BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
10hr ago
Mostly vendors cranking the screw to squeeze more cash out of us. Worst thing is when providers silently update or change the quantization of the model without making it known. Local Models don't have this problem people (I say this as someone who's managed to get Qwen 3.5 397b-a17b running locally on a server I rented).
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
1d ago
Ok, make them pare back the menu, they won't be making as much money then with their reduced offering which naturally gives them an incentive to get better at pricing their odds so they can access more markets. Accurate gambling odds provide benefits to third parties who can now use them to see what the probability of some future event is. It's the minimum societal good which we should expect from these companies in return fr the societal harm thry cause.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
2d ago
Americans, am I right...
Unilateral declarations of Force Majeure (or Frustration, depending on exactly which class of rules governing the insurance contract you're talking about) can usually be challenged by the other party under arbitration or via litigation where the declaring party risks being under a very serious breach of contract if the case goes against them, hence insurers and others have strong reasons to not declare Force Majeure unless something really serious has happened to the point where they're reasonably convinced that an independent arbitration body would agree there actually was a Force Majeure. None of that exists for these prediction markets.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
2d ago
Someone is beating your odds? Get better at providing odds or close up shop.
Minimum requirement all gambling companies should be required to adhere to.
Agreed, this is absolute total bullshit, both the Khamenei market and this pilot rescue market. If you want to take a policy decision that no markets are allowed on people dying (which I'd agree is a sensible policy) then you do it by refusing such markets permission to be set up in the first place, not retroactively voiding them. This breaks people's chains of trades where they attempt to squeeze out edge from multiple correlated contracts and also leads to higher spreads and more inefficient markets because now both buyers and sellers have to price in the risk that the market will get voided when quoting prices.
I can understand why people dislike markets on people's deaths (theoretically it can be used to pay for contract killings in a totally decentralized way) and why we might not want to allow them, but what's the reason to remove the market on the missing pilot?
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
2d ago
Watch Trump complain just as shamelessly this year when he fails to get the Nobel Peace Prize as he did last year.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
3d ago
Yeah that was just Racism with a capital R. We're better than that now.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
3d ago
I like Pete as well, but we all know it's going to be Newsom.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
3d ago
Yes, unfortunately Europe is totally cucked I agree. Europe talks a good game on how the Americans are bad (whether in relation to this war or more generally) but then doesn't back it up with actual action. Spain is showing some minor signs of developing a backbone, hopefully other countries quickly follow suit.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
3d ago
Your Result: Neither; Somehow. German: 38% Autistic: 27%
I'm somewhat surprised by this, considering that I felt distinctly annoyed multiple times during the quiz that there was no back button to let me return to a previous answer to change it. That should have made me Autistic, or at least German.
We are apparently the exact same amount of German @self_made_human, which I guess is one more thing for you to worry about.
Decided to try out Claude's general image editing skills using natural language rather than tools directly to see how far they had come. Since it's Easter time I thought I'd make something topical. I think it turned out pretty good in the end, definitely easier than doing things manually and certainly less mentally taxing compared to writing the code and aligning everything yourself.
Sure, that can work when it also comes with 0% income tax for migrants, it might make the locals in Europe throw their own little tantrum when companies start preferring migrants on 45k to locals on 50k because the migrant gets more money in their pocket getting paid 45k vs the local getting paid 50k after income tax. There's no reason for migrants to choose EU states over gulf states if there's no path to citizenship but they still have to pay taxes like a citizen, and no, Europe can't slash income taxes to near 0 for everyone like the Gulf states can, mostly because of its own obligations it's decided to take on towards its own lower classes.
Some European countries like the Netherlands and Denmark already have versions of lower taxes for recent migrants compared to citizens for like a decade or so but it's nowhere near enough what would be necessary if the citizenship prize wasn't available.
I'm not a fan of that either, illegal migration is a net negative and the correct way to handle stuff if you need more people it to increase legal migration where you can filter who's coming in to ensure they are a net fiscal benefit in expectation, however that's their prerogative if they want to legalize a bunch of illegals and the other Schengen countries can complain (I would if I were them) but they seemed to have kept mum about it.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
3d ago
Spain is fast rising up the ranks in how much respect I have for different European countries, France is still on top thanks to IVPITER Macron but that may be changing next year. Hungary may be about to get a bounce soon as well.
Europe is forced to think about the US because it's the 400 pound baby throwing a tantrum. We'd all rather not have to do this but it's a bit hard when you go and poke the hornet's nest of Iran when we're the ones who bear the brunt of the conseuqneces. Europe + Canada need to get together and collectively tell the US it's grounded until it learns to behave: meaning punitive taxes on its tech companies etc; funny how Trump likes tariffs but the US threw a tantrum at the WTO last week because the WTO tariff free regime for services which had existed for 30 years was about to expire and the US wanted the clause forbidding tariffs on digital goods to continue indefinitely, see here: https://www.ft.com/content/ac711230-3ee6-467f-824a-3a74d356076c?syn-25a6b1a6=1
Iran played their hand very well when they announced they'd start targeting militarily 18 US companies they believed were helping the US war effort including their top finance and tech firms. If Europe did the same and started talking about how if unless the US started behaving very quickly then senior executives from Meta and Goldman etc. would be arrested and tried as accessories for their government's behaviour if they stepped foot onto EU territories (or alternatively these companies openly and formally denounce US actions) we'd get somewhere. These sorts of people have so much money that the true way to hit them is to restrict their global mobility. If Jamie Dimon gets told he can't visit or transit via Europe without risking arrest that hurts him a lot more than fining him like a million or something and is more likely to get him to put pressure on the US government to beahve.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
4d ago
I don't want to know more.
