Quantian

If you are still on the “cheap Chinese models will take share from US labs” cope train you need to get off. US labs are now distilling their own models to compete across the Pareto frontier, so Haiku is better model than Kimi at 1/8th the cost. The only reason to use it is if you MUST self-host.

Sushi in Japan is for rich tourists and corporate expense accounts, not normal people. At nominal exchange rates (eg tourists), the median American is richer than all but the top 5% of Japanese households, and even adjusting for PPP differences they’re comfortably in the top quartile.

One reason games are so expensive is that you need to hire a lot of very expensive programmers rather than much cheaper creatives like writers and VAs, so it’s especially odd given the recently created Automated Programming Machine to go “let’s fire our creatives”. That’s the comparative advantage!

Damn. This would be a huge problem if anyone on the planet other than Google employees used Gemini Pro 4

My ultra hot take is ME1 > MEA > ME3 > ME2 from a thematic/setting/plot viewpoint

One thread they dropped completely after ME1 was you were supposed to be a spy, not a super soldier! Like the council called you up and went “listen up 007, we think this guy is dirty, go check it out and maybe push him out a window in a plausibly deniable manner if he is” bsky.app/profile/slic...

A brief summary of the market recently: all those lines going down are baskets of stocks with "good" characteristics: cheap, profitable, high ROIC, low risk, &c. All the lines going up are baskets with "bad" characteristics: volatile, very cyclical sales, high turnover, already up hugely, &c.

Reminder that the $80bn Anthropic net loss figure is going to be 95% driven by warrant liability accounting, an economically meaningless non-cash charge, BUT you can safely flag anyone reporting on it *as if it were real* as not understanding GAAP and whose other accounting takes should be ignored.

A huge pet peeve of mine is that literally the oldest and most basic genre of storytelling, the tragedy, has entirely vanished from mainstream big budget media for inscrutable and baffling reasons. The most recent original example I can think of that isn’t a remake/prequel might be Breaking Bad!

Last year the CEO of a multi billion dollar quantum “company” absolutely lost his shit at me in public and started yelling at me for being disrespectful little shit because I asked a simple question about the claim he had made one sentence earlier. These people rely on identifying and fooling fools!

Obviously the answer is just that men are better at it than women. As the time investment to cook falls and wages equalize, the comparative advantage of women cooking vanishes, and men return to their natural place in the kitchen. This is why it's diffusing out from the upper middle class first.

Obviously the answer is just that men are better at it than women. As the time investment to cook falls and wages equalize, the comparative advantage of women cooking vanishes, and men return to their natural place in the kitchen. This is why it's diffusing out from the upper middle class first.

A very good approximation of the “quality of life” in a city is the marginal cost of moving there, ie market rent per square foot in units of income. If you tried to build a better index you might be able to, but it would probably have a R^2 of 80% and the graph would not looks like this.

This paper makes school closures look pretty good! It finds they are the second most effective NPI overall, behind only masking, and argues that cost doesn’t justify it. But to get to that $26mm number they need to use an absurdly high number for education value and still only end up at 2x VSL.

I’m playing SWTOR for the nostalgia kick and honestly there’s like 2.5 storylines worth of classic BioWare fire in there that they tried to stretch into 8 and it didn’t really work

It’s kind of funny how TESCREAL was a total swing and a miss on account of thinking “all these people are linked by their shared love of modern Russian cosmist philosophy” and not “all these people are linked by their shared love of experimental Russian research chemicals and rape orgies”