jldugger

Wish I could recall the podcast I listened to a few years ago that was telling the history of robo-dialers and caller ID spoofing. The general gist was that AT&T was making money off it from 1-900 operators so they weren't eager to self-regulate. So even though ending spam calling is a bipartisan issue, feet were dragged on the implementation.

If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was investigating dead government agency phone numbers, and some lady entrepreneur in the 80s. Might have been Reply All, but the market regulation angle makes me think Planet Money.

of course, politicians exempt themselves from the spam call category. Political speech is the most important speech!

By who? The only US people who seem to like the tarrifs are the ones front running trades on their announcement.

The reasons we have Google in the index and not Anthropic are many:

1. Google has a history of profits. Their move into AI isn't coming at the expense of Search Ad revenue, and can be seen as defending it for the future. Their last annual report shows continued growth in this sector. So the P:E ratio isn't NaN.

2. Their stock prices has survived the test of market trading and multiple reporting windows, short sellers, WSB regressive behavior, etc. In part because they have a huge publicly tradeable float.

3. There isn't a huge bundle of shares in lockup until six months after the IPO that would put selling pressure on the symbol.

It's also a safer bet as a company, though that technically shouldn't be the criteria for indexing:

1. Google has a diverse product line: youtube subs, search ads, adwords, cloud services, etc. And a demonstrated ability to launch more (probably too many more).

2. They have a huge existing customer base to upsell to; cost of customer acquisition would be low for quite a while.

3. Anthropic and OpenAI are dependend on nvidia to supply them every beefier chips, while Google has their own TPUs to run on and lease out to others.

> But then I told it that I wanted to leave, got to an inn, where I flirted with the bar waitress, and soon we were watching the sunset in some meadow.

Immediate Silicon Valley vibes: https://youtu.be/S8MAV9jhf04?t=18

But it's also not really plausibly deniable if there's only one actor with the means and motive to do it.

And worse, everyone had their memory of it wiped in 1946.

I mean, America had agriculture[1] before Columbus showed up. Cahokia[2] came and went (and then other people moved in).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Abandonment_and_resett...

See also a famous rebuttal https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

1985 edition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X4o-MV6o

Most of the datacenters in my city are concentrated near the warehouse zoned area by the expressway, railroad and interstate leading to the airport. Basically nobody lives there, and those that do are probably much better off now that the diesel trains no longer running.

> Is it an allegory for something deeper than what it is.

I've always taken it to be a critique of the draft, aka "the lottery."

Or PhDs

>The self-order kiosk UI is quite bad.

Most repeat customers use the app, which sports the digital equivalent of a loyalty program, and various coupons. And lets you save your 'usual' order with customizations etc. Plus the annoying push notifications for FreeFrydays or whatever. And upsells, new product launches, etc.

My recollection is that the kiosk is just a weak facsimile of the app. And wasn't terrible, but everyone's standards vary.

Could be worse. Steve Levitt has a story about working out ad spend causality and actively ignoring the truth[1]:

> LEVITT: And they said to me "[...] One time we hired this summer intern and his job was to do the newspaper inserts for Pittsburgh, and the guy was so incompetent that he just didn’t do it. And when the C.E.O. found that out, he said, ‘If you ever do that again, you’re all fired.’

> LEVITT: So, I said to them, “Well, O.K. But when you looked at the results, what happened to the sales in Pittsburgh when you were dark for a month?” And they called me back about a week later and they said, “You’re not going to believe it. We looked at the data in Pittsburgh, and we saw no impact on sales when they didn’t do any inserts for a month.” I said, “Oh, my God, that’s amazing! O.K., so when can we get started?”

> LEVITT: They said, “Are you crazy?” It was almost if they found out they didn’t work, it was far worse for these people than it was not finding out it didn’t work. Because then they had to explain why for the last 15 years they had been wasting $200 million a year. So, they were happy to just live in a world in which as long as there were ads in every market, every Sunday, life was good.

    [1]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-1-tv-ep-440/

Fascinating, I was literally thinking about how to communicate this to coworkers the other day, literally down to the gantt chart. Now I don't even have to make one =)

> We are now talking about software development, but this is applicable to all processes that take longer than you would like.

