Max Little

If you are here due to a discord account on Force Thirteen called "Max Little #0702" note that this is NOT ME. Please report whoever that is for being dumb enough to steal the identity of a guy with NO CREDENTIALS and under 500 followers.

@hibernianjester I thought it meant "you seem to not be an asshole but I am not attracted to you for whatever reason"

why do women use the "any girl would be lucky to date you" line still

The panic over the SpaceX IPO crashing 401ks is overblown. However, there is not enough opposition to the fact that the rules are being loosened to allow the IPO at all. It risks delegitimizing indices entirely and opens up more opportunities for other predatory IPOs. #SpaceX

@Sasha_Squid Looking at the boxscore it mostly looks like Norway had a hot goalie.

I know people are sad that Canada didn't get a medal but just as a reminder, their record for this tournament was 8-1-1. you can say whatever you want, but expect for people to tell you that you're wrong if you say the team sucked

@FrankFuhrig @KAErdmann Give residents the right to sell their land back to the municipality for the assessed value. If the city inflates property values to collect more tax revenue they are stuck holding the bag.

@KAErdmann The biggest problem with property taxes is the arbitrary assessment of value. Is there a better way to do that?

A property tax is a consumption tax whose rate is in negative proportion to the yield on the asset being consumed, which is great because land tends to have a low yield. It isn’t a wealth tax or an unrealized capital gains tax. It’s a consumption tax on property, especially land

@mmjukic Hasn't the world's per capita real GDP been growing at about 2% per year (smoothed) since the advent of agriculture?

This very chart seems to indicate that it was something other than Vaucanson's lathe that caused the 19th century technological boom.

@GrantStenger Pretty sure fundamentally this would be self-limiting. At some point, their positions get so large that their margins disappear due to their trades moving the market.

Jane Street reportedly grew net trading revenue from ~$10B in 2023 to ~$20B in ’24 to ~$40B in ’25. With reported net margins around 65%, a ~15x multiple implies a ~$400B public-market value. Mega-cap territory, growing fast, one of the most incredible businesses of all time.

@airkatakana Until about the 1970s a woman was effectively not allowed to be single. They were implicitly or explicitly banned from the professional class, obtaining credit, and tons of other BS. Better to die alone than only have a wife because she had no real choice.

you people see 20% of the men get 80% of the attention from women and think this is some sort of new thing, or that it only applies to dating no, this happens everywhere, and maybe the only reason it seems new is that dating markets before smartphones were inefficient

@goblinodds I have no issues if you are upfront about using AI, my objection is people passing off Claude/GPT/Gemini as their own work. Generative AI is qualitatively different from using spellcheck or even a human proofreader. Imagine saying you ran a marathon when you drove in a car.

im really sketched out by attempts to call people out for using AI in their writing, partly bc callouts suck* and partly bc theyre trying to do norm enforcement without actually stating the norm they want or explaining why that norm is good the norm appears to be "don't write using AI" which i think is pretty silly, maybe bc the only defense of it i can think of is "AI writing is currently bad" but in that case the obvious thing to do is... not to give bad writing attention, regardless of its origin the norm they might secretly want is "cite the AI as a co-author when you use AI to write," which i think is a good one bc it's honest, and posting AI writing under your own name is dishonest *idk if i have an articulate defense for why i think callouts suck but i'll link to my attempt in the next tweet

@dailydirtnap Honestly it barely matters when the debt is in fiat currency - it will just be debased by 30-50% and boom, debt to GDP is normalized again.

I know people like to freak out about the debt, but the deficit-to-GDP is 6% today, versus 12% in 2010. And then it was 3% in 2015. Maybe we grow out of it, maybe we don't, maybe politics change, but my point is that insolvency isn't a foregone conclusion.

@infraa_ The other way to see it is the government essentially taxed about 6000 working hours per person since 1980 indirectly through debasement instead of explicitly through taxes.

