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317070

5,536 karma · joined January 11, 2015

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317070··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
Look into who they were the debtor to. Turns out that a lot of German banks would have needed to scrap debt from their books.
317070··on My Business Is Dying
Ironically, doesn't the "Get a job" paragraph have the solution? If you believe that is what the future of jobs at a company looks like, perhaps try to market your tool to agents?

You could add an API which is perfect for agents to use. Something that survives the pull request review process.

317070··on What will be left for us to work on
How do you become a baker, in a world of bread factories.

I think the answer lies in baking the good old fashioned way and ignoring the factories.

317070··on Attention is all we have: A conjectural theory of cognitive inequality
I think that important in this context is to consider Polgar's experiments on his own daughters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

This one is for the bucket "Geniuses are made, not born", and kind of supports the thesis that early habits are important.

> The experiment began in 1970 "with a simple premise: that any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any chosen field, as long as education starts before their third birthday and they begin to specialize at six."

Another point the author misses is the medical trajectory. If you have ever done math under viral fatigue or low blood sugar, you can appreciate that many people probably operate their whole life under what others would consider "brain fog".

317070··on Felony Bench
I like how AI safety expert Robert Miles put it. [0]

So much effort was spend on philosophizing whether a safe enough sandbox would exist. But that was obviously irrelevant as in hindsight it should have been obvious we were never going to use one.

[0] https://youtube.com/shorts/XnnjvIqf4fU?si=MxuPlR3hjxAgjx5_

317070··on Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful
> Search engines will index the decoy. You'll get no traffic. Their solution is basically putting yourself in a black hole.

It's only search engines? And who uses those anymore anyway? Other bots?

It doesn't affect organic traffic, so you are not really putting yourself into a black hole. A lot of website are driven by social media and organic traffic, so they would be just fine with this approach.

317070··on Police officer used Flock cameras to track estranged wife 717 times
> Ideally you don't have the same people responding to a domestic dispute as you have responding to a robbery.

In Belgium, this was the system until 2001. The system was overhauled to the regular single police force after the largest protests in the country's history.

What goes wrong is that these 2 are essentially in competition, and ended up actively obstructing each other.

317070··on People are worried about America's solvency
If the US becomes insolvent, that would severely impact the USD. But other currencies will not try to follow the USD, there would be no point in that. The USD would just lose more status as an anchoring point. The US is also not a major oil exporter, so presumably most oil will trade for other currencies, rather than try to sell for an inflationary currency.

In short, if the US becomes insolvent, the rest of the world will largely ignore what happens in the (at that point) 8th economy in the world, and mostly try to untie their economy from it.

317070··on Claude users are mad that Anthropic's new watermarks will catch them using it
https://arxiv.org/html/2510.20075v6

It is quite counterintuitive, but you can hide texts the same size as the original text in imperceptible statistics of a text.

Compared to that feat, hiding a watermark is very easy.

317070··on More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts
> but I also accept the reality that it is a more visible, and perhaps exaggerated, form of what has been ongoing forever

Thanks for sharing this. It's a deep insight for me. I did not understand how the same people that were deeply skeptical about the state, ended up being so quiet when the state's corruption became flagrant and blatant. But this line of thinking makes a lot of sense.

317070··on Why do we assume everyone should be working?
A retiree and a person during a weekend are not even close to the same. For one, the econometrists have no problem distinguishing them, because they don't look the same at all. I can get accurate numbers for retirees, and they will not be confused by people who are off for the weekend.

For two, in context of the original article, what matters is "are they working" which the author clarified to "having a job". A person during the weekend has a job, a retired person does not. Again, no confusion.

For three, in the context of minimum guaranteed wage: a person during the weekend is not paid by the government, but by his employer. A retired person is paid his pension by the government. So one can go in the bucket of people that is actually receiving a minimum income already, the other one does not. So within the context of my first post, they also don't look the same.

If there is a parallel you are seeing and I'm missing, feel free to point it out. What I agree with is that from the person's perspective, they are both not working (in a sense not meant by the OP) and both receiving an income (though from a different source). But after that all similarity stops as far as I can tell.

317070··on Why do we assume everyone should be working?
If those workers receive pay from somebody else than their employer to do that, one might count them, but I don't know any countries where they do. I don't think there are economic metrics that take weekends into account when defining regular employment.

I'm not sure what you're aiming at with this question.

317070··on Why do we assume everyone should be working?
Because without an income people tend to not live for very long and that idea makes people uncomfortable? I had not considered that.

"Wage to live on" is perhaps a more euphonic translation then.

