webninja

Yes, Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 are still Anthropic’s best chat models. They had more human evals and are still a joy to chat with. Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 by comparison have a cold enterprise feel. Opus 4.7 talks like I’d imagine a hitman would talk.

Sonnet 4.6 is better at writing good emails than Opus 4.8, Fable 5, and even Sonnet 5.

I think the measurable term for this is “Velocity of Money”.

It’s unbearably slow, for sure. Not nearly as slow as Kimi K2.6 though. I’m trying to like 4.8 but I may go back to 4.6 again. Definitely won’t ever be using 4.7.

4.8 took a shortcut today. There was an error in my local LLM’s relay of thinking text. So it brilliantly decided to turn thinking off, neutering the model. Had to revert that nerf. That’s the same lazy behavior as 4.7. 4.6 would never.

US tax authorities will be barred from pursuing claims against Donald Trump, his eldest sons and the Trump Organization under an agreement to halt the president’s $10bn lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service.

The pledge by the Department of Justice on Tuesday came a day after Trump agreed to settle his lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for the US government launching a $1.8bn fund for victims of alleged “lawfare”.

A DoJ spokesperson told the FT that the decision to bar the IRS from pursuing claims against Trump was “only with respect to any existing audits”. “There would be little point in settling several significant claims if either party could simply turn around and seek to initiate more adverse claims that could have been pursued previously,” added the spokesperson. Danny Werfel, an IRS commissioner under former president Joe Biden, noted, however, that he was “unaware of a single precedent where the IRS has agreed in advance to permanently forgo examination of previously filed tax returns for a specific person or business”.

First, what legal mistake did the IRS make that put them $1.8B to $10B in the wrong?

Second the article title is sensationalized and embellished. The article mentions only an exemption from past tax returns —- which have already been thoroughly examined with a fine toothed comb prior to Election Day.

During Presidential election season, this was healthy journalism because it helped make more informed voters, but at this point it’s just unhealthy harassment over a past settled case. If there was something to find, it would’ve already been found by now. Unless there’s something new, leave bro alone so he can do the job America democratically and dutifully elected him to do.

Are you astroturfing? The article you reference is 4 months older. In the Age of AI, that can mean about a 2x change.

A monopoly with lower profits threatens competitor. I mean, since you can write any law, just nationalize every wealthy company while you’re at it. What’s the worse the targeted company will do, sue?

What do they conclude about Russia?

During a democrat presidency, when the citizens complain about the ballooning debt and underfunded social programs like social security, I expect they will sell the stock. Not necessarily for those reasons but because Trump bought it and this was a convenient excuse.

That might not all be true. Another comment above here claims the shares came from Intel’s own unsold stock of shares thus not causing any dilution.

I visited a South American country where the water utility was recently sold to a private corporation. The home I briefly visited had a large water barrel inside because the water now shut off for many hours of the day, including the hours I was visiting.

How exactly are countries like Norway doing with their Sovereign Wealth Funds?

Does it provide its citizens with benefits?

Geez, they shouldn’t have downvoted you for expressing a positive viewpoint :/

From my understanding, these funds were already approved by the Biden Administration via the Chips act and another. Our president managed to obtain 10% of the shares for this money that was already going to intel in exchange for removing a clawback provision stipulated by the Chip’s act.

Norway has an incredible sovereign wealth fund that funds many benefits for its citizens. Perhaps if the Intel dividends are used for social security benefits, there will be bipartisan cheering.

Generally speaking, the UK government doesn’t care about it's citizens. That’s why so many left to the USA for a better life.

You completely missed what I was saying.

He’s helping make the left care about free speech again. Something they wanted to continue censoring.

I wish to highlight the pointlessness in your timing of your leftist activism. Trump cannot run for a third term due to the 22nd amendment to the constitution.

Therefore even if you found evidence that a small subset of the members held national security worse than Hillary secured her emails, (in this case, leaking a Yemen bombing attack 2 hours before it happened), there’s nothing left for voters to vote on.

The only thing far-left activists can do to change this administration is to wait 4 years for Harris, Hillary, or Bernie to run again. But they’ll need a winning platform to run on. Maybe campaigning on making America Great Again or putting America first will work better.

All this left-leaning activism is doing is helping other liberals lose even more of their sanity than they’ve already lost. One reason the democrats lost this election because they didn’t even care about their own American people, let alone other American people.

An air purifier has the same effect and doesn’t require inhaling chemicals. With one i’d back to breathing through my nose instead of through my mouth.

How do you make money doing this and if you earn nothing, how can you afford to in this economy?

