skippyboxedhero

The boring reality is that you can bribe a civil servant with £5k in the UK. They are remarkably cheap.

Whether the civil service is a shit place to work or not (it is), there should be a recognition of the fact that the government still controls a large budget. Whilst MPs are scrutinised quite heavily, that same scrutiny is generally not extended to civil servants (because they make the rules). The number of senior civil servants who have been bent beyond belief is long (Heywood, Sedwill is still being put forward jobs even though he has been selling access to the government...it is incredible).

It is far bigger than this. I would look more closely into who is behind the article and who has been quoted for comment here/why. And you think it is just some expensive IT projects...UK media has been bought and sold, just not by who you think.

Bear in mind, there is far far worse corruption in Scotland (hub and spoke contracting for one, this system has private sector contractors advising the Scottish government on whether to accept their own bids). There is a reason why this specific paper is reporting on this specific corruption in the UK government (and never reports about corruption in Scotland).

It is everywhere, it is endemic, and part of the game is people who are involved briefing the media against other people who are involved in corruption. Almost all the people involved with this campaign that I could find are people on the UK's left-wing grift circuit (in short, you setup an "independent" company/think tank claiming that you are the only source free of big tech...and you are funded by an array of quasi-state bodies and coincidentally end up pumping out continuous pro-regime, anti-change agitprop...it is just layers and layers of corruption).

This isn't the US. Public sector productivity output (in the UK) is measured, it isn't a speculation based upon the population.

AI is not good at writing Rust. The ways in which it is bad vary from writing code that just looks off to actually not working. I do not use unsafe frequently so cannot comment on this particular scenario but I have seen similar stuff often, most Rust code that I read from AIs has at least one or two issues.

In particular, if you have a situation that requires any kind of conceptual understanding then AI will likely have issues. Sync blocking async is the classic example. My theory is that humans make this worse because they will often prompt in a certain direction and AI will faithfully build the footgun.

It doesn't escape the economy. This is the kind of bizarre left-wing isolationism/nationalism that seems to be rife amongst people who don't understand free markets.

If you pay money to Palantir, they are providing a service in return. That service is investment in your own economy, you pay them and then you own the thing they produce. Money does not "escape", the same amount of money is there before and after. The reason the UK is doing bad is this kind of bizarre economic xenophobia combined with a complete hostility to any kind of innovation or change. The question is: why don't we have a company competing with Palantir? Should be very obvious.

Correct, the main reason why private sector is used is nothing to do with salary.

Productivity hasn't increased in the public sector since 1997 due to massive overhiring and bloat, salaries are probably 20-30% higher than they should be based upon on productivity. And the main cost, which isn't factored into the above tired lobbying arguments you read from "sources" in the Guardian, is pensions. Public-sector pensions will rise to 10% of all public spending in the near future.

This is all by intent by the way, the primary issue is that existing employees have impossibly good conditions and it is effectively impossible to reform the system in any way. So you have these people are massively overpaid by any measure screeching about private sector hiring...okay, alternative: 20-30% of workforce are sacked, pensions converted to private scheme with 2% employer contribution, stack rank every year until public sector productivity equals private sector productivity.

Right, but EOD also introduces credit risk on the clearing house/bilateral.

Also, I would say that probabilistic finality is one of the main issues that tradfi has with crypto (which also exists in the case of margined exchanges, for the reasons you mention). Market participants expect trades to be final, the idea that they can be rolled back is extremely unattractive.

The reason you don't need to stop the market in crypto is because you don't have EOD reconcliation. If everything settles immediately and the risk engine can keep up with the market then there is no credit risk (there have also been multiple solutions to this problem in crypto, none of them involved waiting until the end of the day to see what happens when they try to cross everyone). The reason they have market halts is to limit credit risk from the market moving in one direction and winners being unable to recover gains from the losers. It is fair to say crypto DEX haven't solved this with ADLs but they start from a better place and the higher level of competition means that innovation to invent new solutions is actually happening. The reason exchanges have shit tech is because there is no competition.

I feel like your comment is baiting because you surely know what happened at LME with trades getting cancelled because they would have caused LME insiders to lose money. Hunt Brothers caused massive issues for clearing house, HK government had to bail out clearing house...there are massive issues with the current system.

why do you think LMAX disruptor runs inside many big exchanges? have you read some blogs online? LMAX disruptor does not run at "many big exchanges".

Disruptor is written in Java. LMAX itself is a tiny exchange that largely deals with institutions so doesn't have the same message volume as retail facing.

What language do you think validators run? So much stuff that makes absolutely no sense..

Order sequencing is not opaque, that is one of the primary benefits of DEX that aren't decentralized. SOL has issues with sequencing but there are attempts to fix this (Jane Street is one of the places working on this). This is a point that I made above about block space, and isn't relevant for Hyperliquid.

