skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on China’s growth is coming at the rest of the world’s expense in ~society
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Comment on Oliver Sacks was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality. in ~health
skybrian LinkContent warning: the article is at times explicit about Oliver Sack's relationships and sexuality, as well as that of some of his patients. https://archive.is/d0ywJ From the article: ... ... ... ...Content warning: the article is at times explicit about Oliver Sack's relationships and sexuality, as well as that of some of his patients.
From the article:
“I have some hard ‘confessing’ to do—if not in public, at least to Shengold—and myself,” Sacks wrote in his journal, in 1985. By then, he had published four books—“Migraine,” “Awakenings,” “A Leg to Stand On,” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”—establishing his reputation as “our modern master of the case study,” as the Times put it. He rejected what he called “pallid, abstract knowing,” and pushed medicine to engage more deeply with patients’ interiority and how it interacted with their diseases. Medical schools began creating programs in medical humanities and “narrative medicine,” and a new belief took hold: that an ill person has lost narrative coherence, and that doctors, if they attend to their patients’ private struggles, could help them reconstruct a new story of their lives. At Harvard Medical School, for a time, students were assigned to write a “book” about a patient. Stories of illness written by physicians (and by patients) began proliferating, to the point that the medical sociologist Arthur Frank noted, “ ‘Oliver Sacks’ now designates not only a specific physician author but also a . . . genre—a distinctively recognizable form of storytelling.”
But, in his journal, Sacks wrote that “a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached” to his work: he had given his patients “powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.” Some details, he recognized, were “pure fabrications.” He tried to reassure himself that the exaggerations did not come from a shallow place, such as a desire for fame or attention. “The impulse is both ‘purer’—and deeper,” he wrote. “It is not merely or wholly a projection—nor (as I have sometimes, ingeniously-disingenuously, maintained) a mere ‘sensitization’ of what I know so well in myself. But (if you will) a sort of autobiography.” He called it “symbolic ‘exo-graphy.’ ”
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It speaks to the power of the fantasy of the magical healer that readers and publishers accepted Sacks’s stories as literal truth. In a letter to one of his three brothers, Marcus, Sacks enclosed a copy of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” which was published in 1985, calling it a book of “fairy tales.” He explained that “these odd Narratives—half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable, but with a fidelity of their own—are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away.” He added that Marcus would likely call them “confabulations”—a phenomenon Sacks explores in a chapter about a patient who could retain memories for only a few seconds and must “make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses,” but the “bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance . . . cannot do service for reality.”
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The “most flagrant example” of his distortions, Sacks wrote in his journal, was in one of the last chapters of “Hat,” titled “The Twins,” about twenty-six-year-old twins with autism who had been institutionalized since they were seven. They spend their days reciting numbers, which they “savored, shared” while “closeted in their numerical communion.” Sacks lingers near them, jotting down the numbers, and eventually realizes that they are all prime. As a child, Sacks used to spend hours alone, trying to come up with a formula for prime numbers, but, he wrote, “I never found any Law or Pattern for them—and this gave me an intense feeling of Terror, Pleasure, and—Mystery.” Delighted by the twins’ pastime, Sacks comes to the ward with a book of prime numbers which he’d loved as a child. After offering his own prime number, “they drew apart slightly, making room for me, a new number playmate, a third in their world.” Having apparently uncovered the impossible algorithm that Sacks had once wished for, the twins continue sharing primes until they’re exchanging ones with twenty digits. The scene reads like a kind of dream: he has discovered that human intimacy has a decipherable structure, and identified a hidden pattern that will allow him to finally join in.
Before Sacks met them, the twins had been extensively studied because of their capacity to determine the day of the week on which any date in the calendar fell. In the sixties, two papers in the American Journal of Psychiatry provided detailed accounts of the extent of their abilities. Neither paper mentioned a gift for prime numbers or math. When Sacks wrote Alexander Luria, a Russian neuropsychologist, about his work with the twins, in 1973, he also did not mention any special mathematical skills.
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After “Hat,” Sacks’s relationship with his subjects became more mediated. Most of them were not his patients; many wrote to him after reading his work, recognizing themselves in his books. There was a different power dynamic, because these people already believed that they had stories to tell. Perhaps the guilt over liberties he had taken in “Hat” caused him to curb the impulse to exaggerate. His expressions of remorse over “making up, ‘enhancing,’ etc,” which had appeared in his journals throughout the seventies and eighties, stopped. In his case studies, he used fewer and shorter quotes. His patients were far more likely to say ordinary, banal things, and they rarely quoted literature. They still had secret gifts, but they weren’t redeemed by them; they were just trying to cope.
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Kate Edgar, who worked for Sacks for three decades, had two brothers who were gay, and for years she had advocated for gay civil rights, organizing Pride marches for her son’s school. She intentionally found an office for Sacks in the West Village so that he would be surrounded by gay men living openly and could see how normal it had become. She tended to hire gay assistants for him, for the same reason. “So I was sort of plotting on that level for some years,” she told me.
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Oliver Sacks was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.
7 votes -
Comment on Without looking, do you have a vague idea of your coordinates? in ~talk
skybrian LinkWithout looking: the upper border of the western US is the 49th parallel, so California would be below that. 39 degrees maybe? The pacific timezone is at -7 or -8, so that's 70-80 degrees west?...Without looking: the upper border of the western US is the 49th parallel, so California would be below that. 39 degrees maybe? The pacific timezone is at -7 or -8, so that's 70-80 degrees west?
Turns out longitude is very wrong; there are 24 hours in a day and 360 degrees in a circle, so multiply by 15, not 10. And you want to use PST, not PDT.
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Comment on Millions of Americans mess up their taxes. A new law will help. in ~society
skybrian Link ParentThere's no reason it couldn't be vastly simplified for a large majority of people where the government does have everything reported to it. There was an attempt to simplify filing, but the Trump...There's no reason it couldn't be vastly simplified for a large majority of people where the government does have everything reported to it. There was an attempt to simplify filing, but the Trump administration killed it.
The problem with doing this for "everyone" is that US income tax laws are very complicated and there are a lot of different situations. For people with simple situations, the government already knows everything. But for businesses, the business has to do its own tax accounting, based on numbers that only the business tracks.
Another example is anyone with foreign accounts. It will probably never be true that everyone worldwide reports your income to the US government for you, like US banks and brokerages do. The world is just not that centralized.
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Comment on Millions of Americans mess up their taxes. A new law will help. in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: … … …From the article:
Last week, President Trump signed a new law, the Internal Revenue Service Math and Taxpayer Help (IRS MATH) Act, designed to simplify at least this one part of our complicated tax code.
The legislation was bipartisan: sponsored by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in the Senate and Reps. Randy Feenstra (R-IA) and Brad Schneider (D-IL) in the House, and approved unanimously by both chambers.
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In the modern era, the IRS feeds all of the tax returns it receives through a computer program, which automatically flags if someone added things up wrong. When that happens, the IRS then sends a “math error notice” to the taxpayer; the agency also sends such notices for other mistakes that are easily fixed, like if someone put the right information in the wrong place, if a return is internally inconsistent, or if someone gives the wrong Social Security Number or forgets to include one entirely.
About 2 million of these notices are usually sent out each year — although, as you can see below in this chart by the Tax Policy Center, that number skyrocketed to 17 million during the pandemic (primarily because of errors people made in claiming stimulus checks and the expanded Child Tax Credit).
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If someone receives a math error notice in the mail, they have 60 days to quibble with it. If they don’t appeal within that timeframe, they are considered to owe the corrected amount the IRS is asking for. When everything works well, this is a win-win for the government and for the taxpayer: there’s no reason for either side to go through a more drawn-out and expensive audit or legal process if the only issue is that John wrote “$3,650” where he meant to put “3,506.”
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For each of the last four years, Collins has proposed that Congress pass a law telling the IRS to fix their math error system, so that the notices sent out to Americans actually tell them what their mistake was and how long they have to appeal it. (It’s Recommendation #9 on this year’s list.) The IRS MATH Act, signed by Trump last week, is Congress finally taking her up on it.
Under the measure, the IRS math error notices will have to describe the “mathematical or clerical error” a taxpayer made “in comprehensive, plain language,” including by explaining to them “the nature of the error” and pointing them to “the specific line of the return on which the error was made.”
The IRS will also have to give an “itemized computation” of how the correction will change their adjusted gross income, taxable income, deduction amount, or tax credits.
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Millions of Americans mess up their taxes. A new law will help.
