ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
4hr ago
Some fun results from Mississippi Senate (97% in):
Scott Colom Dem 462,779 48.9%
Cindy Hyde‑Smith GOP 462,751 48.9%
ThenElection
4hr ago
It's more likely we will get meaningful federal AI regulations, though likely two parts datacenter water regulation for every one part meaningful.
ThenElection
6hr ago
Impeachment probabilities require the hyperreals to express numbers that close to 1.
ThenElection
6hr ago
Democrats will shift back to that mode shortly, if they ever left it. Lucky for them, with no power, voters were happy to ignore them and ascribe the bread and butter failings to the ruling Republicans.
ThenElection
6hr ago
when we have such a recent example of a Democrat-controlled federal government actively making the problem worse just a few years ago.
And notably, they got their asses kicked because of those problems. As it turns out, voters care about the economy and affording their lifestyles. Who'd have thunk it?
ThenElection
6hr ago
"Your experiences are fake; I have numbers proving that you are actually doing great, and if you're not, you're a loser." Even if that were true, it's not exactly a winning message.
ThenElection
6hr ago
Kind of. But even Trump's killer ad in 2024 was powerful not because of trans issues in isolation, but because he pretty clearly portrayed that Democrats cared about stupid shit instead of voters' actual concerns. In this election, the greater glory of Israel was the stupid shit that was getting in the way of parents' driving their kids to school (where they might be transed, but that's a step or two into the future, which is too much extrapolation for the average voter).
ThenElection
6hr ago
There's a graph floating around of gas prices as compared to Republican (dis)approval ratings. It seems to be pretty indicative of a relationship.
ThenElection
6hr ago
What are you talking about? I've been informed here on a weekly basis that we had achieved a TOTAL VICTORY over Iran and gas prices were imaginary.
ThenElection
6hr ago
I guess all the "voters are stupid for caring about gas prices or a wrecked economy, destroying Iran is for our eternal glory!" talk does not actually win elections for Republicans.
Hopefully Republicans overcome their Israel fetish.
ThenElection
11hr ago
They get to elect a non-voting representative.
ThenElection
13hr ago
$1,000,000,000 voter information system the GOP built under Ronda Romney which couldn't even flag GOP registered voters who hadn't voted yet.
NGP-VAN on the Dem side could do that 15 years ago (I helped write some of the code for that). Sigh.
Makes me feel like I should go help even things out, but wherever the money is going, it's not going to the regular workers.
ThenElection
15hr ago
GOTV is hard and costly, but it also requires upfront investment. Dumping more money into GOTV a couple weeks before the election would probably cost four figures per marginal vote. It's smarter to build persistent organizations that seem "wasteful" in off-election years but allow effective scaling of GOTV during the election time, but it's tricky to do right. Are you sustaining and building institutional capacity, or giving handouts to a mass class of grifters? Are those even really different things?
Dumping money into crappy ads late in the game isn't an especially efficient way to spend the money, but it's likely nevertheless the most efficient way to spend the money.
It's not that frontier models are able to magically somehow do a better job on mundane tasks: "what is 1+1?" is saturated by both open and proprietary, and even economically meaningful tasks like coding can be handled reasonably well by open models today. And the tasks that can be handled by both will expand, with open weights likely remaining 3-6 months behind.
But my claim here is that it's significantly cheaper for the frontier labs to serve those than it is for some host of open weights to. The only reason open weights are cheaper sometimes for the customer is because frontier labs don't care to compete for them: even they (especially they) are compute limited, and their success is dependent on them developing better models that can handle all economic tasks, not by them being the choice of inference provider for every mundane task in 2026 Q4. (I don't think even offering Codex or Claude Code as products matters that much economically for them, except in that they're proofs of concept for automating economically valuable work and help with internal work.)
you have to believe that if, say, inference and training becomes 50% more efficient overnight, that slack is going to be immediately taken up by new demand without any price pressure or panic.
Fully agreed here, which is where the question of model capabilities come in. If within the next year or two frontier labs introduce models that automates most white collar tasks, then there will be no slack. The timing here is critical: this also will have to occur on that short timeline. Successfully automating accounts receivable for a construction company, but in 2029 instead of 2027, is not going to cut it, at least from the perspective of a neocloud. Nvidia is incentivized to backstop them, which could buy some time, but even its powers aren't infinite.
ThenElection
3d ago
It's far better than it was four years ago. Even then, I found myself cursing at it less than I did Vanguard's interface for my 401k.
Ultimately, it's entirely a bet on capabilities. Will Anthropic (and OAI) develop models in the next year or two with enough intelligence to replace or supplement a couple trillion dollars worth of human intellectual labor? Then they're solid. If not? Shareholders will be left holding a bag of shit.
Falling token prices are a sign of strength, not of weakness: OpenAI and Anthropic have large margins on inference, and those margins are likely growing, not shrinking. This is due to improved engineering significantly reducing the cost of inference every quarter; open model competition is a minor element at most, and ANT and OAI are not currently in a race to the bottom with each other in charged cost. The lower token cost (and, more importantly, cost per task completed) increases the size of the market for intelligence. Is it better to sell X tokens at $Y profit/token, or 10X tokens at $0.5Y profit/token? (Of course, it's mathematically possible for it to drop to $0 profit/token or less, but that's not the world we're actually in, at least right now.)
