lordnacho

To settle on a price, you need smart investors to be able to push it either way, which they need shorting and leverage for.

Plus there's option traders who naturally need to go short sometimes.

Such problems may seem trivial to someone trained in modern elementary-school algebra

I've often wondered about how school curricula evolve over time. Presumably people were doing _something_ in 13th century math classes? What were they doing? How soon did we end up incorporating modern number representation into elementary school?

Something like calculus was cutting edge when Newton and Leibnitz were around, now it's what people learn in high school.

Are there things that we currently consider to be new and exciting that in a few years will be taught to every student? What will drop out?

It's just naive to say you are always going for quality. Everyone has constraints in money and time that they need to think about.

Are you not running and testing your code?

Why would you think that?

Most countries we are discussing are richer now than a few decades ago, yet still have domestic servants.

Those servants will be richer in a few decades but will still be in that situation.

But the attraction of LLM code is not that you get quality.

The selling point is that you know have a quality Vs time tradeoff that is a lot better than you used to have.

I can spend 10 seconds typing out a prompt that will generate ok code.

Before a couple of years ago, it might have taken me an hour to type out and debug that code.

But that's LinkedIn working as intended.

Nobody thinks they are about to read an actual analysis of some industry relevant development. People aren't there to provide advice about how to "connect to your true self" either.

You post on LinkedIn to say "hey I'm alive, and I'm around for this kind of thing". Even if you are just commenting, people will see you. When you post something, people look at your CV, and they are either going to offer you to interview for a job or other business opportunity.

The actual content matters very little. Most of it is people saying "hey I'm still a lawyer, don't forget me next time you need one".

It's not population. Yes, everyone will point at population, but it's not population that's the explanation. People imagine that you have to have a bunch of talents born, so the more people, the more talent.

Phenomena that are largely uniform are explained by population. Why does American have more women than France? Well, the generation rate is more or less the same, so the bigger country has more.

Iceland with 400K people managed to knock out England, population ~60M, from the 2016 European championships. China played in one world cup and has struggled to qualify for decades with 1.4B people.

Being good at soccer is not uniform, because the generation mechanism is not the same. Countries get good at soccer when they have good systems for developing talent, ie making the talent, not waiting for it.

In the US, you have some special factors:

- Pay to play. They turned kids soccer into a consumption good, which you have to pay for. In Europe, if you are any good, you play.

- Competing sports. If you're athletic, there are similar games you can play, with a much more developed youth system, particularly where you can get yourself a degree for free. The systems to develop you into an NFL or NBA player are there already, everything from recruitment to NIL deals. To do soccer, you need to find a way to get in front of a European recruiter.

- College soccer is not a pipeline into the big clubs in Europe. In Europe, the kids have already been selected at age 10, and the good ones generally don't go to university.

On the women's side, this is different. US Women get an advantage from the college system, since professional women's leagues are a relatively new phenomenon. They are guaranteed some funds to play in college under title IX, so effectively they've got a massive league subsidised by the universities. As the rest of the world has gotten serious about women's football, the US has been less dominant.

For me it was gradual, then sudden.

I liked using the early models to do autocompletion. It could do a leetcode style thing, pretty nice, but only useful for small things.

Then I sought out Cursor because that seemed to be able to do multi-document edits. Not bad, but models at the time (2024) still got stuck pretty often. So, cross-document autocomplete. Useful, but definitely within the realm of "nice shortcuts to have".

Then a friend (who works in AI) told me to try Claude last year. I was on holiday at the time, but I spun up my work repo and looked at the backlog.

It chewed through the entire 6-9 months of estimated work in a two-week period while I was watching that Lord of the Rings series with a friend (we watched an episode or two in the evenings). I just chatted with him about the series while checking the progress every few minutes. It was a huge amount of refactoring, and it didn't get everything right the first time, but it made enough progress that it could be directed the right way.

Since then I have hardly coded any manual lines. I just tell Claude what to do, with very little harness (skills, MCPs, instruction files), and I get what I want.