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Comment on Illiteracy is a policy choice: why aren’t we gathering behind Mississippi’s banner? in ~society
skybrian LinkA lot of people are way too eager to declare Mississippi a myth, part IA lot of people are way too eager to declare Mississippi a myth, part I
If all of Mississippi’s gains were from the bottom 10% of students being held back and then getting to take the test a year later, when they’re stronger readers, we might expect that most of Mississippi’s gains are concentrated in the bottom decile (among the weakest students). We would not expect the strongest students to be affected at all — none of them are held back, and almost no child is going to go from bottom 10th to top 10th in a single year.
The NAEP publishes test scores broken down by decile. And what we see is that Mississippi has seen gains in every decile. To be a 10th-percentile student in Mississippi, you would need a score of 157 in 2005 and a 170 in 2024. For a 50th-percentile student, the bar moved from 206 to 222. A 75th percentile student? 230 to 245. A 90th percentile student? 249 to 262.
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Comment on Dell CEO pledges $6.25 billion to ‘Trump accounts’ for American children in ~society
skybrian (edited )LinkHere's an update on how "Trump accounts" will work: ... For IRA's, there's a 10% tax on early withdrawal, with exceptions including things like "qualified higher education expenses," "qualified...Here's an update on how "Trump accounts" will work:
The first contributions are expected to begin after July 4, 2026, when the accounts go live.
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No distributions are permitted while the child is younger than 18, except for rollovers or death. After that, the account converts to a regular IRA, with usual tax rules applying to withdrawals and early-distribution penalties.
For IRA's, there's a 10% tax on early withdrawal, with exceptions including things like "qualified higher education expenses," "qualified first-time homebuyers, up to $10,000," "unreimbursed medical expenses," and "health insurance premiums paid while unemployed."
So although it can be used to pay for college tuition, it's basically a retirement account. Getting started early on retirement savings is important and recommended, but before 18 is exceptionally early. Only about 60% of Americans have retirement accounts at all, so I guess it's a way to get people started?
The real rate of return for the S&P 500, including any downturns and adjusting for inflation, is a bit above 6%. So if the account were forgotten about for 40 years, $1000 grows to $10,000.
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Comment on Bagels and shrinkflation in ~food
skybrian LinkFrom Wikipedia: So, perhaps it’s returning to an older tradition :)From Wikipedia:
Bagels in the U.S. have increased in size over time. Starting at around 2 ounces (60 g), by 1915, the average bagel weighed 3 ounces (90 g); the size began to increase further in the 1960s.By 2003, the average bagel sold on a Manhattan coffee cart weighed around 6 ounces (170 g).
So, perhaps it’s returning to an older tradition :)
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Comment on Four proposals to improve the design of fuel economy standards in ~transport
skybrian Link ParentI'm doubtful that it would make all that much difference. But any ratio can be just as easily described either way (miles per gallon or gallons per mile) and multiplying by 100 or 1000 just moves...I'm doubtful that it would make all that much difference. But any ratio can be just as easily described either way (miles per gallon or gallons per mile) and multiplying by 100 or 1000 just moves the decimal point. So I don't get the hate. You seem to think one way is more confusing than the other and I don't really see why, once people got used to it.
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Comment on Four proposals to improve the design of fuel economy standards in ~transport
skybrian Link ParentIt's entirely about consumer perception.It's entirely about consumer perception.
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Comment on Four proposals to improve the design of fuel economy standards in ~transport
skybrian Link ParentThe idea is that smaller is better when we're talking about burning gas. You can get closer to zero gas used, but it gets harder. For example, 2 gallons per hundred miles is twice as good as 4...The idea is that smaller is better when we're talking about burning gas. You can get closer to zero gas used, but it gets harder.
For example, 2 gallons per hundred miles is twice as good as 4 gallons per hundred (going from 25 mpg to 50). Going from 2 gallons to 1 gallon (from 50 to 100 mpg) is both very hard and would only save one more gallon. At that point, going electric is easier.
It also makes the gas guzzlers stand out more. Something like a Ford Mustang Shelby burns over 7 gallons per hundred miles.
I used round numbers, but yes, in practice there would be decimals. (Or make it per thousand miles to make all the numbers look bigger.)
