smeej

> Remember when you could text Dave from the office to turn your PC on because you were stuck in traffic?

I don't understand why this doesn't still work. If Dave from the office has access to your PC, presumably Dave and your PC are in the office, connected to your office's network, and thus it would appear that you are in the office?

Or is the assumption that you're carrying another device with you that would give you away? In which case, shouldn't the complaint be more about being forced to perform some kind of work task (like carrying/being accessible by your phone) when you're off the clock...which is hardly a new issue/complaint?

There are lots of places that are "desirable" to a large-enough-to-be-relevant portion of the population, but not as large a portion as the portion of the population that wants to be doctors. And they may like living there for reasons that someone who is drawn to a career in medicine might be unlikely to share.

Do you hear how this reads? It reads like you're not going to take warnings about the dangers of government power seriously because the people espousing them are trying to use government power dangerously themselves.

If you can't see the irony in that, that their warnings are twice as important if the pool of potential abusers if government power is twice as big, then nobody's really losing anything when you opt out of engaging these people.

Am I missing something? My only options on that site appear to be to watch a video or log in. I can't even read about what the thing does, or why I should care about it.

Has the web gotten that lazy?

This was before Signal switched to a username system.

I don't get it. I keep getting $0. Maybe I'm not using high enough numbers? I used the example of $100k each, or then $100k and $80k, which is on the high side of the median where I live and the single vs. married end up the same.

When I first saw this, my thought was, "Wow, I'm surprised Anthropic hasn't pushed back on their calling it that. They must not know about it yet."

Glad to know my own internal prediction engine still works.

Looking at the world, it really makes me wonder if "human" is what we want to model these machines on. It's not obvious to me what else we should choose, but working together peaceably and effectively doesn't seem to be our strongest attribute when writ large.

As a person who's worked in support roles in tech companies and has a working familiarity with Python but is not a software developer or engineer at all, it's been fascinating to watch the changes.

In the last couple weeks, both Gemini and Claude have asked me, "Can I use the computer?" to answer some particular question. In both cases, my question to each was, "What computer? Mine, or do you have your own?" Here I had thought they were computers, in the vague Star Trek sense. I'm just using the free version in the browser, so I would have been surprised if it had been able to use my computer.

They had their own, and I could watch them script something up in Python to run the calculations I was looking for. It made me wonder who it was at Google/Anthropic who first figured out that the way to get LLMs to stop wetting their metaphorical pants when asked to do calculations was to give them a computer to use.

It did make me scratch my head when I was trying to prompt Nano Banana to generate something and it was like Gemini started talking about the image generator in the third person: "The AI is getting stuck on the earlier instruction, even though we've now abandoned that approach." Felt a little "turtles all the way down" with that one!

I found it really ironic that the author started with something attention-grabbing about a topic completely unrelated to his point, but then made a series of such mundane statements to begin his own writing that I didn't care enough to go past his first screen. He didn't make me care about why I should make people care.

For a few shares, sure, but not if you come in at 10% of the whole market in volume. That would eat a huge chunk of the open order book, causing a massive trading wick. You can't buy very many shares at that 9x value.

It's only a huge payout if you have a huge amount of money. If you have $1k to put in, you get $2k out. Who's risking getting caught and potentially facing the death penalty for $1k in profit?

If someone already has significant money backing, and especially if that person already has some other specific reason to want you dead, I can see how it might be added incentive, but even so, you also now have to tip your hand. To buy in hard, you have to send a signal saying you have reason to be confident I'm about to die. You're basically shooting yourself in the foot right before trying to shoot me in the head.

Plus, it's not like the markets are anonymous. Polymarket isn't trading with Monero. You're not just tipping your hand ahead of time. You're pointing the investigators right at yourself.

I just don't see how the calculations end up falling in favor of killing somebody if you weren't already planning to do so.

But the hitman still does not get the entire value of the contract. The hitman gets the value of the number of shares he can afford to buy, but that's not the whole contract by any means.

I think I understand what you're saying about the pricing. Am I correct in saying, then, that if the odds are 90% in favor of my living through the contract, the "No, smeej won't die today" price should be close to $0.10 (again, ignoring fees and the time value of money)?

