runako

Disclaimer: I do not like to read LLM-generated text any more than anyone else.

IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they suggest.

Per their own benchmarks, they do not achieve 100% accuracy even on text that is published on the Internet, and which is likely encoded into the models themselves.

There is validity to their goals, but that is overshadowed by the irresponsible way in which it is marketed.

(All of this, swirling in a context where students are being told that they absolutely must become proficient at using LLMs to do exactly this kind of work by the highest levels of state and federal governments, faculty leadership, as well as the leaders of the workforce into which they hope to graduate. The message to youth is extremely muddled at best.)

This seems like it would be an altogether different experience than the common experience of using an LLM, which is characterized by the person spending a lot of time waiting on the machine.

> If it's cheaper they should say

I think you would be pleased at the very first selling points on their website, as well as on the product page. It seems they have at least considered the most obvious issue in their product space.

> 500 miles with hybrid system

> the grueling two hour drives

What country are you in, and perhaps more importantly, what roads are you driving on?

Taxes are not just money taken from people in the abstract. They are, quite concretely, used for specific purposes. In the US (because the OP is about the US), property taxes in particular are used to fund local services like schools.

So if you eliminate taxes on primary homes, you will cripple the public schools.

> stay-at-home wives that do nothing but watch TV all day

> include pensioners, kids

The word "unemployment" has academic and colloquial meanings that overlap in places and diverge in other places. Neither of those include a person who is happily living their life, not looking for a job.

Nobody considers a 2-year-old "unemployed" but the Heritage foundation, certain eugenics groups, and people on HN. It's a fringe view.

> from about 1945 until around 2000 in the USA there really wasn't such a thing as "a job that doesn't pay enough to live on".

Also, this is flatly wrong in that the wage laws were crafted specifically to enforce certain jobs not paying enough to live on. In particular, US labor & minimum-wage laws have exemptions for the types of labor which was commonly associated with disfavored groups. As a result, those jobs have been poorly paid ~forever. Example jobs: agriculture, food service, hospitality, personal care.

I'm saying that the "low paying jobs" have never been included in "unemployment." That is not how academics define "unemployment" nor how the term is colloquially used.

The OP is trying to change the definition of "unemployment," and it's a fool's errand because then you have to explain that oh no, I mean people are employed but not in the manner I think they should be.

(That latter part, even if I personally agree with, makes the argument very weak. The former part makes discussing this very confusing.)

Would be more useful to just say that lots of jobs do not pay enough. Simple, true, easy to understand.

> That may be the case in the US

The subhead from the post: "The percentage of the U.S. labor force that is functionally unemployed"

A popular comedy skit in the '90s was around the notion that people had more jobs than they wanted.

1999 was basically ~full employment in the US. Most people who wanted to work had a job.

> How do you tax wealth on unrealised gains?

The US does this in most jurisdictions. Homeowners pay tax on the current assessed value of the property, even if that property was purchased when the property was much less valuable.

It would not be a stretch to do similar for other assets. In particular, assets held in stocks or bonds are more amenable to fractional sales than are the primary residences that we already tax this way.

No, people don't like it. They don't like paying any taxes.

> If I bought $100K of stock in 1999 and sold it in 2026 for $200K

This is because you invested incredibly poorly. The S&P is up ~500% over that period, plus decades of dividends.

Long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate because rich people have more influence over the tax code than people who earn most of their income from working.

Anybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999.

I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.

> Binance, FTX, BitMex, Silk Road founders all went to jail

BitMex didn't go to jail, they all got probation/ankle tag, for not running a clean money org (allegedly no KYC, registering US accounts from offshore, etc.). CZ got caught in the US anti-China panic that also saw the TikTok ban pass Congress with nearly 80(!) votes in the Senate. Silk Road: drug trafficking.

FTX is the closest analog, but by all accounts they did not run a clean operation. What I have read of their operation would have been grounds for charging even if they were trading legal securities.

Seems the through line is if your main business is illegal, you need to run it as if it were going to be legalized tomorrow.

> Kalshi is just hoping to be treated like Uber was.

This is not a bad strategy for a company in our asymmetric regulatory environment. Fortunes were made in crypto on exactly this one-way bet.

Go on breaking the law until you get a favorable judge/Congress. Nobody is going to jail (we don't really do that anymore), you might pay a fine. Every once in a while you'll have change the app a little to sort of comply with a judicial order. There's practically no downside to this strategy.

> Most of us are only citizens because someone up the chain was born under this rule.

This understates the situation. All of us who are not naturalized citizens are citizens only because of the birthright clause in the Constitution. The US does not have any other way for a person born here to become a citizen.

If the birthright clause of the Constitution stops being enforced, Congress (or more likely in our current iteration, the President) will have to create a brand-new set of rules determining which of us natural-born citizens get to retain our citizenship and which do not. There is no existing law to guide them, so they can make it up out of whole cloth.