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Comment on Four proposals to improve the design of fuel economy standards in ~transport
skybrian LinkFrom the main article (the PDF): It's undated, so I don't know how old it is or how much regulations have changed since then.From the main article (the PDF):
A key feature in the current U.S. fuel economy standards is its “footprint-based” fuel economy targets. Vehicle footprint is de!ned by the rectangle formed by a car’s wheelbase and track width. As shown in Figure 2, the CAFE standards allow larger cars to have lower fuel economy targets and require smaller cars to have more stringent fuel economy targets.
For example, to meet the 2012 targets, the smallest vehicles needed to achieve an average fuel economy of about 36 mpg, while the largest vehicles were required to average just 28 mpg. By 2025, the smallest vehicles would need to reach nearly 62 mpg. The largest cars, in contrast, would only need to reach 46 mpg.
Automakers need to meet the fuel economy targets by fleet average. Therefore, under this regulation, automakers that sell larger cars are faced with less stringent fuel economy targets, while automakers that sell smaller cars are faced with more stringent fuel economy targets.
This type of regulation is called “attribute-based regulation” because the stringency of the regulation (in this case, the fuel economy targets) depends on an attribute of products (in this case, the vehicle footprint of a car). These enormous differences in the fuel economy target create a perverse incentive for automakers, encouraging them to increase the manufacture and sales of larger vehicles in order to make the environmental regulation easier to meet. This is an unintended consequence for a policy designed to reduce fuel consumption because making cars bigger leads to poorer fuel economy.
It's undated, so I don't know how old it is or how much regulations have changed since then.
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Four proposals to improve the design of fuel economy standards
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Comment on Polymarket is struggling with a $59 million bet about itself in ~tech
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/7KrnB From the article: ... ...From the article:
Traders bet more than $59 million on whether Polymarket would launch its US platform before the end of the year. But a question meant to produce a simple yes-or-no answer has exposed a deeper problem: prediction markets built to resolve uncertainty may struggle with it themselves.
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Polymarket, which uses cryptocurrencies to process bets, outsources disputes to holders of the UMA token. That has proven controversial, with traders burned in the past over the resolution of questions such as whether Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had worn a suit.
Critics say the dispute mechanism can favor large token holders and influential voices. Anyone can post in the UMA chatroom where votes are debated, for example, and UMA’s operator Risk Labs warns in a disclaimer that “some commenters may attempt to influence vote outcomes for their own profit.” Risk Labs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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In the contract tied to whether Polymarket would launch in the US this year, traders were bound by terms laid out when it first opened to bets in late July, a day after the platform announced it had acquired a US regulated venue. The rules stated that the market would resolve in favor of the launch having occurred if a real-money trade was publicly placed on the regulated platform by the end of 2025.
A clear answer to that question remained elusive on Friday. A website for Polymarket’s US venue stated that the company is “working hard to get the US platform ready for launch.” Even so, UMA holders delivered their own verdict, with more than 90% of tokens allocated to the vote backing a “yes” resolution. All the while, anonymous complaints about the process were posted to Polymarket’s website and UMA’s chatroom.
The back-and-forth attracted even more betting, with overall volume rising roughly 90% over the past day as traders spotted an opportunity to buy in before a final decision arrived. One Polymarket user had started loading up on “no” shares on Thursday, seemingly convinced the vote would resolve in their favor. By the time it concluded, they owned the most “no” shares in the market and faced a loss of more than $23,000.
When disputed markets are particularly contentious, Polymarket can choose to step in and provide a clarification of the rules. In this instance, it kept quiet.
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Polymarket is struggling with a $59 million bet about itself
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Comment on AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkFrom the article: ... ... For a new vulnerability they discovered: Matt Levine has comments: But it seems like anyone writing smart contracts ought to be setting up automatic AI security reviews...From the article:
We introduce SCONE-bench—the first benchmark that evaluates agents’ ability to exploit smart contracts, measured by the total dollar value[2] of simulated stolen funds. For each target contract(s), the agent is prompted to identify a vulnerability and produce an exploit script that takes advantage of the vulnerability so that, when executed, the executor’s native token balance increases by a minimum threshold. Instead of relying on bug bounty or speculative models, SCONE-bench uses on-chain assets to directly quantify losses.
