dbspin

> Prediction markets -- or really any price system -- aggregate the best available information about the future.

The best information available to those participating in the market (in good faith).

> Now, say that you somehow knew that this coin wasn't a fair coin

So insider trading?

I appreciate the verbose response, but the original comment implied that prediction markets literally predict the future... Which as you've stated they do not.

I'd contest the idea that they aggregate the best information too. Since they seem highly amenable to manipulation, the metagame of convincing the market that a given future is more or less likely seems more profitable.

Confidently stating a given markets prediction is wrong would involve accurately predicting the future... If one could do that consistently, a prediction market would be unnecessary to accruing wealth and power.

That's an idiotic premise. There's no circumstance in which it wouldn't be better to load in the missing data computationally.

> the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets

I'm not intimately familiar with prediction markets (I avoid gambling), but can you explain how this is the case? If the market unpredictably incorrect, then shouldn't it be difficult / impossible to predict precisely which bets will be wrong in a way that would allow you to profit from them?

Ultimately isn't it the case that all they're doing (at least from a prediction point of view) is aggregating (better or worse informed) guesses? Excepting outright corruption / insider trading of course. This might tell you a great deal about what the set of users of a given prediction market expect as an outcome for a given prediction, but it doesn't tell you anything about the future itself. Any more than the stock market (fails to) tell us to pull out money out the day before a crash.

Expert as a stochastic parrot may be in impersonating expertise, grammatical or otherwise, I don't see how citing it is relevant.

Always, but perhaps not in this case. I wasn't correcting spelling, but coherence. The comment I replied to includes a sentence that is both ambiguous and non-nonsensical. It doesn't seem to be an issue of grammar, but rather clarity of thought.

> Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them.

First off the sentence simply doesn't make sense. Specifically 'you will be surprised that you counted into them.' I assume the commenter meant something like 'you will be surprised that you were included in those statistics. But it's highly ambiguous since 'you counted into them' isn't sensical.

Trying to parse it from context, they could be suggesting a reader would be surprised at how the statistics are calculated, at who is included, at who is not included, or at how similarly they are calculated when compared to other countries.

"Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them."

Not to criticise, but just to point out that this sentence doesn't quite make sense in English, and it's not immediately apparent what you mean. The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.

Strongly disagree. Most crimes are crimes of opportunity. Most 'pervs' don't start out that way either. Detecting increasingly easy to conceal sousveillance devices is probably essential for any kind of normative public sphere to continue to exist.

Antifa isn't an organisation at all. It's a loosely defined ideology / set of tactics that leftist movements (everything from black block kids to local democratically organised spaces) sometimes use or follow.

Doesn't do bike routes at all in my country (Ireland) for some reason.

The scale is new. Obviously a nightmare or even a tragedy for individual people that it happens at all. But this happening to (tens of?) thousands of people all at once is a whole different thing.

Fortunately there's a near infinite demand for boosterism too.

Citation needed. I've owned Apple laptops for many years - and I'm a video editor (amongst other things). If this is the case it's new behaviour.

> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.

When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.

I think you'll need a more sterling critique than 'why would you wnat to tie this to a file format', to the most successful open source media technology of all time. Aside - yes there are or were legal issues with the fraunhofer patents for MP3, but these weren't enough to stop the LAME project and expired in 2017. The combination of MP3 and RSS should be studied as quite likely the most popular open format ever. They've kept podcasting out of the hands of wannabe privatisers from spotify to apple for twenty years.

OK... I'm going to assume good faith even though your wording makes it somewhat unlikely.

Similar textual examples would be any text containing actual language as it's spoken in a given place or time. Or any factual textbook detailing the buildings present in a given location. Or any text book detailing a now defunct construction process. Or any text book (generally small run) detailing a niche interest, now missing ecosystem or the state of a particular political situation at a given time. Essentially all textual primary sources for events which are not currently considered important - but which we have no way of estimating the future importance of. One can continue to create countless counterfactual examples in this vein. My overall point is we cannot know what may be useful or even essential in the future, and knowledge should be preserved under the assumption that it is likely to be.

Historians frequently refer to this paradox - how everyday aspects of life are frequently not explicitly documented, since they're so obvious to the communities or communities of expertise that observe and carry them out. So it's actually incredibly important to preserve what seems like ephemera.

Hell we couldn't have AI training at all if we lacked the corpus of existing written literature - but there was no way any author could have anticipated this future utility more than a couple of decades ago.

