mediaman

Yes, that construct is, like em dashes, something that humans have been writing for a long time. That's the problem with triggering on one isolated tic. The tic comes from human practice, it's not like they invented it!

We protect kids because they are people, and we socially recognize that even if a person is potentially more likely to cause damage, there is a public interest in not discriminating against people based on age, or gender, or race.

Dogs are not people. Many in Seattle think their dogs are people, or even prefer dogs over people, but they are not, and they do not enjoy the same protections against discrimination.

If you have never been a landlord, I can see why you would think that "if they damage the property, they pay for it" is a reasonable rule that would work, because if your dog destroyed a door, the carpet, and the blinds, you are likely to be willing (if unhappy) to pay to fix it. If you have been a landlord, you know why this doesn't work, and you would also know why pursuing the damages in court also doesn't work.

(If you are wondering why: people do not pay. Deposits, which they also now capped in Seattle, often don't cover the damage. And suing people who have no money in order to get a judgment that you can't collect on is expensive and pointless.)

This just socializes the cost of pet damage onto everyone, which is why this is populist slop.

(Some of the other junk fees make much more sense: mandatory fees that you have to pay, that are fixed in nature, should just be in the advertised lease price. Think "common area fees" you can't opt out of.)

I did not say the EU forces Meta to ban it; perhaps you should re-read the comment.

It does impose significant compliance burdens with massive fines.

You have to report who paid for the ad, where the money came from, what political process it relates to, you have to do this through the entire chain (i.e., ad agency, ad exchanges, publishers), you have to attest to the ad's accuracy, they have to publish all the information through a central EU repository, they are not allowed to use any person-level ad targeting, they have to track whether it pertains to any active EU bill or legislative process within three months of decision-making and, if so, they have to attest that the entity and funds come only from the EU (not just directly, but indirectly).

The penalties for mistakes are enormous. The act allows penalties of up to 6% of global revenue. That's around $10 billion for Meta.

I'm pretty sure I would make the same decision when the EU is threatening to fine me for $10 billion for making any mistake on the rules for the TTPA.

Yes, and instead of sending an letter by post I could send a carrier pigeon. I don't "need" the postal service at all! Why am I shoehorning the postal service in where it doesn't belong?

Meta does not do this outside the EU. It's a EU problem, and was caused by the EU's TTPA enacted last year which imposes heavy bureaucratic compliance process on any advertising that touches on any social or political topics.

Meta doesn't do this outside the EU, and they didn't do this in the EU prior to the TTPA. Draw your own conclusions about whether this is a "meta problem."

The article doesn't mention this, of course, but Meta prohibits "socially sensitive" advertising due to the EU's TTPA law, or "Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising."

It imposes substantial bureaucratic compliance burden on advertising platforms to accept ads that deal with political issues.

Meta decided that the revenue wasn't worth the compliance burden, so they do not accept any political advertising at all. They filter anything that smells like political or social issues, whether it be a campaign about anti-immigration or a play about feminism, because if they accept it they will get heavily fined by the EU.

This is why Meta does not ban this advertising outside of the EU. It's a EU regulatory problem. The Register does not mention this anywhere in the article.

It is lazy and wasteful if you ignore the costs of specialized skills in doing it the "right way." If you stop looking at things in a narrow technical frame, and look at it as an organization, it's not wasteful. And lazy is a useless pejorative used against products that let people do things easily. Lazy is good. When you learn how to make products that allow people to be more lazy, you will become successful.

It's not to write the article. I would hope they don't do that; I wouldn't want to read it.

But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!

Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.

I don't know. I dislike camera asymmetry (mine on, others off) but when everyone's is off it's just like the phone conference calls of olden days. I like it because I can pace around, stand up, stare at the ceiling to allow me to concentrate.

Agreed. I find it really fun to work with customers. It keeps you focused on real problems. And there are so many problems in 'boring' industries that need solving. Just a ridiculous number. There's so much bad software out there, or things being done manually, still now so many decades into the industry.

But you have to be willing to break out of the bubble, including getting on a plane, and I see very few people being willing to do that.

This is a groundless criticism. TB2.1 is saturated. TB4 is not. Sol xhigh is 90% on TB2.1 but 37% on TB4. Is it also "benchmaxxed"?

Your assumption is that the benchmarks are essentially identical in difficulty, with the only difference being their age and thus whether they could have been trained on.

No, that's not correct for any reasonable definition of "impossible." Look up pangram's accuracy ratings. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. LLMs in fact leave very distinguishing traces of their logit distributions in the text they write. It's one of the reasons why it's so easy for humans to also smell them.

It is possible to trick pangram - they bias toward a low false positive and a higher false negative - but it is not true that it is essentially random.

