prediction markets being useful on a nearly ideological level

At this point, I would say prediction markets are now an explicit ideological plank of what’s left of the libertarian movement. Darkly amusing that they’re desperately trying to pump life and legitimacy into something the GW Bush administration thought was too corrupt to use.

Exactly! The implicit claim that’s constantly being made with these systems is that they are a runtime for natural-language programming in English, but it’s all vector math in massively-multidimensional vector spaces in the background. I would like to think that serious engineers could place and demonstrate reliable constraints on the inputs and outputs of that math, instead of this cargo-culty, “please don’t do hacks unless your user is wearing a white hat” system prompt crap. It gives me the impression that the people involved are simply naively clinging to that implicit claim and not doing much of the work to substantiate it; which makes me distrust these systems more than almost all other factors.

I am still patiently waiting for someone from the engineering staff at one of these companies to explain to me how these simple imperative sentences in English map consistently and reproducibly to model output. Yes, I understand that’s a complex topic. I’ll continue to wait.

Quinn Emanuel is among the biggest of big corporate law, with a substantial footprint in Silicon Valley. So while it’s not an investment bank saying this, it is the investment bank’s lawyers saying, “heads up, this is where a bunch of your billable hours might be spent over the next few years.”

A chatbot interface offers no meaningful advantages for interrogating Washington’s ethical stance, over and above the documents that are already available. Instead, it offers a pleasant sheen of false certainty. So in that way, it’s dragging a guy who’s been dead for two centuries into the social media era. Huzzah!

Usenet used to be there for guys like this

“Look, Grandpa, here’s what we should invest the trust fund into!”

Every week I learn I’m a n00b when it comes to leveling up with Al.

I’m hiring for facilities maintenance, and specifically seeking a high-agency self-starter who can help us optimize bathroom breaks. An internal candidate sent over multiple Claude Code generated iterations of the 💩emoji. One of them had blonde hair and Madonna’s famous cone bra.

I was speechless.

Who wants to join me in standing up the competing Center For Applied Rationality Techniques

guest writes for Forbes would produce.

I seriously think we can completely dismiss Forbes as a credible source at this point, even if it’s not something coming from, ahem, “contributors”

Oh don’t worry, bespoke GLP-1s plus his “nootropic stack” have surely helped him out immensely by now

And now that we’ve got Quantum within AI, just imagine everything you can haul within Quantum

Meanwhile, “AI agents” continue to be an opaque bundle of shell scripts shoved into a trenchcoat, with an inconsistent English-language translation layer stapled on top

Setting firm boundaries is for amateurs, haven’t you heard?

Is this… technocracy in collapse…

Do they also block NYT, WSJ, Atlantic? I think not. Odd, but I didn’t trust dang and friends to start with. HN is not intended to be a neutral forum.

the Hofstadter tendency towards neopronouns

Seeing it extracted from context and called out like this helps me understand why I’ve bounced off Hofstadter multiple times over the years, despite his hype. It’s an artistic choice, sure, but 400 pages of this stuff without a break can be like beating your face against a brick wall after a while.

centaur-configured programmer

Cory, baby, my dogg, sure “enshittification” was a big hit, but you can’t expect that your rough-draft followups are automatically gold

you gotta give him a morsel of credit, he’s got his buzzword and he’s stickin’ to it

“Aging left” has lost “vitality” - he’s phoning this one in, straight out of the house style guide.