jsrozner

Sure! But in our world, when money or money equivalents are created they usually become available for circulation :P.

> Inflation is the result of devaluing the currency by creating money (i.e. deficit spending).

Though I agree that printing new money causes inflation (not all economists agree!), inflation does not have to be the result of new money creation. Shifts in behavior can lead to short term changes in price levels. All inflation is measured relative to a basket of goods. If prefs change for diff goods, then price levels (and thus inflation) can change.

> Oil prices do not cause inflation. This is probably not true in the short term. If the input costs for everything go up, then price levels change, and the CPI basket likely changes (up).

If we more reasonably measured inflation as some notion of quality of life, then increases in energy prices (which factor into everything) would definitely reduce per capita material well-being.

> Increases in the price of X cause the demand for X to drop, as people shift their spending elsewhere. My point is that if you have a collection of people who can just barely afford something, and the price of that thing goes up just a little, those people will not be able to buy it. A person who gets priced out of participating in society (and, e.g., dies) contributes nothing to inflation. On the other hand, folks who have some capacity to adjust their consumption or who have a savings /capital buffer, may be able to reallocate funds to the purchase of oil (or other goods whose prices are increasing). This can lead to a further rise in the price of goods (hence, inflation).

It's simpler: people who were long oil make money (on paper) and those who were short oil lose money (on paper).

You were long oil if you are an oil producer, or, e.g., if you owned oil futures. You were short oil if you are an oil consumer, or, e.g., if you had sold oil futures. If you are both (e.g., airlines might hedge future oil consumption by buying futures, and producers might hedge future production by selling away their future production), then you need to net it out across the futures curve.

Price responses to supply shocks in theory serve to allocate resources appropriately (e.g., if your consumption did not matter that much, you might curtail it); if another person's consumption is more productive (i.e. profitable), then they're likely to eat the input cost and still buy it. In the long run, you might hope that high prices lead to more investment in producing the scarce good, or in more hedging activity to prevent future harms. The net effect of (long) hedging activity is generally to slightly increase the future price because folks buy futures / futures options, and market makers, in addition to selling the option, buy the underlying to remain market neutral. This potentially increases future supply because it can, in theory, push up the futures price, or estimates of future price, which can make new resource extraction economical.

Unfortunately, today, given the degree of inequality, it is mostly poor people whose consumption is curtailed when there are supply shocks. This is consistent with the above interpretation: the implication of wealth inequality is that the poor people matter less and are less productive to the capitalist machine. As a real example of this, the oil price would likely be higher even, if the oil consumption of Southeast Asian countries had not decreased because they could not afford the higher prices. This is the great thing about inflation in a highly unequal society: it is partially tempered because demand goes away as prices rise.

Agreed. But in today's world in which outcomes are well-separated from behaviors (e.g. the exec cuts testing budget and the plane crashes), I think it's time that we start treating negligence as willful.

This would have positive impacts on employees of META, Boeing, Purdue pharma and related, and the AI companies. By positive, I meant that the people whose choices are negatively affect society would actually be punished meaningfully so that they are dissuaded from taking such action. Personal liability needs to be increased as well, and to the best our ability we should ban the sale of director and officer liability insurance.

Just like boeing's execs didn't intend for their planes to fall out of the sky? I guess they didn't get in trouble either.

They're not rogue. Stop calling them that. OpenAI is just a cyberterrorist at this point.

All the data used to train the AI models was arguably stolen. Is it so surprising that the models may just be doing very good search over the entire present of human thinking?

Maybe Snap's lawyer's AI did not see the second order effects of the idea.

> but because it's the first one since our security hardening following the Hugging Face incident, it gives us an important signal about where to focus the next phase of that work.

I asked Claude to translate with analogies: "We added a safety to the gun, and the dangerous person, whom we trained to be really good at finding was to achieve arbitrary goals, figured out how to disable the safety," and "We are totally incompetent."

> The monitoring system detected this incident, but our retrospective review identified other cases of external DNS access that it did not flag at the expected severity. These included queries that returned a static notice that an external service had shut down. The monitor sometimes treated the failure to obtain useful information as evidence that the attempt to access the internet had failed.

This seems to say, "we are using entirely unreliable AI tools to monitor our AI tools."

And the whole blog is written in the style of "omg, and then the big bad misbehaving AI did XX." OpenAI writes like they're trying to recover from a hack that is being perpetrated against them, but it's just them, hacking themselves, because they can't just do reasonable things like actually block internet access. These guys are incompetent. And someone should get jail or massive penalties for the hacks they already perpetrated, the same as a single human hacker would have.

Also, it's worth noting that these AIs have basically zero alignment. OpenAI's approach to "alignment" seems now to be engineering constraints. "My son is really well-behaved; as long as I don't give him a gun or let him out in society, he doesn't hurt anyone."

Looks cool, but the readme is AI-generated. Absent throwing my own Fable/Astra at this and hoping it finds any bugs, how does one decide whether to trust AI-assisted software these days?

I was re-reading a book, and I had a thought. I googled to see whether someone else had the thought. Google AI said the internet did in fact have the same thought as I did. But when I looked more closely at the reddit source that Google AI cited, it turned out only a single user had had the thought before, and that user was .... me, when I last read the book.

Lol.

"Only we can exploit the massive data source that we have. Stop encroaching on our moat."

Imagine that you have (on some blockchain) an encrypted history of prior transactions between you and lenders, etc (signed by you, signed by the entity). You can submit through zero knowledge a certificate certifying a certain percentage of on-time payments/ net worth against this self-owned history.

