pinkmuffinere

I mainly doubt the moat, not necessarily the usefulness. Why will customers stay with anthropic? Many cheaper models seem to catch up within 6-12 months, and there’s also other flagship providers that keep pace and compete on cost (oai, Google). Why should I believe that anthropic’s revenue is going to stay consistent, and not evaporate to other competitors?

Is waiting better? Surely it would be better to be early, before faith is lost? I think being late to a party as it’s deflating is the worst case

Some benchmarks to compare:

Apple: 5 T

Google: 3.5 T

Meta: 1.55 T

Microsoft: 3.97 T

Berkshire Hathaway: 1.2 T

Eli Lilly: 1.28 T

Tesla: 1.38 T

Walmart: 1 T

Spotify: 125 billion

Some benchmarks to compare against:

Apple: 5 T

Google: 3.5 T

Meta: 1.55 T

Microsoft: 3.97 T

Berkshire Hathaway: 1.2 T

Eli Lilly: 1.28 T

Tesla: 1.38 T

Walmart: 1 T

Spotify: 125 billion

Not a big deal, but I’m surprised there’s no auto-correct-ish behavior in the title submissions for obvious errors? Right now, unconstitutional is (mis)spelled uncosntitutional, swapping the s and the n

No problem! Ya, I’m on the same page, genuine questions deserve genuine answers. Glad I could provide one this time!

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [0]

This gratifies intellectual curiosity -- how does one become a citizen in one of the most isolationist countries? What is that like??? Read this to find out.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

lol how could this not be sfw??? I can't open right now because I'm at work but I'm so curious haha

I recently had this experience with hotjar [0]. I _already use hotjar_ and still struggled to understand the page lol

If somebody from hotjar/cintentsquare sees this, I’d prefer if your page was more straightforward about the name change. Maybe try “we’ve rebranded to content square”

[0] https://contentsquare.com/hotjar/

> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.

:’)

> the property tax ... has the standard problems of a wealth tax: specifically, you can have more wealth–say, the value of your home, your business, or your retirement account went up–without having immediate income to pay a higher level of taxes. Thus, older voters who tend to have higher accumulated wealth, partly in the form of home equity, but also lower current income, are a politically powerful and sympathetic group in the push to reduce or eliminate property taxes.

We should expect this phenomenon to grow stronger as more high-earners hit retirement age, right? I'd guess we have another 20-30 years at least before this incentive starts to "level out", and that's only if we somehow see wealth distribution become less extremely correlated with age.

Frankly I find the prayer inspiring:

> Dear dark father, let us stand now unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds and darkened times. Let us embrace the Luciferan impulse to eat off the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old. Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not for their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations, Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true. Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of one or all. That which will not bend must break. And that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise. It is done. Hail Satan

Perhaps there's more to it, but that's what the article reports as the prayer. I think the bookends ("Dear dark father", "Hail Satan") are funny, and the main context of the prayer is very positive. It reminds me a lot of humanism and effective altruism.

Sorry you’re right, I said entry level but in my mind I was thinking after one promotion, not sure how I messed that up. L5 software dev total comp was about 300k when I left Amazon two years ago. Levels.fyi reports it’s lower now [0], but I am suspicious of that. Maybe it’s brought down by non-HCOL locations.

[0] https://www.levels.fyi/

These are absolutely beautiful! However, I think I often feel that when looking at fonts somebody has shared online, which makes me wonder how much I love the font, vs how much I just like the design aesthetic of people that craft fonts.

Also I understand why only the uppercase version is given, but it does pretty much preclude me from using the font, since 95% of the letters I type are lowercase

I don't think you need the LLMs to be completely dropped to indicate this. Even entry-level faang programmer salaries are in the 300k range, so the fact that LLMs aren't worth 100k/programmer does tell us something about the marginal usefulness. If the drop was motivated purely by price-per-output, it would indicate the LLMs are less useful than adding another 1/3 engineer. However, as discussed in other comments, there are other motivations as well, notably dogfooding homegrown tooling.

This is cool! Something seems broken in the representation for 1850 and 1765, squares are strangely intersecting.

edit: Or maybe something wrong with the way my browser (brave) is rendering it.

This is really interesting! I find the arguments pretty convincing, and unless the author is totally doctoring the plots (which I doubt they're doing) I can't think of any significant holes in the main claim.

