wmorgan

An interesting test for kids that I stumbled upon. I’ll play them the audio of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when we’re the car or whatever. So all the gags in that TV special are visual. Nevertheless my kids go nuts laughing from the back seat, at the right parts. What we’re all listening to is just instrumental, but they’re seeing all the gags. I wonder if you tried it with a kid with aphantasia. Would they laugh?

Yeah, if the hospital is part of an HMO, it wouldn't even be legal. The ACA sets a floor on medical loss ratio.

Why not? Lasker said, “when you see a good move, look for a better one.” That was tree pruning advice for an implicit search.

It’s talking about how you can type

  def frobQux(Qux qux, int radians) {

And it goes and reads your code and suggests a reasonable way to frob a qux a certain number of radians. Which is at the same time (a) pretty useful!, (b) fairly new, we’ve only been able to do this since 2023 or so, but (c) also not that hard by 2026 standards because capabilities have advanced so much in the last three years.

Yeah, it’s hard to reconcile the assertions by the author, that he has contributed in a "disciplined" way to his 401(k), and he’s 41, and he doesn’t think his savings will replace his income. The S&P 500’s total return over the past twenty years has been around 11%, annualized. That’s on track to millions, maybe even tens of millions for him by retirement age.

Maybe he's nervous comparing the top-line number in his retirement account to his expected expenses, but (a) he's got 25 years of compounding ahead, and (b) anything else he manages to save in the meantime -- including on his mortgage -- is going to help as well.

FYI a tertiary source aggregates both primary and secondary sources. When you read the plot summary of a movie on Wikipedia, for example, that summary cites a primary source, that is the movie itself. It's allowed to cite primary sources but there's guidance on how to be careful about it.

Illicit means maybe against the law but definitely against the rules, for example an illicit affair. The word for against the law is illegal, from Latin, or unlawful, from Germanic. I guess the Germanic cousin of "illicit" would be "forbidden."

Kalshi is in fact more strict, both defining and punishing insider trading, than CFTC/DOJ. Kalshi is perfectly happy to hand out bans and fines for activity the government doesn't care about. Every Kalshi market has a button on it, "report insider trading" which I'm sure is clicked a zillion times a day by gamblers who are upset they lost.

The reason they do these things is that their first priority is to keep the gamblers happy, and the gamblers hate to think they got cheated.

This just gestures at the meta-problem with prediction markets, who pays for the alpha? With stocks, companies generate returns to capital. With commodities, there are buyers and sellers of the underlying. But there is very little economic usefulness about most prediction markets, especially by volume. The only way to get enough users to justify the effort to figure out accurate prices, is to turn it into an entertainment product. And in an entertainment product, if the customer doesn't like X, then you crack down on X.

Brandenburg v. Ohio was decided in favor of the appellant. As I suspected, there are no cases of a US court interpreting your theory of the law on 18 USC 111.

Is that your theory, or is there case law that backs it up? From what I saw the bounds on 18 USC 111 are quite narrow indeed: I found a case where the defendant _fired at federal agents with his shotgun_, and the appeals court threw it out because the jury was incorrectly instructed that they could use the fact that he shot at them when considering he misled them afterwards. But actually, the jury was not allowed to do that. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/199...

18 USC 111 does not apply here. Forcible action is an element. The action doesn’t have to be itself the use of force; it’s sufficient that a threat being some action that causes an officer to reasonably fear bodily harm. But obviously the actions we’re talking about on this subthread fall well short of that definition. If they didn't the law would be unconstitutional.

Those other two laws seem like an even weirder fit for the fact pattern in this subthread.