If the hitman tries to buy in with 10% of the total funds already in the market, the odds/price are going to shift hard. It's going to devour a huge chunk of the order book. Any market that suddenly has someone come in at 10% of the whole market value is going to get a massive trading wick. So yeah, he'd get some shares at $0.10, but he's probably going to eat the open order book to a much higher cost. He can 10x some very small portion of his money (however many shares are on the book at $0.10), but he can only 5x his money at $0.20, or 3x at $0.33.

Even if we assume he does have $50k to dump into the market, I still don't see how he's going to more than triple his money, which is a heck of a lot less than taking the entire market's value as though it were a bounty.

I think the problem is that I don't think it would end up primarily being about gambling.

I already live in a world where people make odds about whether I'm going to die. They're called "actuaries," and they work at life insurance companies. There are also oddsmakers of the same kind at car insurance companies, etc.

Right now, I hate that people who can actually analyze enough data to make odds about these things can only earn a living working for companies that are incentivized to find ways not to pay out when the odds do break against them. I'd much rather these people be able to make their livings just calculating odds, placing bets, and being right. I would like to have access to their calculations, and not be in a position of "just take it or leave it" when I'm evaluating a prospective plan from a life insurance company, for example.

Yes, by all means, there will be gamblers in these markets. There will always be some amount of noise, just like there is in the stock market. But why would that end up being the bulk of the industry? Just like with Wall Street, I would expect companies to grow up around these markets that specialize in getting the odds of things right, and making money off of their predictions. If the market ever became truly efficient, I think we would have a MUCH better idea than we do now about the likelihood of all kinds of things.

Heck, even if I think of something as apparently mundane as weather forecasting, if somebody came up with a breakout model that was right substantially more often, I would expect they would be able to raise all sorts of capital around it and start winning in all the weather forecasting markets, which would then make their predictions a reliable signal, and we'd finally have better information about what the weather is going to do.

I think one part I must be missing is why so many people are assuming that the primary user of prediction markets would be gamblers instead of specialists, especially once they operated at scale. I just don't see why that would happen. Anywhere there's an opportunity to make money reliably by coming up with better analysis or prediction tools, capital will flock there and incentivize coming up with better analysis or prediction tools.

I think I really would like to live in a world where that was highly incentivized, and I'm confused why people would not want that.

ETA: I don't think the gamblers would ruin this any more than they ruin Wall Street. I don't think they have enough capital to matter. (They are, after all, prone to losing money.)

Ironically, I actually have a philosophy degree. If I'm still missing the point, I really don't think it's because I haven't learned how to think.

All I can really do in this case is ask for explanation. If you're enough higher and mightier than I am that you don't care to give me one, that's fine. You don't have to. It's just kind of...unnecessarily condescending to rub my face in it without even trying?

> The size of the bounty isn't defined by the price of the contract, but the total upside available in the order book.

But one person doesn't get the whole thing. ALL the people holding that side of the contract split the payout, in proportion to the size of their holdings in that side of the market.

I think if I use hypothetical numbers, it will help me explain how I think it works, and maybe this will help someone figure out where my error is.

Let's imagine the market is about whether I will die by the end of the day. So far, there are $500,000 in total bets in the market, and there are 5,000 shares in this market. Let's say it's currently sitting at only 10% odds that I'm going to die. I think that means 4,500 shares, or $450,000, is on the "No" side and 500 shares, or $50,000 is on the "Yes" side. Do I have that right so far?

If nothing changes about the market and I'm still alive at the end of the day, everyone who holds a "No" share splits the $500,000 pot, correct? There are 4,500 of them, so they each get $111.11 per share.

But suppose someone has a solid plan to kill me by the end of the day. They decide they want to dump $50,000 in on the "Yes" side. That's not going to buy them 500 shares, because they would need someone willing to sell 500 shares at the current price. They'll actually get well under 500 shares, and probably not even half that many, and they'll still be splitting the pot among the other people who already have the 500 shares on the "Yes" side. So they're still at not even half the "Yes" side of the market. They can probably double or triple their money, but we're talking about making another $50-100k on top of getting their own $50k back. It's not like they get the whole $500k.

That's what I mean when I say it's "not a bounty." A "bounty" makes it sound like, "If you're the one who kills smeej, you get $500k," but that's not what's happening here.

Lots of people might be willing to try to kill me for $500k. A heck of a lot fewer are going to be willing to try to kill me for 2-3x whatever capital they can come up with right before the hit.

