roenxi

There seems to be a bit of a gap vis a vis solutions in the article - someone could set the system up so it doesn't incentivise tanking. The punishment for tanking should be that the teams performed poorly for no compensation. It's all very well to set up a system to encourage poor behaviour then shame the people who behave rationally. But it is much more sustainable in the long term to make good behaviour also strategically optimal.

> Post-Hinkie, the league experimented with variations of the lottery, but none of them could deter teams from losing on purpose.

I struggle to believe they've tried everything unless they're also talking about players betting against themselves (which probably is impossible to overcome without bans). Incentives aren't easy things but there has to be some system where winning > losing.

On that topic we're actually pretty lucky - in the real world, the winning strategy over long time-frames is almost always talking, prosperity and cooperation. Not obvious why the powers that be are so keen to involve other strategies that routinely deliver worse material and moral results.

It interesting because the people at the CIA probably could be fairly described as "liberal, non-violent, and honorable". That sort of thing is heavily into banality of evil territory - lovely people, just a bit thoughtless about the effects they were having on huge tracts of the world.

With those types the best you can hope for is at least they act rationally and effectively. It gets really sad when they do tremendous damage for reasons that make little sense, even in context.

> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to...

There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.

Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].

Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.

Classifying something as a textbook whataboutism is typically itself a rhetorical fallacy. It is rare for it to be used in the sense of identifying a real problem. Normally when it gets invoked someone has an argument, often a reasonable one, and someone else wants to pretend it isn't a valid but can't come up with a logical inconsistency.

In this case nxm's comment has formal problems - it is just irrelevant. True or not, it doesn't justify mowing down cyclists.

> I needed like a minute to process this.

Something like 1 person in 15 in the US is a millionaire, and a million dollar house + some LAN gear should be well within reach of a millionaire. Obviously they're a comfortable distance from poor but we're not talking unattainable wealth on display here.

> ...one of the truly baffling things from either their team or AMDs team, is how much the workstation grade AMD r9700 has been ignored.

It makes a huge amount of sense after considering AMD's approach to graphics cards from around 2010 to 2025. They just didn't see graphics cards as viable compute platform and many who made the mistake of believing that good specs would translate into in-practice performance got badly burned. I'd have been involved in the AI boom but for an expensive AMD graphics card, I'm not going to forget that for a while.

George Hotz was interesting as a public example, but I think his story probably repeated a few times outside the public eye. People tried to make AMD work and ended up the worse for it.

People who had an interest in using AMD cards to get things done are probably by and large waiting for a new generation of hopefuls to prove this time is different. The mutterings out of AMD are promising, but that isn't persuasive enough given the scale of the failures.

> Risam’s own concluding words hammer home how data confers more power on the already powerful, over and over again.

I think the insistence of the body politic on giving more power to the powerful is what drives this. Our ability to gather and organise data is just the limiting technical capability. Which is to say, the more data a central authority can process the more power it is capable of wielding.

Unclear why people are so sanguine about that whole issue given the 20th century, but here we are.

Since when has Facebook been associated with MAGA? They were famously part of the attempt to get Trump banned [0] from social media that led to Truth Social. Their moderation team tends anti-MAGA to the point where it is an international political concern.

And, assuming that the article is accurate, obviously they shouldn't have banned an account for posting "Can't handle a pool, but wants our lake?". I think everyone would agree outside the Facebook team. That would be a classic Facebook over-moderation. Extreme to the point where I'm going to assume there is more to the story.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_use_by_Donald_Tru...

The obvious link between the two maps is neither has much concept of landmass size.The Americas are unknown in the first and unsatisfying imbalanced in the later map (Belize & El Salvadore, something must be done!). With all that in mind, it seems possible it could be a coincidence driven by similar constraints on both maps.

The only choice here seems to be whether the containing shape is a circle, a triangle or a square.

> You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.

Economics does sometimes compel you to read books or other material as a condition or expectation of employment. It is difficult to get a good job while being illiterate and many jobs require reading huge volumes of written work. Work in law or journalism springs to mind as economically compelling people to read a lot even if they they might not necessarily want to.

In this context "trust" is something of a euphemism. The US had a big enough military relatively speaking that if they came for your gold then it wasn't feasible to stop them unless you were part of a competing bloc. So, you know. Keep the gold somewhere the US is happy with. Best shot of getting to a good outcome, and the US was pretty reasonable in the 1900s.

That all appears to have changed. They may already have lost the ability to physically coerce even medium powers and at any rate look like they have to retreat the boundaries of their global Not-An-Empire. So it makes sense to start rethinking the gold's physical location.

There is an element of this essay that seems a bit short on the whole rights-and-responsibilities concept that should be highlighted.

