djoldman

As for drawn child porn, involving fictional characters (i.e. not CSAM), it is legal in certain jurisdictions. Notably, America, where the 1st Amendment errs on the side of creative expression

As I noted in another comment:

Currently this is explicitly against the law[0]:

  (a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
    (1)
      (A)depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
      (B)is obscene; or ...
  (b)...
  (c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.—
  It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.

[0]https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A

Currently it is explicitly against the law[0]:

  (a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
    (1)
      (A)depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
      (B)is obscene; or ...
  (b)...
  (c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.—
  It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.

[0]https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1466A

Meh, I assume "possession" (of drugs) is how the law is worded because otherwise law enforcement would have to catch someone in the act of using or distributing, which must be much harder to do.

Mere possession of a substance is surely not what society cares about.

I am not a lawyer.

There is something ironic about US laws that attempt to prevent crime A by outlawing action B. For example:

  * A: physical sexual abuse of children. B: possession or distribution of CSAM
  * A: drug trafficking or tax evasion. B: structured cash withdrawals

It's my understanding that conviction of CSAM-related crimes do not require any physical act to have ever occurred to any real person: one can be convicted of CSAM-related crimes related to paintings/drawings/created_art of fictional people.

It's my understanding that one can be convicted of structured withdrawals that are not driven by, linked to, or in any way related to anything nefarious.

Love this.

Whoever made this, please make a "proportion" column somehow!

I would like to know which has the most complexity per total volume or weight (it's less surprising that huge items have high complexity).

The variation in prices of staple foods between different stores has exploded in Chicago. For what it's worth, Aldi is significantly cheaper for many items. It's gotten a lot busier there too.

For day-to-day programming work, have you seen a difference in the quality of output between (Opus 4.6 / GPT 5.2 / GPT-5.3 Codex) and the current (GPT-5.6 / Fable) that justifies the price increase?

My intuition says that the output quality difference is marginal compared to the change in price especially when taking into account the effects of prompt/context engineering and harness differences.

Essentially: since opus 4.6, working through a model's quirks with prompt/context engineering and harness development will yield significantly better output than just switching models to the latest.

Initially I assumed it to be negligible but the numbers are actually very close!

I calculate around a 3% drop in speed (from 60mpg) for holding an average sized book out of the window. That's surprising to me.

It's not quite right to use hazard ratios to calculate life expectancy. But if we force it, it looks like being in the top 20% of "regular" sleepers compared to the bottom 20% confers 3-4.5 years of extra life (from birth, assuming everything else equal, assuming USA, etc.). That's 3.8%-5.7% more life (79 year life expectancy at birth in the USA as of 2025). So the numbers are actually close.

I made a bad analogy :)

But you get my point!

... you should worry that your car is going fast.

Only if we know of an intervention that will likely slow the car down and the risks+cost of that intervention justify the benefit.

Otherwise, we worry without purpose.

EDIT: I will say that there is a philosophical question here related to "basic research" / "pure science" / "fundamental science." Usually just "knowing new things" eventually proves valuable, especially in a long timeline. So in that sense, TFA could be important.

As always with a lot of these: it's not saying causation.

You might measure the speed of your car by putting your hand out of the window and notice that the wind force on your hand is strong when the car goes fast.

Putting your hand out of the window and then blocking the wind with a book doesn't make the car slow down.

Keyword: "associated"

EDIT: I meant to communicate that it doesn't make the car slow down as much as your hand behind and blocked by the book (feeling almost no wind), would imply.

The title confused me for most of the article because I assumed they were saying that getting an MRI was equivalently dangerous to a year of smoking.

So the same effort you would expend to get out of those activities on account of their risk, the same effort you should be willing to expend to get a full-body mri.

"get out of those activities"

It's 25-34 year olds:

To calculate the earnings premium for undergraduate programs, the threshold is the median U.S. Census Bureau earnings of a working high school graduate, aged 25-34 who were not enrolled in postsecondary education during the year of the associated measured earnings, in the state in which the institution is located unless the institution enrolls more than 50% of its students from out of state, in which case the national median is used.

Details here: https://www.nasfaa.org/ge_2026

The calculation is interesting:

(For bachelors degrees): Each year, they will calculate the median earnings 4 years after graduation of graduates of every (Institution, CIP code) tuple. (CIP Code: 6 digit code that identifies a "program"; there are ~2,000).

