NondescriptTransfer

@AliceFromQueens @philoshua @JeremiahDJohns Yeah I think this it it. Wall street is about making a 1,000 bets and winning 550 of them. Tech is about making 1,000 bets losing 999 of them but winning so big that it covers the rest. I think this selects for novel/divergent thinking and away from pragmatism/realism.

@philoshua @JeremiahDJohns realism is a virtue on Wall Street

It's genuinely amazing how many billionaires turn into outright cranks and lunatics about the weirdest shit imaginable, despite being otherwise smart people.

@uncledoomer Like.....?

for the entire biden presidency, you would get banned from all social media for saying objectively true things about covid

@scottlincicome Specifically no one will want to rent to poor people. Which means no one will to build housing for poor people. Then they ask why isn't there any affordable housing?

And nobody's gonna want to be a landlord, either.

@EarthFirstVoter @bhaviklathia I don't like that we're expanding grooming from a child molester engaging in a series of escalating behaviors to estrange an 11 year old from their parents to "26 year old talked to 20 year old about life then asked her out".

@bhaviklathia I get a bad vibe by it. She lumps it with other sexist things going on in the department, which isn’t him. The romance was after semester ended, and only lasted a few weeks. Yet she accuses him of grooming and ruining her career choices. That’s a strong allegation.

Full statement from Megan Wachspress re Biss: "I know it’s going to get ugly - it always does in these cases - but if there is one woman...who feels a little bit more empowered to recognize grooming for what it is...it will have been worth it. " cooperativeoverlapping.substack.com/p/a-fuller-sta…

@TheJokerManiac @mr_arize @ryangrim @krystalball She wasn't his student when they started dating. He didn't ask her out until he stopped being her TA.

@mr_arize @ryangrim @krystalball if it’s their student, yes that can be inappropriate. i don’t think that age gap is inappropriate.

Wachspress has now published an essay about her allegation. She says that she was a junior when she was Biss’ student, in roughly 2004 when he’d have been about 26. He waited until the course was over and asked her out. They “made out” a few times, she says, and then he broke it off, saying he shouldn’t date a student.

@HamelHusain @joedevon Do you find the issue is that it's not finding all the issues at once or that it's bringing up non-critical issues? (Is it false positives or false negatives?)

@joedevon Constantly finding new issues, resolving them, finding new ones for too long

One thing that makes me feel that code factory has not arrived yet is the following experiment: 1.Ask a LLM to do an in-depth rigorous review of your code 2. In a new thread, as same/different LLM to consider those review comments independently and address issues it agrees with 3. Keep repeating until no new concerns I find that this loop always goes on for a ridiculously long time, which means that there is a problem with the notion of claude-take-the-wheel. This seems to happen no matter the harness or the specificity of the specs. It works fine for simple applications, but in the limit if the LLMs have this much cognitive dissonance you cannot trust it. Either this, or LLM are RLHFd to always find some kind of issue.

@HamelHusain If you had a time machine you could get the same behavior out of an engineer in an interview. "Give me what's wrong wrong with this code" Make those changes, rewind time, ask again. Rarely would the engineer say this code is perfect there is no room for improvement.

@KelseyTuoc @AndrewCFollett I think there are plenty people who want to go back. I think there are few few who would like it if we did.

@AndrewCFollett a system where you can only trade with people if you personally know them and get along with them has existed before. it was bad. no one wants to go back to that

If you buy a $5 McDouble Meal lunch at McDonald's, you aren't paying McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinsk (net worth of "only" $45 million). The money is going to McDonald's the corporate entity, market cap $233 billion. Nobody is "forcing" you to have lunch at McDonald's. You could go to Burger King, Chick-Fil-A, any other restaurant, or just make your lunch yourself. But you'd rather have that McDouble Meal and McDonald's would rather have the $5. The exchange isn't exploitive, its mutually beneficial. So, if McDonald's raised that price, they'd get fewer customers and advantage their competitors. So they don't, because market competition and their own-self interest prevents it. I don't actually like Chris Kempczinsk much. But, I don't have to. That's the beauty of the system, people from all across the world with different beliefs, religions, interests, ideology, and a million other things cooperate to produce the stuff we humans need to live.

@rogueArth @Popstonox @TrackAIPAC They went on a few dates and made out once after he was her professor. And he was in his mid 20s at the time.

@Popstonox @TrackAIPAC This is ridiculous I’m not fan of the guy but smearing people in order to win election is very low She’s not a victim, she’s a adult who decided to f*ck her teacher for better grades.

