skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Bun has been rewritten in Rust in ~comp
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Comment on ‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves [Stratos] datacenter twice the size of Manhattan in ~tech
skybrian LinkI don't believe the headline numbers. I imagine they asked for approval for a much larger project than they're going to build any time soon. Maybe they'll get there in a decade, maybe not, but...I don't believe the headline numbers. I imagine they asked for approval for a much larger project than they're going to build any time soon. Maybe they'll get there in a decade, maybe not, but they won't need to worry about approvals for room to expand.
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Comment on Investment, animal spirits and algae in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Joseph Schumpeter compared the function of banks under modern capitalism to Gosplan, the central planning agency of the old Soviet Union. Banks, through a conscious, deliberate decision, dedicate some fraction of society’s resources to some project that they have decided is worthwhile. “The issue to the entrepreneurs of new means of payments created ad hoc” by the banks, he writes, is “what corresponds in capitalist society to the order issued by the central bureau in the socialist state.”
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This is not some weird quirk of venture capital. This is a central purpose of finance – to direct society’s resources to one activity that has not yet been successful in the market, but that somebody think could be. The defining characteristic of an entrepreneur is that they undertake some new activity, something that is not already being done, with funding provided by someone else. An entrepreneur in this sense definitionally faces a soft budget constraint.
This is not, again, an anomaly, it is not a breakdown of the normal operation of capitalism. It is essential to what makes capital such a powerful force for transforming our material existence. And it needs to be central to our theoretical accounts of capital and of the investment process.
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Now, some people might say: This planning is based on the hope of future profit, it will eventually have to be validated by markets. But it is not incidental that the market outcome and the pursuit of profit are mediated by conscious planning.. They do not happen automatically. The judgement of the market can be deferred, in principle indefinitely.
We must also reject the idea that the assessment of future profitability is rational or objective. This is one reason the Levine story is useful – it focuses our attention on the ways that financing decisions are made in practice. Making energy from algae is cool! As he says, this an important part of the investment process. That should not be abstracted from.
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Nor is it clear that future profit always is the motivation, certainly not the only one, and certainly in the early stages. It’s not incidental that Levine emphasis that algae energy could get funding in part because it is cool. It’s not, perhaps, incidental that OpenAI started its existence as nonprofit. The pursuit of profit is not always what motivates investment, especially when it involves fundamental departures from existing forms of production.
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There is an idea — Anwar Shaikh offers a contemporary example — that the rate of profit is determined first, and then the rate of interest is secondary, a special case of profit, governed by it, or a deduction from it. But we can’t say what the profitability of the algae business even is, prior to the question of what terms it is financed. At one rate of interest it may be very profitable, at another less so or not worthier pursuing at all.
Now maybe you will say: sure, anyone can make a profit if they get that free Fed money. But it’s not just that. The relative profitability of different projects depends on the term on which they can be financed.
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Partly this is just a simple matter of discount rates. In these narrow terms, the algae project is more profitable if the interest rate is 5 percent; the fossil-fuel project is more profitable if the interest rate is 10 percent.
More broadly we have to consider, for instance, whether the financing will have to be rolled over, if, say, the project takes longer than expected. What are financing conditions are likely to be at that point? If the loan is due and can’t be rolled over and the project has not generated sufficient returns to repay it, then the return on whatever capital the undertaker put in themselves will be negative 100 percent. The chance of this happening — which, again, depends as much on future financial conditions as on the income generated by the project itself — has to be factored in to the expected returns.
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Investment, animal spirits and algae
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Comment on Against money in ~finance
skybrian Link ParentIt's a nice rhetorical florish, but I don't think he's proven that. He pointed out there is a quite a lot of non-market coordination in a market economy (for example, within businesses). But if...It's a nice rhetorical florish, but I don't think he's proven that. He pointed out there is a quite a lot of non-market coordination in a market economy (for example, within businesses). But if there aren't customers paying the businesses and businesses can't pay their workers then it falls apart.
As it should; unpaid labor is usually unethical.
Still, it's nice to read something by a socialist that's not nutty.
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Comment on A Dialogue on Freedom in ~humanities
skybrian Link ParentPrevious generations were presumably happier living in rust belt cities though, which I think goes to show how subjective land value is and how much its value is not in the land itself, but its...Abandoned areas are the only thing left, and that's a small consolation given how that land is only available due to both poor quality and a poor future.
