blagie

24 ms·

91.
by blagie 1y ago
It depends on the format of mortgages. There are parts of the US where home ownership is bottlenecked by land prices, where this is absolutely the case. And there are parts where it's bottlenecked by construction costs, where this is n
92.
by blagie 1y ago
Personally, I think we should have all rent-extracting industries nationalized. Land, like in China, should be available only under a 99-year lease (perhaps with a modest homestead exemption). The government should own radio airwaves, natur
93.
by blagie 1y ago
I don't know that's quite true. I've seen cases where it allows those with money to extract money from those with a lot of money too. Take this situation: Business A and business B are both doing well and competing with each
94.
by blagie 1y ago
That's the reality of every organization if it survives long enough. Checks-and-balances need to be robust enough to survive bad people. Otherwise, they're not checks-and-balances. One of the tricks is a broad range of diverse sta
95.
by blagie 1y ago
To be specific: The nonprofit currently retains control. It will stop once more dilution sets in.
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by blagie 1y ago
Reality: It is the same as any other for-profit with a better-sounding name. It confuses a lot of people into thinking it's a non-profit without being one. Theory: It allows the CEO to make decisions motivated not just by maximizing sh
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by blagie 1y ago
No, this only happens if: 1) You're successful. 2) You mess up checks-and-balances at the beginning. OpenAI did both. Personally, I think at some point, the AGs ought to take over and push it back into a non-profit format. OAI undermin
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by blagie 1y ago
Tektronix instrumentation from this era (as well as HP/Agilent, and many of the military-affiliated labs) used pretty magical engineering tricks. In order to be able to design equipment, the instrumentation generally needs to outperfor
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by blagie 1y ago
I am also worried about "LLMs being used to replace information sources and doing great harm as a result." What in my comment made it sound like I wasn't?
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by blagie 1y ago
These are clearly AI safety: * Ensuring your robot enabled LLM doesn't smash peoples heads in because it's system prompt got hacked. * Ensuring bots don't turn the world into paperclips. This is borderline: * Ensuring your bo
101.
by blagie 1y ago
So do books. Go to the internet circa 2000, and look for bomb-making manuals. Plenty of them online. Plenty of them incorrect. I'm not sure where they all went, or if search engines just don't bring them up, but there are plenty o
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by blagie 1y ago
They probably don't, but it's still a good protection if you treat it as a more limited one. If you assume: [ ] Don't use Doesn't mean "don't use," but "don't get caught," it still limits a
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by blagie 1y ago
It's a little bit more complex than that. My personal benchmark is to ask about myself. I was in a situation a little bit analogous to Musk v. Eberhard / Tarpenning, where it's in the public record I did something famous, but
104.
by blagie 1y ago
Curiously, the mystery brand Bosch-compatible batteries on I bought on eBay -- literally cheapest seller -- seem to work very well even after years. With brandless batteries, it's luck-of-the-draw, but overall, as much as I do wish the
105.
by blagie 1y ago
If you prefer long-form, researched, and academic, Understanding China by Starr is an excellent book. The author teaches at Yale. It's from 2010, but I don't think the big picture has changed much. China has big-O, a 5000 year his
106.
by blagie 1y ago
I see. That question makes sense. I don't hate China. I'm very glad we have a competing model of governance, and I'd like to see a diverse range of governments in the world. China is experimenting with a very different model,
107.
by blagie 1y ago
You'd still need to edit quite a few more words. For example, the world is much more opportunistic than that. I know you're looking for a precise statement you can beat up (much as my edits are taking away the ludicrous parts), bu
108.
by blagie 1y ago
The world is more complex than that. There is plenty of evidence that drugs like opium were deliberately used to keep countries oppressed, but the dominant goal was to make money to pay for tea. There is plenty of evidence that alcohol was
109.
by blagie 1y ago
My opinion is that TikTok is vengeance for the Opium Wars and the Century of Humiliation. Internally, China protects its kids: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/09/1077567/china-ch... I can't
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by blagie 2y ago
One of the key lessons learned in the past half-century is that lawsuits like that are: (a) Often won (b) Pyrrhic victories Right now, it's the policy of Paramount not to sue over very clear violations of Star Trek copyrights (see: Sta
111.
by blagie 2y ago
You're making a classical error programmers make when encountering legal systems: Treating law with the same rules of logic as code. I can cite case law carving out lines around things like copy in RAM/SDD/etc. accessing a we
112.
by blagie 2y ago
I asked AI to complete an AGPL code file I wrote a decade ago. It did a pretty good job. What came out wasn't 100% identical, but clearly a paraphrased copy of my original. Even if we accept the house-of-cards of shaky arguments this e
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by blagie 2y ago
Typically, the customs declaration is filled out on the airplane. This can be done through a mobile app (which most frequent travelers do), in which case, customs might have it before you've even left the plane. If it's done on pa
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by blagie 2y ago
If this is submitted by the person who made the page: There should be clear links to the class and how to sign up. I know this isn't a marketing page, but there's plenty of people who would gladly pay money to do this supervised.
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by blagie 2y ago
> If you suddenly increase the global supply of dollars by 2x, dollars that existed prior to the increased supply will be able to purchase less. I don't think this is true. The US issues currency in two forms: 1) Deflating dollars 2
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by blagie 2y ago
The explanation here is usually simpler. Any major change like this can lead to crashes. If I have three libraries, biz, bar, and bif, and each has bugs. You've used biz. When the system was unstable, you'd debug until it works (e
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by blagie 2y ago
I should also mention: In terms of financial sense, one lesson learned in the engineering industry is that _giving away expensive things_, even at high cost, to engineers makes financial sense. If an engineer puts what you gave away in a pr
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by blagie 2y ago
That makes sense. Until you do the math. 128GB of the slowest possible DDR4 in 8 DIMMs is still faster than 16GB of the fastest DDR5 in one DIMM. 12.8GB/s*8 = 102.4GB/s > 74GB/s It requires many more traces, but you still
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by blagie 2y ago
Intel is close. Good history with software. If they started shipping GPUs with more RAM, I think they'd be in a strong position. The traditional disruption is to eat the low-end and move up. Silly as it may sound, but a Battlemage wher
120.
by blagie 2y ago
Business model is the same as Firefox: Google pays to be the default search engine. The economics are identical to Chrome being within Google. The differences are three-fold: - Bing, DDG, OpenAI, and others can compete to pay for placement

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