skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on OpenAI hacked Australia's Medicare portal in ~tech
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Comment on Maria Edgeworth sneaked economic theory into her best-selling novels in ~books
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] From Wikipedia:From the article:
About a decade ago, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about an aside from “The Worldly Philosophers,” Robert Heilbroner’s seminal history of modern economics. The book noted that one of the pioneers of the field had been friends with a woman named Maria Edgeworth.
“The daughter of an economist, she was perhaps the first woman to express opinions about the workings of the economy,” Heilbroner wrote.
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I looked up Edgeworth. She had been a famous Irish novelist at the turn of the 19th century, one so well-regarded that she drastically out-earned her contemporary Jane Austen. Sir Walter Scott was her pen pal and protégé. Lord Byron envied her. Ricardo and Malthus called her a close friend. This was all surprising. I was both a sucker for Regency novels and an economics correspondent, and yet I had never even come across Edgeworth’s name. Why, I wondered, had I never heard of this lady?
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I wondered if anyone else had noticed. A search through academic journals showed that a specialized few had clocked Edgeworth’s contribution. The economic historian William Henderson once called “Castle Rackrent” a “literary extension” of Smith’s work, arguing that it had “extended the influence” of early economics by inspiring other writers to apply its theories to the social sphere. Other academics, including Susan Manly at the University of St. Andrews, had also written about Edgeworth’s heavy use of economics.
I ordered and read other Edgeworth books, many of which featured barely concealed lessons in early political economy. “Letters for Literary Ladies,” Edgeworth’s first full-length work, published in 1795, makes a case for including women in the intellectual sphere. In it, she applies Smith’s criticisms of monopoly to the gendered labor market. Edgeworth draws parallels to examples from “The Wealth of Nations” to argue that men were holding back the economy of ideas by locking women out of literature and academics — a kind of protectionism.
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“Ennui,” Edgeworth’s 1809 book about a hapless English-Irish landlord, further built on Smith’s and Malthus’s ideas to argue for broad education and free trade, and to riff on the conditions needed for lasting economic development. Edgeworth’s writing for children were full of tales about gains from trade and the division of labor.
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I had dedicated that day to an unpublished essay on education, one that Edgeworth and her father seemed to have written together around 1800. As I worked my way through the hand-sewn notebook, I had a realization. This wasn’t just a piece of persuasive writing. It was a manifesto. It explained exactly what Edgeworth was trying to do, and why she was doing it.
The essay pushes for educating the poor and middle classes as a way to promote upward mobility and to make their members better voting citizens. These were big concerns at the time, when modern representative democracy was young and factories were just beginning to spring up. Edgeworth wrote, “The most certain and safe method of relieving the wretchedness of the poor & of increasing their share of the pleasures of life is to educate them.”
In particular, the essay makes the case for teaching the lower classes the basic principles of political economy, which have broad application to daily life and which might guide people toward pursuing their own interests while serving the greater good. Roughly a quarter century after the publication of Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” economics was the rage in the Enlightenment circles in which Edgeworth and her father, an inventor, traveled.
There was, however, an obvious barrier to bringing avant-garde philosophical and scientific ideas to the masses. They could be complicated and difficult to understand. The Edgeworth pair noted that it could be useful “to mix some political & commercial knowledge with fictions that amuse the fancy.” In fact, this was something Edgeworth had already begun to do.
Edgeworth was embarking on a project that was larger than her own oeuvre. She began to coach other literary women on how to include economics in their work. She struck up a close friendship with Jane Marcet, a London socialite who had already written a primer on chemistry, and the two women corresponded about economic topics. When Marcet wrote what could be considered the first textbook on economics, Edgeworth gave her extensive notes on the rough draft.
Edgeworth was as skilled an editor as she was a writer. She told Marcet that Adam Smith ought to be abridged, because he “needs it much,” whereas the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham was “absolutely impossible” to put in fewer words, because what he needed was “to be diluted.”
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Edgeworth’s project — to spread economics beyond elite circles in Edinburgh and London — worked.
