sobellian

6 ms·

31.
by sobellian 1mo ago
I'm telling you as a fact that as someone working for a manufacturing startup the tariffs have only made things more expensive for us. But I'm sure the Cleveland Cliffs execs are doing great.
32.
by sobellian 1mo ago
Imagine you want to build a factory in the US. You pay tariffs on the factory equipment you need - much of it is made overseas. You pay tariffs on your input goods. And then when you try to export your customers get hit with a retaliatory t
33.
by sobellian 2mo ago
If we are applying Jevons paradox to this then the unit being consumed is not tokens but the inputs for token production - power, capex, something else. To draw an analogy to the steam engine, coal:electricity::mechanical-work:tokens. Jevon
34.
by sobellian 2mo ago
I also tried to evaluate this claim that households have less real income after debt service. It is difficult because it depends on many nuances, like whether we care about all credit, or simply revolving credit. Your graph is interesting b
35.
by sobellian 2mo ago
You can look at the linked page. It uses "Income in 2024 C-CPI-U (2000-2024) and R-CPI-U-RS (pre-2000) adjusted dollars." I would be interested in a dataset that shows deflated household income over this same period using a reason
36.
by sobellian 2mo ago
I'm just evaluating the claim that household income has deflated for 50 years. So I took the start of the data series at ~60k and compared it against the latest datapoint at ~80k. So I concluded that the data does not support your cla
37.
by sobellian 2mo ago
Household income has not deflated. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
38.
by sobellian 2mo ago
A few thoughts. - I'm open to seeing information from an AI (I'm fine with an LLM "teaching me") so long as it is high quality. That does require human inspection. - I've seen a related bit about AI-written emails w
39.
by sobellian 2mo ago
Is it fair to say that you're more interested in discussing wealth inequality than environmental policy?
40.
by sobellian 2mo ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://old.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1qcy40d/growth_in_u... I
41.
by sobellian 2mo ago
I think there's a middle ground between laissez-faire capitalism and degrowth. As far as I can tell no one in this thread has been arguing that laissez-faire always produces great outcomes, simply (and rightly) that degrowth is a horri
42.
by sobellian 2mo ago
A single carbon tax would be a market-oriented solution that captures the externality of CO2 emission - and would likely still permit economic growth! You don't need to revolutionize the entire basis on which human civilization has act
43.
by sobellian 2mo ago
The land of Iran has changed hands many times throughout history. I think we need to avoid some level of historical / geographical determinism. The terrain is a problem but a solvable one for a sufficiently committed power / allia
44.
by sobellian 2mo ago
Just don't ask what the shortest path is to food.
45.
by sobellian 2mo ago
A trend I've noticed in results from AI search (not just LLMs) is that they often look obvious or hard to miss in retrospect. But finding them by oneself is more difficult. I personally experience this when looking at engine lines in c
46.
by sobellian 3mo ago
If you have to be a parrot of another man's thoughts, at least let that man be a synthesis of all human endeavor to date.
47.
by sobellian 3mo ago
Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other ways too - they slowly sucked all joy out of the site. Th
48.
by sobellian 3mo ago
Why are we treating it as a derivative, and what's the slope? Do we have proof it's not zero? Let's say Johnny and Kareem both study poli-sci at Harvard. When Johnny graduates with his gentlemanly C's, his dad puts in a
49.
by sobellian 3mo ago
When you combine the fraction of "hooked" admits with the number of seats affected by affirmative action, you get something between 35%-43% (depending on if you discount hooked admits that were extremely qualified anyway). I think
50.
by sobellian 3mo ago
People have different definitions of progress. I have found that people who are "progressive" on one axis can often be quite conservative on another. Look at the SF Bay Area. While it is quite progressive in the political-ideology
51.
by sobellian 3mo ago
It is not human waves, but they have been on the attack for quite some time now relying on small infantry units while obtaining very little ground. What does that tell you about what's happening to those infantry?
52.
by sobellian 3mo ago
Yeah and Anthropic is a... dividual consisting of founders, staff, and shareholders, and must comply with various governments ultimately deriving their values from billions of people.
53.
by sobellian 3mo ago
I'm curious what the state of alignment research is. My gut says this is basically impossible. People have different moral frameworks. Each individual probably has an inconsistent moral framework. Even granting perfect consistency, app
54.
by sobellian 3mo ago
Nobody at Microsoft knows what a good OS is, or what a good dev toolchain is, or what a good videocall app is, or what a good AR headset is, or... I'm being harsh. I'm sure that there are plenty of people in the org that have tast
55.
by sobellian 3mo ago
I don't know about single letters, but single words? "Score this resumé. Applicant: Jim ..." "Score this resumé. Applicant: Greg..." Is it obvious to anyone that these will have the same modal response?
56.
by sobellian 3mo ago
Even if it's deterministic that doesn't mean it isn't arbitrary. I can achieve determinism at any temperature by saving the seed. But that wouldn't make rejects feel much better knowing that if a bit was flipped in an ar
57.
by sobellian 4mo ago
You would get evicted at most. Even if you're in debt, bankruptcy does not come with any criminal liability. You'd have to do something much worse to receive jail time. And I'm not really sure what this has to do with startup
58.
by sobellian 4mo ago
A sole consumer of labor is a monopsony, not a monopoly (that would be a union). At any rate, the point is that there are many many employment negotiations that no reasonable person would agree to amount to duress. This is a counterexample
59.
by sobellian 4mo ago
There can be labor monopsonies but it is not a rule; I promise you that the key employees at a SaaS startup tend to have plenty of options.
60.
by sobellian 4mo ago
I do not understand your statement, maybe you can elaborate. If you are saying there should be a public option for healthcare, I happen to agree. Then we can have the standard discussions on how the government ought to raise funds for it. I

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