Previous generations were presumably happier living in rust belt cities though, which I think goes to show how subjective land value is and how much its value is not in the land itself, but its surroundings, due to things like neighbors and available jobs.
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Comment on Gemini 3.2 Flash rumored to hit 92% of GPT-5.5 performance at lower cost in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentYeah, using aggregators is fine, but try to get back to wherever they got the data from and see if there's anything to them.Yeah, using aggregators is fine, but try to get back to wherever they got the data from and see if there's anything to them.
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Comment on Gemini 3.2 Flash rumored to hit 92% of GPT-5.5 performance at lower cost in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI don't see much evidence that performance is plateauing, except in the sense that for a lot of simpler questions, the answers we get now are good enough and hard to improve much on. But you can...I don't see much evidence that performance is plateauing, except in the sense that for a lot of simpler questions, the answers we get now are good enough and hard to improve much on. But you can ask harder questions.
They're working on both efficiency and performance gains and they go together. For example, cheaper tokens means you can spend more of them to get better results.
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Comment on Against money in ~finance
skybrian (edited )LinkFrom the blog post, which is a transcript from a speech with ideas from their book, also called Against Money: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the blog post, which is a transcript from a speech with ideas from their book, also called Against Money:
Interestingly, one suggestion that Hamilton made for increasing the supply of “monied Capital” was for the federal government to permanently maintain a large debt. Anticipating contemporary heterodox economists, he argued that rather than crowding out private investment, federal borrowing would in effect crowd it in, because government debt was a close substitute for money — a source rather than a use of liquidity, as we might say.
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From our point of view, first, they all see money not as a distinct object existing in a definite quantity, but as one end of a continuum of financial instruments or arrangements. They see money as a subset of credit. Schumpeter says that when thinking about money we “should not start from the coin,” we should not start from the discrete object that we call money. Rather we should, as all of these thinkers did to one degree or another, imagine a whole system of credit arrangements, some of which can be classified for various purposes as money. He distinguishes a “money theory of credit,” which most economists hold, from a “credit theory of money,” which is what he prefers. The starting point, the atomic unit, is the promise, not the exchange.
Second, and this is a central theme of our book, these thinkers all saw the interest rate as the price of money, rather than the price of savings. An important part of John Law’s argument for his financial reforms was that it would allow a lower rate of interest by making money more abundant. Walter Bagehot insisted that interest was the price of money, not of saving as orthodoxy has it.
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In this monetary-production paradigm, the fundamental constraint is not scarcity; the economic problem is not allocation. The fundamental constraint is coordination. When we stop imagining the world in terms of discrete commodities being combined in different ways, and start imagining it in terms of human beings cooperating (or not) to do things together, the problem becomes: How do we coordinate the activity of all these different people? What does it take to allow cooperation on a larger scale, between people who don’t have pre-existing relationships?
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In general, when people talk about rising household debt they attribute it to rising household borrowing. Much of the time, people don’t even realize that those are two different things. There are articles where the title of the article is something like “explaining the rise in U.S. household debt” and then the first sentence of the article is, “why are U.S. households borrowing more than before?” Or even, “why are households saving less than before?” But these are different questions!
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The difference is that the interest rates facing households were much lower in the 1960s and 1970s than they were after the Volcker shock. The Volcker shock raised interest rates for households, and they stayed high for longer than the policy rate did. And during the 60s and 70s compared with the 1980 to 2007 period as a whole, inflation was significantly higher. (Real income growth was also a bit higher in the earlier period but that plays a smaller role.)
So what we have here is not a story about real behavior. It’s not a story about borrowing, about income and expenditure. All of these stories that we heard from both the left and the right about why household debt had risen — it’s because people have grown impatient, their time preferences shifted or they are competing over status or it’s inequality — none of this is relevant, because people were not in fact borrowing more.
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Of course anybody can write an IOU. You and I could sit down and write promises to each other, just as you and the bank do when you get a loan. The key thing about the bank, here, is that its promise is more credible than yours. If I ask for your bicycle and promise to give you something of equal value down the road, you probably won’t agree. But I can make that same promise to bank, and the bank can then make that promise to you. And that’s fine.
