timoth3y

The saving grace of the SP500 and most similar indexes is that they are cap-weighted. So if SpaceX only, floats 5% only that 5% of their capitalization counts for index calculation.

The Nasdaq100 is more complicated. SpaceX's 5% would be counted as about 25% of their total market cap for indexing.

A Multitudes study recently cited in Scientific American showed exactly this.

AI led to not only longer hours overall, but also a shift from development to bug fixing and a 19.6% increase in out-of-hour commits. So longer hours, less interesting tasks, and more weekend work.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-developers-us...

Every few years a bill is introduced requiring profitable companies to pay additional taxes to cover the cost of the SNAP (food stamp) benefits received by their employers.

Lobbying ensures such proposals never gets far, but it seems like a common sense way of ensuring that these funds subsidize people rather than corporations.

A Google survey of 5,000 developers finds AI helps developers release more software—while logging longer hours and fixing problems after the code goes live.

It seems that LLMs always do the enjoyable work and leave us with the drudgery.

It was supposed to do the dishes while we create art and write poetry, but it turns it gets to create the art and poetry while we wash the dishes. AU gets to write the code while we have to review it and fix the bugs.

William Shatner is someone I really wish I could dislike. I mean, he is certainly not a conventionally talented singer or actor. He's laughably, painfully bad sometimes.

But the man keeps going! He's one of the hardest working people in show business. He clearly takes his craft very seriously, even if he defines it a bit differently from the rest of world.

The Wrath of Khan has no business being as great a movie as it is, and his version of Common People is fantastic.

I'm sure this collaboration will be .... something else.

== Edit I'm sure I am over-analyzing this - I do that with everything - but Common People is actually "perfect" Shatner.

When you start listening, you feel "OK, this is lame." After a bit it clicks and it becomes "Oh! I see what they are trying to do here." and by the end it becomes "Damn! This is awesome."

Shatner doesn't change throughout the performance, but everything just falls into place around him.

The article fundamentally misrepresents what AI is doing.

It claims that people using AI to create works that violate copyright is equivalent to individual artists painting pictures or people writing fan fiction. But that is not at all what is happening.

OpenAI and others are taking money from customers to generate copyrighted works. That's back-letter copyright infringement.

The states that it is unreasonable to go after all the individual customers. That's true, but that's not how copyright law has ever been enforced. If you have a company selling copyrighted works without permission, you go after that company not after their customers.

Many of the original Loony Toons and Warner Brothers cartoons fall into this category.

The reason they were produced from the 1930s to 50s was to be run in movie theaters before the main picture. Since they would run before different kinds of movies they had to entertain both kids and adults. Some of the humor in those cartoons clearly went way over the kinds heads.

It was only later that they were bundled as TV shows for children.

Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained? I've read several of those books, including Kitchen Confidential and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and I don't see the connection that the LLM (or you) is trying to draw. What is the deeper insight into these works that I am missing?

I'm not familiar with he term "Pacemaker Principle" and Google search was unhelpful. What does it mean in this context? What else does this general principle apply to?

I'm perfectly willing to believe that I am missing something here. But reading thought many of the supportive comments, it seems more likely that this is an LLM Rorschach test where we are given random connections and asked to do the mental work of inventing meaning in them.

I love reading. These are great books. I would be excited if this tool actually helps point out connections that have been overlooked. However, it does not seem to do so.

What meaningful connections did it uncover?

You have an interesting idea here, but looking over the LLM output, it's not clear what these "connections" actually mean, or if they mean anything at all.

Feeding a dataset into an LLM and getting it to output something is rather trivial. How is this particular output insightful or helpful? What specific connections gave you, the author, new insight into these works?

You correctly, and importantly point out that "LLMs are overused to summarise and underused to help us read deeper", but you published the LLM summary without explaining how the LLM helped you read deeper.

I think if we are going to ban people under 16 from social media, we should also ban people over 70 from social media.

At least as much mental and societal damage is done by elderly falling for bigoted, scammy, manipulative nonsense online than by teenagers having their self-esteem lowered.

As recent holiday gatherings have shown us, the young handle social media far better then the elderly.

/s

I think a lot of this has to do with the explosion of CEO (and by extension CxO) pay over the past 30 years.

Today, a CEO can turn in a few quarters of really solid earnings growth, they can earn enough to retire to a life a private jets. Back when CxO pay was lower, the only way to make that kind of bank was to claw your way into the top job and stay there for a decade or more.

The current situation strongly incentivizes short-term thinking.

With today's very high, option-heavy compensation a CEO making long-term investments in the company rather than cutting staff and doing stock buybacks is taking money out of his own pocket.

It's a perverse incentive.

The "us" AI is making rich is not the same "us" as the "us" AI is making unhappy.

> "we don't care why or how it works - we want to make the outcome happen".

That's the primary difference between science and engineering.

In science, understating how it works is critical, and doing something with that understanding is optional. In engineering getting the desired outcome is critical, and understanding why it works is optional.

> Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.

Trump did not leave office peacefully last time. The most probable outcome is that he will not leave office peacefully next time.

The TV series Columbo was a brilliant inversion of the British deceive story. Naturally, every story started with an upper-class murder, but from the start the audience was shown who the killer was and how the crime was committed.

The "mystery" was how the detective was going to figure it out.

At it's core, it is a systems problem.

When emergency powers are granted to the same person that has the power to declare the emergency, those powers are effectively no longer restricted to emergencies.

The exception will eventually swallow the rule.

There is some important nuance needed.

Plato was not against writing. In fact, he wrote prolifically. Plato's writings form the basis of Western Philosophy.

Plato's teacher Socrates was against writing, and Plato agreed that writing is inferior to dialog in some ways; memory, inquiry, deeper understanding, etc.

We know this because Plato wrote it all down.

I think it would be more accurate to say that Plato appreciated the advantages of both writing and the Socratic method.

> I have come to the belief that corporations are persons not only in law, but are persons also in reality. Their legal personalities are only the recognition of real, underlying, group personalities.

The author's (along with "many philosophers'") entire line of argument is argument from analogy. She lists many aspects of corporations that are similar to aspects possessed by humans and then conclude they are the same thing.

The same argument could be made with humans and ducks and it would be just as valid.

The author's view that corporations are actually people is becoming more common not because it is rational, but because it is profitable for corporations to be able to claim various kinds of personal rights.

> Update Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias

If foundation model companies want their government contracts renewed, they are going to have to make sure their AI output aligns with this administration's version of "truth".

"The order would dictate that AI companies getting federal contracts be politically neutral and unbiased in their AI models, an effort to combat what administration officials see as liberal bias in some models"

We saw where this fine tuning leads in the previous incarnation of Grok.

The same holds true for everything from cave paintings to Roman frescos. It's part of human expression. The tools of that expression shape it.

For example, Bach's music was shaped by the fact that the harpsichord had no sustain. The piano changed that, but "upscaling" Bach's work to take advantage of this new technology would destroy them. You use the new technology to play them as they were written for the old. The beauty comes through despite the change.

Non-competes (including stealth non-competes like the OP mentioned) are being abused by US employers seeking leverage over their employees.

In fact, 12% of hourly workers earning $20 or less had to sign non-competes. These workers do not have access to corporate secrets. It simply reduces their power to negotiate with their employer.

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2021/non-compete-cont...

Marlowe's "The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus" was written 300 years before Goethe's version.

In Marlowe's version Faust goes to hell.

I always found Goethe's ending to be unsatisfying, and prefer Marlowe's where Faust not only accepts, but embraces his fate to be a far better resolution.

There is also a strong signaling effect.

For better or worse, which books people are reading (or say they are reading) is often used to determine which "camp" they belong to. People who took the time to read Musk's biography are viewed slightly differently than those who chose not to.

IRL, discussions of the contents and ideas tend to be superficial.

When I'm asked what books I'm reading, I always answer honestly, but rarely mention a title that's been published in the last 30 years or so. For some reason, people seem to be more comfortable deeply discussing older works.

This is so frustrating.

Energy Star has been a huge success over the past 30 years. It's (now) widely supported by industry, has reduced the TCO to consumers for most household appliances, and results in hundreds of billions of kWh of electricity saved every year.

Energy Star is not some tree-hugging, drum-circle, feel-good program.

The US urgently needs to expand and modernize our grid. Every GW of power saved, is GW of generation and transmission capacity that we don't have to build and maintain.

Even though I understand LLMs penchant for hallucination, I tend to trust them more than I should when I am busy and/or dealing with "non-critical" information.

I'm wondering if ChatGPT (and similar products) will mimic social media as a vector of misinformation and confirmation bias.

LMMs are very clearly not that today, but social media didn't start out anything like the cesspool it has become.

There are a great many ways that being the trusted source of customized, personalized truth can be monetized, but I think very few would be good for society.

“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

      ― G. M. Gilbert, American psychologist who worked on the Nuremberg trials

> I have never since the beginning of C-SPAN heard anyone refer to anything heard on C-SPAN.

Correct. They hear it on Fox or MSNBC. Fox, MSNBC, and social media teams mine C-SPAN for clips.

Newt Gingrich understand the power of this very early on. He famously made several impassioned speeches to an empty house. He knew exactly who he was talking to.

I think the rise of C-SPAN was also a factor.

Once all congressional speeches began to be televised, everything started to become campaign fodder. Members of Congress were no longer talking to each other, but always and endlessly trying to appeal to the voters.

Congressional hearings are even worse. Very few congresspeople seem to have any interest and asking meaningful questions. They seem to be focused on getting a video snippet that proves how hard the are fighting for/against a particular issue.

It's all become an endless political campaign. Evidence has never mattered too much in those.

Planet Money had a wonderful series of episodes where they did exactly this a few years ago.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...

They traced the path of their barrel from purchase, to production, to refining, to the sale of the various hydrocarbon products.

It's a great listen.