Just look at the prices that inference providers charge for small models. The argument that these unit economics are negative is trivial to disprove.

DeepInfra sells DS v4-flash at 0.08 in, $0.18 out. Gemma4 they sell for $0.07 in, $0.34 out. OpenAI's price for luna is $0.20 in, $1.20 out.

Why would you assume OpenAI is somehow uniquely incompetent at making small, fast models? And that they're worse at serving it than DeepInfra? Any observer can see they are making money here.

I never understand why people who are convinced there is a big con just don't check market prices and see if there's money to be made.

That doesn't mean their business is great -- they're losing tons of money, but it's because they spend too much on fixed costs, and they can't stop spending money on training next generation models with no end in sight, not because the inference is margin negative, which is a flimsy idea that just clouds the actual business issue.

You can make the other argument that China subsidizes the price and that they can't be profitable at this pricing level. From an industrial strategy standpoint, they already do this for many other industries with huge subsidized state loans.

So we can go round and round on this, each with our made-up objections about how it's temporary or unrealistic or impossible or whatever, or we can just accept the prices as listed and use that to guide our economic decisions.

Overall I prefer Codex over Claude in their current state, but I do agree that Codex's solutions tend to be too complex and I have to constantly tell it to simplify solutions, detect when it's creating ornate architecture, and proposing data models that have way too much going on. In my usage that's its main weakness.

As a coda to this, anyone using grok 4.6 via API pricing should be aware that while their headline pricing is good, the pricing that actually matters is pretty bad.

Their cache read costs are $0.50 per million, or 25% of the cost of uncached reads.

The industry standard is a 90% discount, so cache costs you 10% of uncached. So that means 5.6 Sol actually costs less per million cache reads - $0.40/million.

If you are doing a lot of agentic work where the vast bulk of your token consumption will be cached input reads, you won't get the expected cost savings from Grok.

I imagine this is the result of some problem in their serving infrastructure that I hope they will fix, because then the pricing will become actually strong. (The other possibility is that they bet on distracting people with good headline prices assuming they'd miss the bad cache pricing, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that.)

Criminal acts do not require the victim to "press charges." A government prosecuting attorney decides whether to criminally prosecute the alleged perpetrator.

"Pressing charges" is mostly a made up idea for criminal cases. However, prosecuting attorneys may not want to pick up a case if the victim is not cooperating, because it makes the case much harder to win.

Consider that the stance now is banning data centers. That's the context of the discussion.

The county's other option is to simply price data centers. Yes, that means they might not win the data center. If the data center can get better terms elsewhere, they do that. If the town doesn't want to concede on price, then fine.

People seem to be mad that data centers show up with less perceived value to the community than they want, so why would they care if the data center builds elsewhere because they don't agree to their price? The position strictly Pareto dominates the ban stance: at worst, they get no data center (same as ban), at best, they get a bunch of tax money.

Please educate me on how I'm "missing the point" because of how "naive" I am!

My theory is demand substitution. NVME/SSD is up so much people at the margin are switching to spinning rust, which nobody was prepared for, so now they too are drowning in demand.

Simple mechanistic explanations in biology are often wrong. For example, oxidative stress does not have a linear no-threshold harm.

For alcohol, almost every big study has shown either no discernible effects going from zero to 1 drink per day, or actual slight benefits going from 0 to 1 that then reverse when increasing beyond that. There is not strong consensus which of these is true, but there's definitely no real evidence that 1 drink per day is harmful as measured by all-cause mortality.

See GBD 2020 in the Lancet (which showed a slight J-curve), Wood in the Lancet 2018 (optimally low risk at 100g ethanol per week, or ~1 drink per day), Zhao in Jama (no discernible negative effects at 1 drink per day, no benefits either, no J-curve), and the latest National Acadamies review showing lowest all-cause mortality at about 1 drink per day (so, a J-curve).

Alcoholism has tons of negative effects. But these seem to start at around 2 drinks per day and rise rapidly from there.

That's not a study from the WHO, it's a public statement they published in Lancet. It's an opinion piece.

Moreover, the WHO never changed their stance when later big studies showed that the "lowest risk" level is not actually at zero drinks.

The timeline was this:

- In 2018, a study was published in the Lancet that was the Global Burden of Disease analysis. They claimed the modeled minimum risk exposure was zero drinks. But the magnitude effects were extremely small: moving from zero to one drink a day pushed the incidence rate of alcohol-associated health effects from 914 per 100,000 people to 918 per 100,000 people. This was the basis of the "no safe level."

- Four years later, an updated Global Burden of Disease analysis, also published in the Lancet, actually reversed course on this. After controlling for more factors, they found risk was actually slightly J-shaped, and for 40+ year olds the theoretical minimum risk was about 0.5 drinks per day. The WHO ignored this updated study when they wrote their opinion piece in 2023.

