TechTakes

quantum finance

With the private jet and all.

A story I heard, one of the problems with private jets (and private jet trackers) is that often private jets cannot be stored at normal airports. So after delivering the rich people to the airport it needs to take off again, and go to a smaller airport to stay there. This drives up the environmental costs to insane levels (now each trip is 3 takeoffs), but this also causes weirdness with the people tracking the planes of celebs, as they now overinflate the actual flights they are in, which annoys weird pedants (like me). I wonder if the celebs taking these flights are even aware of it. Anyway, remember this if you hear a story of 'celeb X took their private plane to skip traffic' stories, there is a chance they were not actually in this plane. (So put down those surface to air launchers you lunatics).

Not that the usage of private planes isn't insane and should be banned/heavily regulated.

Tennessee has a new law against making LLM clones of performers without permission. It would be great to see our bullshit strike a blow for the side of righteousness, for once!

Yes, it is called the ELVIS Act. I'm sorry.

https://www.tn.gov/governor/news/2024/3/21/photos--gov--lee-signs-elvis-act-into-law.html

SwiftOnSecurity (spoiler: probably not actually Taylor Swift)

it's some US infosec guy working at a corp, identity was figured out a couple years ago

how's the nix drama going these days? I need more spilled tea to sip, anywhere I can read a recap? did everyone just gave up on not being sponsored by border surveillance drones?

Lix fixed it last month of course

'This tool can do X at a superhuman level' is often quite an embarrassing thing to believe. (in before somebody says computers can do calculations at superhuman levels). Saying your tool can do that is also pretty cringe.

I've clowned on Dan before for personal reasons, but my god, this is the dumbest post so far. If you had a superhuman forecasting model, you wouldn't just hand it out like a fucking snake oil salesman. You'd prove you had superhuman forecasting by repeatably beating every other hedge fund in the world betting on stock options. The fact that Dan is not a trillionaire is proof in itself that this is hogwash. I'm fucking embarrassed for him and frankly seething at what a shitty, slimily little grifter he is. And he gets to write legislation? You, you have to stop him!

I got mad at this last time I saw Nate Bronze assign percentages to the 2024 US election.

Like, my dude, what the fuck does that mean? Is the election result a random variable? What is its PDF? What maths could you have possibly done to arrive at a crisp [0, 1] probability value?

How did you go from "predict the future", an obviously wildly fuzzy and inaccurate vibes check, to a concrete real number??

Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.

I'll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.

BRB training an LLM to be a super-goalpost-mover

You have to let it predict things that will happen before 2019, duh.

That is just the average The Sims/Rimworld player.

Their radical idea of building a social network that did not require a either VC funding or large amounts of volunteer labour has come to a disappointing, if not entirely surprising end. Going in without a great idea on how to monetise the thing was probably not the best strategy as it turns out.

I never used Cohost, but I know a couple people who do and fuuuuuuuck this sucks. 'Least Newgrounds is still going, though that's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison.

I'm not shocked.

i used (and use, until the shutdown) as my primary social media site. i'm not surprised, but i can't say it hasn't been disappointing. for all the issues it has (and it did have a lot) it was pretty much the only site that felt somewhat cozy to use for me. stings quite a bit

To be clear: Cohost did take funding from an anonymous angel, and as a result will not be sharing their source code; quoting from your link:

Majority control of the cohost source code will be transferred to the person who funded the majority of our operations, as per the terms of the funding documents we signed with them; Colin and I will retain small stakes so we have some input on what happens to it, at their request.

We are unable to make cohost open source. the source code for cohost was the collateral used for the loan from our funder.

Somebody paid a very small amount of money to get a cleanroom implementation of Tumblr and did not mind that they would have to build a community and then burn it to the ground in the process. It turns out that angels are not better people than VCs.