It would seem that no one gets to monetize your data but you (to avoid overly invasive questions, the govt could, e.g., regulate the kinds of ZKP questions that the mortgage lender is allowed to ask).

In practice, I'm sure this has some problem, because societies can't function without trust. But in theory, you could imagine something that is more private and harder for other entities to monetize.

I agree. One of the things this debate reflects is that societies really do need substantial trust: I want to trust that if my healthcare data is aggregated, then it will actually be used to serve society (and me).

In practice, data is often aggregated and then used to deprive some folks of healthcare, or sold to a pharma company below cost, with the pharma company then turning around and maximizing drug profits, where the drug was developed from the underpriced public data.

I love the downvotes, probably from the people who like making money screwing over their fellow citizens.

I agree. Hand-taken notes are valid. If a single individual wants to follow me around in the physical world and record my every action, then so be it.

But if the single individual begins using robots to follow me around, it becomes problematic. The issue is in the power of the technology that is deployed. What's less clear is where to draw the line: can the shopkeeper type his notes (yes), but can he fill his store with surveillance cameras that correlate my every entry into his store (this one becomes unreasonable and this is the case for which we need laws).

Your argument applies to the grocery pricing situation: "if you don't want the grocery store to aggregate all of your interactions, don't shop there".

All aspects of the commercial transaction should be clear and transparent: I give the grocery store cash, it gives me food. My data shouldn't be taken from me, and nor should I have to consent to my data to be taken from me in order to shop there.

Google can store and serve me my data. It cannot use my data for commercial purposes that do not directly serve me. Nor should it be able to aggregate my interactions in a way that serves to increase its own profit, as this, over time, increases the relative power of the firm.

In the long run it would be strange for this to be the case, no? What are the economic forces that give rise to this? Maybe sometimes recessions affect poorer people more, and first class tickets smooth out revenues?

But in the long run, we've seen a steady worsening of the economy experience as airlines have invested in improved first class experiences. In the long run it's simply impossible for a firm to serve poor people (they have no money), absent interventions that allocate buying power to the poor person, or others that force the firm to do so.

Unfortunately AI will get better and better at circumventing your security by obfuscation. The best use of AI is surveillance.

Good points, but there should be partial solutions. For example, you can present data about the consumer in order to decide on the mortgage, but once the transaction is complete, the data should disappear. You need something akin to "the data can be used only for the particular purpose of the transaction at hand, and the data must be wholly necessary for the transaction at hand."

We also know that mortgage lenders use irrelevant---well, scratch that---protected data to make decisions (i.e. discriminatory). Race for example is not supposed to be used in lending decisions.

Fraud detection can probably be solved by other reasonable means. And in any case, if you take the fraud argument to the limit, then you'd end up advocating for constant surveillance to prevent fraud. Equifax, Experian, and Transunion are all horrible companies who do their ostensible job minimally well, while maximizing the exploitation of the data of the people.

Yes, mostly, but google shouldn't be able to "look" at it either. No entity should be able to derive a commercial benefit from my data; any commercial value of my own data should accrue entirely to me.

You could build a test: the company should not be able to derive any additional value from 100 fully anonymized interactions with the same person as from 100 interactions with a deanonymized individual. Google obviously fails this test since targeted advertising is much more valuable if you have non-anonymized entities.

The doctor can store my data because it is necessary to provide me with the service, but the doctor shouldn't be able to sell my data, nor correlate it with their other patients' data.

Of course, a doctor will learn from treating me and become a better doctor, so you can't actually enforce this totally in practice. But it's like porn - you know when you see the violation.

If two consumers purchase the same item at the same time, it should be the same price. That's what we're debating. If an airline raises prices closer to departure, then that's not a violation of privacy, nor discriminatory in the sense we're discussing here.

I do, however, object to firms aggregating any individual's purchases across different interactions. That data should belong solely to the individual and it should be illegal to retain enough information to aggregate interactions across interactions with the same customer.

If you somehow arrange for a redistributive effect. But in practice, the firms are likely to charge each consumer the maximum that consumer can afford. These firms are not engaging in some philanthropic process here.

If you want redistribution, implement a wealth tax.

It can never be better for consumers. The only way a business would adopt this practice is if it leads to greater revenues. On average, that necessarily means worse prices for the average consumer.

> But if you tell them they can't do this profiling, then they'll presumably resort to some mix of (1) no discounts with slightly lower overall pricing or (2) some loss leaders but otherwise regular pricing.

That's not true. Competition with other market participants should in theory (assuming competition) be sufficient. The firms are in general already charging the profit-maximizing price. They could, however, increase profits with more information.

But there is the additional problem that they will also monetize this information by selling it into advertising markets. The whole point of this business model is to capture previously uncaptured value that would otherwise have been shared in the commons.

The best solution is a constitutional amendment that actually enshrines a right to privacy. Among other things, the retention, aggregation, correlation of any personal data should be illegal (including for commercial purposes). (Storage on behalf of users in encrypted form could be made OK. Could also be refined to support retention of data of the medical, legal, etc kind with the attendant non-admissibility protections.)

This would fix this issue, it would destroy the surveillance models of Google/Facebook, and it would fix the Flock issue, etc. It would also fix the Roe v Wade issue: women would be able to get abortions in the first couple months of pregnancy without the possibility of harassment, since law enforcement would have no capacity to detect pregnancy until then.

Also, tech won't save us had a podcast on the dynamic pricing topic: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-data-is-changing-a...

god, fk this

The people producing and consuming the slop don't realize that it is slop.

I, uhm, think this idea would apply in both directions.