, not one who's just in coalition with the left.

That's the only explanation that makes sense to me, without calling lots of people Nazis/fascists/communists etc.

And turnout was way, way up, indicating that a lot of people went out to vote.

Like, I dislike who they voted for, but as a democrat, I want more people to vote so I'm a little conflicted at the moment.

Yeah, it's survey based and some employers don't hit the first few deadlines.

Last month got revised to being positive, at the same time that this month was being released.

Not really. We'd see a lot of resignations if the numbers were being fudged. Statisticians, as a rule, take a dim view of falsifying data.

> Soon you'll end up regulating all phones to be modular.

That would be great, obviously there would be tradeoffs (not as thin, potentially less waterproof) but that seems like the right direction to go in.

> We won in Iraq 2 as well,

Only if you ignore the rise of ISIS and various militias, along with the collapse of Iraqi society (mind you, the sanctions had done a pretty good job of wrecking that before GW2 anyway).

> Of course there are exceptions like Excel but that is rarely more than a small portion of the workforce.

Excel is still a huge (ginormous) moat, particularly as MS have built basically all of their data tools into it.

Unless someone creates a better Excel, MS will be around ~forever.

And even if only a small proportion of the workforce needs excel, those people tend to be concentrated in the portion of the business which measures money, which means it'll never get cancelled.

That being said, I do think that basically all institutions in the EU/Europe need to get off the US tech stack, as inevitably it'll be weaponised against us.

> against Saddam in the Gulf War

I really hope you're referring to GW1, rather than 2. And yeah, if you weren't a Kurd who believed GW Bush, then that was a pretty effective war from the US (and global) perspective.

Not always, specifically not for the most recent war (gulf war 3).

> Amazon ran for, what? 20 year with no profit.

Profit is a weird metric, in that one can defer necessary expenditure to show increases in it, while having negative profit was a good signal for Amazon as they invested all that money.

The labs are not really in the same position though, as their major capital expenditure is training models, which keeps getting more expensive and they can't stop as the frontier keeps moving.

We'll see when the S-1's come out I guess.

> yeah and antropic s1 is going to shock many people, its going to be an eyeopener

I am looking forward to audited financial statements. Like, all the interesting stuff will be buried in notes, but they'll have to actually calculate real revenue, not the nonsense that is ARR.

These tools are useful, but I find it hard to see how OpenAI/Anthropic justify their valuations.

Apparently Anthropic's may be this week (the S-1) as they've finished picking all their bankers.

> NATO has been involved in every war crime the USA has committed this century.

NATO countries, yes (mostly the Brits and Polish). NATO as an organization, only for Serbia and Afghanistan.

Thank you for the Archunit recommendation, that library looks incredibly useful in this modern, agent driven world.

> revenue

Maybe, I'm not sure this will continue.

> In benchmarks

All published benchmarks are useless, unfortunately.

Where does the secret sauce show up in the outputs, then?

Like, (apart from tone), I find it hard to distinguish between the outputs of GPT/Claude/Kimi/GLM recently (I use cursor, and have been giving them the same prompt and comparing).

If anything, I found that the non-Claude models were better in many cases, which definitely doesn't map to their pricing.

> in fact not all the methods and data are public

Probably not, but unless you work at a lab, I'm not sure that anyone can say (and if you do work at a lab, you should not be replying on this thread).

I'm not really convinced that there's much secret sauce here, all the methods and data are public, the only real difference is how much compute it takes.

> I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual.

No, the responsibility lies with the culture of growth at all costs. Margins and revenues must continue to increase, whatever else happens.

If you want to blame someone, blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options. That's what incentivises this kind of behaviour.

As an aside, it's amusing to me that Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products.

When I used to do this, I bound 'sudo-find-file to a key, then called that to re-open as root.

I suspect that this may be an example in the tramp docs, as I definitely wasn't knowledgeable enough to figure it out for myself.

Unlikely, acquisitions generally take much longer.

How do you review the code? I can use git to see changes, but it's super annoying to tell the agent file line plus comment for each change, so I catch less stuff early which seems to compound.

You are regulated in each country by the respective regulator of that country, and any claims from that country go through that regulator.

Can you find me evidence to the contrary?

My friend, this is how lots and lots of EU regulations work. See GDOR, the AI act and probably a bunch of others.

This is the kind of stuff that's in Draghis report, and it's economically equivalent to tariffs.