On the one hand, she's right that most people would want a wife and she gives a reasonable overview of why. That is why men generally want wives. The wives bring a lot to the table.

If you do the same exercise for husbands, generally most people would also want husbands. The men also bring a lot to the table. Relationships happen when everyone benefits.

Now if she's coming at this from a place of mutual joy and satisfaction then this essay is a pretty good summary of what men are probably looking for in a wife. But I see "instant classic ... [in a] feminist magazine" get the impression that it is probably being interpreted as wives shouldn't have to bring all the things men want to a relationship.

Yeah sure. I can agree with that. They shouldn't have to. Indeed, they don't. As we've discovered in the 1970s-2025 window they can renegotiate the social contract to a large extent. But I'm not really on board with what contribution the essay is supposed to have had beyond highlighting things what men like in women.

That is logically equivalent to a serial token prediction engine. If you have a diffusion text model you can use it to implement a serial token generator and if you have a serial token generator you can use that to implement a diffusion-generated text string. Don't think about the efficiencies of that, it is an upsetting idea (eg to generate N tokens, the serialising model might recalculate the same string N times from an input and emit one token of it each time - rather wasteful).

It is similar to how everything ends up being Turing complete. Any prediction system has to be equivalent to some sufficiently complicated text generation system to describe the prediction. And any text-generation system has to be equivalent to a sufficiently complicated model that serially emits tokens.

> I honestly think most Congress people want to do good for the country.

That seems wildly unlikely. Wouldn't there be evidence for it by now? Over the last decades there have been scant murmurs of the US congress sitting down and taking a serious look at what might be good for a country. I'm happy to say that the root cause is a voting public in the US (everywhere, really) rewarding unprincipled liars and punishing principled politicians. But the outcome is that the US Congress is full of unprincipled liars who have little regard for the good of the country, because that would be a principle that gets in the way of political expediency.

The system isn't some abstract concept foisted upon them from on high. They control it. There are some very high-level constraints on them that are all-weather good ideas and apart from that it is a free-for-all. The reason the system is dysfunctional is because that suits the congresspeople.

> It's just not predicting based on it's training data, but predicting based on RLVR & more, trying to get to the optimal solution ( as much as the solutions CAN be optimal)

It is predicting based on a model. In many cases we can download the model off hugging face. The model is conditioned by all sorts of things. Training data, post-training, coincidence, prompt inputs, runtime data available from whatever means.

> but at least I would still call it a "next token predictor"

We can call any prediction system a next token predictor. If you watch over the shoulder of a human writing a HN comment you are almost certain to see them generating a linear string of tokens. That is what keyboards do. It is impossible to generate text without being equivalent to a next token predictor.

So can LLMs. I asked one about South Wollopop and it suggested that it'd never heard of it but maybe I meant South Wollo in Ethiopia. And that's just a local model with modest hardware and no internet access. First attempt.

I mean, if our position is that a hyper advanced statistical model is going to ultimately struggle with the concept of something being unlikely to be true then the statisticians may as well give up in despair. There is no theoretical obstacle here.

They symptoms sound a lot like humans, so I don't see how it stems from their lack of self reference. Most people you need to keep them in areas they understand or they go to pieces. The lack of self reference just means every time the context clears they reset. They are systems in a permanent state of extreme amnesia.

Driving on the left side or the right side of a road are equally valid. It's still better if everyone coordinates to pick one.

People shouldn't be coerced to give up their culture (in fact, doing that is quite evil) but cultural homogenisation seems like a good thing in principle. We want people to have an easy time communicating with each other.

> but we'll make it up through factory production, standardization and repetition"

Those are economies of scale, for what it is worth.

But they don't consider the anti-abortion label to be much more than a theoretical problem and bad marketing. They can't reasonably arc up at "anti-abortion". They think the dial should be turned towards the end of the spectrum where there are less abortions.

If the anti-nuclear crowd want a different label they can pick one. Part of the problem they have is I'm sure they'd love to rebrand as pro-safety but they know exactly how the conversation will go if they try that one.

If you think being called anti-nuclear is a shallow dismissal of your views; then I might suggest reading my post on the assumption I'm not talking about you? The anti-nuclear crowd might object to "anti-nuclear" in the sense they'd rather be called "pro-something" like the anti-abortion crowd being pro-choice, but they're hardly going to take "anti-nuclear" as a slur.

Someone who thinks being anti-nuclear is shameful won't choose to be anti-nuclear.

> Or refute me at an intellectual level, maybe I can learn a thing!

I assume you're serious, so by way of unsolicited advice - write shorter posts and lead with the top 1 or two best arguments you think you have. A good refutation is normally longer than the post it replies to, so when you post the kitchen sink you aren't going to get a good refutation.

