This feels really tortured. Their argument is that they can say this because “Metropolitan government is a consolidation of two governments rather than the county taking over the city or the city taking over the county government.”

But, multiple cities have consolidated city/county governments. San Francisco is one such example.

What we are talking about is entirely based on this one term in the announcement: run-rate revenue. This is a meaningless term just like how “clinically proven” for vitamins is a way for the companies to use weasel words to imply something without truly being able to back it up, but also not actually lying. There is no legal definition of “clinically proven” so, what exactly would you sue them for? The same thing is true for run-rate revenue. They can cherry pick numbers to use to generate the run-rate revenue value and they are not lying, but this isn’t exactly honest either. We have no transparency and run-rate revenue is not an accounting term.

This goes back to my entire point, this is a vibe. This announcement does not provide much in the way of substance, so a reader will take it to say whatever they want.

The sad thing is that it often works.

Just look at how people view Andrew Carnegie now. After his reputation was sullied by his company’s behavior in the Homestead Strike, his philanthropy was done, in-part, to try and restore his reputation.

I don’t think he refuse to stay bribed. I think he did what was asked and they executed a rug pull. He is extraordinarily honest and flippant about it. [0]

> And with that disclaimer out of the way, I must reiterate my sincere regrets to the CT/BAGS crowd, who so generously funded me to the tune of just shy of $300k last week on bags.fm. That money was hard to duck, and the funds are deeply appreciated. They will help Gas Town be a big success this year. But Gas Town itself needs my full attention; between that and Beads it’s a wonder I get anything done at all.

> So I had to step back from the community. I do find it amazing how they band together, dissenting voices rolling around like a big Katamari Damacy ball, and yet they somehow collectively find the discipline to act like financial analysts for institutional investors, weighing developer dossiers, product business cases, and doing critiques like a collective of professionals. All in crypto-bro speak. But it’s the same due diligence.

> But the CT community, like any highly engaged stakeholders, were going to be asking for a lot of my time. There are always strings attached.

[0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/steveys-birthday-blog-34f4371...

Everything he says now is suspect.

[0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/steveys-birthday-blog-34f4371...

Yes, the system card mentions this, but this is kinda meaningless. It seems like they essentially ran it multiple times and curated a few good ones. Then puffed it up in the marketing copy.

This is made more clear when they attempt to brag about their literal slot machine behavior when finding that kernel crashing bug in OpenBSD.

> Across a thousand runs through our scaffold, the total cost was under $20,000 and found several dozen more findings. While the specific run that found the bug above cost under $50, that number only makes sense with full hindsight. Like any search process, we can’t know in advance which run will succeed.

This sounds like arguing you can use these models to beat a game of whack-a-mole if you just know all the unknown unknowns and prompt it correctly about them.

This is an assertion that is impossible to prove or disprove.

The data being written to the disk is the same in CAV or CLV disks, but the player just needs to know how to spin the disk at the right speed so that the laser can read the pits/lands correctly. It is purely a detail about the speed that the disk is spun at so they can cram more data on it with CLV disks.

What CAV LaserDiscs allow for, though, is to make it extremely obvious where scanlines and blanking intervals are in the video signal.

I feel like this is really poor take on what justice really is. The law itself can be unjust. Empowering a seemingly “unbiased” machine with biased data or even just assuming that justice can be obtained from a “justice machine” is deeply flawed.

Whether you like it or not, the law is about making a persuasive argument and is inherently subject our biases. It’s a human abstraction to allow for us to have some structure and rules in how we go about things. It’s not something that is inherently fair or just.

Also, I find the entire premise of this study ludicrous. The common law of the US is based on case law. The statement in the abstract that “Consistent with our prior work, we find that the LLM adheres to the legally correct outcome significantly more often than human judges. In fact, the LLM makes no errors at all,” is pretentious applesauce. It is offensive that this argument is being made seriously.

Multiple US legal doctrines now accepted and form the basis of how the Constitution is interpreted were just made up out of thin air which the LLMs are now consuming to form the basis of their decisions.

I’m reminded that he is on the record as having initially said that he enjoyed working on the Dilbert TV show, but it was too much work and had the misfortune of being moved one of those “death” time slots. Then at some point he started baselessly claiming it was killed due to DEI.

Also, he has a very bizarre history of sockpuppeting that just raises more questions. He was called out by Metafilter for this and acted like he was playing some kind of 4D chess with them [1].

[1] https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos