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jcfrei

6,184 karma · joined October 15, 2010

jcfrei.at.hn

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submissionscomments
jcfrei··on Astra for Law
Not trying to be dismissive here but a lawyer will always edit your proposal. I do think lawyers will persist but not as many. And they will work very differently, much like we already use claude / codex to code - a big part of the contract probably won't be read by the lawyer.
jcfrei··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
FYI: I'm European and worried about our competitiveness. It appears you didn't get my point. You can have different values like you said but then you have to be consistent with this on all levels to make it work. And that means less EU integration into the global economy - the EU doesn't have a clear vision where it wants to go.
jcfrei··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
That's easier said than done when you are competing in a global economy. The US is actually getting more consistent here: It starts to become more isolationist (through the trade war and specifically tariffs) and as a result will have more leeway in choosing their own mix of workers rights, compensations, taxation, etc. Sidenote: Of course consumers will be worse off as a result.

The EU however is in this weird spot where they are pushing for a more integrated global economy (thanks to all kinds of trade deals) with fewer barriers while at the same time making their own companies less competitive with all these regulations and internal hurdles: There are examples where a German exporter had an easier time sending his stuff to New Zealand than France.

jcfrei··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
It's an improvement for the economy and that mainly benefits the shareholders. How you redistribute those gains more broadly is an open question. But keeping inefficiencies in place to protect workers at all costs is a losing strategy in the long term - see: Soviet Union.
jcfrei··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
No it does not. There's a lot of gold plating happening at the national level that goes beyond EU regulations. It's EU regulations + 27 national regulations in reality. The EU economies are still too different and the population too unwilling to have a truly US-style single market.
jcfrei··on MIT creates method to force AI to comply with safety rules
> In experiments spanning robotics, control of physical processes, and computer vision, the new method consistently satisfied the required constraints while identifying better solutions than existing techniques.

I guess this method works when you can precisely quantify the allowed output - like the degrees an arm can move or the path a robot can take, etc. But it doesn't appear to be applicable to an AI writing code - which is where our main concerns currently are.

jcfrei··on PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD
Just like kids eventually take over most of the daily tasks for their parents (for people in countries where you don't have any kind of retirement fund and assisted living, etc.). Same will happen here - on one hand because the human population keeps growing older without any replacement and on the other because all the new tech will be too complicated for humans to understand.
jcfrei··on Claude for Commerce Agents
This is going to be an extremely interesting space to watch. Will online shops open their perfectly sculpted and sales-optimized webpages to accept requests from chat bots? such that they can just do highly targeted requests for shoppers? Or will they implement custom chat bots that guide and nudge you along your purchasing journey on the page itself? I'm very curious how consumer behavior will evolve from here. is every online search still going to start with a google query? or maybe soon a query on claude and chatgpt? or maybe three separate queries to the chat bots of the respective stores?
jcfrei··on The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
AI can be progressing rapidly and valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic can decline at the same time. In fact I would say that's actually the default scenario. If AI really advances rapidly then it will be quickly moot which company developped which model at what time - since AI will be largely progressing on its own.
jcfrei··on Let the Bond Market Speak
https://archive.ph/q7QBg
jcfrei··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
These blog posts often allude that the EU regulatory bodies are just slightly incompetent or short-sighted and these fragmented national models happen by accident. But unfortunately that's not the case: The EU pretends to be a single-market and almost mantra-like the EU officials keep repeating it. But the fact of the matter is that there is neither a single market nor is the European public ready for one. If there was a true single market (like the US has one) - then this would very quickly lead to massive changes in the labour market. Imagine all the Romanian construction companies suddenly building office buildings in Madrid. Or countless Polish architects suddenly undercutting the much more expensive architects in Milano. Whether they know it or not, Europeans would like to have all the benefits of a single market (mostly more competitive pricing) without any of the downsides (massive labour shifts) - but that option doesn't exist. So what they do is harmonize regulation for a few big corporations, while all the smaller companies (and their employees) still get to keep their national moats.
jcfrei··on Show HN: Argentic – An L402 Lightning toll booth for AI scraping agents
this looks just like x402 by Coinbase which enables stablecoin payments. but instead of transacting in dollars it tries to revive the idea that btc can be used as an actual means for payment rather than just speculation.
jcfrei··on Degraded performance for multiple models
Is anybody else experiencing this: I have multiple claude instances running on different servers - and some keep getting the 529 Overloaded error and one instance doesn't and just continues working. All are using Opus 5.
jcfrei··on Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose
search isnt that super hard to solve. the problem is that incentives are misaligned - which means companies who sell something have an incentive to share their index with the corporation that pays to be the default search provider. for a simple search engine that just delivers facts there's very little incentive to keep its index up-to-date: because that company wont get the apis to retrieve the content efficiently, so it needs more compute, bandwidth and storage to run.
jcfrei··on GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities
A lot of the performance of these open source models might come from distilling the closed frontier models. If those can't raise the funds anymore to train newer and better models then the whole improvement cycle might slow down.
jcfrei··on Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe
> Prior to Bretton Woods countries were well aware that no single country could be entrusted with the power granted in being the global reserve currency.