Then they calculate the median earnings of high school grads in that Institution's state across all jobs.

If the high school grads earn more than the bachelors degree grads for 2 out of the past 3 years, the Feds won't offer student loans for that (Institution, CIP code) tuple.

Incidentally, the IRS already supplies this data in aggregated form to the US Dept. of Ed.

Check it out here: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/

Here is MIT: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166683-Massachusetts...

Yes.

If one lives in the US and feels strongly about it, they should file an Out-of-Hospital DNR and POLST with every local hospital. Also consider wearing or carrying official bracelets/necklaces (varies state to state).

I'm neither a lawyer nor a doctor. :)

Even when the right preparations have been made, the system can still swallow people up. One of my patients was a man named Jack... He explained to me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to be placed on life support machines again.

Even with all his wishes documented, Jack hadn’t died as he’d hoped. The system had intervened. One of the nurses, I later found out, even reported my unplugging of Jack to the authorities as a possible homicide. Nothing came of it, of course; Jack’s wishes had been spelled out explicitly, and he’d left the paperwork to prove it.

It's interesting that our laws punish homicide with maximum criminal penalties, but the opposite (keeping someone alive against their wishes) seems to be assault and battery at worst, with much much lighter punishment.

Say you want to throw an event. A medium sized gathering. More than a couple of friends. What happens if someone gets hurt at this event? Who's liable? Who's insured for what? It's boring and annoying, but if you throw an event without insurance and something happens, you're gonna have problems. So that paperwork needs to happen.

People have been throwing events of medium size since... well, pretty much our entire existence. For most of that, we've done it without general liability insurance.

Then we made new or interpreted old laws making others far more responsible for our well-being. Whole industries are propped up on this: a ton of lawyers, insurance companies, insurance boards, government departments, etc. etc. Did we increase overall utility by spreading out the risk more optimally given the massive cost to support that system? I'm not sure.

And so so so much of all that exists to dot the i's and cross the t's. Government staffers write and debate the law changes, insurance adjusters fight the lawyers, photos are taken, reports are written, doctors have to write more, computer systems crunch numbers.

Many feel that their jobs are bullshit because so much of this seems to be in service of the process or some possibility that might happen as opposed to doing something that actually changes something directly/tangibly.

If you're going to take the time to read Geohot, take it with a grain/boulder of salt: he appears to enjoy poking the bear / being provocative, sometimes outrageously. Sometimes he's writing hyperbole that he thinks is hyperbole to make a point or just enjoy taking the extreme stance. Sometimes he's dead serious.

Anyway, he touches on 2 points that I think don't get enough coverage:

1:

Software didn’t eat the world, it largely removed one layer of friction then reintroduced it for the benefit of a few tech companies.

USA-style capitalism has shown itself to be fantastic at seeking profit. Unfortunately, it turns out that in the context of long standing regulation, it is far far more profitable to exploit regulatory loopholes and user/human irrationality/weaknesses than to increase productivity.

The upshot of this is that the arc of most companies is to first serve the user and then leverage that relationship to exploit market and consumer weakness. So you get UI dark patterns, non-colluding oligopolistic price manipulation, outsourcing of costs to public entities, etc. while the core value proposition erodes as the company strategy turns ever more into making profit by legal anti-competitive tactics.

This company arc is so prevalent it's boring: it's a reflection of the system and it's not Facebook or Google or [insert whatever], it's what the system allows and therefore incentivizes.

2:

No matter how high quality your tokens are, they cannot turn lead into gold.... AI 2040 includes this picture of a datacenter in the ocean. Just like vaporware, you can generate a picture easily. But in reality, you have to deal with supply chains.

"Bullshit jobs" took over the zeitgeist for a turn awhile ago. So many jobs are so far removed from actually moving physical things around. It may be the case that AI will just accelerate how quickly companies generate reports about reports about possible strategies to address potential futures and pay employees to do it.

It seems that AI mostly accelerates paperwork, not production or real service work that tangibly improves real world outcomes. It's all: faster images, more and faster powerpoints, more accurate dictation to satisfy insurance requirements (that is it's own regulatory capture), etc. etc. There are exceptions, but they seem to be few.

"The Anti‑Forbes List"

Other possible titles:

  "List of Founders by Uncaptured Equity Value"
  "List of Most Regretful Founders"

Reed Hastings may be the most regretful. He kept just 1.4% of the eventual value:

https://anti-forbes-list.vercel.app/founder/reed-hastings

This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools).