Although in this case I'd recommend looking up ... pretty much any online argument about nuclear power in the last 30 years. Those all have standard intellectual refutations.

> Oh: and if we don't "overregulate" then we have perhaps another Chernobyl. That happened exactly because the regulation AND the execution of the regulation was too lax.

What we did instead has people sometimes yelling at me that we're going to get millions to billions of people killed, destroy the planet and doom us all to violence and war. I got "burning my future" once which I thought had a ring to it. A Chernobyl every decade or so would be an enormous improvement over what we have actually done.

Yeah, it does. The anti-nuclear crowd has a case of circular reasoning where they put a lot of effort into getting nuclear power crippled by overregulation, then they point to the costs of overregulation as just the inherent nature of nuclear and therefore a reason that it should be abandoned altogether. That changes how an article like this should be read.

And unfortunately the anti-nuclear efforts haven't even managed to stop nuclear proliferation. We seem to have negotiated our way to a world where everyone is going to need to have the weapons but might skip the benefits of nuclear science (though China might make up for the West's failures, hope springs eternal).

Fair, sure. But it seems to be underselling how reasonable Kurzweil is.

We've got things like 2009 - "Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video. No." And ok, sure, but that has happened by 2026 and we have more than 2000 years of recorded history of people making predictions.

I don't think that situation reflects at all badly on Kurzweil except that he doesn't explicitly say he has a 15 year error bar. Which, yes, technically inaccurate, but it seems quite likely nobody would be talking about him if he spent that much time exploring the minor caveats.

And hitting him for the "and genetic algorithms" is verging on pedantry. Ok so genetic algorithms aren't a civilisation-level success that appears to be reshaping the fate of the species in the same way neural nets are. He was right that learning systems were going to be huge and he was off on a detail.

This is an improvement on starting a war on oil markets and getting I've-lost-count-how-many innocents killed in the Middle East. So in many ways this could be considered a step up for US foreign policy. If Trump can stick to low-stakes pettiness that would be a real win for us all.

> An issue was discovered in pip (all versions) because it installs the version with the highest version number, even if the user had intended to obtain a private package from a private index.

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2018-20225

Because I'm sure the public wants to know.

> Friends in other private trackers, including RED, inform me that actually maintaining ratio isn't that hard! I'm not sure why this would be the case, so I don't really believe them.

I don't know how public the data would be, but it sounds like it'd be interesting to check! Looking at myanonamouse they demand a global seed ratio of 1 [0]. Naively that seems like it'd be logically impossible to maintain. What if some altruist with a powerful connection decides to make a habit of maintaining a ratio of 2? They're going to crowd someone out to a ratio of lower than 1 by the pidgeonhole principle; the aggregate number of downloads should match the number of uploads.

So either everyone has to hit a ratio of 1 which seems like it'd be hard to coordinate, or there have to be free riders.

[0] https://www.myanonamouse.net/rules.php

Did they even have a referendum on joining the EU? Just skimming through, it looks like [0] they only had a referendum on EEC membership which sounds like it would predate the EU. It is a bit of an unfair ratchet where people can sidle in to the EU but require strong consensuses to leave. It should be symmetrical.

Particularly when the scope of the EU seems to be a bit vague and regularly expanding to micromanage various aspects of life. It looks like they might be trying to rebuild the US federal government.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_membership_of_t...

So what makes kid users on linux so special that they don't need nanny state protection? Are the Californian legislators just throwing them to the wolves? Or are the protections being put in place here not actually important?

Seriously, what is the message here supposed to be about the kids using linux? And why are they so different from kids using Windows or Mac? Are there other safety features we can exempt kid linux users from?

> Good job, California lawmakers!

Is this serious or sarcasm? They passed a horrible law, now its an internally contradictory horrible law because apparently it isn't important enough to consistently enforce. So, you know. Why legislate it?

There isn't much of an angle here that reflects well on Californian lawmakers, they're still supporting this authoritarian trend of de-anonymisation and rolling back free communication on the internet. They're just going to come back for linux later once the idea of legally mandated PII on account registration is normalised. Although I do see this "In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law" so we seem to be entering a wild space where they're going to try and micromanage this in a weird way.

If you can figure out how to turn the "should" in that sentence into "can" then you'll die wealthy. Tracking goals and turning them into a coherent strategy is a major unsolved problem in software engineering.

We accept best-effort from CTOs, but that leads to an industry that is a bit like a comet with a few success stories and a huge burning tail of leadership where they have limited to no ability to understand whether they are on track to achieve their goals and those goals don't come together into a coherent strategy. There is a strong argument that many of the success stories are only good relative to companies that failed even worse than they did and we all had to pick one of these bug-ridden software packages.

It is a lot like the era of the manufacturing industry before the statisticians moved in around WWII. We haven't managed a similar moment in software yet.