alphazard

Investing in a business is also a bet. The capital you provide is a known quantity, you risk it for an uncertain outcome (the future value of the shares).

If your informational edge is just America invading Greenland, let's say you know that for sure. Then you could invest in the business, but you might actually be diluting your edge if you don't know more than the market does about the fundamentals of the business. The business could already have a lot of debt, and unable to get more to finance an expansion into Greenland. It would be less risky in that instance to just bet on the invasion, since that is where your edge is.

It depends on the person making the bet. With sophisticated enough brain scanning technology, we could distinguish between "placing the bet to achieve a feeling" vs. "placing the bet because they believe it is mispriced".

It's not possible for a 3rd party to, at a distance, determine why someone placed a bet in a prediction market. At a casino, it is possible. Most of the games are negative EV. So if someone plays any of the games, then it can't be because they are trying to maximize EV, it must be for some other reason (like a feeling).

If only there was some sort of way to see if a given market participant's behavior was best explained as a "high iq individual predicting geopolitical moves" vs. "just gambling".

Maybe a number of some kind?

Your criticism applies to any epistemic institution. Prediction markets are far more robust than any epistemic institution that humans have come up with so far.

Contrary to what you insinuate, we don't have 2 parallel markets for each issue, where each groups bets in their own echo chamber market to feel good about their beliefs. The law of one price holds and we have a single market per event, and it almost always resolves such that >> 50% of people agree with the result retrospectively. The resolution mechanism affects the price. If the market is expected to be biased towards a certain outcome, then that outcome will trade at a higher price.

You could easily prove your theory by giving an example of two markets about the same issue, with different arbiters, where the price significantly diverges. Or where the arbiters disagreed after the fact. There will be examples, but how much Volume traded in those markets, compared to the markets where it didn't happen?

The headline is part of a widespread trend of the word "gambling" being used as synonymous with "betting". This new use isn't constructive, as it makes it difficult to talk about either precisely.

Betting (risking something known for a payout which is uncertain), is ubiquitous in life, and really any game where the participants don't have perfect information. You are betting even if you don't realize it. You can't opt out, it's part of the human condition.

Gambling refers to taking on risk for the feeling it brings. The fact that humans can gamble reveals a quirk of human neurology. If we evolved to be more rational, then the phenomenon probably wouldn't exist. We know the feeling is valuable (to gamblers) because they are willing to place negative EV bets to bring about the feeling.

Anytime people criticize betting, it looks to me like some kind of utopian scheme, where everyone can have everything without risk.

> It's symbolism.

It's not. This is where the financial rubber meets the road, actions have consequences, and the rest of the world is looking at the US as increasingly unlikely to pay above inflation on its debts.

The people managing the pension funds (if they are acting in good faith) really want to generate yield, and really want to preserve capital for the Danish people. They don't want to symbolically do those things, they want to actually do them. If treasuries were still part of what they believe to be the best strategy, they would still be holding them.

> Nonviolent folks can be negotiated with. Its not permitted to negotiate with criminals/terrorists.

This is definitely true to some extent, especially when non-violence has been used in the more distant past.

But in recent history, the non-violent approach creates a sympathy for the cause among impartial 3rd parties, who find violence against non-combatants to be unpalatable. You can turn the world against an enemy by putting the enemy's asymmetric use of force on display. This doesn't work in a lower empathy society.

If an idea or methodology leads to "internal dysfunction" more often than not, than maybe it's a problem with the idea, and not a "lack of nuance".

DevOps only works when the developers are always right. What usually happens is the DevOps team thinks they know best (they are developers too, just not the ones using the tools), and they build a lot of garbage that no one wants to use, often making things more complicated than they were before.

Eventually a bureaucrat becomes the manager of the team, and seeks to expand the set of things under DevOps' control. This makes the team a single point of failure for more and more things, while driving more and more developer processes towards mediocrity. Velocity slows, while the DevOps bottlenecks are used as a reason to hire.

It's an organizational problem, not a talent or knowledge problem. Allowing a group to hire and grow within an organization, which is not directly accountable for the success of the other parts of the organization that it was intended to support, is creating a cancer, definitionally.

Equating process to risk aversion is a mistake I hadn't seen before. It's true that moving slow makes it less likely to make something worse per unit time, but it also makes it less likely that anything will get better. It means that you don't try many things, and can't get important things done quickly.

You can ensure quality by making features opt-in, having a beta program available to risk tolerant users, adding QA resources, having representative users in captivity (employed at the company).

There is no law that says that you must move slow or do less in order to be low risk, you can also do a lot, move fast, and only let the best out.

This is exactly right, and the article is clickbait junk.