The last budget surplus we had was under Bill Clinton - Democrat

Yes, and that made us very proud of him. Bill Clinton’s administration was a great administration.

But instead we had to go to war in the middle east.

First, Trump campaigned promising the American People that if he won the election, he would end the war in Israel with the Palestinians before he even took office to bring peace to the Middle East. True to his word, the war ended a couple of days before he even became president.

Second, these political parties change faster and more often than we do. Historically the Republican Party (Chenny/bush era) was the party of war. Now the Democrat party is the party of war. The Republican Party as you knew it is not more. It was subverted into a controlled opposition party managed by some very smart people on the left.

The party is now The Party of Trump. He controls the party. It’s the other way around like it is in the Democrat Party. Precisely one of the reasons he became the nominee instead of the other candidates.

In 2016: the question was asked “Is there any one on stage… who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican Party and pledge and independent campaign against that person?” Out of the 10 nominees on stage, only Donald Trump raised his hand. That set him apart from everyone else.

Give massive tax breaks to the corporations.

Trump was asked about things he would do differently in his second term compared to his first term. A study was done that showed his focus on cutting regulations were significantly more beneficial economically than cutting taxes. This study surprised him and he quipped, it doesn’t cost us [any tax revenue] to cut regulations. Thus, he said he would focus more on cutting regulations than on cutting business taxes. That isn’t to say he won’t cut business taxes; he will, just less than before. His goals are to make America a rather competitive and attractive place to do business and host your company. According to economics, this should increase the number of businesses here that pay taxes here, as that is the primary goal and focus. It’s expected there will be lower taxes for businesses with most of their workers in the USA because their employees will all pay taxes.

and rain helicopter money during COVID.

We had a global pandemic and that’s a pretty good excuse that’s often ignored. Each American received one or two stimulus checks then. A problem was, after the pandemic was over, the Biden administration didn’t cut the helicopter money. Now Doge team has to come in and cut it all out. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was supposed to address it, but it turned out to just be a giant spending package and you can’t spend your way out of inflation.

You can’t pretend anymore that Republicans are the fiscally sound ones.

The old conservatives of your Bush era forgot they were supposed to be the fiscally conservative as opposed to being fiscally liberal ones. Trump admitted at the beginning of his recent campaign during an early livestream on X with Elon Musk that while the growing debt/deficit was a problem, there wasn’t (isn’t then) so much support for addressing it. Elon Musk became that much needed support and deserves the credit for making the conservative side fiscally conservative again. Elon made it popular and cool to be fiscally sound again like it was in the Bill Clinton era.

We can see the results on the near-daily updates by Doge on X. Here are 12 things the Doge team has identified or removed:

-$7 million on various projects studying magic

-$1,513,299 to use kittens in a study to analyze motion sickness.

-State Department spent $2.1 million on border security—for Paraguay.

-USAID spending $20 million on “Ahlan Simsim” a new Sesame Street show in Iraq

-USAID paid $3 million to a rapper in Gaza to produce antisemetic rap songs

- $2.5 MILLION to DEI in Serbia

- $70,000 on an Irish DEI musical

- $47,000 on transgender operas in Colombia

- $32,000 on a trans comic book in Peru

-The National Endowment for the Arts awarded the Bearded Ladies Cabaret a $10,000 grant to support a cabaret show on ice skates focused on climate change

-2 million for sex changes in Guatemala

- $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt

Do you support keeping all of this (wasteful or fraudulent) spending or do you support them cutting it?

The list goes on and on with USAID. Here’s a viral photo of ISUS taking a photo with a RPG from inside a USAID tent — giving us pause and evidence to where our USAID dollars are or were going.

https://x.com/wilkowmajority/status/1886895278495797506

Can you look at the chart "Federal Debt Trends Over Time, FY 1948 – 2024" and tell me what you see?

I see a benign and calming treasury.gov website that has been overseen by Janet Yellen the former treasury secretary who inspired confidence in pretty much no one in her video interviews and press conferences.

Janet Yellen caused billions of unnecessary debt to be added to the debt by not proactively selling treasury bonds at the lowest interest rates instead waiting until interest rates were much much larger. When you’re rolling over $36 Trillion of debt, a difference in treasury interest rates from 0.25% to 4.5% is massive. Massive actually isn’t a strong enough word to describe numbers of that magnitude.

My impression from this website is that it’s downplaying the problem while also having a recent history of incompetence and ineptitude hoping people will complain less.