It's because modern AI promises to relieve you of the tedium, leaving you to consider the important things like higher structure. It actually does deliver on this, but in contrast to older tools, it is unlimited in scope.

A calculator - let's expand this to maps, thesauruses, dictionaries, and other lookup tools - was used for a pretty narrow set of problems, and you had to transcribe the result to whatever context you needed.

An AI can be all the calculators together, and transport the output of one to the input of the next. You're meant to have the overview, but it's just so enticing to let it simply do that as well.

And the natural end point of this logic is called the lemon problem.

It's been written about extensively and is in every undergraduate economics course.

How have dots not been connected?

It's common, most of the people I know from the UK system did their PhD in 3-4 years.

In Europe you just study what it says as well. You happy to do a bachelor's in physics, your classes are all physics. You don't read shakespeare and learn french.

You can also do this in high school, so you can from age 16 be studying just physics and math.

I met a guy this happened to. He got a special award within the company, asked for a bit of equity, didn't get it, in fact got blacklisted and booted out.

Luckily for him it worked out very very nicely.

If you want to make friends, water your friend seeds.

Everybody knows a bunch of people by name, and nothing else, from various contexts. You go to matriculation, there's a bunch of people introducing themselves, too many to get to know. You work a job, there's 50 people whose name you know. You go to a party, your friends introduce you to 10 new people, and you don't have time to talk to them all.

The ones you don't talk to much, they are your friend seeds.

You move to a new town, and you know nobody, other than that one guy you never spoke to after the first week of university. Contact that guy.

Could it be that what we called flow state was actually a sort of high level thinking time afforded by doing low level routine work?

For instance I'm the old world, if you wanted to change an interface, you might have to edit 5 or 6 files to add your new function in the implementations. This is pretty routine and you won't need to concentrate that much if you're used to it, so you can spend that low-effort time thinking about the bigger picture.

How do you value people who learnt to code in the 80's, 90's or 2000's today?

Personally I rate them really really highly. They are always fascinating to talk to. But they also compete with newer cohorts who mature.

Will new developers know/understand what they don't know, or will the new state of things simply become normalized?

Yes because a 32 year old guy with 10 years of experience who got given AI recently is going to be around for an awful long time reminding everyone that he has something the younger ones don't have.

I was wondering if there's anything behind the idea that people who learned how to code before AI will become the human capital version of low-background steel.

Everyone who starts to code after AI has a problem: it's hard to believe you went through the pain and frustration that people often think is required to become a senior engineer. Even if you did, you are in a lemon market with quite a few people who took the shortcut in college. Much better to hire a guy who learned before they could cheat, and then give him the tools to replace the juniors.

For every bucket of probability, what is the chance it resolves correctly?

For example, for markets that are between 60 and 70, is it the case that around 65% of them resolve to yes?

I guess you want to take a certain time before out finishes, so focus on sports.

What would the interest be in India? I don't think it figures much in the American consciousness, contrary to Iran or Cuba.

Superficially, the article is right, intelligence services didn't get this wrong, and the administration made a bad decision despite having a good appraisal to hand.

But really, it's a values failure.

Wanting to make decisions that are good for America, and good for its friends, is a value. Putting people you are supposed to represent ahead of yourself used to be the kind of thing people would say mattered. It used to be a thing that leaders tried to demonstrate that they had carefully considered their decisions.

Once you have an administration that puts itself ahead of everything else, this whole thing makes sense.

This administration is full of insecure people who want to show how strong they are. You can see it in how they talk, and the constant stream of memes coming from the WH. It's incredibly juvenile, stuff like having Trump portrayed with a sixpack, beating up his enemies.

Strongman regimes have a tendency to try to steal the blind, to use a poker concept: bully the opposition into giving you a concession, by making super aggressive moves. Like picking pennies off a train track, most of the time you will win and the opponent will back down, EVEN if on paper the opponent tends to have the better cards, because a rational opponent will appreciate putting a lid on risk. This last bit is really important, because it means the bully learns that he can win despite rejecting advice.