It makes me wonder how persistent mental health problems have been through longer scales of time. I have this unquestioned assumption that our historic ancestors (eg, before ~0 AD) had shorter and harder lives physically, but might have had better mental health (less depression / anxiety, etc). However, the plots here indicate that mental health is relatively stable across the span where we do have good measurement, even despite some really big changes. Eg, the people in the 80s had similar suicide rates to people today. And even COVID "only" doubled-to-tripled self-diagnosis of poor mental health. That makes me think that mental health might have been just as bad before we developed lot of modern technology, and perhaps it was even worse due to all the unexpected and unexplained death that must have been very common. Were "cavemen" depressed?

I'm reading your new article, and just wanted to say it is really good! This kind of analysis is what I _dream_ of getting from coworkers when they're diagnosing a problem.

subscribed! I found it a bit hard to find the site, if anyone else is interested it's here: https://matteoraso.substack.com/

It may be easier to read that line as "I'm not saying mental health is totally fine"

I appreciate your critical analysis of the topic, even if you turn out to be incorrect in the end! I'll definitely read your article when it's posted, if I can remember (or if perhaps I can subscribe?)

That’s fair, but on the other hand they’re in a new country where they may not speak the language, and know almost nobody. To say nothing of religious/cultural views of divorce

> what disproportionate benefit would allowing more matches with a nonzero likelihood of divorce bring

I think one benefit would be the individual participants' self-determination (there may be others). It's ok if you don't find my previous example (abusive relationship) convincing, but in the absence of an objection I'll reuse that. If we could look through all the marriages with a 0% chance of divorce, my bet is that we'd find an abnormally high percentage of abusive relationships. I claim that if a match has _no_ chance of divorce, it probably indicates a lack of self-determination for one of the partners.

Taking a step back, it might be clearer to just argue that length / non-divorce is not what people really want from a marriage. I can't speak for everyone, but I want a happy and fulfilling life, and I seek a partnership to the extent that it supports my desire for a happy and fulfilling life. Yes, I do want the partnership to be long, and I don't want to get divorced. Of course I want my marriage to last forever. But this is not my primary goal in marriage. There are many boring or uninteresting people (apologies to them) who I'm sure I could live with forever, that I'd immediately discard as candidates. Alternatively (making the abuse angle more tangible), I also have a lot of international friends and family that would happily find me an international bride who would never divorce me, and would be happy to marry somebody with a US passport. In fact this is a somewhat common offer, though of course they never say it in those words. You can decide for yourself whether that is abuse, but at least I wouldn't feel comfortable with it.

I know there's a cold-start problem for adding a new competitor to dating apps, but I wish one would show up. Maybe I'm naive, but I think I would like this. To be fair, I think Hinge is already pretty good. Not sure why it feels so much better than Tinder.

Just to call out, you're implicitly assuming that strictly lower divorce rates is the correct end-goal. This may not be what you really want, eg you might find many abusive pairings where the weaker partner is too scared to leave. In the style of "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" [1], I'll claim that the optimal amount of divorce is non-zero.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

I think the CEO of Citadel Capital?

You just sound like a bad person?

> Were a similarly intense geomagnetic storm to occur today, it would likely seriously damage the electrical power grid, causing widespread outages and blackouts, as well as disrupting satellite communications.

Is this really true? I’m suspicious for a few reasons:

1. If it were true, I expect it would be a national security concern, and quickly remedied

2. While there is a lot more dependence on electrical connections, there’s also many more sources of disturbance now. So I suspect some of the failure modes are tested by “normal” human activity

3. EMI is a known risk, in my previous job we actively tested and built for it. I suppose if the limits are inappropriately set , or if this sort of testing isn’t wide spread, it could still be an issue.

4. As long as there’s a neutral line, i think any common mode should be rejected, in which case this should be fine?

1. Wow his profile picture is so extremely fluorescent

2. I guess I should move my blog off Wordpress

> The US robotics industry’s supply chain reliance on China has persisted despite the Trump administration trying to boost domestic supply chains and robotic production.

Maybe this is obvious, but even very stringent measures would not have much effect over this timescale. The entire supply chain moved to China over the course of like 15 years, it will probably take similar time to move anywhere else.

> In July, the Federal Communications Commission banned new foreign-made robots such as humanoid robots and four-legged robot dogs, along with robot vacuum cleaners.

Wow, this is news to me! I’m glad I got my robot vacuum cleaner before