Given the domain name, I was expecting something about the physics of information storage, and some interesting law of nature. Instead, the article is a bad introduction to data structures.

If a single engineer can sabotage a project, then the company has bigger things to worry about. There should be backups, or you know, GitHub with branch protection.

Aside from that, perverse incentives are a real problem with these systems, but not an insurmountable one. Everyone on the project should be long on the project, if they don't think it will work, why are they working on it? At the very least, people working on the project should have to disclose their position on the project, and the project lead can decide whether they are invested enough to work on it. Part of the compensation for working on the project could be long bets paid for by the company, you know like how equity options work, except these are way more likely to pay out.

If no one wants to work on a project, the company can adjust the price of the market by betting themselves. Eventually it will be a deal that someone wants to take. And if it's not, then why is the project happening? clearly everyone is willing to stake money that it will fail.

Companies need ways for individuals to bet against projects and people that are likely to fail. So much of the overhead in a large organization is from bad decisions, or people who usually make bad decisions remaining in positions of power.

Imagine if instead of having to speak up, and risk political capital, you could simply place a bet, and carry on with your work. Leadership can see that people are betting against a project, and make updates in real time. Good decision makers could earn significant bonuses, even if they don't have the title/role to make the decisions. If someone makes more by betting than their manager takes home in salary, maybe it's time for an adjustment.

Such a system is clearly aligned with the interests of the shareholders, and the rank-and-file. But the stranglehold that bureaucrats have over most companies would prevent it from being put in place.

This sounds suspiciously like the average developer, which is what the transformer models have been trained to emulate.

Designing good APIs is hard, being good at it is rare. That's why most APIs suck, and all of us have a negative prior about calling out to an API or adding a dependency on a new one. It takes a strong theory of mind, a resistance to the curse of knowledge, and experience working on both sides of the boundary, to make a good API. It's no surprise that Claude isn't good at it, most humans aren't either.

Firewalls are a fundamentally bad approach and are avoidable with good design.

Nothing should have access to the network by default. You can either get that right by limiting resource access (which is the job of the operating system) or you can get it wrong and have to expose new APIs and hooks to invite an ecosystem of many, slightly different, complicated tools to configure network access.

To give access to the network, you spawn the process with a handle to the port it can listen on, or a handle to a dynamically allocated port that it can only dial out of. This is no more complicated than configuration, and it doesn't have to be difficult for users. It can bubble up to a GUI very similar to what the iPhone has for giving access to location, contacts list, etc.

The fact that most "security" people have a knee-jerk reaction to "firewall bad" is exactly the cultural problem that I'm talking about. It's not a technical problem anymore, the solutions are known, but they aren't widely known, and they aren't known by decision makers. We've become so used to the wrong way for so long that highly trained people reliably have bad taste.

> Every time I've tried to deploy non-trivial software systems to highly secure setups it's been a tedious nightmare.

I don't know exactly which "secure setups" you are talking about, but the false equivalency between security and complexity is mostly from security theater. If you start with insecure systems and then do extra things to make them secure, then that additional complexity interacts with the thing you are trying to do. That's how we got into the mess with SE Linux, and intercepting syscalls, and firewalls, and all these other additional things that add complexity in order to claw back as much security as possible. It doesn't have to be that way and it's just an issue of knowing how.

If you start with security (meaning isolation) then passing resource capabilities in and out of the isolation boundary is no more complex than configuring the application to use the resources in the first place.

We aren't there yet. You are talking about crafting a complicated window into the box holding the AI, when there isn't even a box to speak of.

Microkernels lost "back in the day" because of how expensive syscalls were, and how many of them a microkernel requires to do basic things. That is mostly solved now, both by making syscalls faster, and also by eliminating them with things like queues in shared memory.

> you still need to design everything from the ground up

This just isn't true. The components in use now are already well designed, meaning they separate concerns well, and can be easily pulled apart. This is true of kernel code and userspace code. We just witnessed a filesystem enter and exit the linux kernel within the span of a year. No "ground up" redesign needed.

This isn't an AI problem, its an operating systems problem. AI is just so much less trustworthy than software written and read by humans, that it is exposing the problem for all to see.

Process isolation hasn't been taken seriously because UNIX didn't do a good job, and Microsoft didn't either. Well designed security models don't sell computers/operating systems, apparently.

That's not to say that the solution is unknown, there are many examples of people getting it right. Plan 9, SEL4, Fuschia, Helios, too many smaller hobby operating systems to count.

The problem is widespread poor taste. Decision makers (meaning software folks who are in charge of making technical decisions) don't understand why these things are important, or can't conceive of the correct way to build these systems. It needs to become embarrassing for decision makers to not understand sandboxing technologies and modern security models, and anyone assuming we can trust software by default needs to be laughed out of the room.