So you can go around sucker punching people until it stops working, and there's a decent chance Iran is where it stops working. If it's not Iran, it will be the next thing, because they can't stop.

And to get back to values, too many Americans are unwilling to take responsibility for their country's actions. If you look at what causes discontent with the current Iran situation, it is things like gas prices. In other words, self-interest, still.

What I took from the video game thing is that he thought he could fool people.

It's very obvious to gamers when someone hasn't played, it actually doesn't matter whether you have high level gear.

There's things you can't buy with money, and respect is one of them. He fundamentally doesn't understand how status works. He could, for free, just put out a video where he says "look at me, I'm a busy CEO, but I play this game even though I'm bad at it".

People would think positively about that.

This is why I was wondering what the point was. Surely most countries will claim taxes from you if you work there, so having an Estonian entity will do little?

Can someone explain the actual benefit of sitting in a developed country and charging via Estonia?

Isn't that more or less how it works? You pay tax where you live, with the justification being, as you say, that you are benefitting from the social structure there?

The big country that is an exception is the US. Their citizens have to pay tax regardless of them being elsewhere, and the difference is dealt with via various taxation treaties. I imagine the justification is something like "we help our citizens everywhere, so they owe us tax".

I'd be interested to hear how others see it. Like I said, I haven't really thought about this too much before, and may be missing something more fundamental and obvious.

The big thing that's missing is corporations. They are imaginary entities, with a bunch of rules about what they are allowed to do, how they pay tax, etc. Once you create a corporation (or several), you can move profits around according to various accounting rules, which are often disconnected from how ordinary people interact with an entity. Are you buying coffee from Starbucks on Oxford Street, or Starbucks UK, or Starbucks Luxembourg? Most people don't think about that when they buy a coffee, but the accountants do.

You can also change what kind of tax you are paying. If you have a company, you can pay yourself a salary or a dividend. It's still money either way, but depending on jurisdiction taxed differently.

Not Polymatket, but there's a humorous case of the Sutton FC goalkeeper eating a pork pie on TV, thus resolving a bet on whether he would do so.

I guess the next step in this evolution is to set up controlled news sources. You get people who have an official press card to report on things as you need as part of the reporting manipulation business.

"Hey there's this newspaper that says this obscure thing happened, please resolve the bet in my favour"

Banning it sends it underground into the hands of organised crime, which will still have access to modern technology.

There's going to be a net loss, but it's probably better to regulate it than have another war on drugs.

Adam Smith mentions something similar as well. He talks about how the worker's attachment to the work is different when he's working in a super specialised part of a production process rather than making the whole product like an artisan.

But he already explains why it won't work at the beginning. If stuff is cataloged according to a pop paradigm, why would we expect to be able to reassemble it according to a classical one?

Presumably a pop DJ would also mess this up. It's like going to an Indian restaurant and asking what Dim Sum they recommend.

The only reason a human would be able to do this task is that they might be trained in how to find classical music, and they have spent some time learning what is what in that world.

But a Spotify AI is of course going to be trained on the prevailing classification system only.

But it's not clear to me that medical and education are good examples of cost disease?

For instance, technology means cancer is more easily treated that it was in the past.

Education, I'm less sure about. A lot of the tech there is very new, it takes time for evidence to build up.

I think he means that when you go to watch the symphony orchestra, you are going to watch a bunch of people sitting with their instruments, manually playing them.

There is no way to separate this process from the product of the process.

You're not buying the sound of the music. You can just stream that. As far as that is the product, it has already been automated and scaled so millions of people can hear it at once, whenever they feel like it.

You're buying the sound AND the people sitting in their formal clothes manually moving their strings over a violin, with painstaking accuracy developed through years of manual practice.

You couldn't make a robot do it, for example. You could maybe make a robot play a violin, but that again isn't what the product is.

The product is tied to an expectation of what it is that does not allow for it to be done more effectively.

By contrast manufacturing processes are not tied to this expectation. If I buy a loaf of bread, I don't care whether the wheat was manually harvested or harvested by a huge machine.

You're absolutely right!