317070··on Why do we assume everyone should be working?
"Loon" is Dutch for wage. A loan would be "lening", even though "loon" and loan sound exactly the same.
317070··on Why do we assume everyone should be working?
Absolutely.

Do note that in the US (and loads of countries) people save for their own retirement, whereas in Belgium the government pays the retirement in a "workers today pay retirees today" system.

317070··on Why do we assume everyone should be working?
If you adjust for all ways people receive minimum income benefits, not just the 'final resort' one, you get

> In Belgium, roughly 4.35 million adults (aged 18 and older) are not working out of an adult population of about 9.5 million, around 45%.

Of those, roughly 3.95 million or 40% receive government income above the leefloon.

317070··on Why do we assume everyone should be working?
> if you had that system, we have no idea whether or not the masses will be content enough to stay sane and peaceful.

Belgium, the Netherlands and a lot of European countries, have a "leefloon" or "bijstand". It is a monthly payment from the government if you have no other sources of income or wealth. The name means it is "pay to stay alive". It's not a lot (1518.29 dollars today for a single person), but allows for the necessities.

So what happens is not _really_ unknown.

317070··on Big Food vs. the People
Different people have different susceptibilities to getting addicted. And once addicted different people have different amount of brainspace left in their life to quit addictions, also depending on how hard the rest of society makes it to quit.

So, there is neither something wrong with you, nor with everyone else.

317070··on Magnolias are so old that they're pollinated by beetles, not bees (2025)
For many people, it is the other way around. It is very remarkable that there is a bird, which looks so much like a big version of this butterfly!

After all, in Europe these butterflies are commonplace, but I've never seen the American bird in my life.

317070··on Count Binface
Those other parties all declined to compete in this by-election. They want Farage to stand to the rule of law on his corruption, and not endorse this procedural manoeuvre.

The timing of this by-election is also such that, were there an actual race, Farage would likely get his propaganda on the front of the newspapers throughout the summer months while everyone else in politics is on holiday.

317070··on Why are US consumers so angry? It's not just high prices
"Ethnic Chinese" is a term covering 1.45 billion people. I don't even know where one would find a definition for "ethnic English", but if you take the NHS' "ethnic British" which ridiculously excludes even Irish heritage, I can see how you'd come to 50%.

A reasonable comparison would be to look at "Ethnic European", covering roughly 1.2 billion people.

> london's trust level and prosperity have become a shadow of their former selves

As someone who traveled the world a bit and lived for a decade in London, I'd beg to differ without further elaboration.

317070··on Why are US consumers so angry? It's not just high prices
A datapoint that points to the contrary:

- Singapore pre-1965 was a low trust, racist society. The tensions were so bad that in 1964 there were racial riots.

- Today, after a lot of immigration, within 1-2 generations, Singapore became a high-trust society.

Similar stories in South Korea and Taiwan. In all 3 cases, the trust came recently, within 1-2 generations, and from different approaches of the state. They combine high institutional trust and the economic prosperity with medium-low interpersonal trust.

317070··on Triple Dragon Fractal (2020)
I reckon Paul only claims to have created the webpage titled 'Triple Dragon Fractal'.
317070··on Is The Economist Always Wrong?
I fact checked: Chomsky has never been on Epstein's island.
317070··on Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
In the OECD data averaged here, I reckon this chemo therapy is counted as sick leave. On a first search, the metric seemed to be defined as "(compensated) absenteeism from work due to illness, days per employee per year"
317070··on Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
I probably get there, but I have young kids.

But yes, these are averages between 1 person having 12 weeks and 12 people with 1 week. It's most likely power law distributed, so the average will feel weird.

There are people with cancer, severe car crashes and other horrible but temporary medical conditions in this average.

317070··on The bottleneck might be the air in the room
My portable CO2 monitor goes off. You can set a levels of warning on the aranet. It is a very quiet, non-disruptive alarm, but an alarm nonetheless.

I agree with OP. I don't always carry it along, but it has been a massive boost to my productivity.

317070··on Right to Local Intelligence
The UK did not ban AC. Don't read the Telegraph, and if you do, don't trust it.

Source: I live there

317070··on Scaling Laws, Carefully
Well if it was the data that was copied, nobody would be using LLMs. The data-generating process is the thing that would be copied.

That's why we do appreciate the nth artist making classical or techno music.

317070··on Scaling Laws, Carefully
Right, and what happens at that limit is most exciting! A model that has a cross entropy at that limit for a data stream of text, produces a stream of text that is both theoretically and practically indistinguishable from the original stream.

And so if the datastream has been produced by something intelligent, the resulting model is indistinguishable from that intelligence. That is the whole compression idea behind artificial intelligence.

The limit is not a bug, it's a feature!

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