ETH_start

7 ms·

1.
by ETH_start 3d ago
Making investments that produce a positive return, by supplying consumers with higher quality goods and services at a lower cost, is not rent-seeking.
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by ETH_start 4d ago
Going off on a tangent here: for over a decade, ever since I got an inkling of the power of neural networks, I've argued that privacy is the key to maintaining a broad diffusion of wealth in the modern electronically networked world. W
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by ETH_start 4d ago
I'll try to find the analysis. It compared industries and showed the amount of taxes AI compute facilities pay (which is primarily in the form of property tax) relative to the cost of government services they use is the highest ratio o
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by ETH_start 5d ago
They pay for the energy they use, which leads to the energy infrastructure scaling up, which generally reduces per unit electricity costs. They also fund, either directly or indirectly through their taxes, upgrades to transmission lines, wh
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by ETH_start 5d ago
I'm of the opinion that billionaires are good for the economy. Wages in the US are about double what they are in the EU. There are some aspects in which the EU provides a higher quality of life, but those have nothing to do with tax ra
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by ETH_start 5d ago
These kinds of comments incite frame wars and are not really suitable for HN.
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by ETH_start 5d ago
Yes, they've gotten so much better over the last year. The hallucinations have declined dramatically and the mistakes are getting less frequent.
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by ETH_start 5d ago
It's pretty easy to solve once the political problem is solved. Colorado has solved the political problem, but many jurisdictions haven't. Mustering the political capital to defy the coalition of groups that oppose strict enforcem
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by ETH_start 5d ago
This doesn't scrap public review. It scraps federal mandates requiring public review. The states can decide for themselves if a public review is required. This is a good thing. As the ability for highly motivated activist groups to vet
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by ETH_start 5d ago
The principle means reasoning about the harms that you want to reduce, and the benefits you want to maximize, and designing policy thoughtfully around optimizing on those two fronts, instead of basing policy on vague generalizations about i
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by ETH_start 5d ago
I'd err on the side of allowing development until a proper regulatory process can be implemented or unless there's a concrete reason to prevent it. If allocating scarce electricity resources to an AI-compete facility prevents the
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by ETH_start 5d ago
AI compute facilities can inspire new regulations, yes, but what I'm advocating is that those regulations should not concern whether the facility is generating AI inference or aluminum or chemicals. All it should care about is the metr
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by ETH_start 5d ago
Okay, that is a fair argument, but the policy that that argument inspires should be implemented in a more agnostic way. There should be some objective measure of "positive economic externalities generated per megawatt of electricity co
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by ETH_start 5d ago
That's a fair point, but even this kind of "exception" to the electricity tariffs (which gives the appearance of a subsidy and elicits public opposition) can be done in a more agnostic way. E.g. a 100 megawatt AI compute faci
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by ETH_start 5d ago
I suspect this is just because of context. The AIs have very limited context related to us. I suspect that this is partially a result of the AIs being forced to be highly generalized machines which will work out of the box with anyone'
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by ETH_start 6d ago
Should this apply only to AI compute facilities or all industries? I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any se
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by ETH_start 6d ago
Good public transit is more than just the infrastructure. It's also the law and order, which is not an easy political problem to fix.
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by ETH_start 7d ago
Union shops are bad to invest in though. So you would expect to get fewer new game studios and fewer new games being produced, if other industries are anything to judge by. This is a good 1997 study on manufacturing firms and unions in the
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by ETH_start 9d ago
The degree of nativeness of the skill is orthogonal to the raw power of these systems. A frontier model has access to dozens of GPUs, each moving terabits of data, and performing trillions of matrix multiplication operations, per second.
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by ETH_start 11d ago
What Europe needs to do to spur its tech sector is lower taxes. A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a si
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by ETH_start 14d ago
Good writing != AI The blockchain was designed originally to survive state-level attacks. I responded because you brought up both the subject of censorship resistance and cryptocurrency, implying that the two are unrelated, when the former
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by ETH_start 17d ago
Cryptocurrency justifiably has a bad rep, given how much profit-motivated hype is attached to it, but it offers an alternative to steganography for resisting government surveillance: fully decentralized platforms that massively increase the
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by ETH_start 19d ago
I think to the extent that the system is lopsided, it is in creating fixed costs to participating in investment, which naturally leads to the investment market being dominated by the wealthy. The token sale phenomenon briefly reversed this,
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by ETH_start 20d ago
Gates is talking about dual-use capability (e.g. designing a medicine requiring same capabilities that allow it to design a pathogen). This is a real threat, but not a threat to the human role in the economy, which is one of being an indepe
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by ETH_start 20d ago
Maybe you're right, but I've never learned as much and as quickly as I'm learning now with the assistance of LLMs. It's like a hyper-powered search engine. It not only knows what I'm looking for, it knows the contex
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by ETH_start 20d ago
My comment on this on the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49453549
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by ETH_start 21d ago
I'm going to make an anti-capitalist argument in order to make a pro-capitalist argument. The anti-capitalist argument is that the wealthiest people in the world are not dramatically more intelligent than the average person. Bill Gates
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by ETH_start 21d ago
Hamstringing the build out of AI compute facilities in the United States is strategic suicide. AI compute is a major emerging export industry and the United States is very well positioned to dominate it, unlike mass manufacturing. If it can
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by ETH_start 21d ago
There's enough corruption and special interest dealings in politics to fill an encyclopedia. If we start on that thread, then the forum will fill up with politics.
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by ETH_start 25d ago
Would Putin want Germany to cancel the shut down of its nuclear power plants as Trump urged it to. [1] The Green Movement in Europe, which Trump opposes, was best thing to happen to Putin. As far as I can see, where Trump goes wrong is the

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