So when the iphone came out and no-one was using it, it wasn't useful? I cannot conceive a reality where I perceived the current state of things as the only things that could ever exist. I do not believe anyone could have that amount of self-regard, it is impossible.

HL has been tested up to $8bn/day in volume. The gap in resources is several orders of magnitude so if big exchanges were doing 1000x more volume it wouldn't matter because HL is literally running with a handful of engineers vs thousands. In reality, HL is doing 25-40% of CME, for example.

Fastest ones are processing a block every 10ms.

It depends what you mean by easy. Even if you are using a slow chain, you still have to compete for finite block space, you still have to work out how to risk/matching fast, etc.

With chains built for exchange use, operating them easier, that is why they don't require thousands of engineers. But the actual technical capability of the system is significantly in excess of tradfi exchanges. For example, risk function is real-time on-chain as opposed to EoD settlement. This significantly changes the possible feature set. Once you have built it, it is very easy...the question is why big exchanges rely so heavily on eod processes? The answer is: they are bad at engineering.

How do you think on-chain exchanges do it? Hyperliquid has 16 employees, not engineers...total employees. It is possible, it isn't going to be possible for many of the legacy exchanges.

I work with a major one and, being honest, from day one it was obvious they were incompetent. They employ a huge number of engineers and are unable to deliver basic features at any reasonable pace. Not even remotely close to it either (as in: you ask them to do something, they say yes, execs say yes, you get a deadline, date comes...deployment difficulties, environment not working, run around goes on and on forever).

I remember the CEO got on a call with us at the start and was slapping himself on the back saying they had no downtime...because they were able to do maintenance when markets shut (and have heard very bad things about how that goes). But it is 24/7 world now, our service is up 24/7 and, of course, this led to massive issues in time due to the very different expectations around delivery/quality. Our execs were impressed, our engineers said this was a bad sign. And, ofc, it transpired that they were total amateurs (to be clear, this is one of the biggest exchanges in the world) and were unable to deliver.

To come back to my original statement: there is a company of 16 people total who is, from the point of view of customers, delivering features faster. It is difficult to understate how insane that is.

There are non-profits in the UK. Some of these structures are over 100 years old at this point.

Expectations are completely irrelevant. Charities steal, in the UK the largest charities are essentially run as private companies except the shareholders are employees. Same thing with government, there was a unit of the government that spun out to a "non-profit" structure, some of the civil servants ended up becoming shareholders, and they now lobby their friends in the civil service to use their services...afaik, the government is still their only major customer and they were at, for example, all the pandemic meetings. Just generally, the UK has a vast network of these organizations that have a significant role in government policy but are totally outside the government (this is also true, actually even more so, in devolved countries...to a large extent, government policy there is formed by unelected private institutions).

There are no real rules here beyond humans act self-interestedly. No structure will contain this. This happens in for-profit companies with shareholders too. Principal-agent problem.

As a data point, I work at a US company that ended up in this place and the same thing is happening.

In my BU there were directors with 2 direct reports. Even at the next level up, the number of non-IC directs is only high single digits. There are many managers who were already engaging technically with the product (not PRs but playing an active role in planning work) and they have no idea what directors are actually doing...aside from attending meetings with other directors.

Almost all decision-making capacity has been moved outside of teams which has resulted in almost no actual work (because everything needs to be cleared by someone with no engagement with product) and people leaving (because promo decisions are made by people who have no idea what anyone is contributing, the worst ICs are the only ones they can retain ofc).

It is a terrible environment to work in.

I don't necessarily think the manager should be best IC but definitely someone who is genuinely talented with sufficient scope and responsibility to make good decisions/add value for ICs. There are way too many passengers today.

Also, this is true of higher-level ICs. At my work, they have no real engagement with product so have influence through ambiguous statements about the general direction that get passed around like the word of God. None of these decisions, so far, have been helpful or relevant.

No, you don't understand, the government must do everything.

Because aggregate statistics completely fail to recognise the massive philosophical differences in the system. It is like saying someone who buys Ferrari is getting ripped off because they aren't choosing to ride a bike.

The US pays more because it provides significantly greater coverage outside of aggregate statistics. All of the innovation in rare diseases is because of the US, in public healthcare systems some diseases are simply not treated because it isn't regarded as economic to do so. How do you even quantify that difference? It is like making a GDP comparison between 1800 and today, what price would someone in 1800 not to die of TB? Life expectancy of 20 years old in many countries? Anyone who compares the two things in terms of cost is a lunatic.

In short though, it is not obvious that a high-cost healthcare system is worse. The US system is inefficient, almost all of this relates to their decision not to use universal healthcare which leads to problems pricing insurance. However, this is not related to the system, there are many countries in Europe and worldwide which have effective private healthcare systems.

Life expectancy for a country of 300m compared with a subsection of Europe that is most wealthy...seems like a fairly disingenuous comparison.

Are you one of those people that believes most American schools are shooting ranges too?

