apsec112

This is a 2024 survey, so it predates Claude Code and is mostly measuring GPT-4o:

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/BFI_WP_2...

LLMs recently solved a major, famous open mathematical problem in combinatorial geometry:

https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1tj534d/openais_inter...

Median American pay for full-time workers was ~$62,000 USD in Q4 2024 (BLS), which is around $85,000 CAD. The median Canadian salary is very definitely not $85,000 CAD.

It's not like Americans are all buying X so they can't afford to buy Y - there isn't really a major category of consumption where the US median is below the OECD median. If the US had a higher savings rate, then people could smooth out consumption more (build up savings some years, draw them down in bad years or in retirement), and maybe enjoy more psychological security. But it doesn't really make sense to say that Americans are unusually "bogged down in expenses" and yet have more goods and services in every significant category.

The median American is, materially, much richer than the median person pretty much anywhere else. The US is a bad place, by rich-country standards, to be in the bottom 10%. But in terms of consumer wealth - how large your house is, how many cars your family has and how nice they are, if you have a dishwasher and home A/C, how often you eat at restaurants or travel long distances, can you afford a home repair or the latest gadget - typical American workers are second to essentially nobody. Having grown up in and left the US, I am deeply familiar with all of its downsides, but there's an abundance of data to support this.

A ten year old Honda Fit is like $12K, pretty fuel efficient, and probably reliable and low-maintenance (I owned one until recently). People aren't buying $50,000 new Ford F-150s because they just need a working car to go to work and the grocery store.

The first example I saw (think the order might be randomized?) was an EU ban on plastic straws, which is silly. Straws are a negligible fraction of plastic waste, and have no good substitute ("compostable" plastic straws are also banned; paper straws fall apart easily; metal/glass straws are inconvenient and require washing). This would flunk any serious cost/benefit analysis. You can hide the costs by making them regulatory instead of financial (the inconvenience of not having plastic straws doesn't appear in GDP stats), but the costs are still there, they're just hidden.

Obamacare was passed via regular order (60 Senate votes), not reconciliation. There was a follow-up package to tweak it that passed via reconciliation in 2010, but the original bill was regular order. It's the only (very brief) window where one party has held 60 Senate seats since 1977.

"Despite Democrats holding thin majorities in both chambers during a period of intense political polarization, the 117th Congress (2021-2023) oversaw the passage of numerous significant bills, including the Inflation Reduction Act, American Rescue Plan Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Postal Service Reform Act, Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, CHIPS and Science Act, Honoring Our PACT Act, Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, and Respect for Marriage Act."

All of these except the first two were bipartisan and got 60 Senate votes (or more)

This ignores batching - token generation is much more efficient in batch - and I strongly suspect is itself written by AI, given the heavy use of bullets

You can't choose arbitrary bits of mantissa, because what types are allowed is defined by the underlying hardware and instruction set (PTX for Nvidia). People have done some exploration of which layers can be quantized more vs. which need to be kept in higher precision, but this is usually done post-training (at inference time) and is largely empirical.

Poland does have one nuclear reactor, although it is a small 30 MW research reactor and not a power plant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_reactor

The PACT Act was a new bipartisan statute, passed in 2022, that expanded the VA's responsibilities and how many people were eligible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honoring_our_PACT_Act_of_2022

I have Pro, just updated the app, but don't currently have access

AI GPUs are bottlenecked mostly by high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips and CoWoS (packaging tech used to integrate HBM with the GPU die), which are in short supply and aren't found in consumer cards at all

At least according to WSJ, they had planned to release it earlier but struggled to get the model quality up, especially relative to cost

The vast majority of federal spending goes to the military (including Veterans Affairs), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and debt interest. Everything else doesn't matter much. This is especially true given that Republicans will probably increase the deficit; any money saved will go to tax cuts for the rich, and then some.

They don't say this, but from querying it, they also seem to have updated the knowledge cutoff from April 2024 ("3.6") to October 2024 (3.7)

He doesn't actually say that, the (very biased and polemical) article writer seems to have made that up. The actual quote is:

"Us self-claiming some [artificial general intelligence] milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. So, the first thing that we all have to do is, when we say this is like the Industrial Revolution, let's have that Industrial Revolution type of growth. The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent. Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry."

That's a completely different statement from "AI is generating no value"!

"Also, some of the materials used to make them, such as silicon, are becoming scarcer and thus more expensive."

!?

The Earth's crust is 28% silicon by mass. It's literally the second most abundant element. I'm not a professional, but isn't most of the cost of solar outside the panels now anyway - installation, cabling, inverters, permitting, storage for use during peak hours, etc?

San Francisco's budget is around $15 billion, which is larger than that of many states, for a population of around 800,000

US public education spending as a percentage of GDP is lower now than in 1993:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-government-expendit...

Please add the (2022) date

Polls by Blueprint show that the main reasons for the right shift among swing voters were inflation and immigration; "Democrats are bad at running the places they control" was seen as much less important

Source: https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/

People who read "a great deal of" political news, from any source, went for Harris by 8%. People who never read any political news went for Trump by 20%.

Can we please change the title? "Chokepoint 2.0", from skimming, doesn't appear in the documents at all.

Quoth Patrick McKenzie:

"Nic Carter, a crypto VC and podcaster, who occasionally does very good work, has been steadfastly attempting to brand a constellation of regulatory activities regarding crypto as Choke Point 2.0. This branding is an attempt to delegitimize them by associating them with politically-motivated lawlessness. It has since become popular among crypto advocates.

Unlike Operation Choke Point, which actually was a centrally directed operation with written project plans, status meetings, ongoing progress reports, and a code name decided by the participants (who, in hindsight, should have talked to their own Comms department and picked something that didn’t sound nefarious to describe their plans), Choke Point 2.0 stretches like taffy to attach to any recent regulatory activity crypto advocates don’t like. So we’ll have to review quite an involved history of very disparate issues to give advocates a fair hearing."

(whereupon follows many details of crypto and bank regulation and what happened in 2023, which is much more readable than this pile of documents)

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

curious if you could link to relevant papers? Thanks!

o3 is still a transformer-based LLM, just one with a different loss function

"showing that multilayer transformers indeed cannot solve certain complicated compositional tasks. Basically, some compositional problems will always be beyond the ability of transformer-based LLMs."

Pretty sure this is just false and the paper doesn't show this. I could be misunderstanding, but it looks like the result is only about a single token/forward pass, not a reasoning model with many thousands of tokens like o1/o3

A US invasion of Canada would be militarily successful but result in absolute nightmare chaos. There would be a global move away from US trade, financial, and military cooperation; you'd see tons of rearmament and new nuclear weapons states; the US military would lose its logistical network as countries kicked out bases; the global economy would crash; there'd be a supply chain fire worse than 2021-2 as trade shut down; financial systems would get set on fire as the dollar lost reserve currency status and on and on and on.