More plainly: if we choose to eliminate birthright citizenship, whoever is running the country at that time gets to determine whether you are still a citizen.

A hypothetical operational space data center will cost a multiple over a similar terrestrial facility. It would be cheaper/more efficient to offer a municipality or its citizens a fraction of that multiple to secure approvals, now that the bullying approach is running out of steam.

Instead of installing MWs of illegal gas generation and also still causing local electricity rates to spike, why not arrange to buy down the electricity of local ratepayers and also comply with existing laws & regulations?

It's worth asking why operators aren't doing that yet. I suspect it's because neither OAI nor Anthropic have an extra $50B-$100B to put out at the moment. We'll see what happens post-IPO.

Isn't it true that Euro 7 starts taking effect in a few months, but doesn't cover most cars until late next year?

It's really not. No serious analysis reduces the complexity of markets to a single number in a single sector. In particular, it takes willful blindness to look at subsidies in the EV market and ignore other energy markets.

You're also ignoring the most important point, my last point about values. The comment is still up, feel free to re-read it.

Every country distorts its markets in different ways. It's still silly to pretend the US is free of these kinds of distortions.

> dishonest to say it’s the same.

I literally didn't say that it was?

In any case, the point is that the US also subsidizes markets, including the auto markets. China is far from unique in this. As you say, free market capitalism isn't binary, and in this case all parties are subsidizing to some degree.

I'm sure even some companies who plan to sell in the EU will have to update their models to address regulations that haven't taken effect yet.

> The total subsidies make up half of the market cap of their entire EV industry.

Didn't Tesla essentially stay afloat for years via government subsidies (e.g. government-mandated carbon credits)?

Didn't the US only recently end its direct subsidies for EV buyers?

Don't US taxpayers provide an enormous ongoing subsidy to ICE vehicles by underwriting the security of the oilfields in the Gulf?

Don't US taxpayers in effect subsidize US automakers by ensuring they do not have to compete in the market with the best available vehicles?

More to the point: American free-marketeerism was never about the other side, it was about the US living its own professed values at home. We didn't shackle our press in discussions about the USSR because the USSR chose to shackle its own press. Our lockout of Chinese EVs rankles in part because it's a deviation, at home, from our own professed values.

The PR from the US frontier labs has been poor to terrible from the beginning.

Among other things, "we have stolen the collected works of your culture, now help us grow so that you can all lose your livelihoods and become our serfs" has to be one of the absolute worst marketing approaches in history.

The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't. That's probably 90% of the story.

Once the government stepped in, their 5th generation was effectively killed. They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5).

Hopefully Anthropic has learned to anticipate this risk and has a plan for rollout of their next model that plans for capricious ad-hoc regulation.

> He’s the elder statesmen of the party.

In US politics, that mantle holds until someone else takes the nomination. That role is Biden's. It seems really odd that a former leader other than the most recent would be in charge of the party anywhere. (Remembering here that Biden is still alive and generally capable if suffering age-related decline. Also contextualizing with the fact that the sitting president is also obviously suffering age-related decline.)

> control of the party might pass to Michelle (like happened at least four times in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan).

Yeah, I can see how someone from one of those countries might project onto US politics things that are not commonly done here. Relevant here is Obama beating Hillary for the nomination in 2008.

> After Biden’s disastrous debate in 2024, Obama was the one who swooped in to lead the party through the chaos

I am a political sicko, and I do not remember this happening. Are you perhaps elevating the importance of a single speech Obama gave?

Obviously a choice, but also at 200mph it's obviously a vastly slower experience in a lot of way for many of the most-trafficked US domestic routes.

Even at 300mph, which IIRC is much faster than normal operations on existing system, transcontinental travel becomes "too slow." The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example.

Effectively would split the continent in a way that it hasn't been for generations. Rountes like NYC<->Chicago would get annoyingly slower, but long routes like DC<->Seattle would become an "almost never" trip by train @ 200mph (even assuming direct, as-the-crow-flies). Practically, you're talking "east coast to Asia" durations to cross the continent. Non-starter.

Disclaimer: I love trains. I want high speed trains deployed widely in the US.

Yes, this is part of why it was so stupid for Sanders to not actually join and support the party. Had he done that, it's entirely possible he could have won the support of the actual voters he needed to win the presidency.

Also, it's still insane to expect Obama to police e.g. AOC's language 10 years post-Presidency. That's just an insane expectation. Reality is many voters are crazy.

> Obama as the patriarch so the buck stops with him to police the party messaging.

Sanders is not a member of the party. AOC didn't run for office until Obama had been retired a few years.

Just to make sure I'm reading this correctly, are you saying that Perot thought there was a credible threat that a sitting vice president was planning to have him assassinated?