You're being down voted but you're right. As far as I can tell, this is just a story about Palantir taking their already FedRamp approved GUI and using it to present Claude models running on already FedRamp approved AWS servers. Anthropic is basically just subcontracting their regulatory compliance to Palantir. I have to imagine the primary service being provided here is giving a bunch of 20 something enlisted intelligence analysts access to Opus for writing their commander's briefs. It probably won't even be as good as the commercial off the shelf version
The decline in cancer deaths can almost entirely be explained by the decline in smoking. Getting from 40% of people smoking to 15% was probably the biggest public health victory of the latter half of the 20th century
It's true that there has been some progress in treating most cancers and particular success in treating some specific cancers e.g. with checkpoint inhibitors. But lung cancer is both one of the most common forms of cancer (it's still third even with the massive decline in smoking) and has a much lower 5 year survival rate than the other most common cancers, breast and prostate. The massive decline in smoking has played an outsized impact on the improvement in reducing both cancer rates and deaths from cancer generally
This is true in the large sense but it obscures that 5 year survival rates have been steadily extending for many people who already have cancer. Treatments are in fact improving
Companies can be just as inefficient as the government, sure. But unless they have a monopoly, either natural or government-enforced, inefficient companies will go out of business while inefficient government agencies can linger on for a long, long time
I don't agree, though I guess it depends on how long long is. There are certainly some examples I can think of but I would argue most of them are actually natural monopolies in disguise, usually benefitting from network effects
I 100% grant that large organizations by their nature are less efficient than small organizations due to lossy communication. And some companies have a minimum size due to the nature of their work, which places inherent limits on their efficiency. But they're still subject to competitive pricing from other, similarly large companies.
> I don't agree, though I guess it depends on how long long is.
HP started the Grand Experiment two decades ago to determine how long it takes to destroy a large company if every decision is either incompetent or malicious, with little assistance from network effects… and the experiment is still running.
Some large companies acquire the characteristics of government (spending becomes remote from the source of funds; political cover from being too big to fail; lack of meaningful competition). So when large corporations become malign or inefficient, it can be because of how government-like they have become, and some kind of competition & markets authority should step in.
I would argue the pruning function becomes way more important (and way less used) the bigger a company gets and so there are very few large companies that are efficient, not none. Twitter comes to mind since they just had 70% plus of their workforce pruned as a likely efficient company (at least at serving social media pages, not at making money so far).
I also think this is why government is the most dangerous power structure (they almost never prune anything and they have theoretical claim to 100% of the country's GDP through taxation. It would be better for us all if they were heavily restricted or just figured out how to prune effectively instead of just raising taxes all the time to support inefficient program spending)
Government is just a makeup of workers who serve the population at large. The trouble is that the population at large can never come to agree on what to prune. I want this, you want that. You want me to give up this in the name of efficiency, I want you to give up that in the name of efficiency, but neither of us want to give up what we want so in the end we agree that if I can keep this, you can keep that, thus nothing gets pruned.
That reminds me why corporations have an easier time pruning, They're not democratic, they are basically feudal.
Like, there's a king on the top, he has his board of nobility, VP dukes, knight middle managers and the peasants who do all the work and own nothing. Whatever the king and nobility say is law, they're accountable to nobody (except for the pope/national government).
They are democratic, but usually of the weighted variety. Typically, he who owns more shares has greater say – although occasionally you will see other weighting methods. Government is more likely to consider each individual an equal shareholder, although not always.
Corporations likely also benefit here from the owners generally having more care for the organization and a greater desire to see it succeed. If there is something that needs to change they will work to ensure that it gets changed as soon as a problem is identified. Most government shareholders would rather sit back and just hope that things work out.
Right, this applies more to private held firms and late game startups than public corporations, but I would still expect that the higher you typically go, the more shares one owns on average, so the weighted average of that won't be too far off compared to the actual structure, minus external shareholders. We can imagine those as foreign kingdoms that the king owes money to :P
Plus there is upwards mobility, whereas in typical feudalism there is none, but it is still funny to think about the suspiciously odd similarities.
It is certainly not suspicious. It's all just people being people. It's questionable if it is even similar and not the exact same thing. Government isn't something magical. It's just a particular kind of business.
