Dogs are not people. Many in Seattle think their dogs are people, or even prefer dogs over people, but they are not, and they do not enjoy the same protections against discrimination.

If you have never been a landlord, I can see why you would think that "if they damage the property, they pay for it" is a reasonable rule that would work, because if your dog destroyed a door, the carpet, and the blinds, you are likely to be willing (if unhappy) to pay to fix it. If you have been a landlord, you know why this doesn't work, and you would also know why pursuing the damages in court also doesn't work.

(If you are wondering why: people do not pay. Deposits, which they also now capped in Seattle, often don't cover the damage. And suing people who have no money in order to get a judgment that you can't collect on is expensive and pointless.)

This just socializes the cost of pet damage onto everyone, which is why this is populist slop.

(Some of the other junk fees make much more sense: mandatory fees that you have to pay, that are fixed in nature, should just be in the advertised lease price. Think "common area fees" you can't opt out of.)

It does impose significant compliance burdens with massive fines.

You have to report who paid for the ad, where the money came from, what political process it relates to, you have to do this through the entire chain (i.e., ad agency, ad exchanges, publishers), you have to attest to the ad's accuracy, they have to publish all the information through a central EU repository, they are not allowed to use any person-level ad targeting, they have to track whether it pertains to any active EU bill or legislative process within three months of decision-making and, if so, they have to attest that the entity and funds come only from the EU (not just directly, but indirectly).

The penalties for mistakes are enormous. The act allows penalties of up to 6% of global revenue. That's around $10 billion for Meta.

I'm pretty sure I would make the same decision when the EU is threatening to fine me for $10 billion for making any mistake on the rules for the TTPA.

Meta doesn't do this outside the EU, and they didn't do this in the EU prior to the TTPA. Draw your own conclusions about whether this is a "meta problem."

It imposes substantial bureaucratic compliance burden on advertising platforms to accept ads that deal with political issues.

Meta decided that the revenue wasn't worth the compliance burden, so they do not accept any political advertising at all. They filter anything that smells like political or social issues, whether it be a campaign about anti-immigration or a play about feminism, because if they accept it they will get heavily fined by the EU.

This is why Meta does not ban this advertising outside of the EU. It's a EU regulatory problem. The Register does not mention this anywhere in the article.

But I do want them using it to help them research, find interesting contrary views on a subject, gut-check assertions (how many weirdly wrong statements in articles would have been caught by feeding it to an LLM and asking it to question unfounded or incorrect claims?), check technical accuracy of things outside the writer's core domain, track interview transcripts, search/summarize across prior work, do data exploration of public/government reports. Etc. It's a very empowering tool for journalism!

Instead, it's become a religious issue that is more or less at the level of "one drop" theory.

But you have to be willing to break out of the bubble, including getting on a plane, and I see very few people being willing to do that.

Your assumption is that the benchmarks are essentially identical in difficulty, with the only difference being their age and thus whether they could have been trained on.

It is possible to trick pangram - they bias toward a low false positive and a higher false negative - but it is not true that it is essentially random.

DeepInfra sells DS v4-flash at 0.08 in, $0.18 out. Gemma4 they sell for $0.07 in, $0.34 out. OpenAI's price for luna is $0.20 in, $1.20 out.

Why would you assume OpenAI is somehow uniquely incompetent at making small, fast models? And that they're worse at serving it than DeepInfra? Any observer can see they are making money here.

I never understand why people who are convinced there is a big con just don't check market prices and see if there's money to be made.

That doesn't mean their business is great -- they're losing tons of money, but it's because they spend too much on fixed costs, and they can't stop spending money on training next generation models with no end in sight, not because the inference is margin negative, which is a flimsy idea that just clouds the actual business issue.

So we can go round and round on this, each with our made-up objections about how it's temporary or unrealistic or impossible or whatever, or we can just accept the prices as listed and use that to guide our economic decisions.

Their cache read costs are $0.50 per million, or 25% of the cost of uncached reads.

The industry standard is a 90% discount, so cache costs you 10% of uncached. So that means 5.6 Sol actually costs less per million cache reads - $0.40/million.

If you are doing a lot of agentic work where the vast bulk of your token consumption will be cached input reads, you won't get the expected cost savings from Grok.

I imagine this is the result of some problem in their serving infrastructure that I hope they will fix, because then the pricing will become actually strong. (The other possibility is that they bet on distracting people with good headline prices assuming they'd miss the bad cache pricing, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that.)

"Pressing charges" is mostly a made up idea for criminal cases. However, prosecuting attorneys may not want to pick up a case if the victim is not cooperating, because it makes the case much harder to win.

The county's other option is to simply price data centers. Yes, that means they might not win the data center. If the data center can get better terms elsewhere, they do that. If the town doesn't want to concede on price, then fine.

People seem to be mad that data centers show up with less perceived value to the community than they want, so why would they care if the data center builds elsewhere because they don't agree to their price? The position strictly Pareto dominates the ban stance: at worst, they get no data center (same as ban), at best, they get a bunch of tax money.

Please educate me on how I'm "missing the point" because of how "naive" I am!

For alcohol, almost every big study has shown either no discernible effects going from zero to 1 drink per day, or actual slight benefits going from 0 to 1 that then reverse when increasing beyond that. There is not strong consensus which of these is true, but there's definitely no real evidence that 1 drink per day is harmful as measured by all-cause mortality.

See GBD 2020 in the Lancet (which showed a slight J-curve), Wood in the Lancet 2018 (optimally low risk at 100g ethanol per week, or ~1 drink per day), Zhao in Jama (no discernible negative effects at 1 drink per day, no benefits either, no J-curve), and the latest National Acadamies review showing lowest all-cause mortality at about 1 drink per day (so, a J-curve).

Alcoholism has tons of negative effects. But these seem to start at around 2 drinks per day and rise rapidly from there.

Moreover, the WHO never changed their stance when later big studies showed that the "lowest risk" level is not actually at zero drinks.

The timeline was this:

- In 2018, a study was published in the Lancet that was the Global Burden of Disease analysis. They claimed the modeled minimum risk exposure was zero drinks. But the magnitude effects were extremely small: moving from zero to one drink a day pushed the incidence rate of alcohol-associated health effects from 914 per 100,000 people to 918 per 100,000 people. This was the basis of the "no safe level."

- Four years later, an updated Global Burden of Disease analysis, also published in the Lancet, actually reversed course on this. After controlling for more factors, they found risk was actually slightly J-shaped, and for 40+ year olds the theoretical minimum risk was about 0.5 drinks per day. The WHO ignored this updated study when they wrote their opinion piece in 2023.

- Another big study with ~600k participants published in 2018 in the Lancet shows lowest total risk consumption levels at 1 drink per day, with mortality rising above that level. The WHO also ignored this.

- The JAMA study in 2023, with >4 million participants, showed no benefit to low-volume drinking, and also no increase in harms from low volume (1 drink daily) drinking. Again, the WHO ignored it.

Several other studies have shown either no discernible risk change between zero and 1 drink per day, or lowest possible risk at 1 drink per day.

But the WHO and much of the public health policy community ignores almost all of the actual credible science on this because it does not fit with their ideology. It's a huge problem with public health policy: the actual scientists and statisticians are doing great work, but if it's not what the policy people want to hear, they discard it and keep repeating their mantra.