arctic-true (u/arctic-true)

arctic-true commented on America isn't exceptional – it's the exception not-ship.com/america-isnt... · Posted by u/hedayet

metalcrow · 10 hours ago

To pick one point out of the article for discussion, does anyone have any idea why the US is the leader in per-capita prison rates? The laws aren't all that different from other first world nations, and i doubt all the other nations have magically solved crime. What is going on? Is crime just lower in other nations? Do they not punish as many crimes with jail time?

arctic-true · 10 hours ago

America uses prisons to warehouse the mentally ill. We also have the rare combination of extremely high rates of violence - our rate of violent gun deaths per 100,000 is in the top 5 globally, slotting in between Mexico and Venezuela - and fairly robust policing and judiciary functions.

arctic-true commented on Humans peak in midlife: A combined cognitive and personality trait perspective sciencedirect.com/science... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

tmoravec · a day ago

> Yet, human achievement in domains such as career success tends to peak much later, typically between the ages of 55 and 60. This discrepancy may reflect the fact that, while fluid intelligence may decline with age, other dimensions improve (e.g., crystallized intelligence, emotional intelligence).

Isn't it about accumulated human capital (aka social networks) and experience more than anything else?

arctic-true · 20 hours ago

Yes, and that’s also why “career success” here really only means “modern era white collar career success”. In other times and other fields it can look very different.

arctic-true commented on The Waymo World Model waymo.com/blog/2026/02/th... · Posted by u/xnx

breckinloggins · 4 days ago

Interesting question. If the Waymo was driving aggressively to remove us from the situation but relatively safely I might stay in it.

This does bring up something, though: Waymo has a "pull over" feature, but it's hidden behind a couple of touch screen actions involving small virtual buttons and it does not pull over immediately. Instead, it "finds a spot to pull over". I would very much like a big red STOP IMMEDIATELY button in these vehicles.

arctic-true · 4 days ago

I feel like this ends with drunk morons accidentally creating Waymo barricades and totally ruining Mardi Gras

arctic-true commented on Anthropic AI tool sparks selloff from software to broader market bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/garbawarb

roysting · 7 days ago

Can this really be a kind of herding stampede behavior over Cowork? It’s been out several days now and just all the sudden today, all the traders suddenly got it into their little herd animal heads that everyone should rush to the exists… after that equally sketchy silver and gold rug pull type action last week?

Something seems quite off. Am I the only one?

arctic-true · 7 days ago

It could also be that we have been in an economy-wide speculative bubble for a couple of years. Whispers of an AI bubble were a way to self-soothe and avoid the fact that we are in an everything bubble.

arctic-true commented on First, make me care gwern.net/blog/2026/make-... · Posted by u/andsoitis

ErroneousBosh · 16 days ago

> I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.

No, I think you're right.

I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it was intended to be heard, if it's been copied onto a ratty old TDK D90 that's been getting bashed around in your schoolbag for months by your mate's big brother who has the CD and a decent stereo.

There's a lot of stuff I listened to that I probably wouldn't have if I'd had the selection that's available on streaming services. When you got a new tape, that was Your New Tape, and you listened to it over and over because you hadn't heard it a thousand times yet. Don't like it? Meh, play it anyway, because you haven't heard it a thousand times yet.

I got into so much music that's remained important to me because of a chance tape swap.

Maybe Spotify et al needs instead of unskippable adverts, unskippable tunes that are way outside your usual range of tastes. "Here have some 10,000 Maniacs before you go back to that R'n'B playlist!"

arctic-true · 15 days ago

Now there’s an idea. You could get artists to pay for ads just like other advertisers, and instead of hearing an ad for a product that takes you completely out of music mode, you have to listen to a whole song (or the first minute, or whatever) that’s maybe a little outside your usual mix.

arctic-true commented on Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking philipotoole.com/why-talk... · Posted by u/otoolep

normie3000 · 18 days ago

Enjoyable analogy.

> Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider.