I prefer the usdebtclock.org website because the numbers stay up to date on it. It also doesn’t downplay the problem, it merely shows the numbers and lets you draw your own conclusions from it.

That debt clock is going to keep going up for four years straight.

Would that make you happy? It would be better if they can stop the clock. But balancing the budget is a lofty goal to some. According to Elon Musk, if they can cut federal deficit spending from $2T to $1T and we can grow the economy by $1T then we get to have no inflation in 2026.

“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted $6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget?” Musk was asked on stage during the Madison square gardens rally. “Well, I think we can do at least $2 trillion.”

To be fair, I’m not aware of him being asked whether that will take 2, 4 or 8 years as it takes time for preexisting contracts to expire and not be renewed. It’s expected that the Democrats will step into congress to block further cuts after the two year mark — so all of the cuts have to be made quickly and be made now while we still have a real shot at improving America’s fiscal outlook… because it’s probably the last shot we’ll get —- at giving our kids and the young people of our country a future rather than a debt for them to pay off.

Next, as sure as gravity, international confidence in the U.S. government finally reigning in spending (again) will cause investors to be willing to buy U.S. treasuries at lower interest rates. This allows the government to be able refinance the debt, further lowering wasteful government spending. On a local note, it also lowers borrowing costs for (for example) young people that want to buy their first home making mortgages more affordable.

Have you ever tried to balance the Federal Budget? I have. It was required as the final project in our Macroeconomics class. It’s not easy but I did it. The far-left fiscally-liberal Democrats can and will block DOGE from making progress in many ways. One example to blame already: Judge Paul Engelmayer, a temporary judge, recently blocked DOGE Treasury data access.

The democrats couldn’t cut wasteful spending so the republicans have to instead. Ever seen the debt clock?

I suppose you could ask ChatGPT or another AI how to calculate Volatility Decay and it would give you a pretty good answer that you can compare against the fixed interest rate of the mortgage. A lazy way to calculate volatility decay might be to add the returns of TQQQ and SQQQ together, divide by 2 then subtract that against QQQ and then subtract out the dividends.

But that doesn’t take into account how RE is providing you with shelter and additional SQ footage. If your total mortgage, insurance and taxes are less than renting, which is the case with mine, then there is pretty much no way to be at a loss with real estate. There’s pretty much only upside then over any 3-5 year period.

Comments like yours make the comment section invaluable. Upvoted.

Volatility decay means if QQQ is flat, TQQQ is negative. It also consumes your dividends.

100%.

I’ll give you a too-big-to-be-illegal example. Geogroup, now named CoreCivic. It’s the largest owner of private prisons and jails in the US. They, along with other private prison corporations, engage in far more corruption than just pocketing the extra change though. They actively lobby legislators for mandatory minimum sentences and other law changes so that America can continue to be a world leader in the highest percentage of prisoners per capita.

Their 2024 revenue was $2B.

Respond to my comment with your recommendation(s) for apps that allow or assist you in contacting others with encryption strong enough to keep out state-level attackers.

Testing is even more callous and meaningless hypothesis: why waste drones on civilians when there are plenty of military targets? Why not test in Russia dropping paintball grenades?

This article has numerous points that have difficulty standing up to a healthy application of common sense.

Why would Russia attack its own citizens when there’s free targets next door in Ukraine instead? Can we reasonably expect any ordinary citizen to be able to identify the nationality behind a missile or a drone? They could be from any EU country.

The governor of Pennsylvania was recently lambasted for spending so much of his time signing bombs and signing missiles in photo-ops instead of focusing on improving Pennsylvania and helping the zombies on Kensington Ave. I wonder if any of these munitions had his signature on them, jokingly.

If the goal, as Noam Chomsky would say, to manufacture consent for war: there are better articles for that than this.

It’s also somewhat too late to be pushing out articles like this when a change in the U.S. leadership will occur in less than 2 months on Jan 20th, 2025. Can you even deploy significant numbers of military-aged men on the ground over the Christmas Holidays, especially when we have no formal declaration of war through congress?

It already was mob rule by the establishment. Now it’s moving towards populist rule. For the domestic constituencies instead of for the globalists.

Part 7 out of 7:

How come the only freedoms being advocated for are the freedoms to turn gay, become trans, and then preorder your suicide pod from the next Dr. Kevorkian! But at least you can abort your kid and not need an ID when you vote! Lol I’m pro-choice but can you see how the masses would find these solutions to their problems… distasteful?

So we shouldn't have the freedom to choose these things or what's the point here? I think the only retarded policy democrats have regarding trans-issues is trans athletes.