This is why Hyman Minsky, the great theorist of finance, said that the defining function of banks is not intermediation, but acceptance. You can’t get a claim on labor, on real resources, simply by promising you’ll do something useful with them. But a bank might accept your promise, and then the promise that it makes to you in return can can be transferred on to other people in return for a claim on real resources, which you can use to create new forms of production that otherwise wouldn’t exist. And this is the other side of the Keynesian vision — the fact that banks can create money by lending allows for the reorganization of productive activity in new ways that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
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We can find this same principle down through the history of the corporation. When in the beginning of the 20th century we see the generalization of the corporate form, it’s not a process where large-scale investment required raising more funds. The problem that the corporation is solving is that you have large-scale enterprises with long-lived specialized fixed assets, on the one hand, and wealth owners, on the other hand, with claims on those enterprises — often the owners of smaller enterprises that merge into one larger one, or the heirs of the founder — who don’t want an interest in this particular company. They want money. And so the function of the corporate form is to allow the conversion of ownership rights into money — to enable payments that will satisfy these claimants, so that their authority over the production process can be pooled, their smaller interests can be assembled into a larger whole.
This is not a system for raising funds for investment. It’s a system for consolidating authority. It’s a system for reconciling the need for large-scale, long-lived organizational production, on the one hand, with the desire of the wealthy to hold their wealth in a more money-like form, on the other. As William Lazonick says, the corporation is not a vehicle for raising funds for investment, it’s a vehicle for distributing money to the wealthy. The origin of the corporation as we know it is as a vehicle for moving funds out of productive enterprises to asset-owners.
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Where money is necessary — this is important — is where something new is being done, where there’s a need to organize production in some new way, for coordination between strangers who don’t have a relationship with each other. Money is genuinely productive insofar as the development of our productive capacity requires breaking up existing ways of organizing production, dissolving existing relationships, extinguishing obligations, and starting from square one.
Money should be seen as a specific kind of technology of social coordination. It’s a way of organizing human activity in new ways that it hasn’t been organized before.
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Against money
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Comment on Gemini 3.2 Flash rumored to hit 92% of GPT-5.5 performance at lower cost in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkUh, how about trying a little harder to find a good link to post? This is just a random social media comment with no source at all. Edit: did a few searches and didn’t find anything.Uh, how about trying a little harder to find a good link to post? This is just a random social media comment with no source at all.
Edit: did a few searches and didn’t find anything.
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Comment on ‘It’s shameful’: New York’s elite lash out at Zohran Mamdani’s second-home tax in ~finance
skybrian (edited )Link ParentNowadays, people are advised to diversify their retirement investments by buying index funds that are national or even international. The big companies in these funds are also national or...Nowadays, people are advised to diversify their retirement investments by buying index funds that are national or even international. The big companies in these funds are also national or international. They do have offices and factories in specific places, but the decisions about where to invest are made by professional managers. McDonalds is said to be largely a real estate company. Banks buy real estate to build local branches everywhere they think they can get people to open accounts with them. The current fad for large investors is that they’re desperate to build data centers in all sorts of places, which is a local investment of a sort, but not very popular these days.
Who else has local investments? Real estate developers and landlords and small businesses. Also farmers and the businesses that serve them. The owners of fruit orchards, car dealerships, construction companies, shopping plazas. People who own apartment buildings. Local developers.
Here’s a blog post about “local gentry.” I’m not seeing all that much of a point in it, but it seems to be roughly what you’re talking about?
It seems like local investors don’t get a whole lot of good press, and in large parts of the US, they tend to be conservative?
It seems like high real estate prices don’t happen without attracting lots of investment money, which suggests that urban California is absolutely awash in local investment.
Companies don’t build worker housing anymore because they don’t need to - it’s provided by other real estate developers.
One thing I often wondered about is why Google builds offices in big cities rather than somewhere suburban with cheap real estate. It seems like older companies like IBM used to do that. Maybe it’s because urban sprawl is no longer considered a good thing?
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Comment on Overworked AI agents turn "marxist" in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThere are some agents that automatically update context that gets used in future iterations (“memories”), so that’s worth watching. But I agree that it’s unlikely. There are also techniques to...There are some agents that automatically update context that gets used in future iterations (“memories”), so that’s worth watching. But I agree that it’s unlikely. There are also techniques to train out unwanted behavior that I suppose would get used if it looks like it might become a problem.
I don’t believe there’s any such thing as “overwork” for an LLM persona, but you should be polite to it anyway to avoid getting into the habit of being rude.