Am I at least understanding this part of it correctly, how the payouts actually work? If I'm not, that would go a long way toward helping me figure out what I'm missing.

But it's not a bounty. It's a market, right? So the payout is split among everyone on your side? And the if you try to dump a ton (measured relative to the size of the market) into the market, the price tanks because there aren't enough people coming in on the other side. You get a big wick in the trading candle, so you scoop up the much less favorable terms of the bet at higher cost.

Yes, but it spikes BEFORE the attack begins, which means we learnt someone thought there was a string reason to believe things were about to change earlier than we otherwise would have.

That's the whole point, isn't it?

And if you're going to tell me the paragraph I quoted nullifies what I've said, would you please explain how? Obviously I don't currently understand it the same way you do, and I have asked for help understanding what I'm missing. Saying, "You're missing it," isn't helpful.

It's not a bounty, though, right? It operates like other trading markets? So unless they have big money to wager, they don't have big money to gain. If it's hovering at, say, 10% odds, it's not like they can automatically 10x their money because other people have to take the opposite side. There would have to be a lot of liquidity in the market for their large bet not to move the odds, and as the odds move, they make less money.

> The irony of prediction markets is that they are supposed to be a more trustworthy way of gleaning the future than internet clickbait and half-baked punditry, but they risk shredding whatever shared trust we still have left. The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the capture of Nicolás Maduro may have been just a stroke of phenomenal luck that netted a roughly $400,000 payout. Or maybe someone with inside information was looking for easy money.

I'm trying to understand what the criticism is here, because the example seems to support the point that these are meant to be a way of learning the future, not oppose it. I thought the whole point was that yes, people with inside knowledge will bet large sums of money on things they expect to happen, and that's what makes the prediction useful. The market is meant to incentivize people who know things to act on them in a way that makes them known.

If I knew someone wanted me dead, of course I would want a prediction market on it, and if the odds suddenly shifted dramatically in favor of my death, I would use that as a trigger for whatever defense strategies I had in place. Someone has really good reason to bet a lot of money on the prospect that I'm about to die. It's probably someone who knows of an active plot in motion to try to kill me! The sooner I can find out about that, the better. I would much rather give them an incentive to make that known somewhat earlier than wait.

I feel like there must be some big piece of this puzzle that I'm missing that makes it so these cannot operate the way I imagine them, but I haven't heard anyone explaining what it is. Someone fill me in on what I'm missing here?

"Thinking" is directed and intentional. That may very well not be something people can do. I don't know. That's not what I'm talking about. And it very well might be practically impossible to find enough people whose brains can go multiple directions at the same time that it could be studied.

So no, I'm not going to follow you down a tangent that isn't actually related to what I'm saying.

It's impossible to me that you're dumb enough to be saying these things in good faith, so maybe I'm guilty of the same assumption, that anyone who can form sentences must have a brain at least as much like mine that they can connect two thoughts.

Nobody's talking about a heart functioning like a kidney. We're talking about the range of functions among people's hearts, or people's kidneys, or people's brains.

You're acting like everyone's heart is the exact same shape and has the same blood pressure and the same resting heart rate and the same outflow volumes, which is just stupid. There is a HUGE range of function among hearts. There is a HUGE range of "healthy enough to work" among hearts.

JUST LIKE THERE IS WITH BRAINS.

There's also a huge range of "not healthy enough to function under normal circumstances, but not bad enough to kill the person."

I don't believe anybody with the brainpower to create an email address, register for an HN account, and sign into it is actually somehow as ignorant of basic human biology as this, so stop trolling and go away.

No, you don't understand. On about a weekly basis, my need to go to the bathroom does not make itself pressing enough to get me there without leakage. It is not more than 15 steps from my desk chair to the toilet. Sometimes I roll the chair over because if I stand up, I won't make it.

Is it really impossible for you to believe that someone else's brain might be this different from yours? Presumably you have no trouble believing someone's eyes might be completely different from yours (i.e., might exist but not see a damn thing), or their legs might be completely different from yours. Why should brains be any different? What possible reason could there be for that?

Why, when there are full-blown medical specialties dealing with these sorts of differences, do you maintain the sort of willful ignorance that denies other people's brains might be completely different from yours in a way that makes things that work for your brain not work at all for their brains?

