twoodfin

6 ms·

91.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
My hypothesis is that an LLM’s ability to concoct prose that will convince even an expert of the validity of an idea is largely independent of the LLM’s ability to validate the idea itself, or whether the idea is correct in the first place.
92.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
I think the key question is more effective at what? I see plenty of anecdotal evidence that models have been trained fantastically well—and getting better—at writing to trigger the right neurons in the human population to produce “This is
93.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
It took longer than necessary, but in what ways do you think an Intel Core-derived chip is different from what an “Intel Alpha” would have been? Taking for granted that hardware backcompat (Itanium had this, too!) was a starting requirement
94.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
I did this research once, and actually consumer CPU’s didn’t hit the performance of the original Cray-1 (1976) until roughly the Pentium II (1997). The Crays used in the fictional Jurassic Park (Y-MP’s?) would have been much more powerful
95.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
What does Robinson-Patman enforcement have to do with the economic definition of a monopoly? Robinson-Patman applies to every supplier and every retailer, not just monopolies, which is what makes it so difficult to equitably enforce. So it
96.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
Also, I’ve observed a rhetorical trend among the “anti-bigness” crowd towards defining “monopoly” down: “You may think a monopoly is an overwhelmingly dominant position as a supplier of a good or service, but that’s just naive popular econo
97.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
The post is absolutely LLM-generated. “Punchy” short sentences, “… has quietly come to mean …”, “The optimized paths weren’t there to execute.”
98.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
Google (Alphabet) paid over $26B in corporate income taxes last year.
99.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
What does that have to do with the question of how they’re taxed?
100.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
Nope. Northern Virginia communities, for example, have seen significant budgetary wins from data center buildout over the past decade.
101.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
If/when open-weight models do catch up (i.e. become the dominant product in demand), Amazon transitions from a middle-man to the supplier with the best economies of scale. Great business either way. You could even draw an analogy to Li
102.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
Good question. Given what happened with xAI’s excess capacity lease to Anthropic, and Meta’s noises about doing the same, seems likely that the demand for inference will continue to slope upwards for a while. If I’m Oracle, I’m not worried
103.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
Sure, but fundamentally they’re acting as a distributor of someone else’s product in the form of the frontier models. That’s a classic middle-man. No value judgement. I think this is a fantastic strategy.
104.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
Amazon Bedrock is probably middlemanning an insane amount of token consumption these days for the same reasons.
105.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
Sure, there’s plenty of places where you could plausibly build a data center, so the leverage that localities have to insist on high tax rates is limited.
106.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
Property tax is the dominant method for local governments to capture the value of hosted commercial activity. You don’t need a high rate to capture plenty of value out of a $multi-billion data center. The problem is mostly on the electricit
107.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
Coming to this unexpectedly awesome thread a bit late but… Take away any questions of ego or rivalry: Don is obsessed with the youth of his era. Over and over again we see him trying to pick the lock of understanding how they see the worl
108.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
I am highly skeptical that you can usefully capture actual comparative growth rates after normalizing for PPP. Take someone in Kazakhstan making a salary equal to per capita GDP. Unadjusted, that’s about $17,000 USD. With PPP adjustment we
109.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
As you suggest, if anything, inflation statistics overstate the decline in currency value over time. Over the long term, attempting to quantitatively adjust for the value of goods that simply did not exist prior to time X becomes a subjecti
110.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
“We should regulate tech companies” != “Online advertising should be illegal.” Also, real median household income.
111.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
Real household median income in the US has risen by more than 25% since 1996, largely driven by technology built for and by the ecosystem you want to pull out by the roots. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA67
112.
by twoodfin 3mo ago
That merely hundreds of people can make a $30B investment return Apple/Broadcom-level profit margins is amazing . This is what technology does: More output for less labor input.
113.
by twoodfin 4mo ago
The money they’re not spending on the Xbox every year!
114.
by twoodfin 4mo ago
The Fourth Amendment covers exclusively “their persons, houses, papers, and effects” so it has to be one of those.
115.
by twoodfin 4mo ago
Chatrie was about Google’s personal location tracking feature in Android, not about carrier tower records.
116.
by twoodfin 4mo ago
The very first holding of the majority opinion by Kagan: Held: Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his
117.
by twoodfin 4mo ago
As I understand the ruling, the Court decided these location records were akin to a diary or a personal photograph. That’s what triggered the essential element of an expectation of privacy, from which the fact of a search was established. T
118.
by twoodfin 4mo ago
To its credit, the article covers all the reasons why the Chatrie decision won’t be determinative for this case. But the headline and narrative paint a way too optimistic (if you’re anti-Flock) picture of Chatrie ’s impact. In particular
119.
by twoodfin 4mo ago
Government overreach X is good because in a sea of bad consequences, a few good things happen, too? It’s much better for governments to be principled, and only interfere with mutually voluntary engagements by citizens when there’s an urgent
120.
by twoodfin 4mo ago
That’s not really responsive to my concerns about Robinson-Patman. A world where it’s enforced uniformly and strictly might have some local benefits, but getting the government involved in regulating every wholesale transaction for “fairnes

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