> things pressed down on each other because everything was expanding at the same rate

I don't think this originates with him, it sounds like an amusing joke a physicist would say because the math happens to be equivalent, and there is not an experiment to differentiate between the two.

A lot of comments here use this metaphor of emotions as things that flow from a source, and need to be expressed or they will accumulate and explode. I think this can be traced to pop-psychology bullshit, and there isn't any neuroscientific basis backing it up. It seems like wishful thinking by people who like expressing their emotions to others and want to justify their spend on therapists, or their occasional emotional outbursts.

Instead, the evidence points to the brain building habits around emotions and their regulation the same way it builds habits around everything else. If you practice not feeling emotions or becoming identified with them, then that habit will continue and they will become easier to not feel. There is not a debt to be paid, or a buildup to be released.

This is often framed in different ways, mediators talk about "creating distance" and "noticing but not indulging". The timeless grug-brain approach is "ignoring", described by emotional people as "bottling up". These are different ways to frame the same phenomenon, which is that the brain does what it has practiced.

If you are sharing facts like "Wisconsin falls are more deadly than Alabama falls", then you need to address the more obvious hypotheses that are conjured in the readers head. I found no mention of "ice" or "slippery", and instead the article blazed forward with its preferred explanation without providing evidence to dismiss the more obvious hypotheses.

Unfortunately most of the existing communication protocols that are standardized conform to a broken model of networking where security is not provided by the network layer.

Cryptography can't be thought of as an optional layer that people might want to turn on. That bad idea shows up in many software systems. It needs to be thought of as a tool to ensure that a behavior is provided reliably. In this case, that the packets are really coming from who you think they are coming from. There is no reason to believe that they are without cryptography. It's not optional; it's required to provide the quality of service that the user is expecting.

DTLS and QUIC both immediately secure the connection. QUIC then goes on to do its stream multiplexing. The important thing is that the connection is secured in (or just above) the network layer. Had OSI (or whoever else) gotten that part right, then all of these protocols, like SCTP, would actually be useful.

> or is Iran just not yet prepared to deal with them? ... you could flood all channels with packets like a jammer or something

A related question that someone here may be able to answer: Who wins the jamming game in principal? Is it $JAMMER or $COMMUNICATORS?

It seems like Starlink could distribute secret codes[0] on each device, where each code is used in some kind of spread spectrum scheme, and that jamming all of the codes would be difficult, the wider the spectrum? There must be some kind of energy/bandwidth tradeoff, but what I want to understand is if the game is easier for one side in principal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_theory

Strange to think that the whole obesity epidemic was essentially people buying 5% more calories than they should have.

> like every moment I spend with someone is just increasing or decreasing my score with them

This is more of a statement about the other person, especially if true, than the person trying to estimate the score, who is just trying to model their world as accurately as possible.

If you don't like it, the only thing you can do is try to be more complicated than a single score yourself. If it is in fact a good model of most human, then there is nothing you can do to change it, and being angry at the person who made you aware of the model doesn't help either.

Likely unconstitutional as it violates the 1st amendment, which has done a very good job of protecting the right to author and distribute software over the years. Clearly an unintended positive consequence, since no one who worked or voted on the Bill of Rights had a computer.

If the courts upheld the part in question, it would create a clear path to go after software authors for any crime committed by a user. Cryptocurrencies would become impossible to develop in the US. Holding authors responsible for the actions of their users basically means everyone has to stop distributing software under their real names. There would be a serious chilling effect, as most open source projects shutdown or went underground.

Definitely agree with the concern here, but this is not a problem unique to the food pyramid. Children will be taught all kinds of propaganda if they attend a public school. It's part of the cost, just not the part that is taken from tax dollars.

> There is a lot of speculation that we will soon see a new food pyramid that is inverted.

Pretty much everyone I know understands that the food pyramid is the product of various lobbies coming together and does not represent a legitimate theory of diet or nutrition. That is independent of their politics or opinions about RFK.

I don't think a change to the food pyramid would change anyone's actions, people haven't taken it seriously for decades.

> I'm not proposing to abandon ipv6, but at this point I'm really not sure how we proceed here. The status quo is maintaining two separate competing protocols forever, which was not the ultimate intention.

The end game will be a cryptographically large address space allocated based on some cryptographic operation, rather than a committee carving up the space arbitrarily.

Tor already does this, addresses allocation is not a problem. I think they used to use hashes, but now use Ed25519 public keys. Obviously, Tor is not suitable for most tasks. No one should have to pay for the extra latency if they don't need the anonymity.

The real problem is routing in these address spaces, and there have been a few projects like CJDNS which try to solve it.