Her books and stories were read by the literate classes around the world, in English and in French. King George III reportedly said “I know something now of my Irish subjects” after reading “Castle Rackrent.” Generations of children, including Queen Victoria, would be reared on the educational texts that Edgeworth wrote with her father. (At age 10, Victoria even wrote a story mimicking Edgeworth, titled “Sophia and Adolphus: In the Style of Miss Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy.”) As an empire’s worth of readers imbibed her stories, they also drank of the lessons they contained.
“Owing to the great popularity” of her work, Edgeworth had exerted “considerable influence on the attitude of thought in England regarding economic questions,” wrote Clara Elizabeth Collet in one of the earliest histories of economics, published in the 1890s. (Collet was a friend of Karl Marx’s family who was among the first women to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in England.)
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Political economics was seen as an extremely male pursuit, and cloaking it in stories made it both more digestible and more socially acceptable. Yet even the disguise of fiction was not enough to save those early female economic writers from eventual censure.
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As the field professionalized, the second- and third-generation economists distanced themselves from the women and the fiction that had once helped to popularize and explain their ideas. Serious science, after all, could not possibly be for everyone. The economist Alfred Marshall referred to the women who tried to simplify economic doctrine as “parasites” in a footnote to his hugely influential textbook, “Principles of Economics,” first published in 1890 and popular throughout the 1900s.
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In that derision lies the answer, at least in part, to my second mystery. Edgeworth did not go missing from our histories by accident. Her literature was lost partly because of its clunkiness — its economics lessons made it harder to digest as lighter and more naturalistic stories became the style.
Her economics was lost for a different reason. Subsequent influential academics disparaged the ways that the early women of economics had presented the field. They bristled at being simplified, and they dismissed the idea that the women could have contributed something meaningful.
From Wikipedia:
Castle Rackrent is sometimes regarded as the first historical novel, the first regional novel in English, the first Anglo-Irish novel, the first Big House novel, and the first saga novel. William Butler Yeats pronounced Castle Rackrent "one of the most inspired chronicles written in English". Sir Walter Scott, who met and carried on a correspondence with Edgeworth, credited her novel for inspiring him to write his Waverley series of novels[.]
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Maria Edgeworth sneaked economic theory into her best-selling novels
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Comment on The plunging price of AI in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkFor coding, currently I talk to Astra to make a plan and tell it to use a Luna subagent to implement each commit. Luna is extremely cheap and I don't worry that using Luna alone will ever exhaust...For coding, currently I talk to Astra to make a plan and tell it to use a Luna subagent to implement each commit. Luna is extremely cheap and I don't worry that using Luna alone will ever exhaust my $20/month plan. Astra is too expensive for coding use unless you're using it professionally, but I think the planning goes better.
And I haven't even switched to the latest version of Luna yet, which will be half the price.1 It doesn't seem to be available via a ChatGPT subscription yet.
1 Yeah, it's an "introductory" price but I think that's OpenAI hedging their bets in case there's a capacity crunch. These price drops have a tendency to become permanent due to competition.
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Comment on The plunging price of AI in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
- AI has gotten cheaper more quickly than any other transformative technology in history. The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023, or 13× per year. That price drop is four times faster than DNA sequencing, six times faster than compute, 18 times faster than lithium batteries, and (in the century up to 1973) 54 times faster than electricity.
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The next chart shows some examples. On January 31, 2025, OpenAI released a new iteration in its series of “reasoning” models, called o3. We estimate that for an average cost of 30 cents per question, it could achieve a 75% score on GPQA Diamond, a multiple-choice exam covering PhD-level physics, chemistry, and biology.1 Just under 18 months later, OpenAI released GPT-5.6 Luna. It scored just as well — for four hundredths of a penny per question ($0.0004). That is a 725-fold drop in the price of thought in under 18 months. It is like the sticker price on a new car falling from $50,000 to $69. No other general-purpose technology in history appears to have gotten so cheap so fast.
