1) open weights and cheap models are only about 6 months behind the frontier in evals, but…

2) it’s always the premium model that only the biggest fans pay for, that’s just now finally achieved enlightenment.

Oh well, I guess we’ll see in another 6 months.

I’m thinking of something like finite element analysis… but, I guess since the shapes in OpenSCAD are defined through this constructive geometry system, can things be better/more mathematically defined general purpose “discretize the PDEs over my mesh” type solutions?

Anyway, nowadays population is barely increasing so I guess property values… maybe they’ll keep pace with inflation (for whatever reason)?

Another possibility is that property values tend to go up and down as some areas become more fashionable. Maybe, for whatever reason, there’s a selection bias where we tend to associate ourselves the trajectory of people who lived in those fashionable areas instead of the unfashionable ones?

Anything past the paycheck is a gamble.

That said I’m also worried about getting banned for blocking too many YouTube ads (Google doesn’t have any obligation to send me emails after all) so I… just don’t go there.

> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.

> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.

The essay is intentionally exploring an alternative to the obvious one. I think the essay does brush off the cruelty of the empire too quickly, but cruelty isn’t inherently profitable, so there’s still some explaining to do.

I mean, just as an example, your savings account interest could be computed continuously, e^(rt), which would obviously be better approximated in floating point than some decimal type. But they won’t have to do any approximation if they write the contract so that the value compounds nightly and is rounded to the nearest, whatever, tenth of a cent (which means that the rounding isn’t an approximation at all, it is part of the definition of the value being represented).

That would seem to support the theory in a way. If they could make bronze “in their back yard,” the same way that everyone else could make iron in the Iron Age, they would be sort of living in their own proto-iron-age, right? (In the sense that access to metallurgy was democratized). So if anything, it would provide some pretty strong support of the link between democratized metallurgy and more disperse power.

Anyway, should this be called LSL or WSLL? Or maybe LSWSL.