roenxi

Broadly I agree but it has to be said that on the web that isn't mandatory. Firstly barter is an option. Secondarily you can use non-fiat currency if you prefer - crypto has been around for nearly 20 years now.

I am perfectly capable of expressing myself if HN's software allows me to misspell chauvenist and the idea that an iPhone needs a different standard should be totally rejected. That entire line of argument is distracting from the actual problems with censorship - people with power forcing the public discourse into nonsense and lies.

Promoting bad spelling and grammar is not a free speech issue.

Interestingly; that goes to whether someone is a hedonist or not. Dumping money into personal pleasures would defeat the point of the wealth for many. The idea of bettering themselves is expressed through boosting social status rather than hedonistic pleasure. If you gave the average man on the street more money they'd buy yachts and whatnot because they know that people have yachts generally have a higher social status than people who do not. They don't have a strong concept of wealth independent of status.

I don't even think it is complex; you can say what you like so there isn't a free speech issue here. Users are still going to type what they intended to type. Apple can reasonably have their software avoid making guesses about what users meant to say on charged topics.

It'd be a better if Apple provided a list somewhere for transparency but what they are doing isn't going to cause anyone any trouble.

I mean sure. The paint isn't dry on China's economy, they built most of it in the last 20 years. They're probably not feeling overwhelmed at the thought of that sort of change - they won't have jobs they never used to have, but there will be all this stuff available assembled by machines.

This is similar to complaining that we don't all have the opportunity to spend 8 hours a day doing backbreaking farm labour after the agricultural revolution - it is only important to have people labouring if the labour is achieving something useful.

Labouring for the sake of doing labour is stupid. If robots can do it cost effectively, they should.

We could innately have built-in statistical models, then everyone can be happy. Given how well statistics seems to work for language acquisition the brain is probably approximating a statistical formula at some level.

It's something of a mix of both - the world is a web of cabals executing conspiracies but simultaneously most people are so bad at systems thinking that they can't identify the conspiracies from people acting individually in their own interests.

For example, in this instance the fall of the web to commercial interests is more or less inevitable if you look at the basics, regardless of conspiracies (people getting paid produce more & better quality stuff than people making a hobby of it). But if you look at the execution of that dynamic there are always going to be small highly motivated groups of people trying to achieve specific goals on the sly.

It is unusual for any individual cabal to be powerful enough to control a situation.

Yeah. I think that the pelican SVG benchmark is actually a much better reflection of the state of AI art than the visual quality of the images.

Based on current trends I would not be at all surprised if LLMs working with tools, SVGs and looking at their own work get there before diffusion models. I've stopped keeping up with the image models so maybe I'm underestimating the progress but I dropped out because they were so frustratingly bad at composition and integrating details together.

That whale image makes me think that the situation hasn't improved as much as I'd expected. It is a really cool idea and a pretty picture, but the whale looks a lot like it is flying over the top of some sort of huge glass dome on the ground.

The essay is long and could do with a summary version (hurrah for AI). I get the impression it missed some of the big worries about curiosity - you can be curious and explore things that are terrible ideas. For example, being curious about what it feels like to gouge your own eyes out with a rusty spoon - legitimate question but not something that a healthy human should want to be feeling emotionally or exploring practically. There is a spectrum of healthy and unhealthy curiosity.

The same thing turns up at a societal level. There is a profound question of whether truth and human society are compatible. In some hypothetical universal truth sense, maybe the right thing for humans to do is pack up and end the species. Maybe there is something that looks a lot like a universal truth that implies that, but isn't and we wouldn't realise it fast enough to avoid doing something stupid. We don't (can't, really) know what the outcome of inquiry would be. That suggests that if anyone has any values at all then it is possible for them to conflict with curiosity because curiosity may undermine them.

There are a huge number of people involved in AI outside of the major AI companies both in smaller AI companies and lots of independent developers. They aren't having much success bringing AI to the masses and this is because they don't care enough about money and they aren't selling their ideas aggressively enough. There is this odd tendency to undersell achievements because they weren't motivated by the Right Stuff.

The AI companies are as much being pushed along by investors as they are in the driving seat, but the push is in the direction of getting real products in front of people and experimenting with this miraculous tech everywhere it could possible work.

It's a highly speculative investment in a company that, based on current trends, relies heavily on technology which doesn't exist yet and experts in the field aren't sure what it will be used for. It lost 42 billion dollars last year.

I'm not even going to say it is a bad investment, it might be a once in a lifetime opportunity. But if the current public information isn't enough to dissuade a buyer then that investor is sophisticated enough that they can wait 2 more quarters after the IPO before buying.

That's pretty interesting, because with the Bonsai 2 quantisations it is quite achievable to get Qwen 27B running at 50 t/s on reasonably priced gaming machine [0]. Which in turn suggests that Fable 5 coding performance can be achieved locally with a bit of clever harnessing.

Although the same harnessing should also improve Fable's performance. The important thing here is the cap for local performance looks like it could be quite high.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... suggests 16GB VRAM, 32 GB system.

I think it is more that the common words in the language are the scaffolding (like hedging with "I think...", "like" for setting up an example) and the subject of the scaffold is normally unique and highly context specific.

Looking at the first Frieren example:

"Live without [fear]", "Live without [bread]", "Live without [sunlight]", "Live without [honour]". The common words are more than enough to set up a generic sentence for lack of something but then what someone lacks can be literally any object, concept or verb. There are a lot more than 500 of those in the world.

Yeah and those ideas have a common thread to them - making other people's lives worse with no obvious gain to anyone. People should stop with that and spend some time thinking about how to make the situation better instead. Somehow modern society sprung up in place of barbarians living in caves and it wasn't by vigorous protest. The trick seems to be capital investment, clever application of science and accumulating reliable data. A lot of negotiation and tolerance of people who believe other ideas too. Violence did happen and in some small amount is probably useful but people go waaaay over the top in trying to use it as though it was a productive force. It nearly never works.

What this woman is allowed to do makes up a complex topic; there are arguments in all directions. But if her scheme for improving the world involves foremost delaying some people's lunch then she should put some time into coming up with a better plan. Ginning up attention by being unusually petty isn't going to be the path to world peace and prosperity.

> Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain

They don't have "domains", they are career politicians. It is nice when a politician has some experience in the topic they're legislating on but the system works by having generalists who bow in whatever direction winds are blowing the most money from.

It is not possible to be an effective career politician by having firm principles or technical expertise. It requires a near total dedication to politicking. If they happen to have knowledge of a topic it is coincidence because the number of political topics is large and the number of politicians is comparatively small.

> The wearable would see the increased heart rate when a person is moving with a heavy backpack versus moving without one.

I'm sure it would notice the heartrate was up, but how is it supposed to translate that into energy consumption? Eg, my heartrate is 80 bpm. How much energy am I burning in an hour? There isn't enough information to say, even if we add in data points like a gps measure of my velocity and elevation change.

This comment confuses me. Why would we expect calorie burn to be related to steps and heart rate? How could a wearable measure energy expenditure? What if someone was wearing a heavy backpack? The energy to move the backpack has to come from somewhere but the wearable can't tell that the person has one.

One of the problems with highly judgemental writing is it does become a bit challenging to pick out what the argument is. I think there are probably some good points in here but I'm too distracted by the style to focus on them.

> "I'm not here to remind you that DHH is a shameless fascist"

While fascist is a vague word I don't think he's using it properly; and it means that all the other times he asserts something it needs extra interpretation to figure out what situation he's describing. As far as I can see [0] facism to him might even include things like free speech absolutism.

[0] https://davidcel.is/articles/the-dhh-problem

It's difficult for a politician to do something that isn't political, so I think we can let them off the hook for making symbolic gestures.

However, putting legislation up for a vote is not puffery. Establishing what parties vote against and why is actually an important part of what the opposition does. Otherwise they may as well not turn up.

That's a terrible argument, the IRS taking an interest in obscure finances is usual. Can't escape from the tax office by trading in obscure things.

Monero is, time of writing, #12 on the coinmarketcap leaderboard [0] and less than 1% of the crypto space by market cap. It's hard to complain about that being called obscure; anyone who gets a feel for crypto by looking at a top 10 coins list isn't going to see it.

Although it is a technological miracle. That coin specifically might do poorly in the long term so I'm not about to call it an investment, but I think it's quite possible that Monero holds a probable entry in the history books in 150 years time.

