Yet if John Nash had solved negotiation in the 1950s, why did it seem like nobody was using it today? The issue was that Nash's solution required that each party to the negotiation provide a "utility function", which could take a set of deal terms and produce a utility number. But even experts have trouble producing such functions for non-trivial negotiations.

A few years passed and LLMs appeared, and about a year ago I realized that while LLMs aren’t good at directly producing utility estimates, they are good at doing comparisons, and this can be used to estimate utilities of draft agreements.

This is the basis for Mediator.ai, which I soft-launched over the weekend. Be interviewed by an LLM to capture your preferences and then invite the other party or parties to do the same. These preferences are then used as the fitness function for a genetic algorithm to find an agreement all parties are likely to agree to.

An article with more technical detail: https://mediator.ai/blog/ai-negotiation-nash-bargaining/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835411

Points: 28

# Comments: 8

You’re right that data remains in Freenet only as long as people are actively interacting with or hosting it. After that, it may eventually be removed. The key point is that Freenet is a communication medium with caching, not a storage medium.

That said, it only takes a single peer to keep a contract alive by continuing to host it. We call this pinning. As long as someone maintains a subscription to the contract, its state remains available.

You’re also correct that if a contract disappears entirely and someone later reintroduces an older state, that older state becomes the state others retrieve. There is no global database preserving history independently of participants.

Happy to clarify further, especially if you’re planning to write about it.

Happy to answer questions.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930547

Points: 6

# Comments: 3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659281

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

The only people frothing about the mouth over it are people who hate him over politics, it's a convenient gotcha - nothing more.

Do you disagree?

I'll get over it.

Sure — but I wouldn’t be if I thought he was a bigot. Having listened to hundreds of hours of him explaining his views, I’m far better informed than people judging him from short, out-of-context clips.

> It’s tough to see your idols fall into being dumbasses

I don’t treat public figures as idols. I also don’t think disagreeing with prevailing opinion automatically makes someone a “dumbass.” Sometimes it means they’re willing to take reputational hits for what they believe is right.

> If you sincerely think Scott Adams had zero bias

Nobody has zero bias. That’s an impossible standard.

> As someone who likes the Harry Potter series

For what it’s worth, I think J.K. Rowling is an example of someone who did the right thing at substantial personal and professional cost, particularly in defending women and girls. That’s not idol worship — it’s acknowledging moral courage when it’s inconvenient.

> That he didn’t support ‘stop the steal'

This is where the argument seems to shift from racism to political conformity. Disagreeing with someone’s politics isn’t the same thing as establishing that they’re a bigot.

No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking. The terminology has changed; the existence of compliance-driven hiring and promotion pressures has not.

> You only have one source of this ‘truth’.

When the question is what someone believes happened to them, their own account is inevitably the primary source. You can argue he was mistaken or self-serving, but dismissing the account outright because it doesn’t fit your expectations isn’t evidence.

> I am betting you’re a white male

And that assumption rather neatly illustrates why, for a long time, it was socially risky for white men to even claim discrimination without having their motives or identity used to invalidate the argument.

Most people never get interviewed on cable news at all, so that’s not a meaningful baseline. When someone is publicly accused, explaining yourself publicly is a predictable response, not evidence of guilt.

> Saying something publicly is an action. You can’t take it back.

Of course you can clarify or correct yourself—people misspeak all the time. Whether that matters depends on whether listeners are interested in understanding or just in cancelling someone they don't like.

> Why do you feel the need to defend him?

Because I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of Scott Adams over many years, and I’m confident I understand his views far better than people judging him from short, out-of-context clips.

I don’t get anything out of this except insisting that the truth matters. Even when the person involved is unpopular or dead.

What evidence is there to go on that's better than his own account?

> b) why he was dropped from syndication.

That is well-understood https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4