I agree, but it goes to the heart of my fundamental disagreement with the way AI is presented to the public. If Claude Code does that, that's great, but I wouldn't think I needed a coding LLM to look up basic statistical data from government sources. So whn someone like me who wants to use it for other things that seem like are in its wheelhouse try it and get crap for a result, we get pissed off. Believe me, this is only one of the LLM-assisted fails I've experienced in the past month. So I get the inevitable response of "Well, if you were using the frontier deluxe model that costs $200 a month..." at which point I cut you off and say "No. This software hasn't given me any indication that it's worth $20/month, let alone $200." It's like a mirage, where what I'm looking for is always off in the distance but I never seem to get there. We're now at a point where companies in perhaps the only industry in history that's worth a trillion dollars despite not being profitable at all have to use all that compute power to subsidize nonsense from the trivial (AI girlfriends) to the actively harmful (cheating on term papers) because they've relied on a business model where they'll grow rapidly by creating a hype cycle that allows them to raise eye-watering sums from venture capital to develop an expensive product with limited commercial use.
In a rational world, OpenAI would have remained a research nonprofit that allowed things like universities and the government to use its models for free until they had developed to the point that there was a viable commercial use for them other than creating glorified chatbots. And when that point came, the hype cycle would hopefully be muted enough that companies wouldn't implement them unless they were seeing real returns. Instead they've created this world where they've spent more money than they could ever hope to earn creating products that don't make money and still have pathetic monetization rates that they've gotten into the habit of offering to the general public for free. And they keep creating more bullshit to justify it like "inference is profitable". Really? Because when I hear that, I hear "If we ignore all of our expenses except one category, the company makes money". It's like justifying pouring money into a failing retail outlet because you sell every item for less than you paid the supplier for it. "We're profitable if you only look at COGS!" And even that isn't entirely the truth, since a large percentage of this revenue from inference comes from other AI startups like Perplexity that are themselves unprofitable hype machines propped up by venture capital. I apologize for the rant, but if you want me to believe in this technology that fails to do everything I ask it to that it could theoretically do faster than I can myself, you can't keep telling me that it's only because I'm not paying enough money. Because I'm sure that when Oeuvre or whatever they call the next Claude model comes out that cost ten times as much to train and five times as much to run, I'll be told that Opus or CC or whatever couldn't handle it but if I only paid the price of admission all my problems would be solved.
Edit: I ran the query again and it did try to code something to get access to the API, but was unsuccessful. It also failed to recognize that a lot of this data, if not all of it, doesn't require access to the API and is available in PDF documents available on third-party websites.
Alright, I have one for you: If you read the most recent installment of my Pittsburgh series you'll see that I have a sentence about how the Italian composition of Bloomfield changed over time, based on information compiled by the US Census. While I am skeptical of AI overall, I admit that it has legitimate potential uses, one of which is aggregating large amounts of statistical information from diverse sources that are a pain in the ass to search manually. To give you some background, the census started asking about ancestry beginning in 1980, on the "long form" that was given to 1/6 of the population. Following the 2000 census, the long form was eliminated, and the data was continually polled using the American Community Survey. When it was only being collected decennially, it was published in reports that are available online in PDF format. Following the introduction of the ACS, the census bureau implemented an API. In order to streamline the process, I gave Claude the following instruction:
Using long-form census data from 1980 to 2000 and American Community Survey data from 2005 to the present, determine the percentage of people in Pittsburgh census tract 804 who list Italian ancestry for each year that data is available.
After running for tens of minutes and spitting out a bunch of technical data about the API, it gave me this message:
The Census API (api.census.gov) is accessible from a browser, but my server-side tools can only fetch URLs that appeared in prior search results — I can't construct and call novel API query strings directly. The specific variable code for Italian ancestry in the 2000 SF3 (the PCT016 table) and the ACS B04006_058E queries for Tract 804 (GEOID 42003080400) require direct API calls.
It then informed me that my single, unsuccessful query used up my limit for the day. I would add that the pre-ACS data is available in PDF form from third party websites. I was able to compile it manually without much issue, though this would have been shorter. If Opus is able to do this, then I would like to see if I can get it to extend the data to prior years based on national origin. I don't know if this was compiled but the individual forms are available from 1950 and earlier, and they list the country of origin for each person. Around that time, most people with Italian ancestry would have been first or second generation, so the number of people born in Italy would be a starting point for an estimate.
I would also add that I tried this again with a different LLM that first incorrectly told me that it couldn't do it because of tract boundary changes (the ID number of the tract changed but the boundaries have been the same since at least 1940), and when I told it that the boundaries were the same it gave me 15%, which is the Italian-ancestored population of Pittsburgh as a whole. Another LLM told me it couldn't provide that data because it wasn't compiled and available online, which is basically admitting that it's a glorified search engine. So give it a shot with Opus and we'll see how it does.
Edit: Before you run my suggested prompt, try running something more general, like "How did the population of Pittsburgh Census Tract 804 change over time?" I try to give these LLMs as specific instructions as I can, but I feel like they are of limited utility if I need a lot of preexisting knowledge regarding how to find the information, as someone who knows that presumably doesn't need an LLM.
Rov_Scam
17hr ago
The legal technicalities surrounding what beneficiaries are actually entitled to and the financial realities of what they're getting compared with what they paid in aren't relevant to the discussion. Bring that argument up to conservative retirees who will bitch endlessly about all the handouts "the blacks" get and you'll see them get defensive about their Social Security checks. "That's different; I paid into that for 40 years!" Same with Medicaid.
Rov_Scam
18hr ago
I think people forget about how much labor household appliances have saved, and how poor a lot of people were until relatively recently. I deposed a guy who grew up in West Virginia in the 40s and 50s in a house without running water and he talked about how every Saturday his mother did the laundry and he, his dad (whose clothes were filthy from the mines) and all his brothers and sisters would spend half the day hauling buckets of water from a spring in the woods behind their house so their mother could heat the water on a stove and do the laundry with a wringer washer.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
A friend of mine was in charge of signs and pavement markings for PennDOT District 6 before his retirement a few years ago. I once engaged him as an expert witness in a traffic case, just because I liked the idea of bringing in an expert to fight a speeding ticket. I'll have to ask him if there are any signs that annoy him, but he seems more irritated by poor implementation. A town near where he grew up made a bunch of traffic "improvements" that PennDOT thought were necessary but everyone else was against, and when the project was complete he drove down there to take a look and said that whatever other problems there were with the plan they got the signs wrong. He refuses to go into Pittsburgh because he doesn't like the way they do their signs.
In other sign-related news, there's an increasing problem, mostly in rural areas, of people, and especially large trucks, getting stuck on bad roads. This is the inevitable result of people blindly relying on GPS, not realizing that it will direct them onto anything open for vehicular traffic regardless of surface, winter maintenance status, etc. Some municipalities have responded by posting signs that say "No GPS Route" on roads where this is a particular problem. My friend told me that these were not MUTCD approved signs, and that they were posted on local roads (that don't strictly follow Federal guidelines) and not state roads, but that he thought that the MUTCD should adopt something similar, since one of the most frequent constituent complaints he received was trucks getting stuck on roads they had no business being on.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
That's the only explanation I can think of. I did a time-restricted search for "melania epstein" and the only story that came up was a Chicago Tribune piece about the email from January 30. This tells us three things:
- The email is not a new revelation
- There was very little coverage when it was first discovered
- There is no recent reporting Melania was responding to
If someone released potentially damaging information about me, and no one cared, I wouldn't call a press conference for the specific purpose of denying the allegations. Especially if I wasn't normally calling press conferences. In any event, it seems to have worked, somewhat, as the story was mentioned on a radio news program I heard on the way home and while I didn't hear the actual segment, that's one segment that won't be discussing Iran, which otherwise dominated the discussion.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
No but that relies on the fallacy that sanctions are an effective tool for preventing a country from getting a nuke. Pakistan wasn't under sanctions, but they got nukes in 1998 despite having an economy of approximately the same size as Iran's, and much worse per capita. North Korea got nukes despite being under US sanctions for years and being one of the poorest countries in the world. I don't see what killing generals has to do with their nuclear program. The "scientists" you're referring to are literally one guy. And he was killed by the Israelis, who weren't party to the agreement.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I thought I was giving you a layup there but instead you decided to wander even further off into fantasy land by claiming that the war aims were now that Iran, at the threat of bombing, will turn into normal, friendly, prosperous state. Of all the various contradictory objectives Trump has given for this war so far, I have not once heard him suggest any of this. Neither have I heard any other politicians suggest this, nor have I heard anyone in the media suggest this. Because the elephant in the room that you conveniently ignore is that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed, causing oil prices to spike and wreaking havoc on international shipping. Trump hasn't figured out a way to force it open other than through a ground occupation of the coast, which he is unwilling to do, and has thus resorted to making threats. Pretty much everyone who knows everything about Iran has been saying that this was the likely outcome for the past 20 years, but Trump figured he knew better and that by making things go boom the Iranians would just give in.
