https://charliesykes.substack.com/p/a-vivid-snapshot-of-trum...

Some highlights include a $580 million dollar bet on oil futures 15 minutes before Trump made the announcement of talks with Iran, which the Iranian government denied actually happened.

Naturally, political appointments at the SEC are preventing investigation.

That range is a significant caveat. If your round trip commute (or one way commute, if you can charge at work) is outside the electric range, then you'll be relying on gas every day. In my situation it's worked out extremely well. I charge at home and only need to fill the gas tank about three or four times a year.

Hanlon's Razor applies: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

This just happened in my neighborhood. There was a proposal to build low rise apartment buildings about a mile from the detached single home neighborhood where I live, and people had lawn signs opposing the construction. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loudest and most active anti-development voices were from Trump supporters. Economic illiteracy used to be the domain of the political Left, but the Republicans are making real inroads in rejecting free market principles, so there's some amount of political realignment. Luxury beliefs indeed.

Let's be real here. Nothing this administration ever does is planned.

Children don't learn to speak a language by learning all the grammar and conjugation rules first. They learn by repeating phrases they've heard before and they generalize. Usually we learn tools the same way. We see someone else using a tool, and we do what they're doing, and generalize.

That's not to say that man pages should consist only of examples. There are times when you really do need to understand how the tool processes corner cases and really understand how it works. But I expect most of us here can relate to the experience of opening the man page for a tool and being completely baffled by a wall of unfamiliar jargon. Most of the time you just want to see how to do the most normal common functions, especially when you're learning a tool the first time.

What would be stronger evidence for an absence of neanderthal mothers among neanderthal/sapiens hybrid children would be a lack of neanderthal mitochondrial RNA in modern populations. This would point in the direction of no neanderthal grandmothers for us modern humans, though I'd be reluctant to present this as solid evidence. Maybe sapiens mitochondrial RNA is just better and there's selective pressure against neanderthal mitochondrial RNA.

None of this is to suggest that all neanderthal/sapiens couplings were loving affectionate parents. Just that the absence of neanderthal DNA on modern X chromosomes means nothing in this context.

If a fraction of the level of skepticism these people applied to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton were applied to Trump and his cronies, they'd be demanding impeachment.

As far as today's models, these are best understood as tools to be used as humans. They're only replacements for humans insofar as individual developers can accomplish more with the help of an AI than they could alone, so a smaller team can accomplish what used to require a bigger team. Due to Jevon's paradox this is probably a good thing for developer salaries: their skills are now that much more in demand.

But you have to consider the trajectory we're on. GPT went from an interesting curiosity to absolutely groundbreaking in less than five years. What will the next five years bring? Do you expect development to speed up, slow down, stay the course, or go off in an entirely different direction?

Obviously, the correct answer to that question is "Nobody knows for sure." We could be approaching the top of a sigmoid type curve where progress slows down after all the easy parts are worked out. Or maybe we're just approaching the base of the real inflection point where all white collar work can be accomplished better and more cheaply by a pile of GPUs.

Since the future is uncertain, a reasonable course of action is probably to keep your own coding skills up to date, but also get comfortable leveraging AI and learning its (current) strengths and weaknesses.

This isn't a reason not to use Qwen. It just means having a sense of the constraints it was developed under. Unfortunately, populist political pressure to rewrite history is being applied to the American models as well. This means its on us to apply reasonable skepticism to all models.

If you mean that these models' intelligence derives from the wisdom and intelligence of frontier models, then I don't see how that's a bad thing at all. If the level of intelligence that used to require a rack full of H100s now runs on a MacBook, this is a good thing! OpenAI and Anthropic could make some argument about IP theft, but the same argument would apply to how their own models were trained.

Running the equivalent of Sonnet 4.5 on your desktop is something to be very excited about.

But I can declare with 100% confidence that this song *rocks*! Go check it out.

The "mis-alignment" we do need to worry about is intentional. Naturally, the hyperscalers are deploying these models in order to benefit themselves. Ideally, customers will select models that are most grounded and accurate. In practice, there's a danger that people will select models that tell them what they want to hear, rather than what they should hear. We've seen this with journalism and social media.

The other danger is that absent a competitive marketplace for AI, a single corporation or a cartel will shape the narrative. The market valuations of some AI providers seem to be based on this assumption.

It turns out that if you aren't deluded by culture war superficialities, energy efficiency is an advantage on the battlefield. Presumably this Prius on treads is confusing to chickenhawks who conflate "Likes" on Facebook and Instagram with military supremacy.

It's not "This is the truth." Rather, it's "The truth is unknowable." If nobody knows what's true and false anyway, there's no reason to concern yourself with "facts" that disturb your preconceptions.

People today may have a better sense of the downsides of ad-based services than we did when the internet was becoming mainstream. Back then, the minor inconvenience of seeing a few ads seemed worth all the benefits of access all the internet had to offer. And it probably was. But today the public has more experience with the downsides of relentless advertising optimization and audience capture, so there might be more business models based on something other than advertising. Either way, GenAI advertising is certainly coming.