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adamandsteve

16 karma · joined March 26, 2026

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adamandsteve··on Grand Theft Oil Futures: Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense
There's a <50% chance you'll make money off of it because it's zero-sum, and if insiders make money on average then other traders (i.e., you) have to lose money on average.

The issue is that the odds aren't actually 50/50 on you buying either side of the trade; one half will look like a better deal (and given public information, it is a better deal) so you'll buy that half. Then when the market resolves, it'll turn out that insiders knew some piece of information that made the other half of the trade a better choice.

adamandsteve··on SWE-bench Verified no longer measures frontier coding capabilities
"The community" is astroturfed as hell though. Anthropic pays influencers to promote Claude Code and likely bots a ton as well, so it's hard to come to any kind of consensus online. Even if everyone was acting in good faith, some people will have a much better experience than others because of the domain they're working in (e.g. AI being much better at frontend and commonly used libraries).

The only real way to evaluate a model is to test it yourself but that's exhausting for each new model and not comprehensive anyway.

adamandsteve··on GPT-5.5
This has to be bait.
adamandsteve··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
Being good at predicting the future will give you only a slight edge, so even a small amount of inside trading can make you unprofitable.
adamandsteve··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
> Why do we need a third party gambling apparatus involved?

Wisdom of crowds > wisdom of individual firms, also a market solution actually would work in this case imo. Manipulating the weather seems easy enough to detect and much more expensive than any benefit you'd get, and there aren't really any negative externalities.

adamandsteve··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
Between these I think Amazon is less bad. It's a monopoly & monopsony which causes a lack of innovation and (eventually) higher prices but it's also a much more efficient way to sell things and it doesn't destroy the fabric of society or anything. Meta though is just as bad if not worse than any gambling site out there. Its products are optimized to destroy your attention span, feed you polarizing content, destroy your mental health and waste hours of your time every day all while ironically making you less connected to other people because users won't get off their phones and have a conversation.
adamandsteve··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
Prediction markets are far, far more slippery. Anyone working at one of these places had other options & chose to sell their morals so I think it's perfectly reasonable to not hire them.
adamandsteve··on My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
I kind of agree, but presumably this would happen more among people maintaining security-critical projects. In that case it'd be a net positive for other projects to get infected first, since if they aren't delaying package updates by 24 hours then security probably isn't quite as important. Which also makes it better in general because hackers will be less incentivized to write viruses if all the really juicy targets will only download them after they've gone undetected for e.g. 7 days.