Eh, the drugs work. A great many people in the US struggle with weight despite shifting to high quality foods, fad diets, exercise etc. I'd honestly attribute the root cause to high general stress levels in daily life.
I really want a machine which gives me the statistical average opinion of all reviewers in a target audience. Sycophancy is a specific symptom where the LLM diverges from this “statistical average opinion” to flattery. That the LLM does this by default without clarifying this divergence is the problem.
Usually retrying the review in a new session/different LLM helps. Anecdotally - LLMs seem to really like their own output, and over many turns try to flatter the user regardless of topic. Both behaviors seem correctable with training improvements.
Yeah, most of the time when I want an opinion, the implicit real question is "what sentiment does the training set show towards this idea"
But then again I've seen how the sausage is made and understand the machine I'm asking. It, however, thinks I'm a child incapable of thoughtful questions and gives me a gold star for asking anything in the first place.
The strategy of the administration appears to be that they have authorization to “breaking things quickly” and then can ask the powers at be to approve any “fix” or simply accept the broken state.
If Venezuela descends into a state of anarchy, they can ask congress to approve a plan to restore order. We’re irrevocably involved in the situation now.
But I will be blunt, the problem is not just the current government. One of our political parties starts at least one large conflict every time they are in power. This has happened for 35 years now, if this continues my entire lifespan will have existed in a perpetual state of war.
> Doing something hard and a little bit scary together strengthens the bond
This can’t be underestimated. Most of my adult friends come from my trekking hobby. Everyone struggles during a trek, group dynamics form, you stay surprisingly close with the people you trekked with.
I used to do long distance cycling with a few friends. We have a ridiculously tight bond around that suffering. So many hours asking each other what the hell we were thinking, and so many hours planning the next trips. We'd do 300, 400, 600km in a go. I miss it, and I miss them.
600km?! at what pace? I've ridden 190km a couple times, but that was a. a long time ago b. took all day. In my defense, it was on a fully-loaded touring bike, but even on a high-spec racing bike I can't imagine cranking (heh) out more than maybe 300km in one go.
For those really long guys we'd manage just 18kph or so. On shorter ones like 200km, we'd average more like mid 20s. I think beyond 300km is where the big shift happened and our average dropped a ton. Though we rode with some guys who had averages in the high 20s, even on 600s or further.
We initially wanted to do a ride in France called Paris-Brest-Paris, but never got good enough. That's a 1200km ride. Then kids happened, careers, etc. I'm too bad at time management for that kind of riding, haha.
I’ve done some long rides to be sure, but the longest I’ve ever ridden non-stop-ish is probably about 14 hours. I think riding through the night is a deal-breaker for me. I’ve never been on the road earlier than 6am, or later than 10pm.
14 hours is a solid trek! The 30 hour+ rides were relatively uncommon for us. I'd say the majority were closer to what you've done.
For sure, riding at night is awful. I'm too risk-averse to do it much these days. I've got kids who depend on me to be more careful than that.
We typically left around 4am, and on some rides would finish after midnight if not riding most of the night. Those dark hours were always pleasantly low-traffic, yet I always wondered if the ratio of drunk and/or tired drivers was far worse.
I think that's really the only part I don't miss, come to think of it. Headlights at night were always unsettling.
People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront.
How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know, scaling the online storefront would have required Amazon scale investments which a dividend maximizing company was unlikely to do.
> People are talking about putting a mail order catalog store online. Presumably, sears already had the catalog, shipping infrastructure - so it really should have been about digital payments, and an online storefront. [...]
> How significant their shipping catalog was in the 1990s I do not know
Sears discontinued its general mail order catalog (which had declined in relevance for years) in 1993, the same year NCSA Mosaic was released, while the web had about 0 public penetration and no commercial use.
So, it wouldn't have been a matter of adapting the catalog business to the web, it would have been rebuilding it from scratch.
people underestimate how slow picture loading was back then. Online storefronts seem to live and die by their product images. It wasn’t really feasible to sell anything other than books until DSL came along.
It wasn’t perfect but we had plenty of successful sites where most users used dialup. You’re talking small, heavily compressed JPEGs but it was manageable and especially important to remember that people didn’t expect it to be super fast. For browsing, it was slower than paging through a full catalog but still days faster than mailing an order and less stressful for a surprising number of people than calling an order phone line, especially if they weren’t certain about what they wanted. Web pages had room for a lot more text than a printed catalog, too.
Online ordering from the paper catalog would have worked well enough to bootstrap. For items in the catalog, you don't need a lot of pictures, and they don't need to be big. If you want to have a few more pictures on a details page, you would put them behind a more photos link and show one at a time so you don't trash the connection.
It can also be as simple as finding meaning in the habit of work and the growth which may come with it. Nihilism and hedonism wear thin after a short while.
The taxes on returning profits to investors via dividends are quite high. You’d be looking at the corporate tax rate (35%) + the dividend tax rates (between 15 and 35%). For any company which may need to raise equity finance later, this is an awful deal - but growing a cash balance doesn’t do the job either.
So MSFT is effectively getting 2x the equity by putting money into OpenAI, it also conveys some financial engineering capability as they can choose to invest more when profits are high to smooth out cash flow growth.
There was a report groq missed revenue targets by 75%. It wouldn’t move hard for the board to conjure a “dire” sell or die story. As it’s not an acquisition, they are somewhat freed from proving market value.
It’s a good point, if they are actually struggling then a fire sale is justified.
The counterpoint would be that 3 months ago they raised $750m at a $6.9B valuation. Unless they are burning through that cash so fast that they need to start raising immediately, the missed target shouldn’t be an existential blow.
The printing of dollars by the Fed comes with a secondary effect - the dollars are not evenly distributed amongst the population. They are printed via market action, and the ones who are closest to the market action are free to capture as large of a share as markets allow.
Over time, it's natural that actors will optimize the above system to capture as many dollars from the printer as they can.
My understanding is that European Air and Ground forces have been able to deter or destroy Soviet/Russian Naval operations in the North and Baltic Seas since the start of the cold war. Land based anti-ship missiles have more than enough range to cover the entire water way on their own.
This was a major reason the Soviet Union and now Russia never invested in a large navy outside of Submarines.
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