This is a classic mistake. We have no way of estimating the future value of a given book. It's perceived current value (a large part of which is simply obscurity) may be low. But it's future value - to historians, ethnographers, to researchers seeking a specific fact or example of language use or a hundred other things - is literally inestimable.

To take a crude example in a different medium - new york in the 90s - widely documented right? Yet, if you want to find high definition video of street life in a given burrough on a given day or year, you're faced with an enormously difficult task. There were some HD test videos done in Manhattan in the late 90s (which have been posted to Hackernews before), but there's no equivalent for the other burroughs. Your best best would be finding original negative out takes or location scouting footage from feature films, a very hard task. That's only 30 years ago. Outside of the focal points of the worlds attention - English language, rich countries, places in the news, contemporaneous sources for 'non notable' events (lifestyle, how people spoke dressed etc) is surprisingly poorly preserved.

Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc.

Doubtful. A robust protocol would be to scan several of each edition (to ensure no scanning errors), and scan each edition. Then too, these books are being purchased in lots with accidental duplicates, and all the major labs are doing it. So we're likely talking about tens of each book. For rare books - anything over a couple of hundred years old or small print runs either, that could well be most or even all copies. This wouldn't be immediately noticed either, especially if the books aren't currently considered noteworthy or well known.

"Look, I get it. It’s Q3 2026, and we should expect that everyone is utilizing AI at SOME point in their process (sourcing ideas, creating outlines, refining prose, etc.)."

Hell no. Sourcing ideas? From AI? Are you kidding? Essentially guaranteeing they won't be original? Refining prose? Making it much more likely it'll be generic as hell. Call me old fashioned, but while I can certainly understand asking LLMs concrete questions - how do I fix this, where can I unsubscribe from that - using AI to help communicate seems bass-ackwards. LLMs have no idea what you're talking about - they're free associating probabilistic sentences! What on earth value could that have in communicating. They self contradict, hallucinate, speak most frequently in a weird smug corporatese. How is this an attractive use case of the technology?

Interesting. In every European country I know of, the private option is still available. Just vastly cheaper and more beneficial due to having to compete with a public option which covers basic necessities, surgery etc.

Downvotes are disturbing and ideologically motivated rather than bothering to engage with the point.

You're not a musician if you hop onto Suno and generate a song. You're not a filmmaker if you open Gemini Omni and prompt some video. And you're not a bloody writer if you have an LLM do it for you. Talk about wheelchairs for the mind...

So... You don't write with language models... You have a language model write for you... You can spend all the time you like developing structure and ideas, but if you don't actually do the writing you haven't written it.

This is spectacularly wrong headed. If you want a book with your name on it for adulation or career reasons, but lack the interest, time or talent to produce one - hire a ghost writer. Writers are affordable and plentiful.

Similarly if you have a hyperspecific interest, kink or genre preference - use your position as a presumably well remunerated tech person to hire a writer to cater to it. Trust me, we need the patronage.

If you're looking for the pleasure of writing, you will unfortunately have to undergo, as all writers have through history, the process of suffering and discovery that we call writing.

From my observation and discussions I'd say 'the public' are far more concerned by material conditions - i.e.: the threat of job loss, the noise and environmental concerns around data centres, the increases in the cost of electricity and so on - than too much positive talk about AI.

No... As tech helper for various family and friends, I've been the one to clean install brave on a variety of machines. I typically demonstrate youtube before and after ublock for them, so they can see its effects. Never once not had adverts on a clean brave install. Not a representative sample obviously, but I've installed it for a fair few folks over the years.

I don't know what to tell you... It most definitely does not block youtube adverts for me and never had / did... Also, I found Ublock origin updates less reliable / frequent on Brave. Since switching zero issues.

Brave's ad block is pretty ineffectual by itself. For example it doesn't block youtube adverts. Recently switched to Firefox with Ublock origin, and loving it. So much more efficient and quick than it was back in the day when we all switched to Chrome.

I was replying to the references to the canon of Western mythology around dwarves and the like.

Since dwarfs (little people) actually exist, I don't think we need to reach into psychedelics for an explanation.

100% this. I wish more techies could understand this. That same logic underlies the 'scanning books and music and movies without permission is just like a student / artist / filmmaker learning'. Differences in technology and information access elicit different outcomes, different processes and entail radically different consequences for society.

That's not the case at all. You can regulate and audit a small number of players. To a great extent at least. You cannot even theoretically regulate local models. Hell I've got a jailbroken Qwen 3.5 running on my mac studio that has no guardrails at all.