All of the problems in the US are concentrated in subsections of the population (just as in Europe). America is a wealthy country that has a mix of south American and African problems attached to it. There is no healthcare system that is going to be able to fix this. Europe has the same problem, the difference is that share of the population was typically much smaller than the US.

I didn't say anything about the cost of healthcare on average. The US already has a public healthcare system, it doesn't work well expecting that to magically improve is not smart (again, particularly when you have evidence from other countries, even in magic Europe-land, that private healthcare can work effectively).

The point is that Europeans seem to believe that the US does not have a public healthcare system, it does.

I am not sure what your point is about covering fewer people either. The point of public healthcare systems is that there are redistributive, correct? The reason the US public healthcare system does not cover everyone is because there are people who can pay for their own healthcare...which is the same in Europe. I live in Europe, in a system with "free healthcare", I pay $100/month for private healthcare because queues for most things are multiple years long AND I pay $1-1.5k/month for other people to use the public healthcare system I can't use.

the US has a bigger public healthcare system than, afaik, every European country. the reason why there aren't pitchforks is also because the US is a much richer country than Europe so people are happy to pay for more healthcare. if you are rich, the marginal value of money vs more time being alive is zero (an example is orthapedics for the elderly, the US spends a huge amount in this area relative to most European countries).

it is worth considering whether could a rational person could possibly disagree with the idea that the government is best placed to decide whether extending your life is a good investment (there are European systems that are not well run which resolve this unusual ways i.e. being unable to provide basic healthcare whilst giving hundreds of millions to PR agencies, sometimes run by people who happened to work for the government...total coincidence, to run media campaigns to "prevent" ill health).

it is not simple. there are largely private systems that run very well, funnily enough most of these are in Europe. there are public systems that run very badly, again many of these are in Europe. the discussion of public vs private is largely not relevant or particularly interesting (do people think that doctors just work for free in Europe? they do not, the incentives when you try to create a cheaper healthcare system by underpaying doctors, which exists in parts of Europe, creates some very bad situations i.e. an overreliance on doctors from Africa who have unknown training, Americans tend not to have imagined the scenario where healthcare is "free"/paid with taxes but they are being operated on by someone who can't speak English).

Every country does it. Doing it is a central function of having a government.

The number of, presumably, left-wing people who advocate for the most extreme forms of libertarianism is truly incredible.

No-one cares.

Yes, everyone country does this. You can be barred from travel in a wide range of other circumstances in many other countries.

Every person has a nationalistic solipsism that renders them incapable of understanding events that occur outside of their own country. China and the US are two countries where this tends to be most severe, people outside these countries seem to believe they possess a profound and innate understanding of events there that renders them capable of offering a complete opinion (and, in reality, that opinion will almost always be entirely self-referential, 20% of the comments on this thread seem to be talking about the US).

At a high-level, the characterization of China as a lawless dictatorship is undermined somewhat by the higher levels of crime in almost every other country. You will see this interpretation of China from people in the US who live in places where there are constant, visible signs of crime.

Yes, all of the people involved live in a delusion bubble. Their economic and social existence depends, at this point, on making increasingly bombastic and eschatological claims about AGI. By the standards of normal human psychological function, these people are completely insane.

Definitely interesting to watch from the perspective of human psychology but there is no real content there and there never was.

The stuff around Mythos is almost identical to O1. Leaks to the media that AGI had probably been achieved. Anonymous sources from inside the company saying this is very important and talking about the LLM as if it was human. This has happened multiple times before.

Its like a Tesla, their values only go up. Stop asking questions, this is a legitimate investment.

The provider is a massive issue. People moving off Claude tend to assume this is solved.

Claude's uptime is terrible. The uptime of most other providers is even worse...and you get all the quantization, don't know what model you are actually getting, etc.

wait a few months, been using claude code since beta, there are issues but it takes time to realise what they are. people who have been using claude since 2024 began moving away before Anthropic's marketing blitz at the end of last year.

Cursor's token utilization is significantly better than Claude Code. Composer's latest model, for coding, is very competitive on quality given price and was clearly well-optmiized (in two months, you will hear almost nothing else than how expensive Anthropic is...this is before they try to release the really expensive models). so many very obvious things like this if you have been using this tech every day for multiple years.

unfortunately, the competition in this space is very weak because of how dominant cursor has been (Kilo/Roo/Cline all have major implementation issues with token utilization, everyone else is trying to go all in on agentic). don't see this getting better until things get much worse because of anthropic/agentic. from the decisions that anthropic is making, it seems they are busily digging their own grave. growth will come after this.

IDE is a moat with people who can code.

Anthropic has been giving companies access to the model. I think people on here have fallen for it once again. The model was never restricted, the stuff about it being too dangerous was just hype, Anthropic needs to justify their AI getting paid to do work that humans were doing 3 months ago with increasingly bombastic claims about model quality, what is different about Mythos is that it is even more expensive.

i have a solid picture now, the honest answer is: you're absolutely right

You're absolutely right.