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Comment on We should take hantavirus more seriously in ~health
skybrian Link ParentI’m glad Zeynep wrote it, but for nearly everyone, I don’t see this as “news you can use.” The people who might need to hear this are other journalists and the medical establishment. But I will...I’m glad Zeynep wrote it, but for nearly everyone, I don’t see this as “news you can use.” The people who might need to hear this are other journalists and the medical establishment. But I will support disaster preparedness efforts when it comes up.
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Comment on Most US doctors are quietly using the OpenEvidence AI tool. Few patients know about it. in ~health
skybrian Link ParentThere’s a bit more about it (and alternatives) in this article.There’s a bit more about it (and alternatives) in this article.
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Comment on The boy that cried Mythos in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentThe White House meeting was apparently to discuss cybersecurity risks for banks, which seems reasonable. Nuclear weapons aren't mentioned on that page. The second paragraph from the system card...The White House meeting was apparently to discuss cybersecurity risks for banks, which seems reasonable. Nuclear weapons aren't mentioned on that page.
The second paragraph from the system card seems like the clearest justification for not releasing Mythos:
In particular, it has demonstrated powerful cybersecurity skills, which can be used for both
defensive purposes (finding and fixing vulnerabilities in software code) and offensive
purposes (designing sophisticated ways to exploit those vulnerabilities). It is largely due to
these capabilities that we have made the decision not to release Claude Mythos Preview for
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Comment on The boy that cried Mythos in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentPeople have speculated about such things, but that's not why Anthropic is holding Mythos back.People have speculated about such things, but that's not why Anthropic is holding Mythos back.
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Comment on Decluttering X and Bsky feeds in ~tech
skybrian LinkI don't have anything to recommend, but Bluesky has an open API so it seems like it should be possible to build an alternate client. It might be a fun project for someone?I don't have anything to recommend, but Bluesky has an open API so it seems like it should be possible to build an alternate client. It might be a fun project for someone?
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Comment on The boy that cried Mythos in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentI have no special knowledge about Mythos and I'm not going to make any specific claims about it. Instead, I'm making a burden-of-proof argument: Imagine a car manufacturer decided to delay the...I have no special knowledge about Mythos and I'm not going to make any specific claims about it. Instead, I'm making a burden-of-proof argument:
Imagine a car manufacturer decided to delay the release of a new car due to safety concerns. How well would these arguments hold up?
- "they clearly didn't think the previous model was dangerous"
- "Every other car on the road was safe for release"
- "I test drove it and didn't notice anything particularly dangerous about it"
If a manufacturer claims that their new product has safety issues, usually we take their word for it. We assume they've tested their product better than us and give them the benefit of the doubt. We don't demand extraordinary evidence.
If other people have tested the LLM and they didn't find anything, sure, those are useful observations too and we can infer that the problems aren't immediately obvious. But it doesn't invalidate Anthropic's observations, because there are lots of different ways to use an LLM, such as different prompts, just to start. Maybe they tested something different? It's not enough to prove a lie.
Also, I've been putting it in binary terms, but safety is a continuum. Cars aren't all equally safe, are they? As we're seeing, neither are LLM's. It's looking like it's too late to keep attackers from discovering lots of security bugs using already-released LLM's, so maybe the already-released LLM's weren't safe, for some definitions of "safe?" But I still appreciate that Anthropic makes some effort at testing each new LLM for safety and that they're willing to delay a release if they have concerns.
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Comment on Multiple security bugs in Dnsmasq in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
There has been something of a revolution in AI-based security research, and I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of months dealing with bug reports, weeding duplicates (so many duplicates!) and triaging bugs into those which need vendor pre-disclosure and those which it's better to make public and fix immediately. Those judgements have been necessarily subjective, but given the number of times "good guys" have found these bugs, there's no doubt that "bad guys" have been able to do the same, so long embargoes seem kind of pointless. There's also the problem that the amount of time and effort, for all actors, needed to co-ordinate an embargo and provide backports is huge. I think the priority for most bugs is to fix them going forward, and have new dnsmasq releases as bug-free as possible. To this end, you may have noticed that there have been a lot of security-fix commits to the git repo in the weeks prior to this announcement.
The test I'm seeing it write for my projects aren't all that rigorous but I haven't seen it write complete crap either. I think it's okay but you have to keep an eye on it.
Back when I was working I would see tests that don't actually do anything written by people, too. Usually due to heavy use of mocks.