I feel like I should try and do business with you because you would be easy to take advantage of..... Workers serve their own interests and are contracted to serve a purpose mandated by government but the only guarantee they do so is the quality of their manager (who has the same problem). Once you get through the matryoshka doll of managerial layers you eventually hit a politician or committee of politicians who also serve their own interests (but more often than not lied to your face about supporting your personal interests in order to get elected). The reason nothing gets pruned in government is because the points in the decision tree that require pruning almost never get hit because there is low interest from a majority of politicians on addressing old problems when they have some new nonsense they are personally invested in that they want to push and they have growth in the economy (and the opportunity to raise taxes if there isn't enough growth) to fund the new nonsense. On top of that, it's harder to prune government workers because they usually have a strong union (because again, no one pruned that nonsense in the 80's and 90's when private enterprise mostly jettisoned theirs due to shareholder and competitive pressures).
> I feel like I should try and do business with you because you would be easy to take advantage of.....
Yet for some reason you haven't... You must, deep down, be worried that I will end up taking advantage of you?
> Once you get through the matryoshka doll of managerial layers you eventually hit a politician or committee of politicians who also serve their own interests
Of course, the cool thing about government is that you can literally tar and feather anyone who violates the wishes of the owners. That's usually a lot harder to pull off in a private business.
But you need people who care. That is a rare quality when it comes to the owners of government. It's a miracle when someone shows up just to hire the worker, let alone stay in contact with the worker after they have the job.
Inefficient companies _may_ go out of business. The problem is that this only happens if there’s more effective competition and clear market pressure across the board.
Consider Google: they’re highly inefficient in many areas producing entire applications which are written off not long after release and failing to capitalize on areas they had substantial edges in (e.g. AI), (arguably their last successful product launch was in the 2000s) with the net result that they employed a ton of people doing things which were not really tied to satisfied customers. This didn’t matter because they had a few business areas where they had massive profits despite not having a government-enforced monopoly which more than made up for those losses. Most of the tech giants have variations on that theme where they have many people who can report absolutely absurd internal inefficiencies but until that’s broken out on a balance sheet it’ll probably never change.
Government is unique in two ways: the first is that it’s more public (which is good, but e.g. you’d be shocked if Comcast was audited at the same level) but the other is that much of that inefficiency is mandated by the same people who complain about it in public. For example, benefits programs are often structured to require expensive validation processes which cost more than the savings, and there’s intense pressure to contract everything out even though that process requires significant overhead.
Yep, a classic case is governments have to serve all their citizens, including all the really problematic and expensive ones. Businesses don't have to do that.
this is far too often the case -- i.e., they are the only business providing X in Y region; or while technically not a monopoly their market share is so large it takes a very long time to be displaced (i.e., Google)
New Great Filter just dropped: Once a technological civilization develops cloning and ancient DNA analysis they decide to revive all the greatest warlords and conquerors in their history and, to everyone's surprise, all the Will to Power types cause a global thermonuclear conflict
But they can't fetch the memories and psychological traumas right? The person would just look like the old person then and no personality resembling the old one.
It has everything to do with shortening the distance!
You see there was a prophecy among the Bene Gesserit that a careful human breeding program could produce a genetically perfect man who could survive taking the water of life. This would enable in him an ability similar to that the Guild Navigators employ to guide their ships, but for the course of all humanity rather than the course of a single heighliner.
This gave me a good head scratcher. Taking the terms to be religious, I started to unravel it.
Bene Gesserit sounds like it would be Hebrew or Yiddish ("sons of decree" or something like that) although Google Translate does not hesitate to call it Latin. Water of life sounds like too common concept to trace it back to any specific religion, but Guild Navigators? Now that sounds like a more modern concept, and I would not be surprised if that was present in Mormon teachings or within the church of Scientology. Finally, heighliner, that's not a type of ship that either me or wiktionary is familiar with, so what are we even talking about?
I would be so lost without the sibling comment hinting towards the fictional world of Dune.
Huh... all these hebrew/yiddish linguistic ties are fascinating. There are other things that hint at Judaism or some evolution of it with the Bene Gesserit:
* They are a deeply matriarchal group tracing lineages more by motherhood than fatherhood. (Although with a more over feminist slant too - in that they are all women)
* They are referred to by some in ways that are similar to antisemitic stuff - schemers, conspirators, shadowy powerbrokers, etc. (although in that universe they actually do that stuff too)
* the mesiah prophecy referred to above
* their beleif system and source holy book are a basis for many religions
* a bunch of random little references throughout the books suggest that their ancestors may have been jewish (10k years ago, back on tera)
Dune is a really really good example of world building - at least the ones written by Frank Herbert. Lots of subtlety, the societies and groups in it evolved from ones on earth, and he pulls from a variety of cultures and religions to create the fictional ones. All of it is presented in a way that isn't super expository, but rather you just have to figure it out as you go in a fairly well written way. I recommend reading them - I think you'd see a lot of interesting stuff in there that I've missed.
