qeternity (u/qeternity)

qeternity commented on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes? english.elpais.com/techno... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

stingraycharles · 2 days ago

It’s much easier to tax the general population than businesses, as they don’t push back as much.

It’s the same pattern everywhere around the world (perhaps there are a few exceptions). Businesses can be much more creative with tax evasion as well.

qeternity · 2 days ago

> It’s much easier to tax the general population than businesses, as they don’t push back as much.

Businesses don't pay taxes. People do. Every dime that a corporation pays is a reduction of capital returns to shareholders, or a reduction of investment into business activity, both of which are taxed again by the people who ultimately receive the capital.

qeternity commented on GPT-5.2 openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/atgctg

Workaccount2 · 6 days ago

I (and others) have a strong suspicion that they can modulate models intelligence in almost real time by adjusting quantization and thinking time.

It seems if anyone wants, they can really gas a model up in the moment and back it off after the hype wave.

qeternity · 6 days ago

Quantization is not some magical dial you can just turn. In practice you basically have 3 choices: fp16, fp8 and fp4.

Also thinking time means more tokens which costs more especially at the API level where you are paying per token and would be trivially observable.

There is basically no evidence that either of these are occurring in the way you suggest (boosting up and down).

qeternity commented on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

DangitBobby · 10 days ago

https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/dollar-stores-are-killing...

qeternity · 9 days ago

This does not prove, at all, what you are claiming.

qeternity commented on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

bittercynic · 9 days ago

Dollar General and their ilk are behemoths compared to the shops that might have served these areas before they rolled in. It's possible they're the only game in town because they engaged in dumping or other dirty/illegal tactics to drive out established businesses.

I'm not an expert on the topic, but I don't think it's a reach to think that they might have engineered this situation.

qeternity · 9 days ago

Or perhaps more likely like a large corporation simply has economies of scale that smaller retailers cannot compete with.

qeternity commented on Solution to US debt crisis is severe austerity triggered by a fiscal calamity fortune.com/2025/12/06/us... · Posted by u/mohi-kalantari

simonsarris · 9 days ago

> How severe? A sustainable U.S. debt trajectory would entail elimination of nearly all defense spending or almost all non-defense discretionary outlays, he estimated.

Reminder that infrastructure is ~3% of the budget, the military is ~13%. Almost all of the rest are benefits, either health or money, for old people or various poverty reduction schemes. Or debt.

Social Security was made when there were ~130:1 worker:retiree ratio, now its closer to 3:1 and getting worse. The budget is largely an exercise in transferring money from the younger to the older. Unlike when SS started and the older generations were the poorest, right now they are the richest, so its an exercise in making the richest generations a bit richer at the expense of the current working generations.

Since debt is now a large part of the US budget, this represents the retiree generation (again, the richest generation!) borrowing from even farther in the future to give themselves more money.

There is no solution that doesn't confront this. The old are eating the young at an accelerated pace. People will say things like "But seniors are on a fixed income" as if that didn't represent most people, more or less, or justify the sheer scale of the wealth transfer.

The most realistic solution is that we would have to stop all kinds of benefits to already-rich people and make it solely and exclusively on poverty reduction for the retirees that are in fact poor.

qeternity · 9 days ago

> Reminder that infrastructure is ~3% of the budget, the military is ~13%. Almost all of the rest are benefits, either health or money, for old people or various poverty reduction schemes. Or debt.

The US Government is an enormous welfare program with a military on the side.

Whenever people talk about the rich paying their fair share, they simply fail to grasp the enormity of the problem. There is no taxing your way out of this problem.

Society's expectations have far outpaced our fiscal strength.

qeternity commented on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

DangitBobby · 10 days ago

Then feel free to explain the studies and articles online describing how dollar stores are fucking rural grocery stores.

qeternity · 10 days ago

How about you cite something.

qeternity commented on Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

garbagewoman · 10 days ago

Did you ever consider that they might have caused this situation?

qeternity · 10 days ago

It would help people to consider your point if you made even a modest attempt to explain and justify what you mean.

qeternity commented on 'Life being stressful is not an illness' – GPs on mental health over-diagnosis bbc.com/news/articles/cx2... · Posted by u/jnord

oncallthrow · 11 days ago

I agree that mental health conditions probably are overdiagnosed and overdiagnosis of this kind is genuinely harmful in many cases (via nocebo effect).

But equally I do think it's true that there really are more people with mental health conditions, largely because:

* life is genuinely worse today than it was 20 years ago, mostly because of technology

* the excessive amount of screen time that the average person experiences is fundamentally harmful to the natural balance of neurotransmitters in the brain

qeternity · 11 days ago

> life is genuinely worse today than it was 20 years ago, mostly because of technology

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Almost everything today in absolute terms is better than 20 years ago, even more so outside the developed world.

What specifically today is worse than 20 years ago?

qeternity commented on Anthropic acquires Bun bun.com/blog/bun-joins-an... · Posted by u/ryanvogel

mayo369 · 15 days ago

Maybe same for anthropic, they can simply write agent using Rust/Go. Instead they decide to buy and develop a JavaScript runtime.

qeternity · 14 days ago

These are completely different. Agents (aside from the model inference) are not CPU bound. You gain much more by having a wider user base than whatever marginal CPU cycles you would gain in Rust/Go.

Video games are of course a different story.

qeternity commented on DeepSeek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models [pdf] huggingface.co/deepseek-a... · Posted by u/pretext

bbor · 16 days ago

I mean, there are lots of models that run on home graphics cards. I'm having trouble finding reliable requirements for this new version, but V3 (from February) has a 32B parameter model that runs on "16GB or more" of VRAM[1], which is very doable for professionals in the first world. Quantization can also help immensely.

Of course, the smaller models aren't as good at complex reasoning as the bigger ones, but that seems like an inherently-impossible goal; there will always be more powerful programs that can only run in datacenters (as long as our techniques are constrained by compute, I guess).

FWIW, the small models of today are a lot better than anything I thought I'd live to see as of 5 years ago! Gemma3n (which is built to run on phones[2]!) handily beats ChatGPT 3.5 from January 2023 -- rank ~128 vs. rank ~194 on LLMArena[3].

[1] https://blogs.novita.ai/what-are-the-requirements-for-deepse...

[2] https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-3n-E4B-it

[3] https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text/overall [1] https://blogs.novita.ai/what-are-the-requirements-for-deepse...

qeternity · 16 days ago

> but V3 (from February) has a 32B parameter model that runs on "16GB or more" of VRAM[1]

No. They released a distilled version of R1 based on a Qwen 32b model. This is not V3, and it's not remotely close to R1 or V3.2.