That's a misleading statement. First of all at the beginning of the 20th century the British pound was clearly the global currency - where a lot of the international commerce happened. Then towards the 1930s and later on the Dollar took over that role. But that role carried much less weight back then - globalization was still in its infancy and a "global reserve currency" as we understand it today simply didn't exist back then. Right now some Dutch pensioners money is invested in American, Canadian, Australian, German, etc. companies. And the parts for most consumer goods are coming from all over the world. Pre Bretton Woods basically none of this existed. This global financial system we speak of today is unprecedented and only exists since the late 70s - where most countries abandoned their currency controls (apart from the US and CH which never really had them).

jcfrei··on uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.
jcfrei··on Nvidia's Risky Business
In many investment theses - like Nvidia's bet that demand for compute will keep growing - the first order assumption is usually correct. Yes, demand for more compute, chips, infrastructure is huge and each year some additional data centers will be built. Where such investment bets usually fail is in the second-order assumptions: Ie. the expectation of the growth of demand. This is where there's a high chance that the current expectations are likely exaggerated. So: demand is likely to persist for the foreseeable future but not increase every year. And that can upend the whole investment story. That can be enough to make these bonds a huge burden for Nvidia in the end. Not because people stopped buying more compute but because they stopped buying more every year.
jcfrei··on Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities
That's how quickly your perception shifts when you are inside of a real, fundamental technological shift. If some similar computer program figured out the same improved bound just 6 years ago there would have been numerous blog posts, experts interviews and NYTimes, WaPo op-eds about some computer working on the Riemann hypothesis. Now that we are in the middle of it it's going to be a footnote at best.
jcfrei··on Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs
I think their move makes a lot of sense. Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available. Most of the text that goes in is online chatter, images and some scientific texts. That's great for chatbots, knowledge retrieval and programming. But with that database genuine discovery is hard to do. I think for the next step in intelligence the models need to have access to much more data: Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments - and so on. And they need the data in much higher fidelity than you can currently access. If we just feed AI with all the knowledge we've acquired it's much harder for it to become smarter than us - it basically needs it's own eyes, ears, nose and so on.
jcfrei··on Third Drone Shot Down in Three Days in Romanian Territory
People keep bringing WW3 up but I disagree. There's such a huge aversion in EU countries against any kind of war against Russia and the governments know it. They will let a LOT slide on Russia's side before any kind of retaliation (and I mean by force) is coming. Russia could probably kill several service members with a drone, claim it was an accident and the only thing coming from Europe would be a stern letter, some more sanctions and telling off the ambassador (and the Kremlin knows this too).
jcfrei··on Patreon laying off 20% of staff
Upvoting this so more people see how cringey it's written.
jcfrei··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
That's an overgeneralization and haircuts for debtors are common - even when a positive equity value remains.
jcfrei··on OpenNode – Bitcoin Payment Processor
lightning is a pain to set up, you have to open a channel and keep funding it - so if we are talking about small amounts these costs should definitely be added to your calculation. or you use lightning via an exchange - but that again kinda defeats the purpose of bitcoin. in fact all of this could probably be achieved much simpler by just using a stablecoin on tron, solana or one of the ether chains and forget about the whole lightning sending and bitcoin hedging. I doubt you can get lower transaction costs end-to-end staying on btc.
jcfrei··on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
very unlikely that they are holding models back. models are very quickly depreciating in value and have internal cutoff dates. that would really not make sense from a business perspective. and doing an entire training run without commercializing it also seems like a huge waste.
jcfrei··on Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy
Some good answers below already. I think the anti nuclear movement already started before Chernobyl. I believe it was one of the founding ideologies of the green parties (the danger of high CO2 emissions was not yet front of mind for a lot of people back then). So the opposition to nuclear energy kind of laid the foundation for the modern (European) green parties. But these were all young people back then (in the 70s) and a they have now become the dominant generation in politics. So just like in any other country the 50+ years old are in charge and that cohort in Germany happens to have fond memories of opposing nuclear energy.

And just a little side note because I've looked it up recently: EU produces about the same amount of nuclear energy as the US - and that's despite Germany shutting down all reactors. So it's not like the US or any other region has a much higher usage.

jcfrei··on OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says
If you find a more informed and up-to-date source than a market where people wagered close to $1M on I'm all ears.
jcfrei··on OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says
There's a very low chance of OpenAI doing an IPO this year: https://polymarket.com/event/openai-ipo-by. So the assumption that they "have to do an IPO" already seems questionable. The rest of the analysis also feels pretty hand-wavy. I'm not saying OpenAI is in a strong financial position, but this article doesn't make a solid enough case for why it's supposedly in such dire straits.
jcfrei··on 'There Is No Going Back': The Inside Story of Europe's Rupture with America
No to both in my opinion. The EU market is in reality still heavily fractured - especially in the services sector. A Hungarian construction company for example can't just easily build a bridge for a town in Italy. With Europe steadily getting older effective reforms become near impossible - especially those that would lead to large changes for workers. So Europe will forever stay in this semi broken / semi integrated state - and much higher trade barriers towards China and the US seem much more likely to me than a more competitive Europe.
jcfrei··on The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level
Fascinating. The 2001 shift aligns well with China's entry into the WTO.
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