The military is German, not British. Eisenhower, Nimitz, Oppenheimer. Operation Paperclip. The maneuver tactics you see in Band of Brothers were copied from the Prussians — that is going back to the 1870s. Patton’s speech to the Third Army is the least British speech imaginable; if Rudyard Kipling heard it then he would have exploded. USMC has a web page basically apologizing for being so German: https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/why-the-german-example/

Everybody grew up among, and got their culture from, lots of different kinds of people. You are right about the culture of Massachusetts, where I live. It’s a special place, but it’s a counterexample to your point. MA has one of the highest rates of foreign-born population in the country, and it has been that way for a long time. When I was growing up, there was a big influx of people from China. Today it’s India. A couple of generations ago, Italy/Ireland/Poland. “Eat to live, don’t live to eat” my mother told me, but her mom was born in Germany and her dad was Irish. Massachusetts — by the way also consistently one of the most Catholic states — shows you can have the Puritan culture without the Puritans.

Untrusted userspace is exactly right. I’d expect these approaches to help on the margin but the authors oversell their point using words like “guarantee.”

Control tool access like OSes enforce file permissions: I understand it’s a metaphor, but also isn’t the track record of OSes here pretty bad?

Check whether the agent is allowed to use the booking tool: so a web browser? Isn’t a browser a pretty powerful general-purpose tool, which by the way could also expose the agent to, like, a jailbreak?

> As such, security researchers have to devise new mitigations to prevent AI models taking adversarial actions even with the virtual machine constraints.

An understated reminder that yes, we really ought to solve alignment.

This analysis would seem to exonerate even Pat Buchanan, who by the 1990s had learned to couch all his rhetoric in terms of culture rather than race.

> I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?

Nevertheless, his comments drew contemporary accusations of racism. So how modern are we talking about? This was well-trod discourse in 1992.

Buchanan and Vance had every possible culture to draw from to make their points, but they reached for Zulus and Haitians, two nations of Black people whose most famous historical event is a somewhat-successful war against White people. It strains credulity that this messaging is not fine-tuned to the electorate.

This so-called traditional definition returns too many false negatives. It would exclude, for example, the inflammatory newspapers of the Jim Crow era. Americans learned with tragic regularity in the Post-Reconstruction era why spreading racial rumors is so reckless. It doesn’t matter to the moral calculus that the rumors were "truthy." The norm against expressing racial prejudice predates the most recent party realignment; it's amply represented in WW2 training materials. This is not a new thing.

Concerns about reputation, too, as well as general friction. I used to do the menus for my dad's restaurant, which was always a big hassle first of all with the typesetting and going to the printers and everything, and then also it was such a struggle to get him to go up on prices. He'd just rather undercharge a little bit and make less money than be known as the guy in town who sold the "expensive" burgers.

The boring answer is meetings. Chapter 3 of High Output Management has a great treatment on the topic, and it covers both middle management and the executive level, including a timetable from one of Andy Grove's days. Here is a quote where he summarizes:

> As you can see, in a typical day of mine one can count some twenty-five separate activities in which I participated, mostly information-gathering and - giving, but also decision-making and nudging. You can also see that some two thirds of my time was spent in a meeting of one kind or another. Before you are horrified by how much time I spend in meetings, answer a question: which of the activities -- information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside a meeting? The answer is practically none. Meetings provide an occasion for managerial activities.

You can have those things without written language; they weren't hunter-gatherers. I don't know what building you're talking about, but as far as I know the Brits didn't have any building nearly that tall in 1700. The Brits didn't have a steam engine in 1700. The Brits recognized, in 1700, that the Indians were people just as much as themselves. This argument of yours projects onto the past an opinion that nobody actually held.

In addition to what the other commenter said, the Indians in 1700 Virginia weren't hunter-gatherers. They had farms, money, laws, and government. To the extent that the colonizing English didn't think of them as "the same," well, they felt the same way about the Irish, who are also European.

I suppose it's a matter of opinion. I would not have guessed that your list of US states governed “to spec” would include Idaho and Montana (weaker municipalities? Not sure), but not Massachusetts or Rhode Island (New England towns).

I'd only reiterate that if the question is whether there can be high-trust societies with a lot of local self-governance, that also have a lot of immigration, then Massachusetts proves that the answer is yes.