Anthropic's slowdown is more concerning for the bull case, but two points there: 1) it's less a slowdown in the overall market and more OAI showing stronger competition in the coding space and 2) coding is a relatively small part of the overall economy, and AI's impacts outside of it have been limited at most so far. It returns us to the question of whether capabilities will advance enough in the next year to start making a real impact in other sectors. Will it? Impossible to say until it does or doesn't, but it's not a linear process: like coding, it would have no meaningful impact until it reaches some threshold of capability, and then rapidly explode.
Sundar is imperfect, but there's much more to Google's AI strategy than "Gemini Gemini Gemini!" Cloud is up not because GCS is suddenly surging in popularity, but because ANT and increasingly OAI are giving GCP ungodly piles of money; ripping TPUs away from Core to Cloud was one of Thomas Kurian's masterstrokes. (TK will be Sundar's successor, whenever that happens.)
Who will end up making money from AI is an open question: frontier model developers? The hardware owners? Platforms and enterprise integrations? Google is currently straddling all three, giving it incoherence but also optionality. This means less compute and privileging of GDM, but at least in some worlds that's fine (though I think Google has realized it was under investing for the frontier model dominance scenario).
Three other notes:
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I interpret the market response as less to the earnings miss itself and more to lackluster Search. We're finally starting to see the cannibalization of search revenue by AI.
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As for layoffs: I've heard through the grapevine a big one is coming in Q1.
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The market this week has been really stupid, and within a month or three Google will have a substantial recovery. (I console myself over a solidly six figure loss in a single day.)
ThenElection
5d ago
Unfortunately most of it comes from hyperwoke Asian women who decry WMAF relationships as complicity with colonialist cisheteropatriarchy (or whatever verbiage the kids these days are using). Even if said women actually apply their stated beliefs to their personal lives
Spoiler alert: they don't.
ThenElection
5d ago
I agree you can group books into archetypes; I'd push against that being unique to Asian women, though. E.g. you have the Jewish male author whose main character is always a sexually frustrated neurotic man, whose failings are an indictment of American civilization. Or the WASPy author who lives a bored, middle class existence punctuated with affairs, whose inability to keep it in his pants is (sigh) an indictment of American civilization.
What's always a joy is finding someone whose writing is both great and genuinely unique, which is rare.
Any reasoning driven by literary output has to explicitly account for the publishing filter. There are lots of Asian American female authors trying to get published, but who the industry chooses to publish, platform, and publicize is very much a reflection of the white women who comprise 70% of the industry and their preoccupations, not the demographic whose experiences are ostensibly being expressed.
They're largely obsessed with white people, but in the worst ways possible
They think white people are just as obsessed with them
"Asians' existence revolves around me."
The books are mostly portraits of neuroticism.
"I'm neurotic, therefore this book will resonate."
telling them they are getting fat.
"I am jealous of Asian women being professionally accomplished and skinny, but it's really a reflection of psychological damage, not competence and physical health, so actually I'm better."
They all have white boyfriends
"Asian women steal white men from my dating pool; this demands explanation."
None of this is to say that those trends aren't real. But it's much more an ABC thing, not a recent immigrant thing. And even for ABCs, it's exaggerated into a ridiculous parody of itself.
But if you dig into more obscure authors, you can find ones who don't fit the archetype you describe. You've got to be careful, as some of those that seem to break it is really attempting to tell the same story through a genre lens. But it does exist. E.g. Yamashita
ThenElection
6d ago
Laws should just be guidelines; there're more corner cases than archetypal cases, and writing a trillion page legal code to cover every conceivable situation would both fail to cover everything and also be a monstrosity.
The question I have is why the police didn't apply common sense here. If you polled most officers in that department, I would bet a large majority would say this makes no sense. Why did the insane point of view end up deciding the outcome here?
ThenElection
6d ago
The machine god will anticipate whether you want or need your light bulb turned on. If you disagree, you're wrong, at least within the constraints of what best delivers shareholder value. Now go back and play your gacha game, there's a new weekly prize.
ThenElection
8d ago
It's far too broad a term to be useful. Even if you try to split it up into reasonable vs schizo ideas, the schizo ideas don't actually have much in common with each other (in terms of psychological motivations); you might also try to separate it into abstract ones (the cause of the world's issues is "capitalism," the Jews, patriarchy, wokedom) vs concrete ones (a bunch of narrow claims about specific people and institutions), but even that doesn't help too much in figuring out which theories are helpful or predictive of reality. Each proposed conspiracy needs to be individually analyzed, and the difference between which are high status vs low status depends mostly on how successfully the conspiracy has captured existing institutions.
My favorite conspiracy theory: there's a small group of people currently deploying trillions of dollars of resources toward the goal of creating a pet God to allow them to dominate all of reality, at the risk of ending human existence. They're secretive; don't (fully) describe their motivations or risks as they see them; engage in subterfuge and punishment of people who defect from the conspiracy; and use rhetoric about evil foreigners to justify why they have to do what they do. And most observers are sheeple who either take them at face value or critique them .
Am I a conspiracy theorist? I mean, yes, but the conspiracy theorist label doesn't help in evaluating my claims one way or another.
ThenElection
8d ago
they genuinely believe that revealing it would have terrible outcomes
Do they believe that? The motivation has always struck me as more like "I have to make public statements about HBD being evil in order to progress in my career," not that it'll result in a Fourth Reich.
Of course, that's speculative about interior mental states we don't have access to, but so is the Fourth Reich hypothesis.
E.g. from Scott Wiener (likely replacing Pelosi) and his SB 1047:
Just a start (and Newsom vetoed it), but it can be the basis for future legislation as AI continues to rise in salience.
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