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Our analysis comes with major caveats. AI companies may be expressly training their models for some benchmarks (“benchmaxxing”), so that improvement on the benchmarks outstrips improvement for real-world tasks. Even if they are not, doing well on a benchmark is not synonymous with useful work. Because we focus on the frontier — the absolute cheapest model capable of any given level of performance — we implicitly posit an AI user who relentlessly searches for the most cost-effective model for each task, when real users do not switch models so often, and therefore do not reap quite the same savings. Our data are incomplete and noisy: the timeframe is barely three years, and we do not include all combinations of AI model and benchmark. Prices drop differently for different models, benchmarks, time periods, and performance ranges, and there are many reasonable ways to average over this variegated experience. Overall, while we believe that our bottom-line numbers are reasonably representative of reality, they should not be read as exact.
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The plunging price of AI
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Comment on Guatemala’s democracy dilemma in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/x4Z9f From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Arévalo’s personal integrity is undisputed. But some of the reformers who helped elect him now argue that he may be too scrupulously rules-respecting to deal effectively with the “pact of the corrupt” and the institutions it captured—too much of a liberal democrat to save democracy. When he leaves office in 2028, they fear that the pact will quickly retake control of the few institutions it has lost, or that voters will choose an autocrat who promises to crush crime without concern for legality.
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In a way, both Arévalo and his critics are right. Guatemala has avoided a democratic breakdown. But the president’s rules-bound approach has also left many Guatemalans feeling that he has not fought for them forcefully enough. The question now is whether Arévalo has preserved democracy as an ideal that Guatemalans believe in and, if necessary, will defend.
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When I met Arévalo a few days later, he justified the delay by explaining that his government had arrived “with an enormous level of public legitimacy, but without control of the Congress, and with the justice system positioned against us.”
Legally, he had no authority to simply eject the attorney general. He sent a bill to Congress to grant him that power, but the opposition blocked it. “If, in that scenario, I make a political miscalculation, the result isn’t that I go with a hundred people to pull Consuelo Porras out of that building and that this is sustainable and produces results,” he said. It was that “I go to prison or into exile, and someone else comes in, one of them, to take power.”
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“We are in a process of recovery,” he said. “Democracy doesn’t develop in a linear, unidirectional way; it has leaps and twists, not only here, but everywhere in the world.” For much of the 1990s and 2000s, Guatemala had been twisting its way toward democracy, but corruption networks and drug traffickers had insinuated themselves into the country’s institutions. “Part of what we set out to do is to recognize the serious damage this had caused the country—this corrosion, this penetration of political-criminal networks” that served no “ideological interest,” Arévalo said, but rather “the highest bidder: whoever could pay for impunity.”
Dislodging these forces from the machinery of the state has been neither swift nor straightforward, and even those most anxious for change are hard-pressed to offer practical solutions. The president told me that some supporters had asked him to use the military to remove Porras. He found the suggestion unsettling: “Are you really asking us to go back to the years of military dictatorships of the 1970s, when armies were the only solution?”
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Arévalo can point to some successes. Young lawyers have worked to clean up corruption in the judicial selection process. Appointed in March, the new bench of the Constitutional Court, which rules on the constitutionality of laws and policies, is more favorable to reformers than the one it replaced, as is the new electoral tribunal, which oversees elections. I spoke with the new attorney general a few days after he assumed his post: He was so busy firing Porras’s apparatchiks and preparing for the institution to resume serious criminal investigations that he was sleeping only four or five hours a night. An anti-corruption commission that Arévalo formed early on has already filed more than 200 criminal complaints against former officials.
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Still, much else that Guatemalans had hoped for has failed to materialize. Congress, which remains dominated by the old-guard pact forces, has blocked or stalled bills aimed at curbing corruption—for example, bills to modernize public-works contracting, require shell companies to disclose who owns them, and protect whistleblowers. Partly because the contracting system remains dysfunctional, the government has made little visible progress toward repairing the country’s crumbling highways. And, unwilling to buy votes in Congress outright, as his predecessors did, Arévalo has resorted to pork-barrel spending and raising congressional salaries to win legislative support. Such tactics are deeply unpopular with the public.
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Arévalo, too, has found his convictions under pressure—not only from former allies who worry that his reforms have gone too slowly, but also from constituents and conservative politicians who want a government that will ignore constitutional limits in cracking down on crime. In this they compare him unfavorably with the autocrat next door: Many Guatemalans who live in daily fear of extortion and kidnapping see gangs, not illiberal state capture, as the biggest threat to their basic freedoms, and they see President Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador as a beacon of safety.
