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polygamous_bat commented on Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset   economist.com/leaders/202... · Posted by u/vnorilo
rimbo789 · 3 months ago
Crypto was a huge mistake. It should have been rigorously regulated right out of the gate to the point of being unusable for anyone. I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes.
polygamous_bat · 3 months ago
Money laundering is also a pretty large use case (https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/additional-12-defendants-...)
polygamous_bat commented on E.U. Prepares Major Penalties Against X   nytimes.com/2025/04/03/te... · Posted by u/dotcoma
nradov · 5 months ago
There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here, so your comment is a non sequitur. If particular accounts are posting fraudulent information, then go after those through regular legal channels. The platform is not the problem here.
polygamous_bat · 5 months ago
> There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here.

That is a purely subjective opinion, since I have talked to elderly people who assumed “blue checkmark = celebrity” and was therefore confused why there are so many such interactions on trivial posts.

polygamous_bat commented on Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other   fuelarc.com/news-and-feat... · Posted by u/NotInOurNames
BeetleB · 5 months ago
That is not addressing the base rate.

To take a hypothetical extreme: If all cars but one on the road were Teslas, it would not be meaningful to point out that there have been far more fatalities with Teslas.

Even more illustrative, if 10 people on motorcycles had died from Teslas, and 1 person had died from that sole non-Tesla, then that non-Tesla would be deemed much, much more dangerous than Tesla.

polygamous_bat · 5 months ago
> To take a hypothetical extreme: If all cars but one on the road were Teslas, it would not be meaningful to point out that there have been far more fatalities with Teslas.

However, in such a case, “base rate fallacy” would prevent you from blaming Tesla even if it had a 98% fatality rate. How do you square that? What happens if other companies aren’t putting self driving cars out yet because they aren’t happy with the current rate of accidents, but Tesla just doesn’t care?

polygamous_bat commented on Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other   fuelarc.com/news-and-feat... · Posted by u/NotInOurNames
PaulRobinson · 5 months ago
That gives you absolute rate, but not relative rate.

There are not many other cars out there (in comparison), with a self-driving mode. There are so many Teslas in the World out there driving around, that I think you'd have to considerably multiply all the others combined to get close to that number.

As such, while 5 > 0, and that's a problem, what we don't know (and perhaps can't know), is how that adjusts for population size. I'd want to see a motorcycle fatality rate per auto-driver-mile number, and even then, I'd want it adjusting for prevalence of motorcycles in the local population: the number in India, Rome, London and South California vary quite a bit.

polygamous_bat · 5 months ago
> As such, while 5 > 0, and that's a problem, what we don't know (and perhaps can't know), is how that adjusts for population size.

This puts the burden on companies which may hesitate to put their “self driving” methods out there because it has trouble with detecting motorcyclists. There is a solid possibility that self driving isn’t being rolled out by others because they have higher regard for human life than Tesla and its exec.

polygamous_bat commented on What if we made advertising illegal?   simone.org/advertising/... · Posted by u/smnrg
christophilus · 5 months ago
I hate ads. I hate them everywhere I see them, but if you want to start a business, and you can’t advertise, how do you possibly stand a chance against entrenched incumbents? Banning advertisements is regulatory capture taken to an extreme.
polygamous_bat · 5 months ago
There can still be product catalogues, people will still shop in person or on online resellers. You can still start off with a limited time discount so people can try your product. None of these need advertisement, they are organic ways of getting the word out there.
polygamous_bat commented on What if we made advertising illegal?   simone.org/advertising/... · Posted by u/smnrg
chii · 5 months ago
> Why should money be able to buy you that power?

why shouldn't it?

If somebody believes that their message is important enough to outbid everybody else, their message ought to be the one that is displayed.

polygamous_bat · 5 months ago
> If somebody believes that their message is important enough to outbid everybody else, their message ought to be the one that is displayed.

Sometimes (often?) people with a lot of money may not believe in speech but in suppressing speech. However, money should not allow for suppressing speech, for example by buying a giant megaphone and speaking over people.

