brazzy (u/brazzy) - Readit News

brazzy commented on Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/nomdep

krupan · 4 days ago

I clicked and starting reading this expecting some actual connection between said markdown files and losing money. There was nothing at all like that in this blog post.

brazzy · 3 days ago

The connection is implied: technology companies quite suddenly lost a $285bn in market valuation, which means that the owners of these companies (either as stock or other forms of equity) have a combined $285bn less net worth. And apparently people are linking this sudden decrease in market valuation to "Anthropic launching a legal tool", which essentially consists of said markdown files.

brazzy commented on Company as Code blog.42futures.com/p/comp... · Posted by u/ahamez

brazzy · 4 days ago

"Code" is absolutely the wrong word here. There's nothing executable about it.

It's a model. And it will inevitably be incomplete and out of data, because the map is not the territory[1]

Of course, the same is true about the unstructured documents he laments, and whatever is done with those documents could probably sped up a lot this way, probably enough to justify the cost of building and maintaining it.

But the more advanced use cases he imagines run a big risk of making very costly decisions based on an incomplete or outdated model.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

brazzy commented on A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs pdfa.org/a-case-study-in-... · Posted by u/DuffJohnson

zoky · 5 days ago

Such a weird way to do it when it would be a vastly easier to just blow the document out to paper and re-scan it.

brazzy · 5 days ago

Vastly easier when you do it to one or a handful of documents.

But if you want to do it to 2000 documents...

brazzy commented on The Great Unwind occupywallst.com/yen... · Posted by u/jart

sharifhsn · 5 days ago

Speaking as a quant that has followed this story closely for months (and was educated about the yen carry trade in my degree), this narrative is somewhat wrong and also very obviously LLM slop.

It is true that the yen carry trade is currently being unwound and that it has significant implications for nearly all holders of treasuries. But claiming that ALL of the recent volatility is due to this one event is ludicrous. There are some blatant falsities, like saying that gold and silver are historically uncorrelated??? And it’s clear that the author has a bias against the financial establishment (“monopoly money”), coloring the output.

That said, there are legitimately interesting bits here I didn’t know about, like the Japanese institutional liquidation of US treasuries. I would not repeat this information to others without fact checking it, but if accurately described it’s an important space to watch. It’s not surprising that the LLM would get some things right, of course.

One big problem with this article is the clear prompt given to connect x current event to the yen carry trade, like Warsh’s nomination and the Greenland nonsense. This creates a lot of noise. It’s basically the LLM looking for a pattern between these things instead of identifying a structural flow. It might not even be wrong, but it’s horribly biased towards finding a fake pattern, so I would never trust it.

For the tech heads in HN that are excited to see a Justine Tunney post: don’t go crazy. If you’re really interested in learning about the unwinding of the yen carry trade, there’s plenty of information from actual experts to read about, not this slop.

brazzy · 5 days ago

> And it’s clear that the author has a bias against the financial establishment (“monopoly money”), coloring the output.

That should have been more than obvious from the domain name and the logo at the top already.

brazzy commented on Claude's new constitution anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

Amezarak · 18 days ago

Uh-huh. Here's the problem. Here's the way this almost always works: "Author X would have been BIASED because he belonged to Culture X that fought these people - so this is all fictional propaganda!"

Nearly all the time this is the entirety of the evidence. That is, there is no actual evidence, just people churning out papers because we live in a publish-or-perish world that well, maybe he would have been hypothetically motivated to lie or embellish. So therefore, he totally did. It's all fake!

The most notorious examples of this sort of pointlessness are claims that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians did not practice human sacrifice and it was all made up by Roman propaganda, nevermind the third-party information we have and now the archeological evidence. Rarely, in ancient examples, are they exhibiting much outrage over it.

Same for the Aztecs, another frequent target - we have non-Spanish evidence, and we never had any reason to doubt them in the first place. Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.

brazzy · 18 days ago

You are making pretty bold and sweeping statements.

Do you have a specific example for such a paper that has "no actual evidence", in an actual scientific magazine?

Considering author bias is absolute standard baseline practice in historical research, and OF COURSE it is only a starting point for a comparison with alternative sources.

> Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.

Tertullian, Apologeticum, Chapter 9:

"Babes were sacrificed publicly to Saturn in Africa till the proconsulate of Tiberius, who exposed the same priests on the same trees that overshadow the crimes of their temple, on dedicated crosses, as is attested by the soldiery of my father, which performed that very service for that proconsul. But even now this accursed crime is in secret kept up."

Does that sould "numb" to you?

brazzy commented on Claude's new constitution anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

withinboredom · 18 days ago

Right... The historical texts were propaganda for the few people who could read and write ... for what, exactly? I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?

brazzy · 18 days ago

The few people who could read and write were the educated ones - mostly those in power or close to them. So exactly the people you needed to influence to get something done. And of course written texts could be read aloud to those who cannot write.

What exactly are you actually trying to say? That propaganda didn't exist back then? That it was never written down?

What do you think "Carthago delenda est" was?

> I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?

And why would you assume that?

There is in fact a modern time example for exactly the kind of thing we're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

brazzy commented on Claude's new constitution anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

Amezarak · 18 days ago

There’s revisionist claims that all the primary sources, even those corroborated by people of the cultures in question, are either just invented propaganda or actually just isolated instances because actually, everyone throughout all time and space is on board with 2025 Western social norms. I think that’s what he’s alluding to. It’s not a very fruitful path of discussion. Archeological confirmations and independent testimony can all be safely ignored by this view as well.

But we are talking about specifically torture for sport, not just burning them alive. You can find many firsthand accounts of this throughout different times and places in different cultures. Steppe peoples and groups like the Comanche were particularly notorious for it, they seemed to find it funny.

brazzy · 18 days ago

It's not revisionist to point outthat a LOT of ancient texts, especially those describing particularly horrifying actions, were propaganda written by the enemies of the cultures in question - or embellishments written hundreds of years later.

I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you just take every text at face value, especially since it's the kind of thing that gets repeated (and embellished for shock value) far more than other historical accounts.

brazzy commented on Claude's new constitution anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

Amezarak · 19 days ago

You can find many ancient cultures who tortured babies for sport when they captured them in raids.

Exposure and infanticide was also very common in many places.

brazzy · 19 days ago

> You can find many ancient cultures who tortured babies for sport when they captured them in raids.

Can you? Sources, please. And pay attention to the authors of those sources and how they relate to the culture in question.

brazzy commented on Article by article, how Big Tech shaped the EU's roll-back of digital rights corporateeurope.org/en/20... · Posted by u/robtherobber

seydor · 22 days ago

Almost nobody in europe cares about these things. Nobody has gone out demonstrating for digital rights vs american companies. If we did we we would have already firewalled europe outside big tech.

Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.

brazzy · 22 days ago

> Why are these articles finding their way here? In europe , this is not news, never.

A provably untrue statement. Examples:

https://www.politico.eu/article/big-tech-lobbying-brussels-d...

https://www.brusselstimes.com/1916422/us-tech-giants-allying...

https://taz.de/Digitale-Rechte-in-Europa/!6130097/

https://fr.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/18/champ-de-batail...

brazzy commented on Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing spectrum.ieee.org/it-mana... · Posted by u/pseudolus

Ghoelian · 2 months ago

I've also worked with payment processors a lot. The ones I've used have test environments where you can fake payments, and some of them (Adyen does this) even give you actual test debit and credit cards, with real IBAN's and stuff like that.

brazzy · 2 months ago

It's even public: https://docs.adyen.com/development-resources/test-cards-and-...