HardCodedBias

Legally this is quite fascinating.

The state constitution is quite strange wrt. taxes:

https://law.justia.com/constitution/washington/constitution-...

There is a school of thought that the powers should be enumerated in the constitution. But this is not in favor.

Instead this argues that Culliton the ruling that classified income as property was incorrect. And once that door is opened saying that the claims within the existing constitution only apply to property and finally that there is a strong presumption of constitutionality.

Seems like a gauntlet. But it seems clear that given the composition of the supreme court that they will pass the gauntlet.

A constitution is but paper. It does not hold back the motivated.

AI says:

TX: Average Effective Rate: Approximately 1.36% to 1.6% (some estimates range up to 1.8%) of a property's assessed fair market value. The typical homeowner in Texas pays a median annual property tax of $4,108

WA: Effective Rate: The average effective property tax rate in Washington is approximately 0.75% to 0.79% of the home's value. State mean the median annual property tax payment is roughly $4,361 to $4,729

I doubt that the Russian kit is a scam.

I'm sure it is reasonably good. It just can't compete with the US's combination of technology, quantity, and operational excellence.

I don't mean that in a rah-rah way, it just seems to be the reality.

We'll have to wait a day or two, maybe a week or two, to determine if this is more capable in coding than 5.3, which seems to be the economically valuable capability at this time.

In terms of writing and research even Gemini, with a good prompt, is close to useable. That's likely not a differentiator.

The actual question is if Eaton overstepped his authority in this ruling.

Instead of ruling narrowly that named plaintiffs would get a refund

Eaton expressly said:

"all importers of record" which is all who were subject to the IEEPA duties.

It is unclear if this is lawful.

He didn't have to do this at all. He could stuck with tradition here. He specifies why he did it in this case, but this opens the door.

Also note that he did not open the door to "final liquidations" getting refunds (it is unclear how many tariffs more than 180 days ago were not officially protested).

"This is the end of software engineering."

Likely. The models have to improve, but the trend has been strong.

I have the misfortune to be required to use Gemini at Google, so I am not seeing it as clearly as others, but indeed the trend seems real.

AFAIK it has clearly been a ban of Gemini and not of all people's Google accounts.

However many stories appeared where people tried to claim that their whole Google account was banned to gain traction.

Unless it is clear that a full Google account has been banned we should push back on any story that claims this.

So much insanity.

Anthropic wanted a veto on use of force by USG. That is intolerable, no private party can have a veto over the sovereign. It is that simple.

Anthropic should have just walked away (and taken the settlement lumps) when they realized that the USG knew. But no, they started some crazy campaign.

This is so irrational on Anthropic. Purchasing managers across the US (and the world) have to understand now that while Anthropic has the best model on the planet, it is not rational (if you prefer it is not rational in ways commonly understood). It is a risk and must be treated as such.

It absolutely is a PR stunt. And the media is cheering.

It's absurd.

It's simple: If you do not like working with the military, cancel your contract with the military and pay the penalties.

They are explicitly not doing that.

Wait it gets worse for the "article"

ITEP gets the number by dividing Meta’s current federal tax expense ($2.82B) by its domestic pretax income ($79.64B), which is about 3.5–3.6%.

But Meta’s total 2025 GAAP effective tax rate was actually 29.6%, because it also booked a huge $15.93B charge tied to the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax and valuation allowances.

IIUC Meta is spending more on capital (due to AI buildout) than they are receiving in profits.

Given Depreciation this is expected. And ... the intent of the law, to prompt capital investment.

What's the scandal, exactly?

You sure it is about labor prices? These are highly capital intensive businesses.

You may want to ask your LLM to do very detailed research.

Of course it can do both. They are synergistic.

"If AI tech goes very well, it can be the greatest invention of all human history"

As has been said at many all hands:

Let's all work on the last invention needed by humans.

I think this is key:

"On top of that, there is currently no reliable way to accurately measure how AI use among businesses and consumers contributes to economic growth."