By your logic paying people $500 to heckle at your political opponents rally is fine. It may be legally okay, but it is a moral hazard, and for a better society we should try to better distinguish between “free” speech and “bought and paid for” speech.

polygamous_bat commented on What if we made advertising illegal?   simone.org/advertising/... · Posted by u/smnrg
jjk166 · 5 months ago
The problem is the harder you try to imagine it, the less it looks like a better world.

Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy. Getting rid of a billboard for something I am never going to buy sounds great, but it kinda sucks for the person who actually is interested in the thing that billboard is advertising. Even if there were some type of advertising that provided no benefit to any part of society, the restriction on the freedom to communicate those advertisements is something that harms all of us.

Sometimes the part of building a better world that takes the most effort is recognizing where we already have.

polygamous_bat · 5 months ago
> Letting people communicate freely is a good thing in its own right, and fundamental to so many other good things we enjoy

I would argue that paid advertisement is a force distorting free speech. In a town square, if you can pay to have the loudest megaphone to speak over everyone else, soon everyone would either just shut up and leave or not be able to speak properly, leaving your voice the only voice in the conversation. Why should money be able to buy you that power?

polygamous_bat commented on What if we made advertising illegal?   simone.org/advertising/... · Posted by u/smnrg
etempleton · 5 months ago
How do those sites make money if advertising doesn’t exist?

A major challenge in journalism is because of the collapse in value of banner ads. No one but the very largest newspapers have sustainable businesses in the United States and they only do because of the critical mass they have reached with subscribers.

polygamous_bat · 5 months ago
Good information is valuable. When internet didn’t exist people paid good money for newspaper and magazines because they provided good information which people found valuable.
polygamous_bat commented on Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout   finance.yahoo.com/news/as... · Posted by u/rcarmo
junon · 7 months ago
o1 also does this.
polygamous_bat · 7 months ago
o1 does not show the reasoning trace at this point. You may be confusing the final answer for the <think></think> reasoning trace in the middle, it's shown pretty clearly on r1.
polygamous_bat commented on Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout   finance.yahoo.com/news/as... · Posted by u/rcarmo
plaidfuji · 7 months ago
The part of this that doesn’t jibe with me is the fact that they also released this incredibly detailed technical report on their architecture and training strategy. The paper is well-written and has a lot of specifics. Exactly the opposite of what you would do if you had truly made an advancement of world-altering magnitude. All this says to me is that the models themselves have very little intrinsic value / are highly fungible. The true value lies in the software interfaces to the models, and the ability to make it easy to plug your data into the models.

My guess is the consumer market will ultimately be won by 2-3 players that make the best app / interface and leverage some kind of network effect, and enterprise market will just be captured by the people who have the enterprise data, I.e. MSFT, AMZN, GOOG. Depending on just how impactful AI can be for consumers, this could upend Apple if a full mobile hardware+OS redesign is able to create a step change in seamlessness of UI. That seems to me to be the biggest unknown now - how will hardware and devices adapt?

NVDA will still do quite well because as others have noted, if it’s cheaper to train, the balance will just shift toward deploying more edge devices for inference, which is necessary to realize the value built up in the bubble anyway. Some day the compute will become more fungible but the momentum behind the nvidia ecosystem is way too strong right now.

polygamous_bat · 7 months ago
> The part of this that doesn’t jibe with me is the fact that they also released this incredibly detailed technical report on their architecture and training strategy. The paper is well-written and has a lot of specifics. Exactly the opposite of what you would do if you had truly made an advancement of world-altering magnitude.

I disagree completely on this sentiment. This was in fact the trend for a century or more (see inventions ranging from the polio vaccine to "Attention is all you need" by Vaswani et. al.) before "Open"AI became the biggest player on the market due and Sam Altman tried to bag all the gains for himself. Hopefully, we can reverse course on this trend and go back to when world-changing innovations are shared openly so they can actually change the world.

u/polygamous_bat

KarmaCake day3570April 5, 2018View Original