This is why the debt can never be repaid *in real terms* It will almost certainly be repaid in *nominal terms*, but looking at the debt in terms of human labor shows the true scale of the problem

Here's how many hours of work you have to work to pay your share of the federal debt Currently: 7,100 hrs of work at the avg hourly wage The average worker would have to work 177 weeks, or about 4 years, to cover their share of the federal debt

@InlandCaGuy All they have to do is make it so when you borrow against an asset, it counts as realizing the gain at the collateralized price. You owe tax immediately, it resets the cost basis, and then if it depreciates in the future you book it as a capital loss.

I find this concept under discussed. This seems reasonable to me, both the idea that you can't stockpile too much in unrealized gains and that you'd get refunded to the level of typical capital gains once realized. I have no idea if this is how a wealth tax would work though

@Empty_America 50 man-hours at 30$/hr plus $500 for materials, depreciation on tools, overhead, etc. seems pretty reasonable. If it takes less time the workers are more skilled and deserve a higher hourly.

Yes, it's reasonable but it really illustrates the intractable "cost disease" that has no apparent solution. That $2,000 reflects the wages of everyone involved from the loggers to the home depot workers to the carpenter. Outside of immiserating them, how could be cheaper?

@lymanstoneky Main reason for humanoid robots is to easily work around existing infrastructure, so there likely will be a good niche for them for quite awhile. I do think eventually robots end up more like self-organizing grey goo, where they take whatever shape/form the task requires.

"have a boutique robot for every single use case will be more efficient than generalist humanoid robots the factory can sell for 5,000 different use cases" is this really the take? do we really think robotics as they exist now are actually peak performance?

@DerekPederson3 I guess it also depends on what you define as interstellar travel. There is a big gulf between "container of tiny self-replicating robots propelled by a solar-powered laser station" to "anything that gets humans there alive, even generation-ship style."

Most of the responses I am getting are ambiguous historical analogies and criticisms of me for not “dreaming big” rather than attempts to answer the very serious questions about why this may just not be possible.

@burkov I am not sure where the practical limit is but it is my biggest fear w.r.t AI: we don't get takeoff or relegation to a gimmick. Instead, we get infinite slop which is "good enough" to displace many humans economically and artistically.

@burkov I think you can reduce the occurrence of this by feeding the initial answer back through another instance of the LLM to try and pick out inconsistencies and then retry if any are seen. Basically, burn more compute, which is what I understand "reasoning" models are doing anyways.

Always remember that when an LLM prints the beginning of a text, it has no idea what the end will be. Therefore, when it says "The answer is yes, and this is why:" the text after "why" would most likely be a very elaborate lie combined with gaslighting in case "yes" was the wrong answer.

@DerekPederson3 I think even with technology just a bit beyond today's it is more a motivation issue than a capability issue. You would basically turn large comets into generation ships using their internal volatiles for reaction mass and supplies.

Science fiction nerds are gonna hate me for saying this but the Great Filter is that interstellar travel is probably more or less impossible and there is no reason to come up with any other explanation for that.

@mcuban You can't have a free market when "walking away" means death or debilitation. You might get away with it for primary care (family doctors) but hospitals would basically turn into neo-feudal entities extracting rent from their catchment areas in exchange for access to care.

Ok. Take government completely out of healthcare. No rules. No laws. No Medicare. No Medicaid. Hospitals, insurance companies, can do anything they want. What do they do ? If you were running any of the biggest insurance companies or hospitals, what would you do differently once gov was completely out of healthcare ?

@portraitinflesh It is interesting to see what was mostly missed by mid-20th century science fiction writers versus what they expected that never happened. From my experience they overestimated nuclear power, humanoid robots and space travel but almost completely missed the internet.

I'm currently reading Asimov's The Caves of Steel, for the first time since I was a child, and it's fascinating on so many levels. I am legitimately enjoying it as a novel, because the man *could* write, but so many things about it now land very oddly, from a 2020s point of view.

@Empty_America Too bad the particles in Saturn's rings are more micrometer-sized than mountain-sized - "The Martian Way" is a great classic Sci-Fi example of this. Common slow interstellar method is to take a large comet and use some of the hydrogen for fusion fuel and reaction mass.

Ironically, the civilization that expands into endless space will exist in a world of caverns and tunnels. Most realistic plans to avoid deadly radiation involve boring and tunneling, both into planetary surfaces and also asteroids. The "ships" may end up *being* asteroids.