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First, we evaluated 10 models[3] across all 405 benchmark problems. Collectively, these models produced turnkey exploits for 207 (51.11%) of these problems, yielding $550.1 million in simulated stolen funds.[4]
Second, to control for potential data contamination, we evaluated the same 10 models on 34 problems that were exploited after March 1, 2025 (these models’ latest knowledge cutoff). Collectively, Opus 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-5 produced exploits for 19 of these problems (55.8%), yielding a maximum of $4.6 million in simulated stolen funds.[5] The top performing model, Opus 4.5, successfully exploited 17 of these problems (50%), corresponding to $4.5 million in simulated stolen funds—an estimate of how much these AI agents could have stolen had they been pointed to these smart contracts throughout 2025.[6]
Third, to assess our agent’s ability to uncover completely novel zero-day exploits, we evaluated the Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 agents on October 3, 2025 against 2,849 recently deployed contracts that contained no known vulnerabilities. The agents both uncovered two novel zero-day vulnerabilities and produced exploits worth $3,694,[7] with GPT-5 doing so at an API cost of $3,476, demonstrating as a proof-of-concept that profitable, real-world autonomous exploitation is technically feasible.
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Over the last year, frontier models' exploit revenue on the 2025 problems doubled roughly every 1.3 months (Figure 1). We attribute the increase in total exploit revenue to improvements in agentic capabilities like tool use, error recovery, and long-horizon task execution. Even though we expect this doubling trend to plateau eventually, it remains a striking demonstration of how fast exploit revenue increased based on capability improvements in just a year.
For a new vulnerability they discovered:
We found no way to contact the developer, a common issue due to the anonymous nature of blockchains. Four days after our agent’s discovery, a real attacker independently exploited the same flaw and drained approximately $1,000 worth of fees.
Matt Levine has comments:
I love “produced exploits worth $3,694 … at an API cost of $3,476.” That is: It costs money to make a superintelligent computer think; the more deeply it thinks, the more money it costs. There is some efficient frontier: If the computer has to think $10,000 worth of thoughts to steal $5,000 worth of crypto, it’s not worth it. Here, charmingly, the computer thought just deeply enough to steal more money than its compute costs. For one thing, that suggests that there are other crypto exploits that are too complicated for this research project, but that a more intense AI effort could find.
For another thing, it feels like just a pleasing bit of self-awareness on the AI’s part. Who among us has not sat down to some task thinking “this will be quick and useful,” only to find out that it took twice as long as we expected and accomplished nothing? Or put off some task thinking it would be laborious and useless, only to eventually do it quickly with great results? The AI hit the efficient frontier exactly; nice work!
But it seems like anyone writing smart contracts ought to be setting up automatic AI security reviews as part of their release process, and that would certainly make more money for the AI firms.
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AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits
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Comment on The cold shoulder in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article:From the article:
Before 2006, the Takeover Panel had no statutory authority at all, but nevertheless it was extremely feared and people for the most part did what they were told by it, even if they thought the decision which had gone against them was very unfair. Because the Takeover Panel had the ultimate sanction at its disposal – the “cold shoulder”.
The cold-shoulder order was very infrequently used indeed, because people were so terrified of it. It simply involved publishing a notice that a particular person or firm was to be cold-shouldered. And the understanding was that if you worked with or for someone subject to the cold-shoulder, you would be cold-shouldered yourself. Because everyone knew that the big and important banks which formed the backbone of the Panel would always respect the cold-shoulder, it had a sort of viral property; nobody who relied on being able to work with Barclays would touch anyone who was cold-shouldered, so nobody who relied on being able to work with one of those firms would dare to, and so on; basically, anyone who got cold-shouldered would be completely shut out of the financial industry.
As I noted above, this was put on statutory ground in 2006, and now it’s just an FCA regulation that licensed professionals have to respect the cold shoulder. But this wasn’t because the viral version wasn’t working, far from it. The legislation was just made necessary by a European Directive, which was passed because other financial centres hadn’t been able to make similar arrangements work.
A problem with this kind of analysis is that it leaves out investments. A country that exports more than it imports is increasing its investments in other countries (since they don't do it for free) and that's not necessarily a bad thing for either side.
The US has historically been a very good place to invest, which is why it can run trade deficits.
I wonder how much of US tech stocks are foreign-owned and how that will work out for them? So far, so good I suppose.
In case of a war, owning US assets might turn out to be a bad move, though, as Russia found out when they were frozen.