- Another big study with ~600k participants published in 2018 in the Lancet shows lowest total risk consumption levels at 1 drink per day, with mortality rising above that level. The WHO also ignored this.

- The JAMA study in 2023, with >4 million participants, showed no benefit to low-volume drinking, and also no increase in harms from low volume (1 drink daily) drinking. Again, the WHO ignored it.

Several other studies have shown either no discernible risk change between zero and 1 drink per day, or lowest possible risk at 1 drink per day.

But the WHO and much of the public health policy community ignores almost all of the actual credible science on this because it does not fit with their ideology. It's a huge problem with public health policy: the actual scientists and statisticians are doing great work, but if it's not what the policy people want to hear, they discard it and keep repeating their mantra.

What I don't understand is why communities want to block the data centers.

Just make them pay!

Your electricity price shouldn't go up because of them. So just make a rate card for data centers that ensures the burden doesn't fall on residents. That's what Oregon started doing, and residents' electricity prices actually started falling, because the fixed costs of energy production were being spread across more kilowatt-hours and the data centers weren't getting a special deal.

I've also seen counties offer tax incentives. Why? Just have them pay property tax. Then you get nicer schools, more police, better roads.

Instead we have these campaigns to stop them, instead of making them a local cash cow. Loudon County gets half of all its revenue from data center property tax. Its residents were already rich, and now their local taxes are artificially low. Who wouldn't want that?

To continue to take us off topic, there is actually pretty limited evidence that this is true.

It is true that wine doesn't do anyone any good (unless you count it making people more social or something). But the effects of one glass a night is indistinguishable from zero. There are definitely statistically significant morbidity effects at 3.

I've been shocked reading public health proclamations that "anything above zero" is bad, and then reading the actual underlying paper they refer to, which clearly states exactly the opposite finding. I think it is an extension of the public policy belief that the public cannot be trusted with moderation, and so therefore must be communicated to in absolutes, and nobody will read the underlying paper anyway.

Clickhouse has a more intentionally built ingestion system. Duckdb has concurrency limits so you can't have a writer and a reader on the same file if they're not the same process (multiple readers is fine).

But that's not too hard to work around. You can either have a single process that owns both writing and reading that file, or you can do a data lake where you post updates as parquet files into object storage, and duckdb handles the catalog. The Quack protocol also basically fixes this (though still in beta).

With Clickhouse, you can of course still have tenant separation, but you have to do it by managing users within Clickhouse that map to users/tenants of your main app, so that you can restrict SQL access by tenant to only their data store. Not a huge deal but I just like the Unix "it's just a file" simplicity of "Tenant A gets to run arbitrary SQL against their separate read-only, no-ATTACH duckdb file".

It's possible, but I've experimented with different style guides and prompt methods and have never gotten it to output what I'd call "good" writing.

It is almost always low information density. Sometimes I can get it to remove most of the extraordinarily cliche phrases it injects into everything, along with the tortured, gauche prose (especially Claude). But what remains is an expansion algorithm: it takes a simple idea and expands it like polyurethane foam to fill however much space it can take, the volume filled mainly by grammatical syntax and only traced with any actual semantic meaning.

I do something similar and just use echarts. Very happy with it.

I built a platform for some midsize companies in a specific vertical that is basically a data warehouse with some LLM-driven dashboarding and query tools on top. Typical data size 5-150gb. So I built a service layer around duckdb, where each tenant gets their own duckdb. I'm also in the boat of knowing that duckdb is not the perfect solution for this (the classic use case is running it against local data on a laptop), but there's so much I like about it, and it's really nice that each tenant can have total separation with custom schemas and that it's straightforward to pile data into object storage and form your own lake.

And now with things like quack the sharp points around concurrency are relaxing, and it feels like the compromises of using it this way are disappearing.

That poster mixed it up with trademarks, for which enforcement is required to maintain its validity.

I don't see how this follows. The cost of nails has fallen by 95% over the last century. It's because the cost of manufacturing has fallen. Not because they are selling the information of nail consumers.

Tokens are not normal software, because they have marginal cost, and I think people who are used to software economics really struggle with this. With token generation there really can be manufacturing cost efficiencies where one producer is just straight up better at serving product at a lower marginal cost.

Yes but there is a big, big market for subagents to consume lots of tokens cheaply and condense information up to parent agents. Luna would not be my choice for planning. But an explorer to comb through a codebase to find relevant parts? Or for enterprise retrieval, where it needs to search across many different types of data to see where to focus efforts for a smarter model? Or to wake up periodically to evaluate some conditions and determine if a bigger model should be spun up? Definitely.

I've previously found flash (for all the hate it gets) to be good for these kinds of things. Haiku was fine but it's ancient.