Now that Trump has hit that tripwire, repoening the strait is priority number one in the immediate term. If he does nothing, the strait remains closed indefinitely. If he invades the coast, he takes a huge political hit for putting boots on the ground and while the strait will eventually be reopened, it will take a while, and will only stay open so long as US troops are there to protect it. Meanwhile, energy prices, which are already elevated due to futures speculation, are going to rise even further once we start seeing actual supply cuts. The only thing that matters right now is getting the strait reopened. You can load up your wishlist with all the items you want, but all of that's negotiable, and Iran has the upper hand. Trump can bomb all the power plants he wants, but it won't reopen the strait. Trump assumed that taking out Iran's navy, missile power, etc. would keep them from closing it, but the people who are actually taking the risk of transit aren't going to attempt it without permission from the Iranian government.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I'm going to limit my response to this post for the time being, since @Amadan summarized my position better than I ever could, but you state:
We destroyed Iran’s military. They can project very little force anymore in the region. Of course they could rebuild, that’s just a property of time having a forward direction. We can also stop them from rebuilding. We can bomb them again. We can do that whenever we want and they can’t stop us.
This is what winning looks like. It is in fact concomitant with several win conditions Trump laid out at the beginning of the war.
If this is what winning looks like, then why does Trump need a deal? Why not just declare victory and walk away, secure in the knowledge that Iran will not be able to obtain a nuclear weapon for the foreseeable future, that they will not be able to arm proxies in the region, and, as you say it, will not be able to project any appreciable amount of force in the region?
Rov_Scam
2d ago
My point is that if Mexicans receiving remittances were living high on the hog due to wage and cost of living differentials, as OP suggests, then meeting solvency requirements for immigration should be a piece of cake. The fact that this might not be possible is evidence that they're not.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
We're not talking about people working in Mexico. We're talking about people not working in Mexico and being sent remittances from people working in the US.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
If you're trying to make an argument for restricting the labor supply, don't pick a country with over a billion people as an example of how to do things, especially if most of those people were poor peasants a generation ago.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Do you find gentrification harmful as well? Looking back at my recent post about Lawrenceville, in 2000 it was a working-class to lower class area with an average home sale price of around $25,000. At the same time, a house in a good suburb like Bethel Park would cost over $100,000. These days, the average sale price in Lawrenceville is over $400,000 while Bethel Park is around $300,000. Bethel Park hasn't changes much over that time period but Lawrenceville certainly has.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Then why didn't it happen? Iran's nuclear program was effectively unrestricted for nearly 8 years.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
No, but people move around all the time to improve their economic status, including to places where they don't speak the language, have extended families,nor have nostalgia for from growing up there. If these kinds of migrants were getting as good a deal as the OP thinks they are, more people would go in the opposite direction.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
That theory has them getting a viable nuke sometime between June of last year and the present. I don't think you, or anyone, can predict the timeline with that degree of certainty.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Americans generally do have the option of sending their families to live in Mexico and sending them remittances.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
LOOK AT THE TIMELINE! The offer Trump accepted was on the table before he made the threat.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
A smarter man would have done more to talk Trump out of it, or at least help identify strategic objectives and have an exit plan for what to do if those objectives weren't realized within a certain timeframe. I get the impression that Hegseth pretty much discounted the possibility that anything but bunnies hopping through the woods would come out of this, and that if he'd given stronger pushback from the outset, then we might not be in this mess. He's clearly the least qualified person in a major cabinet position and the only thing he has to offer is the role of sycophantic yes-man who's the only one in the room to tell the president his instincts are correct. Because let's fact it, if Trump wanted a qualified candidate who would tell it like it is, those guys aren't in short supply, especially when you consider the qualifications of the guy he actually picked. Unfortunately, unflappable loyalty doesn't keep you from being the scapegoat, especially when it's the only quality you have to offer, extra especially when the president trusted your word over all others. I agree that the problem wasn't with any of Hesgeth's individual tactical decisions. The problem was with his strategic decisions, of which there were none. Not once in this entire conflict did we get a clear picture of what the administration's goals were. If the administration doesn't know what its strategic goals are, then the whole enterprise is doomed. I hate to quote Sun-Tsu, since it's the realm of cringeworthy corporate assholes, but tactics without strategy is the fastest route to defeat.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
These are all fake posts, AI, Russian, both, or otherwise. I've seen enough political posts on Facebook from verifiable salt-of-the-earth conservatives to be able to spot fakes:
- No selective capitalization; Caps Lock is either on or it isn't
- No recognition that the em-dash exists, let alone an old typewriter substitute
- No statistics that aren't from copypasta
- At least one spelling or grammatical error
Perhaps "most extreme" was a bit of hyperbole; when people bring up the Fox comment section to provide examples of conservative idiocy, someone always points out that it isn't representative, and I wanted to avoid that accusation. But it is representative of a certain kind of conservative idiocy, the kind of person who creates an account just so they can respond to a comment they agree with with "Bingo".
