The trouble here is that the two things are related. It's easy to build a data center 50 miles outside the city. But because we don't allow higher density housing to be built, they instead have to build low density housing all the way out into what should have been rural land. Then you go outside the city to try to build something and instead of the neighbors being forests or fields of grain it's exurbs.

Isn't this basically how things work now when lawyers take cases on contingency?

> Time is cheap when your wages are low

Disposable time is very expensive when your wages are low. You have to work more hours just to make rent so you have less of it to begin with and then you have to spend what little you have left doing all the things you can't afford to pay someone else to do.

> It's not a binary between knowing the odds accurately or not at all. Even with good advice there will still be uncertainty.

If you know that the odds of winning are between 5% and 100% then you barely know anything and the result of proceeding with only that information would be a huge number of losing cases. If you know that they're between 90% and 100% then that's the situation where an insurer should see that and want to make money.

It's ~18% more in California than Massachusetts but ~313% more in Massachusetts than Oklahoma.

The vast, overwhelming majority of data centers source power from the grid rather than continuously operating gas turbines, and the obvious response to the ones that do is to have a moratorium on gas turbines rather than data centers.

Then you get three corporations that each own a one third stake in all the things that constitute Alphabet and a variety of investment instruments that allow anyone to buy shares in all three of them at the same time.

Things like that wouldn't work if they had an actual individual majority shareholder, but the larger the company is the less likely that's the case.

> The idea is that you wouldn't need to government to actively break up companies, they'd do it themselves (or get outcompeted).

And then we're back to the original point -- business expenses are deductions so raising the tax rate actually gives them the incentive to spend money expanding rather than using it to pay dividends, so if anything it does the opposite of that.

If the system isn't actually going to give them redress then what benefit is there in consuming the resources of the complainant and the court only to end up with the same result? The problem you have to solve in those cases is how to make it so someone with a meritorious claim would have a high probability of winning.

And what results from this when you compare system with a 15W CPU to one with a 60W CPU on performance per watt when both systems have an additional 10W draw from non-CPU components?

Eh. Most LLM output is significantly transformative. The challenge here is that some of the output is similar enough to a work in the training data that it could reasonably be considered derivative. And evaluating whether it is when you have both of them in front of you isn't even the hard part.

The real problem, from the perspective of LLM users, is that you don't know when it's happening because you haven't seen the original work to notice how similar it is to a particular output, and now maybe you have problems if you start making copies of it.

> The big corporations won the fight on file-sharing so they ought to at least be accountable to their own legal arguments.

Those big corporations are the likes of Sony and Comcast. They're the ones who would prefer to be able to sue OpenAI. But that's also the thing which is trash, because if the money went only to them then it's just propping up the incumbents while spitting on small independent content creators who get nothing. Whereas if you actually included everybody then we're back to ~$3/year and it's not even worth the administrative costs compared to just having them pay ordinary taxes on their profits to the extent that they eventually have any.

But then won't experts be offering that insurance on easy to win cases left and right?

> 1% might not deter, but I bet it still deters more than you want.

You don't actually want to deter meritorious cases at all, but we don't have that as an option. You can either have more false negatives or more false positives. Requiring either one to be zero is going to make the other one unsustainably large.

And that's the case even if there isn't any formal penalty for filing a losing case, because there is still a time cost. This is actually the "problem" AI is creating -- the time cost still isn't zero but now it's lower and therefore less able to serve its previous role of deterring frivolous cases.

> Especially because these non-experts don't know the actual odds.

Having something that can tell them that is essentially required regardless or they'll be continuously initiating cases with a <1% chance of success.

How many entities is "Google"? Is it one or is Search one company and Android another and YouTube another and so on? If they need to get the size of each unit below some threshold they can just file more LLCs.

Just use the size of the parent company, you say? Okay, which is the parent company, Google or Vanguard? If it's Vanguard then every public company exceeds the largest size threshold. If it isn't, they can use something which is formally an investment fund as the parent company and get as big as they want.

And even if you could do it, you would then create a perverse incentive for the government, because then breaking up those large companies into smaller ones would reduce tax revenue. When you should just break them up to begin with and actually solve the problem.

The funny thing about all of this is that it's basically taking revenue from the major media companies to the benefit of OpenAI's customers more than OpenAI itself, which is exactly the redistribution of wealth people seem to be demanding, but that's not how it gets characterized because the media companies are the ones characterizing it.

And there is some case to be made that disincentivizing human content creation is bad, but what that case really looks like is the argument against having the AI users free ride on an investment made by Sony or Comcast. Then what their proposals end up looking like is a tax paid by everyone where the money goes to those huge corporations. And of all the things we shouldn't do about this, that's the thing we shouldn't do the most.

What you need here is antitrust enforcement and lower barriers to entry so that there are more companies that are each smaller, and correspondingly more millionaires and fewer billionaires.

When the odds of success are 50/50, in this context that's a nuisance complaint because making it "free" to turn all of those into real adjudications would flood the system with exactly the cases where the outcome is unclear which are correspondingly the hardest to efficiently resolve. The only practical way to address that is to clarify and simplify the rules to begin with so that the outcomes are predictable rather than ambiguous, and then we're back to not really deterring anyone because it's obvious who is going to win.

And in the meantime plugging up the system with unlimited questionable complaints isn't very prudent.

You apply for your permit or whatever and the AI instantly denies you, so you start over and pull the lever again and this time the AI's random number generator comes up 777 and you get your permit.

Then the house can tune this for either reducing red tape (e.g. pulls are free) or favoring the rich (you have to pay a fee for each attempt so only the poor have to take the L once they run out of pocket money).

If the complaint has a high probability of success then it has a low probability of making the plaintiff pay costs. If it has a low probability of success then isn't that what we're trying to deter?

Russia is 15 slots lower than Nigeria on government corruption. Putin can easily have someone killed but the idea that if he needed money for the war he could get it by e.g. enforcing the law against taking kickbacks for misallocating public funds is so ridiculous that even attempting to do it might be one of the few things that could cause him to be removed from power.

And for a similar reason he can't enforce laws that require any form of localized information, because everybody is just fabricating the numbers.

The trouble with running a kleptocracy is that there's no honor among thieves.