Reminds me of a good line from Starman…

Until AI isn’t trained on all open source code ever written, regardless of license, which I doubt will ever happen, isn’t SaaS-writing AI in some sense building a larger scale & more concentrated version of what you’re hoping to destroy?

Personally, I hope and want everyone selling used cars and life insurance to be honest and upstanding. some of them are.

I used the wrong word, btw. The word I meant to use was ‘discretionary’ income. I think that’s what you’re suggesting, that rent is discretionary? ‘Disposable’ income is what’s left after taxes, but ‘discretionary’ income is defined as being what’s left after paying for things like rent, transportation, food, and utilities (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discretionaryincome.asp)

It’s true the amount one spends on rent is a bit elastic, and that is also true for most consumer goods. The problem with your argument is that rent is not optional, like most consumer goods are. There are very few things that one cannot go without paying for at all, and rent is one of those.

If I understand correctly, what you’re suggesting is the reverse of how most people including economists think of rent. This discussion does depend heavily on what “other goods” you’re actually talking about. Can you provide more concrete examples, and show that they really are getting less expensive over time? Is your hypothesis supported by Eurostat’s HICP or the World Bank’s data on inflation and consumer prices?

> then the entire experiment is invalid

Isn’t that what I said? You even quoted me saying it. But I didn’t say anything about only control being contaminated or mis-measured, I think you’re assuming something I didn’t say. Validity is, of course, compromised if the control is compromised, regardless of what happens to the test samples.

> The control cannot be “mis-measured” […] yes, the control may itself be contaminated […]

So which is it? Isn’t the article we’re commenting on talking about the possibility of mis-measuring? Are you suggesting this article cannot possibly be an issue when measuring control samples? Why not?

Controls absolutely can be mis-measured or contaminated or both. It has been known to happen. It’s bad when this happens because it means the experiment has to be re-done.

> If the experimental process contaminates the controls, it will also contaminate the non-controls

Yes! This is exactly what I was implying, and is exactly how you might end up underestimating the relative presence of whatever you’re looking for in the test, if your classification procedure overestimates it.

> You’re looking for between-group differences

Yes! and this is why if, for example, you didn’t notice your control had stearates and you counted them as microplastics accidentally, and then reported that your test sample had 2x more microplastics than your control, you might have missed the fact that your test actually had 10x more microplastics, or that your control actually had none when you thought incorrectly that it had some.

This, of course, is not the only possible outcome, not the only way that the results might be distorted. But this is one possible outcome that the Michigan paper at hand is warning against, no?

> Most of the papers I have read are far, far from even that naïve baseline.

Short of it, or exceeding it? Based on earlier comments, I assume you mean they’re not meeting your standards. I don’t know what you’ve read, and my brief googling did not seem to support your claims here so far. Can you provide some references? It would be especially helpful if you showed recent/modern SOTA papers, work that is considered accurate, and is highly referenced.

> There’s no such thing as “overestimating in baseline samples”

What do you mean? Contamination and mis-measurement of control samples is a thing that actually happens all the time, and invalidates experiments when discovered.

> What you’re trying to say is that if there’s a chemical everywhere, the prevalence makes it harder to claim that small measurement differences in the “treatment” arm are significant.

No. What I was trying to say is that if the control is either mis-measured, for example by accidentally counting stearates as microplastics, or contaminated, then the summary outcome may underestimate or understate the prevalence of microplastics in the test sample, even though the measurement over-estimated it.

There is practically universal recognition among microplastics researchers that contamination is possible and that strong quality controls are needed, and to be transparent and reproducible, they have a habit of documenting their methodology. Many papers and discussions suggest avoiding all plastics as part of the methodology, e.g. “Do’s and don’ts of microplastic research: a comprehensive guide” https://www.oaepublish.com/articles/wecn.2023.61

Another thing to consider is that papers generally compare against baseline/control samples, and overestimating microplastics in baseline samples may lead to a lower ratio of reported microplastics in the test samples, not higher.

I googled it. According to Google, London’s average rent is around €2,700, around 3x higher than the average. I assume the number of people living there and paying that much balances against the number of people like you living in smaller towns and rural areas who are paying lower rents.

But yes, rents have become very high everywhere. I live in a medium sized city in the US not anywhere near a coast, and most kids attending the local university are paying over $1000/mo for a 1-bedroom place. The primary way to get cheaper rent is to have flat-mates, try to get 3 or 4 people into a place that rents for, say, $2500/mo.

I was paying $2k/mo in San Francisco 25 years ago for a place that was maybe 90m^2, and since then rents have gone way up. Google says the average now is just under $4k/mo. In some nicer neighborhoods, some people pay $8k/mo for a single bedroom. This big-city rent in SF, LA, NY, Chicago, Miami, etc. balances against the small towns in the US where you can find a room for $500/mo, which is why the average is above $1k.

You’re technically correct, btw, rental housing is a market and is subject to market forces, meaning what people are willing to pay. I’m just not so sure about framing rent as being lower priority than other necessities. And rent prices have been increasing faster than other necessities, and faster than income, so that might be a confounding factor in your argument.

Still, my initial reaction above is due to the fact that in the US and in Europe in most large cities, the average rent is north of $1000/mo.

Last year, at first, $200 seemed crazy. Now that I’m getting addicted to coding agents, not so much. Some companies are paying API rates for AI for employees, and it’s a lot more than $200/mo. It seems like funny money, and I’m not sure it’ll last.

> these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup

This is true, and while AI spend continues to rise, I’m starting to think once the dust settles and the true costs emerge and stable profits are achieved, that it may be expensive enough that it’s a limiting force.

You named Dune and 2001. Let’s look at IMDB’s 1-star reviews for them:

(2001) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/reviews/?ref_=tt_ov_ql_...

(Villeneuve’s Dune) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1160419/reviews/?ref_=tt_ov_ql_...

(Lynch’s Dune) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087182/reviews/?ref_=tt_ov_ql_...

Do the same for products that you like and paid for. I’m certain that an honest application of that test will demonstrate that you’re cherry-picking, made up your mind here for some reason and are unswayed by facts.

Again, name any movie you like and go look at the 1-star reviews. You will see the very same rants you’re making here. You can trash any SciFi movie this way because it’s fiction.

So when you said “no actual SciFi” you just meant you thought it was bad sci-fi? The book spends a lot more time on the scientific challenges, so if that’s what you want, maybe you should read it before commenting on this story any further. I can see why they chose to skip that stuff for the movie.

You’re entitled to your opinion. I, and others here and online, disagree with it, and we’re not being paid by Amazon. I don’t know why you keep saying Disney and Deadpool over and over again, especially since those two are very different and this film is very different from either, but some people actually like the film, and it appears to be more people like than dislike. Is that why you’re coming on so strong, because you expected pushback?

HN runs on user-submitted posts. People submit things they find interesting, and things they believe others will find interesting.

I liked the movie and loved the book. Did you read the book? You seeing to be ignoring opinions from real people in this thread. What if the good reviews are as genuine as the bad ones? All I can conclude from bad reviews is that some people have different taste than me, and occasionally some people are in a bad mood when they watch something and it spoils the experience.

What is an example of actual SciFi? What do you mean about there not being any?

Being in a religion doesn’t imply belief in deities; it only implies people want social connection. This is clearly visible in global religion statistics; there are countries where the majority of people identify as belonging to a religion, and at the same time only a small minority state they believe in a “God”. Norway is a decent example that I bumped into just yesterday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Norway