I live in one of those New England towns where everyone piles into the gym at the high school to argue about whether we really need a new fire engine. It’s not clear to me who you think lives here, but from what I can see it’s mostly Irish, Italian, Polish, and Indian. To meet someone whose four grandparents were born here is rare. Something like 30% of the population of Massachusetts was born in another country. Whatever else happened in history to make it this way, it sure wasn’t keeping out immigrants.

The Godfather is famously popular with Italian Americans, to a degree that was newsworthy in 1972 and people still write think pieces about it today. My cousin on the Italian side of the family started a Godfather-themed sandwich shop in Saugus, where he was out-competed by the existing Goodfellas-themed sandwich shop in Saugus. Italian Americans love The Godfather like Irish Americans love the Dropkick Murphys.

Yes your understanding is how almost everyone treats the word today. The slur is from a different meaning & different context. You'd never come across it in regular life, unless you were, like, into the history of baseball:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_(nickname)

Very true!

As an author of software, sometimes you make mistakes, and those mistakes are often of the form, "I permitted the user to do something which I didn't intend." How do you correct something like that? In the Java world, the answer is "add newer & safer & more intentional capabilities, and encourage the user to migrate."

In the Python world, this answer is the same, but it also goes further to add, "... and turn off the old capability, SOON," which is something that Java doesn't do. In the Java world, you continue to support the old thing, basically forever, or until you have no other choice. See, for example, the equals method of java.net.URL: known to be broken, strongly discouraged, but still supported after 20+ years.

Here's an example of the difference which I'm talking about: Python Airflow has an operator which does nothing -- an empty operator. Up through a certain version, they supported calling this the DummyOperator, after an ordinary definition for "dummy." But also -- the word "dummy" has been used, historically & in certain cultures & situations, as a slur. So the Airflow maintainers said, "that's it! No more users of our software are permitted to call their operators DummyOperator -- they now must call it EmptyOperator instead!" So if you tried to upgrade, you would get an error at the time your code was loaded, until you renamed your references.

This decision has its own internal consistency, I suppose. (I personally would not break my users in this way). But in the Java world it wouldn't even be a question -- you'd support the thing until you couldn't. If the breakage in question is basically just a renaming, well, the one thing computers are good at is text substitution.

So overall & in my opinion anyway, yes, it's very much true that you can upgrade Java & Java library dependencies much more freely than you can do the same sorts of things with Python.

Yes. I read a tweet a while back -- which appears to check out -- that the biggest city in Florida in 1900 was Key West, population 17,000, and Key West is not even on the mainland. The alternative to air conditioning (not to mention modern mosquito suppression) is that people simply would not live in Florida.

As you note, it's not an option to take it easy in the summer because otherwise the plants would cover everything and the roads would be impassable. Somebody has to mow it, and they need a place to cool off.

For another example, the author notes that the fruits are wrapped in plastic, but I don't think he realizes how much faster food spoils in Florida than the UK where he's from. Every bad apple that has to be thrown away is another apple which needs to be trucked in.

Api longa, sprinta brevis

John is not an Anglo Saxon name :-P

I guess this is my point of disagreement with the article:

> We have thus arrived at the intriguing result that wealth averaged over many systems grows at 5% per round, but wealth averaged in one system over a long time shrinks at about 5% per round.

Wealth averaged over many systems doesn’t grow by 5%. It shrinks just like the average. The EV calculation is just wrong. For any finite starting wealth between the players and the bank, there is a number of iterations where the EV turns negative.

If you say, well let the starting wealth be infinite, I say, okay? If you have infinite dollars there are a lot of tricks for making infinite more dollars. It doesn’t work in the real world.

> If we put bounds on the bank in SPP, the first coin toss would still have positive EV.

Not if the bank starts with $0. 0 is just as valid a bound as a trillion. You can’t calculate the EV without knowing how much the bank has, and once you know that, you realize the naive calculation for EV is wrong.