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Guatemala’s next presidential election is just nine months away. Right-wing candidates are beginning to emerge, some imitating Bukele, and many sure to court the White House, in the hope that Trump will try to tip the scales. Arévalo’s and Pérez’s reformists claim that they will join forces behind a unity candidate, but such a figure has not yet surfaced. Democracy is twisting its way forward, in Arévalo’s words. No one thinks it is leaping.
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Guatemala’s democracy dilemma
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Comment on Googlebook revealed and ready for pre-order in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentAnd yet, it works well for someone in my family.And yet, it works well for someone in my family.
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Comment on ‘We hacked The FBI:’ hackers say they have data on all FBI employees in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
A high profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the group, called ShinyHunters, told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone number, and information on their spouse.
The data breach could be massively significant and may have all sorts of national security and counterintelligence implications. Criminals from the same ecosystem as ShinyHunters have previously used hacked data like phone records to track, intimidate, and harass the FBI agents investigating them. The highly sensitive data could also be a boon to foreign intelligence agencies who want to better understand how one of the most important law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the U.S. operates. And if the data fell into the hands of more criminals, FBI agents and their spouses could face serious threats to their safety.
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404 Media put some of the sample phone numbers into open source intelligence tool OSINT Industries and found they did correspond to people with the same name as listed in the sample file. 404 Media also searched some of the records through compromised data tool Darkside, made by cybersecurity company District 4. That revealed some of the phone numbers are associated with U.S. Department of Justice personnel.
ShinyHunters also defaced the FBI jobs website on Tuesday. That defacement says, “this site has been seized by ShinyHunters,” which is an obvious nod to the seizure notices the FBI and other law enforcement agencies often put on sites after taking them down. The representative said ShinyHunters carried out the hack on Monday night. At the time of writing, the FBI jobs website says, “Apply.fbijobs.gov and the Special Agent Applicant Portal are currently unavailable.”
The defacement adds, “All FBI data was compromised including PII/PHI [personally identifiable information and protected health information] on incumbent and former FBI employees and all applicant information. We have a lot more than we claim here.”
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The representative said ShinyHunters said the group used a zero day exploit in an Oracle product called PeopleSoft. From there, the group managed to access AWS GovCloud servers and downloaded data. The representative said the exfiltrated data totalled between two and three terabytes.
Typically, ShinyHunters hacks targets and then attempts to extort them. The group threatens to publicly release more compromised data if the victim organization or company doesn’t pay a hefty fee. Obviously, it is unlikely that the FBI would ever pay a ransom like this.
When asked if ShinyHunters was going to attempt to extort the FBI, the representative said, “what we plan to do is not something I’d call extortion, maybe coercion.”
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‘We hacked The FBI:’ hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
5 votes -
Comment on How Trump turned a refugee bureau into a $410 million deportation operation in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Since then, Ehrhardt, 41, has crisscrossed Africa, trying to persuade the continent’s leaders to accept flights full of people deported from the United States even though the migrants are not their own citizens. These “third country” deportation deals, a controversial innovation of the second Trump administration, have become a central part of the president’s hard-line approach to immigration, and they’re negotiated by the office Ehrhardt now oversees.
He has been making rapid progress. The Trump administration has authorized or pledged at least $410 million to facilitate agreements with 31 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America, as of the end of June, according to internal government records reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents, which have not been previously reported, provide the most comprehensive picture to date of the Trump administration’s fast-growing third-country network.
Under the arrangements, the U.S. has expelled migrants to countries across the globe where they have no previous connection. Early deals included flights to Costa Rica carrying migrants from China, Russia, Iran and Afghanistan and a flight to the tiny African kingdom of Eswatini with migrants from Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and Jamaica.
The agreements have been secured under the orders of Stephen Miller, a long-standing aide to the president who now serves as White House deputy chief of staff. Current and former officials say that Miller, known for his relentless anti-immigration focus, has been able to push key appointments at the State Department that have allowed him to overrule other foreign policy objectives in his goal of achieving more deportations.