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Read the timeline again. They made an offer. Trump turned it down and made threats. Then he accepted their offer. He could have done without the bombast and got the same result. I've been down this road before as a lawyer—you and the opposition are at odds, they make an offer, you refuse, you threaten to go to trial, and you cave during jury selection. It's pretty clear that he thought he could get a better offer if he made threats to wipe out their civilization but when no offer was forthcoming as the deadline approached, he decided to cave rather than go through with it.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
So... I originally replied (without reading more than one sentence)
That's actually apropos for the discussion since Levin and his ilk evidently do the same thing—reflexively praise Trump without paying attention to what actually happened. Respond to the part where Trump declares victory without looking into what's actually on the table. With Israel bombing Beirut less than 24 hours after the ceasefire was announced Levin may find himself throwing more intense fits if the US has to put real pressure on Israel to get them to stop.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Say I'm negotiating a settlement to a lawsuit. I offer $200,000; the plaintiff insists on $250,000. It's the eve of trial and I tell opposing counsel that if she wants to take this to a jury fine, I'm happy to see that she gets nothing. We start picking a jury and by the end of the first day I've agreed to the $250,000. If I told you this story and ended it with "Whenever we started picking the jury and opposing counsel saw that shit was getting real she begged me to settle" you'd tell me I was delusional. I could have made the exact same deal the day before without wasting anyone's time. What happened was that we got into a staring contest and I blinked first. This isn't the perfect analogy, but you get the idea.
As for all these dubious benefits we have to keep in mind that, for the past 20 years, there have been two reasons Iran has been a problem:
- Their nuclear program
- Their arming of proxies in the Middle East
I don't recall any point in that timespan where anyone has claimed that Iran's conventional capabilities were a threat to anyone. They had those capabilities for decades but hadn't used them since the Iran-Iraq War, a war in which they were on the defensive. Six months ago, no one was warning us about the threat from the fucking Iranian navy. And I don't think there was much of a question that US conventional forces would be able to damage the Iranian military to the extent they have. In any event, we couldn't do enough to stop them from shutting down the strait, the one thing everyone has been warning they would do for years if we attacked them.
As for the nuclear program, that was supposedly "obliterated" last June, and I haven't heard much about it in the present war other than that they were continuing to bomb nuclear sites, so how much the program has actually been set back is anyone's guess. My own guess is not much, considering that I can't find any information about it and Trump would certainly be bragging about it if it were true, and probably even if it weren't. The Supreme Leader's death was completely without consequence. The guy was 87 years old and in bad health. If he had died of natural causes on the same day and was replaced with the same guy, I don't think any international analyst would be saying that this was a positive development for the United States. By all accounts the guy was actually worse to begin with, and now we've just killed his whole family. And I don't know how you extrapolate the ability to kill Supreme Leaders with impunity when we've only killed one to date.
So I think I can confidently make quite a few predictions that will be vindicated, because these are American non-negotiables and because America won (America is winning)
Did you actually read the ten point plan that Trump himself was claiming will form the basis of negotiations? Because there's nothing in there about anything on your list. The fact that you're reading into the terms of a future agreement items from your wishlist that Iran hasn't done anything to indicate they'd be amenable to discussing and that they've said repeatedly in the past that they wouldn't be amenable to discussing is evidence that you're doing exactly the same thing that all the conservative commentators are doing, i.e. relying on your own blind faith in Trump to achieve whatever fantasy land outcome you desire. You might as well add that the Assembly of Experts will all concede power to a pro-American democracy who will recognize Israel and become a strong ally in the region. Sheesh.
Their revenue growth is massive to the point of suspicion, especially since they admitted that they're using unaudited internal numbers that don't use GAAP. Why wouldn't they be using GAAP? The only explanation is that the GAAP numbers are pretty crappy. In fact, we know they're crappy because in court filings Anthropic stated they made 5 billion in total GAAP revenue between 2023 and the end of last year. The huge numbers you see are annualized projections that aren't representative of any actual revenue.
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