This makes it sound like buying brewed coffee is the budget option. But the real budget option I've seen is to brew at home. Almost any household will have an appliance to boil water. Then add instant coffee.

I don't understand why, but in my experience instant coffee seems to be the baseline even in coffee-producing countries.

arctic-true · 18 days ago

I think the idea is that there are higher startup costs to brew at home. Even a cheap coffee machine is going to cost more than a cup of coffee at a diner, in the same way that a computer that can run a local LLM is going to cost more than a bunch of API calls to a commercial model. Eventually, those diner coffees add up, but you’re stuck with them if you can’t afford the coffee machine.

arctic-true commented on 2025: The Year in LLMs simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

simonw · a month ago

The summer slump was a thing in 2023 but apparently didn't repeat in 2024: https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-bea...

The weekend slumps could equally suggest people are using it at work.

arctic-true · a month ago

Interesting, thank you for that. I’d be curious to see the data for 2025. I was basing my take off Google trends data - the kind of person who goes to ChatGPT by googling “chatGPT” seems to be using it less in the summer.

arctic-true commented on 2025: The Year in LLMs simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

nen-nomad · a month ago

ChatGPT has roughly 800 million weekly active users. Almost everyone around me uses it daily. I think you are underestimating the adoption.

arctic-true · a month ago

Usage plunges on the weekends and during the summer, suggesting that a significant portion of users are students using ChatGPT for free or at heavily subsidized rates to do homework (i.e., extremely basic work that is extraordinarily well-represented in the training data). That usage will almost certainly never be monetizable, and it suggests nothing about the trajectory of the technology’s capability or popularity. I suspect ChatGPT, in particular, will see its usage slip considerably as the education system (hopefully) adapts.

arctic-true commented on AI will kill all the lawyers spectator.com/article/ai-... · Posted by u/015UUZn8aEvW

OutOfHere · 2 months ago

> but this is out-of-touch and silly.

Expensive lawyers can get better deals in court even for run-of-the-mill cases. Why is this? Are cheaper lawyers so dumb that they can't even handle common cases?

arctic-true · 2 months ago

Cheaper lawyers can’t afford to pay for as many research librarians, paralegals, junior attorneys, writing consultants, jury consultants, etc. LLMs may level the playing field in this regard. But of course, the expensive lawyer might be able to pay for more tokens.

arctic-true commented on AI will kill all the lawyers spectator.com/article/ai-... · Posted by u/015UUZn8aEvW

simonw · 2 months ago

> I mention the problem of ‘hallucinations’ – when an AI model presents false or fabricated information as factual – and the need for a human face in court. The Sandie Peggie judgment allegedly contained AI-made errors. He waves this all away. ‘Temporary bugs and sentimental preferences. The economic argument is overwhelming.’

As usual with "AI replacing humans", the key thing to consider here is accountability.

I want to get my legal advice from someone who is accountable for that advice, and is willing to stake their professional reputation on that advice being correct.

An LLM can never be accountable.

I don't want an LLM for a lawyer. I want a lawyer armed with LLMs, who's more effective than the previous generations of lawyers.

(I'd also like them to be cheaper because they take less time to solve my problems, but I would hope that means they can take on more clients and maintain a healthy income that way even as each client takes less time.)

The closing paragraph of that story:

> ‘My niece is a lovely girl, really smart, great at school, and the other day she told me she wants to be a lawyer. And I thought, “Oh my God, my little niece wants to be a lawyer”, and I flat out told her. I said please do not destroy your life. Do not get into a lifetime of debt for a job that won’t exist in ten years. Or less.’

Uh oh. Here we go again, with the "don't bother studying computer science, it's 2002, all the jobs will be outsourced to cheaper countries in the next few years!". So glad I didn't listen to that advice back then!

arctic-true · 2 months ago

When I was thinking about law school the big panic was about e-discovery tools: we wouldn’t need many lawyers anymore since we didn’t need to rifle through boxes of physical paper anymore! What happened instead was that, with the burden of collecting documents significantly reduced, we were able to start looking for needles in much bigger haystacks.