I’ll acknowledge that you dodged the no ID when voting, like California where it’s expressly illegal for a poll worker to request an ID. Voter ID laws keep people from double-voting or voting more than once.

No, why are the only freedoms being advocated ones that most Americans can expect to never meaningfully utilize? What those two freedoms have in common is that they prevent people from creating a family, which is why they are being benevolently offered.

Yeah being gay is fine, being trans is fine. Few are against those. None of the candidates or vice presidential candidates are against those freedoms. I’m too liberal to be against them either. Who knows, in 12-16 years we may all have to turn gay or trans to feel pride in our own skin color, lol

Yeah Trans athletes isn’t okay with most people. Perhaps you saw Boxing in the Olympics where a transman won by pummeling all of the women to death. Though some like that kind of entertainment. Not you and I though. Considerations to spend our tax dollars for sex reassignment surgeries (sometimes in prison or with illegal immigrants) isn’t very popular.

Let’s have freedoms most Americans can reasonably expect to utilize — freedom of speech, freedom for each American to own land, freedom for a business to be open during Covid, freedom to not grow up to be a debt slave because of the national debt, freedom to give a great country to our kids. Ones that aren’t just globalist agendas but national ones too.

Are you really improving women’s lives by becoming the party of Islam? Or is that talk about women just propaganda and lip service? Lol, by that metric the Republicans IS the party of Islam with wanting to:

* Ban abortion

* Ban LGBT people

* Limit women's rights such as voting

* Teaming up with Muslims to enact these policy changes etc. etc.

*Wanting to ban abortion is a lie that Kamala kept reciting at her rallies. It’s really a trap to talk about that because we know Trump wanted to leave it up to the states to decide — and that is the most moderate position a candidate can take.

*Who the F is banning LGBT people? Lol yet another lie.

*Limiting women voting rights is probably the most proposterous thing of these 4 though they all preposterous. Show me one time in 2016 when Trump motioned to reduce women’s voting rights or any video of him saying so. [Citation Needed].

*Teaming up with Muslims? lol where do you get this from?? Lol, you can keep all of your pro-hamas protesters. Maybe you forgot the Trump Muslim travel bans during Covid. However, many Muslims did vote for Trump this time around and they said because they want peace in the Middle East.

Are pro-Palestine flags virtue signaling or do they advocate Hitler-level genocide as their supporters chant “from the river to the sea” as they aim to wipe an entire group people off the map?

I don't support Palestine, beyond that they should work together with Israel as it is in Bosnia.

Out of all of the things the left-leaning NPR can talk about, why did they give an “From to the river to the sea” advocate the microphone? Is NPR where we want our tax dollars to continue going to? Left-leaning in what way is publicly funded NPR left-leaning? Because they invited on 1 person who has crazy views? You should check into C-SPAN then.

C-Span is neutral, they usually don’t even have any commentary. NPR has a hard time even pretending they are neutral, especially during election seasons. NPR has always been available to listen to for the entirety of my lifetime.

But again how very centrist of you, judging others.

Nice try attempting to gaslighting me. Recognizing bias or disagreeing with programs on the radio is something anyone should be able to do. It takes critical thinking skills though, which correlate with not always voting for the same side every election.

There’s a reason the right is always more welcoming of the left than the left is of the right.

There is a reason the right, this election cycle, was willing to have those open debates and go on the most podcasts & talk shows and have the tough discussions. The campaign strategy of the Trump & Vance campaign was to go on so many podcasts that they were uncensorable by the legacy media. As we all know, their campaign strategy worked and people were able to hear both sides. A campaign running on emotions like “Joy” vs. a better economy that benefits all. Democrats have had their head in the sand when it comes to new media, that's about it, just like Republicans used to have their heads in the sand about cable TV being important. If you want to learn more, don’t debate me. Listen to an episode of Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, or David Sacks instead. I'll do whatever I want, and I sure as hell will not be listening to charlatans as you suggest. If you want to read about real conservatives here's a few names:

* Emmanuel Mounier

* Heinrich Pesch

* Wilhelm Röpke

* Hilaire Bel-

I don’t recognize their names or know anything about them. Those names don’t even sound like they’re from the country of America! I also know that your view on who good republicans are is more than questionable. I trust that while you may have a list of good liberals, I don’t trust that you have a list of good people on the “right” side. IDK about them but some people are paid to be dufuses to make the rich Left feel good.

I’m informative but I’m not persuasive. While I’m good at providing and sharing information, I almost never convince anyone of changing any views. Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, or David Sacks can and likely will challenge and change your views.