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What countries get in return under these agreements varies significantly. The documents from inside the Office of Remigration reviewed by The Post show financial commitments that include $81 million in direct payments to 13 of the foreign governments. While that overall sum is small in terms of the U.S. budget, it often represents a massive expansion in funds being sent to authoritarian regimes that previously received smaller amounts from the United States. The deals were written through contracts designed to bypass statutory requirements, including human rights safeguards, that come with most foreign assistance spending, according to people familiar with the agreements.
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The deals also vary widely in size and scope, with foreign governments setting a range of conditions, according to the internal State Department documents. For example, Uganda will only take African nationals, while neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo has dictated the opposite, as it won’t accept anyone from Africa. Several countries, including the Central African Republic and Eswatini, have agreed to take violent criminals, but others such as Ghana and Sierra Leone only permit nonviolent offenders.
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Migrants whom the Trump administration has deported to third countries have alleged, in interviews and legal complaints, that they have been subjected to inhumane conditions — beaten by armed guards, denied food and prohibited from communicating with lawyers or their families.
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So far, the administration has deported more than 25,000 people to at least 28 third countries, according to an analysis for this story based on data collected from several independent sources, including Third-Country Deportation Watch — a tracking site run by Refugees International and Human Rights First — and the Berkeley Human Rights Center Investigation Lab. The vast majority, about 20,000, have been sent to Mexico, which has an informal agreement with the United States, and nearly all of the rest have been deported to countries in Africa and Latin America.
That is but a fraction of the 985,000 deportations that the Department of Homeland Security says it has carried out in Trump’s second term. But the policy has another significant impact: spreading fear and a deterrent message that migrants are better off returning home rather than risk being sent to an unknown location.
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How Trump turned a refugee bureau into a $410 million deportation operation
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Comment on Googlebook revealed and ready for pre-order in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI vaguely remember settings to disable things like this. Might be worth a look? When I upgrade the OS, part of it is finding what new things to disable.I vaguely remember settings to disable things like this. Might be worth a look?
When I upgrade the OS, part of it is finding what new things to disable.
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Comment on Googlebook revealed and ready for pre-order in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentNot necessarily. There are people who have trouble with touch screens.Not necessarily. There are people who have trouble with touch screens.
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Comment on Googlebook revealed and ready for pre-order in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThey're also good for giving to relatives who aren't very computer-savvy, because it's hard for them to mess it up.They're also good for giving to relatives who aren't very computer-savvy, because it's hard for them to mess it up.
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Comment on Mindful posting in ~society
skybrian Link ParentOzy Brennan’s audience, whatever that is. Do you think maybe Rationalists and EA types post weird takes sometimes?Ozy Brennan’s audience, whatever that is. Do you think maybe Rationalists and EA types post weird takes sometimes?
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Comment on Mindful posting in ~society
skybrian Link ParentFrom reading Bluesky, I can say that yes, sadly, many people are no good at it. But maybe they would do better if they actually tried?From reading Bluesky, I can say that yes, sadly, many people are no good at it. But maybe they would do better if they actually tried?
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Comment on Googlebook revealed and ready for pre-order in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentSecurity updates only is what I want when the alternative is that they’re making the OS worse. I’ve deliberately stayed on older versions of MacOS for years.Security updates only is what I want when the alternative is that they’re making the OS worse. I’ve deliberately stayed on older versions of MacOS for years.
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Comment on Googlebook revealed and ready for pre-order in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI think those higher-end devices were partly to set an example for other Chromebook manufacturers and partly they were what Google wanted for their own employees. The higher price is in part to...I think those higher-end devices were partly to set an example for other Chromebook manufacturers and partly they were what Google wanted for their own employees. The higher price is in part to compensate for low volume.
Or maybe that’s just cope? If they sold well, I assume they would have kept making them.
With Android phones, they sort of started that way, but Pixel was good enough to keep going.
ChatGPT alone allegedly has a billion weekly active users and there are rough estimates between 1.5 and 2.5 billion users of LLMs. It seems like those people would benefit the most from whatever conversations they had?
It's like how the person who benefits the most from a cell phone is usually the owner of the cell phone, and the people who benefit the most from a car are usually the people who ride in it. But like with cars, there could be very large harmful secondary effects, fortunes to be made selling them, etc.