[0] https://coinmarketcap.com/

Absolutely. It's a very effective system for quickly concentrating all the owenership of ice cream machines in the hands of the people who are best at deciding when, where and how much ice cream is needed as measured by profits - even if they personally don't have much when they're starting out. And if there is a better measure than profit I'd like it to be proved up in a country I don't live in because those experiments usually result in ice cream shortages.

The concentrated ownership results in graphs a lot like the one in the linked article.

Assuming we're talking about the US, printing money and giving it to wealthy people has been a big contributor to the failure of the last few decades. The US has made a broad-scale effort to disable every form of market-based feedback that tried to replace the leadership class with more competent leaders. If they'd stopped with the upper class welfare then the 1% probably would have less money, but giving them the money then organising to tax it away again is a strategy that is both bizarre and unlikely to be effective. It's too complex and arbitrary.

If we're talking globally, Asia ain't failing. They're big on producing lots of real stuff. Minted a lot of new billionaires.

> The primary benefit of massive wealth is power. It's an intangible, but it's very real. It can't be dismissed as paper wealth.

I mean, sure. The follow up thought is after that power has been taxed away then someone else is going to need to be taxed for the raw resources that are needed. If welfare checks start being paid out with intangible benefits it'll lead to loud complaints. That gets to the heart of the problem with taxing the people with truly enormous amounts of wealth, they mostly have power, which isn't much use to someone who needs food and shelter. The tax burden has fall somewhere in the logistics chain that produces the houses and the food (although maybe a long way upstream).

> Distributing from the person who owns the ice cream machine to the person buying ice cream puts the money in the hands of the person far more likely to spend it quickly

I'm not going to disagree with that, but I will point out that this is why they couldn't afford the ice cream machine in the first place. Consuming the seed corn is a road to eventually having no corn.

There is an economic optimum amount of ice cream production and there isn't any reason to believe it isn't being hit under the current system. It isn't obvious if the need is for more or less ice cream machines. Moving ownership of the machine around doesn't obviously change the amount of ice cream produced; and its owner isn't consuming the machine. But a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy is pulling all those levers on the assumption that making random changes in ownership has to help. It probably won't.

There is a certain tautology to "tax the rich" - a country can't exactly tax the poor. The poor have no money. Taxes on poor people are more about the principles of fairness and to some extent transparency than because they have the financial resources to contribute meaningfully.

It'd be interesting to do the same graph by real consumption. I bet it'd be much more equal - most of the wealth is tied up in systems that keep the country ticking over and are only providing paper benefits to the owner. Which is why I say "transparency" - once you track what happens in real terms, "taxing the rich" almost certainly becomes "everyone ends up with less". If you take real resources away from the person who owns the McDonald's ice cream machine in real terms I have a hard time seeing how it won't come out of the lifestyle of the dude buying icecream. The person getting the money wasn't consuming anything real.

> ...or chinese models are benchmaxxed...

It is hard to tell what people are trying to say when they use undefined words with no particular meaning. This doesn't seem to change the relative position of the Chinese models much. The Chinese are a month or few behind and the state of intelligence is so volatile that the top 10 will be completely different in 6 months. I'd expect it to still be a mix of US and Chinese models with the US models leading.

If he is that does seem like a reasonable claim. There is precedent in concepts like citizenship, for example. Property rights. Inheritance. A lot of things give people advantages purely because that is how the legal superstructure works without reference to any inherent imbalance in economic or social power.

darth_avocado is implying that he'd rather use a different index to measure inflation. Which is reasonable, this game where "real" doesn't mean real is not helpful. I've been seeing "real" growth in my gold holdings for years but mysteriously enough the weight hasn't changed. And while I'm ranting it drives me mad that we're supposed to pretend exponentially increasing prices are "stable", that is about as unstable as prices can get without starting a mathematics degree.

I doubt there is a compelling argument why people should have to use CPI as the comparison index. I'd consider any investment that only matched CPI to be losing value for example; they should be tracking something one of the monetary aggregates.

There is probably more to it than that. If the platform can censor the content then it is capable of identifying it and so can choose not to display a Nestle ad. That would be a more palatable solution for the ad platforms and also probably acceptable to most companies. If users want to watch something on a platform what do they care? The article makes a good case that this is something more like Operation Choke Point or the itch.io deindexing where the financial system is being mobilised for political ends.

It is an interesting use case to monitor because there are obvious need for something like crypto, but so that has not come close to taking hold.