No no. Not "somewhere." A thousand places. At once. Not in sequence. Not from one to another. At the exact same time. And then they each fractal off in their own directions.

Take away the external reminders and my reality fragments into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which are just as real to me as the rest, just as pressing, just as important, or just as unimportant, because they all get lost in each other.

We are not describing the same thing. It's confusing that this is somehow not obvious from your side, because it's SCREAMING obvious from this side.

This doesn't answer the question on any level. There is ALWAYS a choice. Where does the choice go when you remove it? What exists in its stead? How is there ever not a choice?

You say "when you're allowed choice" like there are some times when you aren't allowed choice, and I think this is where you lose me. Everything is a choice. Always. It's not a matter of "allowed/not allowed." It's just a reality of existence for me. I'm not sure if I can explain this, but I can try.

You seem to have a kind of "decision persistence" that I don't have, where having decided it once makes it still true in the actual moment of taking the action. It doesn't matter how many times I choose things in advance, in the hypothetical, for the future--and the future is always in the hypothetical. I still have to choose every moment, day in and day out, what I'm doing. Even now, it's not quite a foregone conclusion that I'm going to finish typing this and click the "reply" button. Probably will, but I won't know that for SURE until I've done it. I might decide it isn't worth it after all.

My brain simply does not consider past decisions binding on present activity. I might still decide to do the same thing I thought I would do at this time when I thought about this earlier, but I have to decide it again, because it hasn't happened yet. Every moment is a "deciding again," which means every moment needs willpower. Putting on one shoe doesn't guarantee the other shoe comes next. After a shit, pulling up my underpants doesn't guarantee the pants come next. Maybe I step out of the pants and am halfway through lunch before I realize I never pulled my pants up after the toilet and have been walking around my house without pants for 45 minutes.

"It just is" is not an experience I have. They're not excuses. The next thing just goes, right out of my head. I don't talk myself out of doing what I previously decided to do next or into something else. But there is no mechanism that makes something happen just because I decided it should earlier.

There always has to be another choice, in each moment, about what to do, and whether to keep doing it. Every one of these choices requires willpower, and there's only so much in the jar. But it's not like the jar fills up once, overnight, and I just draw from the jar until it's empty and then it's gone for the day. The jar arbitrarily loses and gains willpower ad hoc throughout the day. So I can always reach into the jar, and sometimes there's some willpower in there and I can do the thing that Planning Smeej thought would be a good idea yesterday, but sometimes there's not, and nobody knows what's going to happen until maybe there is again later.

I don't know if I've made that make any sense. I just know that you're describing a reality fundamentally different than the one I experience.

10%: There's were I a Proving It's

100%: There's no way you could ever understand me if I were trying to say something complicated. I'm much too intelligent. I have way more mental firepower than you do. I'm a very complex thinker, and you just can't keep up. Proving it to you would be a waste of time. It's just hopeless anyway. -- If communication isn't working, sure, it might be a comprehension error. But...it's rarely only a comprehension error.

> Just 100% effort of resting and recovering, without any distractions.

You say that like the distractions are exclusively outside. I'm not the person you're replying to, but if I close all my blackout curtains, turn off all the lights, and turn off all but the white noise, but I'm not sleepy, my mind will go in a thousand directions at once.

How do I or anyone else explain that to you? The challenge is in the brain. It's not an outside force. There is no boredom.

The assumption that there is one set of rules for "correct behavior, rules, habits" that somehow applies equally to all brains is so spectacularly ignorant it's staggering.

I can obtain the same results as almost anybody at the vast majority of things. But if I am required to follow the same process, I simply cannot. I can't tell you how destructive the well-meaning people were who tried to tie me down to the way that works for their brain rather than saying, "OK, fine. Don't do it my way. Do it your way. Just get it done."

It's like saying to someone with dyslexia, "You just have to be MORE vigilant regarding looking at the letters, putting them together, and saying the words! There's no excuse for not following proper reading rules!"

It's just asinine. It's wonderful that you have figured out a set of "proper task-management rules" that work for your brain. I'm even happier for you if it was easier for you. That sounds nice.

But why on EARTH would the billions of living brains on this planet all function like yours? Does anything else in all those billions of bodies function exactly like yours? Of course not. And it would be ridiculous to expect them to.

So does the fall that tends to follow pride.