Daniel Biss, candidate for IL-09 in tomorrow's election, has been accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a student during his tenure as a professor at the University of Chicago Megan Wachspress, now a Stanford law lecturer, says she was that student

@Bearthafuckdown @LauiLittle4050 @BoreJoka @Popstonox @camkasky He was like 25-26 and they went on a few dates after he was done teaching her and they made out. This seems more like minor professional lapse over a decade ago than any type of scandal.

@LauiLittle4050 @BoreJoka @Popstonox @camkasky If it was consensual and she was over 18, it’s definitely not disqualifying. But it is a bad look.

@LauiLittle4050 @BoreJoka @Popstonox @camkasky He was like a 26 year old who asked a 19 year old out on a few dates after he finished teaching her and they made out. Grooming is a child molester slowing pushing the boundaries of an 11 year to induce a since of shame so they don't tell their parents.

@BoreJoka @Popstonox @camkasky This is not good but it's not drop out worthy, unless she felt groomed or violated.

@Michael_E_Lopez @ignisdepetra @mattyglesias Oh sorry I was saying that's how it should work not how it works today.

@QuaintTransfer @ignisdepetra @mattyglesias I am not sure that's true. But I would be keen to find out!

Anti-billionaire-ism helped paper over an Obama-era mod/prog split about taxing people with low six figure incomes, but it's now tipping back over into the idea that maybe those people need a tax CUT. slowboring.com/p/upscale-libe…

@Michael_E_Lopez @ignisdepetra @mattyglesias I think if you use something as collateral and you borrow money above the basis you pay taxes up to the amount totally owned on the asset and the basis increases to that amount.

That's a reasonable approach, I think. Hard to engineer, in a few ways. Because if you use a dollar amount (exempt basis step up after $2M or whatever) you have to figure out what the *asset* is. Is each share a separate asset? What about the various stocks in a brokerage account? I mean, there are legislative aides who do stuff like that for a living. But it leans towards something like a PERCENTAGE cap. Thorny little problem, that.

@Michael_E_Lopez @mattyglesias The big issue with buy borrow die is stepped up basis. We should just remove that.

@mattyglesias What about taxing it as income if it's appraised and posted as collateral?

@Jackbmeyer @mattyglesias I'm concerned that 99% of the discussion doesn't meet the level of two drunk undergrads in a econ 101 course.

@mattyglesias Without improvement on substance, a poorly reasoned argument remains poorly reasoned even when dressed up in economic terminology. Appeals to 'econ 101' are the low hurdle you would need to clear, but I'm most concerned with that being where the conversation stops

In contrast to 'slopulism' there exist an equal and opposite strain of policy discourse that we can call 'wonk-slop,' using technical terminology but representing an underbaked kind of contrarianism. Think 'econ 101' argumentation and belaboured emphasis on second order effects.

@kiaran_ritchie We are very far away from intelligence saturation. And the models that will saturate intelligence will cost far more than any opensource project has in resources.

I don't see how Anthropic, OpenAI or any of the model providers have any hope of defending their moats. And consequently, I think they're going to get wiped out. Right now, in early 2026 they have a meaningful advantage in terms of model capability. But far cheaper and open source models are not far behind. How long can they maintain a meaningful advantage? For the vast majority of use cases, we don't actually need much higher intelligence. It doesn't take 140 IQ to automate Turbotax or powerpoint. Eventually we will be saturated in cheap, local models that are "good enough". Of course some scientific labs and frontier research will always want the latest and greatest. But that market is orders of magnitude smaller than these company valuations can justify. What am I missing?

@Noahpinion @NateSilver538 There's also bioweapons but there aren't any policies that are going to go through Congress that will reduce that risk.

@Noahpinion @NateSilver538 The only two things that deeply scare me about AI are how the government will use it and super intelligence. Policymakers won't do anything about the former and are two inept to do anything about the latter.

Two groups of people have been extraordinarily bad for the AI safety discourse: 1. Lefties like Emily Bender who dismiss AI as a useless toy 2. Doomers like Yudkowsky who force the discussion to only focus on superintelligence

@Noumenon72 @william_sh36802 @mattyglesias I imagine chain restaurants like McDonalds use way more of the chicken than a typical home does when purchasing. If I buy a chicken breast from the store vs mcnuggets. Those mcnuggets are using way more of the chicken and throwing out less.

@william_sh36802 @mattyglesias Only in a value-destroying way. If you imagine people only eat chicken, they demand the same number of calories of edible chicken; the only savings is because the restaurant uses extra chicken to make sure some is instantly ready, give you only your favorite parts, etc.

@william_sh36802 @mattyglesias Why? Everyone who would have bought a burger at mcdonalds would instead be buying ground beef. And McDonalds wastes less (probably an order of magnitude less) ground beef as % of what is purchased than a household.

@mattyglesias I mean, if people didn't have to compete with restaurants for the same amount of food it would probably be cheaper, though.