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"The man who can really play his part as a citizen, who is fit for the management of public and private business, and who can guide cities by his counsels, establish them by his laws, and amend them by his judicial decisions, is assuredly no other than the orator... My aim, then, is the education of the perfect orator. The first essential for such a one is that he should be a good man, and consequently we demand of him not merely the possession of exceptional gifts of speech, but of all the excellences of character as well."

— Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (Book 1, Preface, 9–10)

Does Mexico have a free market for medicine?

It's only $100 in Mexico because the company can charge $10000 in the US. Not by some inherent virtue of the Mexican system. If the US forced costs down they'd rise everywhere else.

The US subsidizes the rest of the world in Medicine, Defense, Technology, etc...

Agreed! Protest is always about the assertion of power and identity, like all politics. But protest, like physical violence, attempts to assert power by sidestepping the mechanics of government. So it does not need evidence reason or logic, it is operating on an entirely different plane!

I prefer to think of LoZ without a coherent timeline. Just 3 archetypal souls finding each other again and again and again...

1-800 Contacts has my undying love because their customer support is excellent and seamless. I wouldn't say I look forward to calling them, but it's just so simple and effortless.

Again I analogize to the situation with developers. There are glass half empty devs who seem to enjoy writing boilerplate and hate AI, and glass half full devs who realize AI when properly used enables an order of magnitude increase in productivity.

If AI saps motivation from some mathematicians, I question where their motivation came from in the first place. Maybe they're just too wedded to the traditional way of doing things and aren't fully appreciating the actual productivity gains AI makes possible.

But it's entirely up to humans whether or not higher mathematical thought ceases due to lazy over reliance on AI.

Just because AI is capable of churning out vomit inducing prose, doesn't mean we need to surrender to a future filled with it. Humans who actually care about what they're doing will use AI when and where it should be used. I trust the intelligence, curiosity and tenacity of mathematicians to learn to work with AI. I don't understand the sky is falling worst case scenario Tao and others seem to be taking as the most likely future.

Wouldn't that be developers?

I really can't empathize with treating mathematicians as some sort of AI refugees who need coddling and support. AI is a tool, and competent mathematicians should learn to use it like everyone else. I find it hard to believe that AI doesn't represent a net potential benefit to human understanding of mathematics. Yes it can be misused, but any tool can be misused. Just don't misuse it...

Agreed from my experience 3.8 Flash writes better prose than Opus 5.5

That's the glass half empty view. I prefer the glass half full view that the future is going to be an exciting continuation of the endless and universal arms race between attackers and defenders. Life would be boring if there was no conflict.

Surprised at how few there are...

What was hard about it?

Reducing prehistoric existential struggle to "xenophobia" is really something...

This comment may trigger life changing reflection in hundreds or thousands of souls...

Tokenmaxxing is just the new pr-maxxing. Proxies truly are the root of all evil.

It's like a mass proliferation of fast casual but damnit I want some steak.

It's just their culture

Labs are innovating to bring token prices down. You can already see the focus shifting from frontier intelligence to frontier efficiency. Not to say models aren't improving, but improvement is slowing while token efficiency is increasing rapidly.

Commodified products competing on price does not bode well for valuations.

Now just to coincide release with a global pandemic!

Genuinely curious, because I know von Neumann was an intellectual giant, but what was his most original/groundbreaking contribution? My impression of his work has always been that he would survey a field, find some particular problem that needed attending to, tidily solve it, then move on to some other domain. But I guess there's a latent assumption there that he didn't do anything huge or groundbreaking.

As you say neutrality is a fiction.

Everything the US does and has done is aimed at defending itself and its interests, which includes its allies, as it should, and as it must.

The extent to which these actions appeared neutral was just a product of the overwhelming power of the US and overwhelming unity - by virtue of deference - prevalent among the Western powers during the Cold War, in the shadow of a common enemy.

Global neutral institutions exist on a fictional foundation that becomes thinner by the day. For substantial matters on which there is no rational answer, the only solution is the exercise of power.

"loading phase" is 20g a day. It's well tolerated as long as you drink adequate water

But as you say, it's the Iran war and other factors that are to blame. Inflation is lurking in the background but various things will always appear in the foreground to occupy the market's attention for a bit.

But on the scale of years inflation will dominate all transient idiosyncracies.

Past performance doesn't guarantee future results

Stock market dynamics are fundamentally different now compared to the last period of sustained high inflation (70s)... And stocks have done fantastically over the last few years of stubborn inflation.

Stocks keep marching higher. And it's not irrational. Because the only way out of this mess (debt with high rates) is inflation.

Important to remember AI is a direct assault on their actually profitable business: search and ads.

OpenAI and Anthropic are existential threats to Google and it will operate accordingly.

Ominous for the industry and investors that token price is becoming the main battleground. Could be Anthropic's rationale for IPOing this year.

Read the headline too quickly and thought it was about AI agents...