bildung (u/bildung) - Readit News

bildung commented on A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages nytimes.com/2025/07/31/te... · Posted by u/jrwan

nopinsight · 23 days ago

Sounds good in theory but I'd be bored to death in a month, at most two. Traveling the world...maybe good for a few more months and that's it.

Wouldn't you yearn for any more impact given how much that amount of resource could improve the lives of many, if used wisely?

bildung · 22 days ago

If you want to improve the lives of many, by all means go for it, I think that is a wonderful ambition to have in live and something I strive for, too!

But we are talking about an ad company here, trying to branch out into ai to sell more ads, right? Meta existing is without a doubt a net negative for mankind.

bildung commented on Donate to the Treasury to help pay down the $36.7T public debt pay.gov/public/form/start... · Posted by u/jxntb73

echelon · a month ago

We need an API to block the government from spending more money.

It seems like voting for "fiscal conservatives" results in bigger spending.

bildung · a month ago

It seems you are more in need of an API to block the government to willingly reduce their income. The US spending per capita isn't that high compared to other developed countries, the US problem is the repeated decisions to have the wealthy citizens not contribute in proportion to their wealth.

bildung commented on Distillation makes AI models smaller and cheaper quantamagazine.org/how-di... · Posted by u/pseudolus

pama · a month ago

Silicon is already more efficient for inference than the brain. If we use centralized decoding of the V3/R1 scale models as a baseline, one can produce 720,000 tokens (a wild guess for the tokens humans could produce in 24 hours) using the energy of only 0.36 bananas. Deeply thinking humans expend up to a a third of their total energy on the brain, but cannot sustain themselves on a single banana per day.

(You can use an LLM to check this work at the cost of a tiny speck of a banana, eg: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw%3D%3D_60f4890d-711b-4331-9... )

bildung · a month ago

Well compared to the human brain LLMs do approximately zero work. An LLM neuron is at least 3 orders of magnitude less complex than a neuron in the human brain - and this factor only accounts for the neuronal instrinsics we currently know of.

bildung commented on 'It cannot provide nuance': UK experts warn AI therapy chatbots are not safe theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/distalx

Y_Y · 3 months ago

Sounds like we need more information than safe/not safe to make a sensible decision!

This is something that bugs me about medical ethics, that it's more important not to cause any harm than it is to prevent any.

bildung · 3 months ago

I you look at the horrible things that happened in medical history, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study it's pretty clear why the ethics care more about not causing harm...

bildung commented on Only Teslas exempt from new auto tariffs thanks to 85% domestic content rule fuelarc.com/cars/only-tes... · Posted by u/abduhl

nosefurhairdo · 4 months ago

Why should we send $240 million to Zambia? Is it the United States taxpayers' responsibility to treat all of the developing world's problems? How much foreign aid is enough?

The United States is approaching 37 trillion dollars of debt. There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.

bildung · 4 months ago

> Why should we send $240 million to Zambia? Is it the United States taxpayers' responsibility to treat all of the developing world's problems?

If you see someone drowning in the river, and you stand by and are a good swimmer, is it not your responsibility to help?

> There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.

US Foreign Aid was a trivial amount of money buying much soft power around the globe. China for comparison has almost double the foreign aid amount the US had, relative to GNI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_sovere...

bildung commented on How a $2k 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured 404media.co/how-a-2-000-m... · Posted by u/jaredwiener

tonyedgecombe · 4 months ago

>More robots, fewer people.

It would be amusing if after all this turmoil the work came back to the US but it barely increased manufacturing employment.

bildung · 4 months ago

Your scenario is more like a best-case option, actually. I mean currently there are only 13M people employed in manufacturing in the US [0], while output is at an all time high [1]. The vast majority of this manufacturing is dependent on components imported from other countries - which just got much more expensive. So even if employment in manufacuturing would increase by 20% (unrealistic IMO), that would only translate to 2.6M people - while at the same time losing multiples of that in better-paid jobs in other industries, mostly services.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...

bildung commented on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy... · Posted by u/belter

SJC_Hacker · 5 months ago

If thats the case, why not just register a business, and make a bunch of purchases so you don't have to pay VAT?

bildung · 4 months ago

Because that would be an obvious loophole and has been made illegal almost everywhere (i.e. you can't have a business that isn't aiming for profitability).

bildung commented on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy... · Posted by u/belter

butterknife · 5 months ago

You are right I suppose. We pay it and then we can get some of it returned.

bildung · 5 months ago

You get all of it returned. 100% of the VAT you paid on things you as a company bought you'll get back from the tax office.

And when selling products, you'll send 100% of the VAT collected from consumers to the tax office.

VAT doesn't affect a company (besides the bookkeeping).

bildung commented on U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat theatlantic.com/politics/... · Posted by u/_tk_

pembrook · 5 months ago

Yes, Europe did have great entrepreneurial culture in the past, but the point of the “founded in the last 50 years” distinction is to measure how things have been going for entrepreneurs who are still alive today.

You can’t call a region a “safe haven for entrepreneurs” if all the globally relevant entrepreneurs from that region are dead from old age.

Remember, Europe has double the population of the US. To lag behind so dramatically in the last 50 years is absolutely something to be concerned about.

Having to move the goalposts to the 1850s to make a point about relevant European businesses should be alarming to you.

bildung · 5 months ago

But if that is true, why does the EU actually has almost double the entrepreneurs per capita the US has, as I have linked?

> Having to move the goalposts to the 1850s to make a point about relevant European businesses should be alarming to you.

Please actually have a look at the EU list and click through to the companies. They are all directly linked in Wikipedia. The majority is from the 1980s and younger.