Especially not these days with the solar revolution, which has taken Iran by storm just like many other countries in that area. Battery usage is still lagging behind but in a pinch even the old lead acid batteries will do. Together they effectively mean grid connectivity becomes optional for ordinary households.
Iran will end up demanding that every last cent of what it costs to rebuild their infrastructures will be collected from Hormuz tolls (with interest) that Europe et. al. will have to pay. The question is whether Europe has the balls to come out and state that every last cent they have to pay Iran for this will be collected from US tech firms via extraordinary taxes imposed on them. Alas we all know they don't...
Edit: And she's gone
Mashallah. I'm not a Marxist but this second trump admin is reminding me of that old quote about how history plays out twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. A good 30% or so of my white western friend group at this point absolutely refuses to visit the US while Trump remains president and this is only growing, not because they're personally afraid for themselves but because they don't want to patronise the US anymore. I expect this number to only go up over the next year or so.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
5d ago
Your proposed model is actually not too dissimilar to what used to be the case before 1911. MPs used to be unpaid before that point and the civil service was mostly gentlemen of independent means or (more regularly) their sons. It sort of worked because everyone involved was mostly properly educated and formed and despite the usual minor corruption was genuinely invested in seeing Britain stay Great.
The Roman Republic was surprsingly similar as well, the cursus honorum was ruinously expensive for everyone apart from the top patricians and therefore the people who took those positions didn't have much of an incentive to loot the state unless they were trying to prefigure Crassus or something (which of course didn't work out).
The problem is that this only works when the people at the top who take these jobs are properly forged and not merely selected. These people went to Eton and Harrow followed by Oxford before taking on their government posts and back then this was a proper rigorous education in the classical Trivium and Quadrivium. Back then these institutions didn't make you run the rat race to get in, if your stock was good and you could pay (or even if you couldn't but were academically excellent, Newton went to Cambridge on the back of nothing but his own intelligence in the 17th Century) you were in. The prestige you got from graduating form these places came from what they taught you and put you through, not because you were chosen by admissions committees as being worthy from amongst the huddled masses yearning to be given entry.
These people were formed properly before their public service began and this formation was necessary for them to do a good job. However today who are the sons of the rich by and large? With few exceptions it's mostly people who made their money in finance and technology, people who don't have much "institutional pedigree" in the intellectual sense and got where they are through "sharp practice" which of course percolates down to their children's mindset as well.
Their upbringing by and large consists of expensive private schools that optimize relentlessly for university admissions: little Johnny should do 8 weeks working in a lab with Prof. X on Drosphilla not because he cares one whit about cellular biology but because if he gets his name on a paper doing something menial but necessary then that will help him get his admission at Princemouth after which he's basically set for life. Handing governance to this class on the theory that their wealth frees them from financial incentive is like handing surgery to someone on the theory that their steady hands free them from the need for medical training.
What is far better is to have the formation without the careerism. The solution isn't to make the positions unpaid so that only the rich need apply but rather to make the formation so demanding and the culture so oriented toward duty that the careerists self-select out. ENA at its best did exactly this: the sortie, the ranking system, the culture of public service, all of it was designed to filter out people who were merely ambitious and retain people who were ambitious for the right reasons. That it failed to do so perfectly is not an argument against the principle, merely against the execution, and certainly not justification for giving it the chop.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
5d ago
I'm lucky that I have a digital record predating LLMs that I can point at to show that I don't need them as a crutch or as a total replacement, more as a regular tool or aide.
Hey, I have the same thing as well...
I'm left wondering whether there's a market for me writing a post fully from scratch and then putting it through an LLM before uploading the result instead of my original post so that keen eyed detectives such as yourselves have something to point to below the surface meaning of the text itself; think of it as an Easter Egg (quite topical), if you will. I already strive to make my posts work on multiple levels, and there's always the allure to add yet another an extra dimension in.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
5d ago
I'm literally reading Infinite Jest right now. Honestly it's a Skill Issue if you don't get it if you ask me. The more well read you are otherwise the more you'll get out of it. Blood Meridian was a harder read for me the Infinite Jest (though it's an amazing book as well).
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
5d ago
Here in the UK it's the opposite way around. An Oxbridge undergrad is seen as significantly higher status than an Oxbridge Masters (ignoring certain very difficult and very prestigious courses, but they are collectively tiny), which just requires you to be in the top 10% and have the money to pay for it mostly. PhDs are at the top but so few people have them that it doesn't particularly change the bulk.
BurdensomeCount
Thou Shalt Read BC's Writings!
5d ago
Crazy how some people think this essay was better than my unassisted writings while others insist that it's worse.
Were I a tabloid style writer I might make a new post titled "Is AI the new Marmite?" (whether it would be made with or without AI assistance is left as an exercise for the reader).
I don't understand the people who don't understand how much of a big difference AI is making to software development. Speaking of Software development, this video is great and captures my frustration with a lot of the software developers who I have to work with and yeah for people like that I'd understand completely why AI is bad, all it does is it 10x the amount of slop they produce which then others have to review.
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