Indeed, it's kind of a generalized version of Amdahl's law. Since we only speed up a portion of the work, there are upper bounds on time saved. Worse, work in progress tends to bunch up at a specific point: code review. A coworker of mine literally complained two months ago now that nobody was reviewing code (and that it was blocking his work). I'm not sure review delay has actually gotten better since.

Ah yes, the bread lines were a sign of Soviet success! Enormous growth in demand they just had trouble keeping up with!

I guess it feels less abundant when there's a million people in the store and you're basically in line to check out the minute you step in.

Interestingly, my local subreddit loves to describe Costco as a late stage capitalist dystopia.

- fighting for space everywhere: fighting for a parking lot, avoiding people seeming to ram you with their shopping cart, waiting for the extended family of seven in front of you to pick a cereal so you can leave the aisle, waiting for traffic to clear so you can _leave_ the costco

- you have to pay to get in

- and then you have to pay extra to jump to the head of the line

- fights over rare stock like pokemon cards

[flagged]

> the factory line both costs and produces all the value.

I think the point OP is trying to make is that manufacturing and design are seperate steps with different workflows and expectations. And that the design step does have value, as without it your factory line has nothing particular to make or sell.

Nobody is sitting around Ford trying to make the clay modeling step faster or more error free, it's a design function. But there are hundreds of software execs out there trying to do exactly that. In part because cp and git and make and your other build tools that make up the factory line function are pretty much rock solid and cost optimized to nearly free.

> In Polymarket you can just spin up a new account. If an account spins up, makes a $50k bet and wins

You'd probably want to use some form of bayesian ranking, like say add 1k of total bets and 500 in total winnings to the raw scores.

But your bigger problem is just that people spinning up new accounts may be doing it to avoid your tracking. The kind of person with lots of evidence that they're good should be smart enough to know about copycat traders. The evilest among them might use a small bet to lure copycats and then trade against them in alts.

Wonder if the fact that the actual author is asking the question taints the result in some way; same for all the examples in this thread using unpublished articles. By definition only you would have them, so if there are system level prompts somewhere with your name on them...

I'm not sure what point you're making, or whether it actually contradicts my own.

"When the president does it, that means it is not illegal" -- a former president

I wasn't around so I'll have to take your word for it?

Well, the $5.14 figure is using the generalized inflation number derived by tracking the price of a specific basket of goods over time, across the entire country. This is a reasonable number to pick.

If you narrow down to Food for all Urban Consumers[1], it shifts to more like $5.24. If you look at "Food away from home in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA, urban wage earners and clerical workers, not seasonally adjusted" that number moves to $7.60. Which confirms your intuition: restaurant prices are way higher than the overall inflation rate predicts.

How do we explain the difference? A variety of ways. Maybe the burgers you get are "better" in some way. Bigger. Better cut of meat. More veggies and toppings. I wasn't around in 1959 and never ate at that specific diner, but it's a real possibility. In fact, this is explicitly called out in the FAQ[3]:

> Specifically, in constructing the "headline" CPI-U and CPI-W, the BLS is not assuming that consumers substitute hamburgers for steak. Substitution is only assumed to occur within basic CPI index categories, such as among types of ground beef in Chicago. Hamburger and steak are in different CPI item categories, so no substitution between them is built into the CPI-U or CPI-W.

There's also some other complicating factors to account for, like coupons and bundling. Like consider Applebee's Really Big Meal Deal deal. "NEW Big Bangin’ Burger with unlimited fries & soda, still just $9.99" Or you can order just the burger for... $15.99[4]. I don't even know how BLS copes with that and am sorta guessing they just take the a la carte prices for consistency, even though that likely overstates price levels consumers actually pay?

[1]: https://data.bls.gov/dataViewer/view;jsessionid=3A241A4C4F0A... [2]: CWURS12ASEFV [3]: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/common-misconceptions-abo... [4]: https://www.applebees.com/en/menu/handcrafted-burgers/big-ba...

IDK how it applies to LLMs but the original meaning was a change in a distribution over time. Like if you had some model based app trained on American English, but slowly more and more American Spanish users adopt your app; training set distribution is drifting away from the actual usage distribution.

In that situation, your model accuracy will look good on holdout sets but underperform in user's hands.

And just think how much more profitiable they'd be if they scaled up

(◞ิ౪◟ิ)

No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle.

And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly.

The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.

> SSR walked

rolled, surely