The top 3 scores for 20th century atrocities are held by people who started off as nobodies.
People who rise to the occasion in times of national crisis seem to frequently be people who are on the line between somebody and nobody with people like George Washington and Caesar toward the "somebody" end and people like Napoleon and Eisenhower on the nobody end.
Friendly reminder that the modern country of North Macedonia has no connection whatsoever to the ancient Kingdom of Macedon which was a Greek state, similar to the other Greek city states (Athens, Sparta).
Ancient Macedonians spoke a Greek dialect, had Greek names and practiced the Greek religion. Modern Macedonians are for the most part Slavs that speak a Slavic language and have no historical connection to ancient Greece.
The naming confused me until I visited Vergina in Greece and had a chance to learn more about the EU politics behind it.
I was listening to a podcast with Naval and David Deutsch yesterday. They talked about this. He said these kind of studies are kind of pointless. Yes. It's likely twins will more or less end up with same outcomes in life. Because they look the same and society has a tendency to treat people who look certain in certain way. But that does not mean what they can do in life is limited by their genes. What they think plays much more important role than their genes.
There's a rather good story by Poul Anderson from 1990ish where Machiavelli and Frederick the Great are reconstructed by training LLMs on historical corpora (seriously! of course they don't use the term "LLM") -- and employed as advisers in strategy. This turns out to be a bad move for humanity.
I would argue Saudi Arabia is the closest thing to a post-scarcity / socialist society we have to compare to. Something like 70% or citizens are employed by the state of Saudi Arabia (which obviously is funded by oil sales). All you have to do is swap out the migrants that do all the real labor for robots and you basically have a sneak peak at the future
I actually think that fridges with image recognition would be a value add depending on the price. Could evaluate whether or not your food has spoiled, queue up a list of items to purchase, etc.
Maybe for larger kitchen/restaurants. But for residential use I think it would only serve to further distance the human from nature with all subsequent drawbacks.
There's no dark budget, it's all there, the programs are just usually listed as "Classified" or "Special Activities" like NGA funding was in the late 90s.
> This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance, cleanup, and production, which are in the Atomic Energy Defense Activities section,[90] Veterans Affairs, the Treasury Department's payments in pensions to military retirees and widows and their families, interest on debt incurred in past wars, or State Department financing of foreign arms sales and militarily-related development assistance. Neither does it include defense spending that is domestic rather than international in nature, such as the Department of Homeland Security, counter-terrorism spending by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and intelligence-gathering spending by NSA, although these programs contain certain weapons, military and security components.
> Accounting for non DoD military-related expenditure gives a total budget in excess of $1.4 trillion.[91]
The Pentagon frequently "loses" $1T here and there and then says, "oopsie!" with no actual consequences. That looks like a dark budget to me once you factor out typical government waste and overredundancy.
Obesity rates aren't consistent because access to cheap calories is not consistent across the globe. I don't mean to be glib, there are certainly other factors, but as a first order approximation obesity rates of a region or country are going to be proportional to how easy calories are to access, followed by how satiating those calories are
Japan and Colorado have just as much access to cheap calories as Louisiana, but notably less obesity. Also, obesity rates have increased faster than access to calories has; it's a surprisingly recent problem.
Even in the eighties, household spending on food was nearly 50% higher relative to overall consumption than today.[0] Japanese households today actually spend 16%(!) of their household income on food, compared to only 7% in the US.[1]
Obviously there are multiple factors, as I said I think the relative satiety of food also plays a role. US food spending has been more or less static over the last two decades while obesity rates have continued to climb so cost can't explain everything (though as an aside, I do think lower costs probably take some time to have an effect). But even if there are multiple factors at play, cost really should not be discounted as a huge driver, especially if we're taking a public health approach to addressing the problem. If we just attribute obesity to individual moral failings, as some are wont to do, I think we're really doing a disservice to ourselves
If you subscribe to Peter Singer's views on consequentialism, we all have a moral duty to spend our life maximizing the number of people we save from dying or from immense suffering. Hard to do that if you're not being productive; though I'll be the first to admit nobody does or can live with perfect adherence to that principle
That’s a crazy ascetic view of life. Also completely unrelated to almost anyone on this forum, since it’s unlikely most here are doing any work that saves anyone’s life
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