These news articles are just tiresome at this point. Obviously folks cheated previously, obviously it's easier now, obviously the answer has been to not have take homes all along.

Follow the Nordic model has never been anything but a fantasy.

All the Scandinavian countries put together have slightly more people than the NYC metro area and are extremely homogeneous in terms of ethnicity, religiosity, etc. as compared to the USA.

In short, it's never been a good policy testbed for the much much larger and more diverse USA.

So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars.

She wasn't saying, of course, that it's impossible to become a billionaire.... What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.

But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don't have to cheat to become a billionaire. You've seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the growth rate and how long it continues. If it's impossible to make a billion dollars without cheating, which of those two numbers is impossible?

AoC quote:

There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.

Come now @pg.

$2 million * 9.45 months * 93% growth rate = earning a billion dollars, ok. Does that really address what AoC was saying? She wasn't saying that the math doesn't math.

What's rarely addressed in these articles is the question: if the product/service is so bad relative to the cost, where's the competition? Specifically in this article about fire trucks, they say that margins have tripled... ok, why isn't anyone jumping on that?

Society gains massively from future workers/tax payers

It seems to me that, all other things equal, future workers/tax payers will lead to economic increases proportional to their costs.

A reasonable forward looking plan / budget scales with the population size. Therefore there would be no need for these special one off exceptions and nudges.

All these little bandaids add up to complexity that necessitates more bandaids.

Under the US Cloud Act, American companies are required to hand over all information they store to the government if requested to do so, even if it is stored abroad.

Hrm. It's my understanding that a US company is required to give almost no data to any government without a warrant.

Non-paywall:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/us-is-starting-to-see-...

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence.

So something like, "Frontier AI has broken the 'high school' or 'university' format"?

The hype surrounding AI is just pervasively exhausting: you've got the folks talking about an entire new age for humanity where we're shortly going to take over the entire universe. And you've got the folks talking about how our entire society is crumbling.

Education is one place folks seem to throw up their hands and say nothing can be done.

The fix is simple: students are to be evaluated on their performance in person. That's it.

Any other "collapse of education" isn't due to AI, it's something else.

I would love for the standard to be to ALWAYS report the required amount of memory to load and run a model in bytes of RAM alongside any other metrics. I'd love to see time to first token, token throughput, token latency as well but I'd settle for memory size as described above.

Essentially, many people want to know what the minimum amount of memory is to run a particular model.

Parameter count obscures important details: what are the sizes of the parameters? A parameter isn't rigorously defined. This also gets folks into trouble because a 4B param model with FP16 params is very different from a 4B param model with INT4 params. The former obviously should be a LOT better than the second.

This would also help with MOE models: if memory is my constraint, it doesn't matter if the (much larger RAM required) MOE version is faster or has better evals.

I'm waiting for someone in anger to ship the 1 parameter model where the parameter according to pytorch is a single parameter of size 4GB.

Not to support or attack the rationale behind the css or html standards but these have exact real world SI unit meanings:

   CSS  |                    | Exact Size | Exact Size    
   Unit | Name               | (Inches)   | (Millimeters) 
  --------------------------------------------------------
   cm   | Centimeter         | 50/127     | 10            
   mm   | Millimeter         | 5/127      | 1             
   Q    | Quarter-millimeter | 5/508      | 1/4           
   in   | Inch               | 1          | 127/5         
   pc   | Pica               | 1/6        | 127/30        
   pt   | Point              | 1/72       | 127/360       
   px   | Pixel              | 1/96       | 127/480                 

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

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-3/#absolute-lengths

Could you share your thoughts about neuralink? Is there enough signal for this to really work?

Have you never met a bad doctor? A shoddy lawyer? A barista with a PhD?

I presume the implication is that bad doctors and shoddy lawyers exist and just because they have advanced degrees doesn't make them good at what they do. This seems reasonable.

BUT, I find it fascinating that people who aren't doctors or medical experts think they can spot a "bad" doctor or people who aren't lawyers or experts in law think they can spot a "shoddy" lawyer.

A good doctor/lawyer makes good decisions and executes beneficial actions given the facts surrounding a situation. It's pretty hard to judge whether those decisions and actions are good or bad if one isn't an expert.

That's a huge motivating factor for professional licenses.