No doubt people are using it work ( https://www.gallup.com/workplace/701195/frequent-workplace-c... ) the question is how much productivity results and to whom does it accrue.

Partially this is AI capability (both today and in the past), partially this is people taking time to change their tools.

I will repeat myself:

comparative advantage

[edit] I will further repeat myself:

If comparative advantage will not hold then that's really something, no one understands what happens in that future, proposing some random solution at this point is unbelievably premature.

I upvoted you right off reading the first line.

But then you drifted.

I have no idea what you mean by "AGI, however, is mathematically impossible."

Further, your point about political pushback is short sighted. As AI becomes more lucrative there will be more impetuous to "pay" locations to have data centers, and as that becomes too expensive space is clearly the next answer.

What a poor take if

"AI makes human labor obsolete"

Given comparative advantage gives a offramp to this for a lot of what we currently understand as "economics", if the author is positing that we will be beyond this, then your response is missing the forest from the trees.

Seriously Guardian, this has to be the least interesting question possible "if AI makes human labor obsolete", I mean FFS talk about a lack of understanding.

If this had happened it would be scandalous. Unreal, really.

Luckily, it sounds like reality was his Gemini account was banned. Much more reasonable.

"They can't afford to fall behind on it."

They are very, very seriously far behind as of 3.0.

We'll see if 3.1 addresses the issue at all.

"These models are so powerful."

Careful.

Gemini simply, as of 3.0, isn't in the same class for work.

We'll see in a week or two if it really is any good.

Bravo to those who are willing to give up their time to test for Google to see if the model is really there.

(history says it won't be. Ant and OAI really are the only two in this race ATM).

LOL come on man.

Let's give it a couple of days since no one believes anything from benchmarks, especially from the Gemini team (or Meta).

If we see on HN that people are willing switching their coding environment, we'll know "hot damn they cooked" otherwise this is another wiff by Google.

It's just poop tier.

Come on.

Worthless.

Do you have any market counter points.

Market counter points that aren't really just a repackaging of:

  1. "Google has the world's best distribution" and/or  
  2. "Google has a firehose of money that allows them to sell their 'AI product' at an enormous discount?

Good luck!

Deepmind was their worst acquisition ever. It is a vanity project that burns cash.

Let's be real.

Google leadership is pathetic.

Sundar "the manager" has presided over an enormous growth of the businesses he was handed. He also presided over the complete collapse of the internal culture. OTOH he may have fired Dianne Green, so that's something. Overall, at best Meh.

Demis ran a startup that burnt cash on vanity projects and continues to burn cash on vanity projects. Gemini is barely open source quality AI, but Google makes it nearly free and has the best distribution on the planet.

Gemini has been a joke since 1.0. No release has hurt Google's brand more. 3.0 was STOA for about 2 days, easily Gemini's best release.

Anthropic and OAI are moving at amazing pace, Google can not keep up at all.

Their models are absolutely not impressive.

Not a single person is using it for coding (outside of Google itself).

Maybe some people on a very generous free plan.

Their model is a fine mid 2025 model, backed by enormous compute resources and an army of GDM engineers to help the “researchers” keep the model on task as it traverses the “tree of thoughts”.

But that isn’t “the model” that’s an old model backed by massive money.

Always the same with Google.

Gemini has been way behind from the start.

They use the firehose of money from search to make it as close to free as possible so that they have some adoption numbers.

They use the firehose from search to pay for tons of researchers to hand hold academics so that their non-economic models and non-economic test-time-compute can solve isolated problems.

It's all so tiresome.

Try making models that are actually competitive, Google.

Sell them on the actual market and win on actual work product in millions of people lives.

I saw this movie! It was awesome.

When that wave washed over New York, awesome! The freezing helicopter, woot!

I also liked the South Park parody.

If this pricing ratio holds it is going to mint money for Cerebras.

Many suspected a 2x premium for 10x faster. It looks like they may have been incorrect.