I found that using bags for compost isn’t really necessary at all. I just dump the container out each night and clean it along with my dishes. It’s nice this way because then nothing is ever actually rotting in my indoor trash.

Having a stainless steel compost container helps with this, as it’s easier to clean and doesn’t retain odors like the plastic bins.

I understand being annoyed at a sales pitch, but this sounds like about 3-4 hours of work for the contractor, which comes out to about $80/hour. That doesn’t sound so unreasonable to me.

Sorry, I skipped some details. They had a pre-agreed $180 "diagnostics fee", which we paid, then they tried to charge $250 on top of that for the part. The contractor had no technical knowledge and kept video-conferencing the office for help. He had lots of sales training, though.

Even trying to sympathize with the contractor is ontologically evil.

I think you missed the parent comment’s point. They are not saying that a free market had it’s downsides, but rather that a lassaiz-faire approach often does not even result in a free market, but rather in a market that tends towards monopolization. And a market without competition is not free.

In order to have free, competitive markets, you need to have a referee to enforce a common set of rules, like antitrust.

Thanks, that's a very succinct way of putting my original idea.

It was well put in (one of the) the ending(s) of Evangelion, where the protagonist Shinji learns that gravity, a constraint that removes a degree of freedom, also gives him freedom by providing a surface upon which he can walk; without the constraint, he would actually be less free.

Sorry for the double reply but I think a concrete example might elucidate what I am discussing.

I have had to deal with close friends being addicted to heroin. I believe the free market is harmful when it comes to hard drugs because of my experiences. I am all for the complete ban of these hard drugs. However, that does not mean no one will OD on heroin even though it is banned. Such a law will create a black market, crime due to its illicit nature, incentivize horrific cartels to smuggle it into the country, and cost a lot of tax money to enforce. These are all negative outcomes from legislation whose goal is to prevent people from having access to heroin. I think this trade-off is worth it personally although some would disagree. The point is I’m not comparing the negative outcomes of hard drug use to the intentions of “fixing” it through legislation. Rather I am comparing outcomes to outcomes because there are some serious downsides to such a policy solution.

I have also lost a friend to heroin (well, probably fent... it was the early days of that, and we suspect that nobody knew how to dose properly...) and so I appreciate your tangent.

One of the things we've learned up here in Canada over the last couple decades is the need to understand that some people just cannot be sober. They will not be, and they will do anything to not be, ranging from the familiar drugs to whatever they can find (gasoline, inhalants, etc). Obviously, there are worse and better choices in this range of options, and there are more and less self destructive outcomes. Harm reduction has become a key strategy; what can we do that will help keep these people from hurting themselves and others?

We've achieved some manner of success helping prevent people from OD'ing, getting needle-transmitted drugs, etc. which helps them and helps all of us at large (in the most utilitarian sense, it keeps social healthcare costs lower). What we've failed at is preventing them from hurting others, unfortunately.

In the long run, I think that what we're going to need is better drugs. We have to find something that makes people feel as good as they need to feel, without all the massively negative side effects of heroin, meth, etc. that result in wrecked lives. Healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry should seriously be looking at it this way; not just working on antidepressants and other clinical meds that are trying to get people to a stable "normal", but drugs that actually make you feel good so that they can displace heroin / fentanyl, without the downsides.

Yes, we would still see people addicted to that.... <sips coffee> <watches guy across the street smoking>

I didn’t miss their point, I challenged the foundation upon which it rested.

You are asserting that a free market is unstable and will inevitably lead to a monopoly. Even if I take this as a fact for the sake of argument, it doesn’t nullify my point that judging the intention of political action (antitrust laws to prevent monopolies) against the outcomes of a system (free markets devolve into monopolies) is comparing apples to oranges. You must judge the outcomes of both systems. As I stated in my original reply, regulations can actually lead to monopolies, so the outcomes matter a lot more than their good intentions.

If I don’t take your assertion as a fact though[1], then what you’re doing is judging what you believe to be the outcome of a free market with what you believe will prevent that through legislation. This is entirely too theoretical and doesn’t even begin to answer which is a better system. Ultimately we need to understand the actual trade-offs that are being made between these systems in order to select the system with the most desirable characteristics.

[1] It is not at all proven that a free market will naturally devolve into a monopoly. This has been a contentious debate in economics for centuries and is absolutely not resolved. People tend to assume a static market and extrapolate into the infinite future, e.g. if a horse drawn carriage manufacturer has 99% market share then will it forever be a monopoly in a broken system or will a fledgling automotive industry dethrone this “monopoly” with a better alternative that is not even a direct competitor? This is a really, really deep subject in either case.

> You are asserting that a free market is unstable and will inevitably lead to a monopoly.

No, I am not asserting that.

I think the first thing to clear up is our definitions. My main point would be that a market that is controlled by a monopoly is not a free market. I would define a free market not as a market that is free from government interference, but a market in which all of the actors are free to participate on a fair competitive playing field.

I think that lassaiz-faire, with the meaning of "hands off" may be a more precise way to describe what you are saying when you say "free market".

I think that a fair competitive landscape is ultimately what we want out of markets. I agree that it is bad when government actions interfere with a fair competitive landscape. But it is not inevitable that all goverment actions will do that, and in many cases government action can help rather than hurt. And similarly, plenty of actions by non-government actors can interfere with a fair competitive landscape as well.

> a market that is controlled by a monopoly is not a free market.

In other words, the thing you are talking about _does not exist_ except in libertarian fantasies. Without a government (the monopoly on force in a region, that controls the markets within) providing the backbone for this - i.e. with features such as courts, police, mint - there is no freedom, because an aggrieved party has no recourse other than violence.

> It is not at all proven that a free market will naturally devolve into a monopoly.

I think it comes down to the category of item being offered in the market. Some things naturally lend themselves to monopolies; it feels like perhaps it's based on factors like the difficulty of entering the market with a new product at all, the amount of coordination and manpower required to field it, and the cost efficiencies of having a singular producer vs. many.

There are certainly cases where we see duopolies or triopolies etc. where one really-well-run company might be more efficient, from a labour standpoint; but then, in turn, we all benefit from having a redundant array of supply chains.

There are other cases where we absolutely want a monopoly, such as with policing, or (in many countries) with healthcare, because they apply to everyone and being a consumer of the service is not exactly optional.

> Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude.

I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.

Wow I’m surprised at the heavy downvoted here.

I don’t think mandating cameras on and insisting on 100% is the right move, but I definitely think you want to aim for a team culture where camera-on is a default and most people have them on 80-90% of the time.

Otherwise, yea participation and engagement seems to take a major hit.

I would challenge you to find statistics that show that any public transit system in the U.S. is more dangerous than driving.

How are you defining ‘dangerous’? Are you counting deaths? Or also things like assault, robbery, sexual harassment, drug abuse (second hand smoke or needles), etc? What about crimes that take place around transit but not on transit itself, like crimes near a train station or whatever? I think it’s easy to construct narratives that are misleading both with data and without data. My point is simply that for many people, they feel safer in private transit and would prefer it. I see some other people here talking about some shuttle network Microsoft runs - presumably that is also a private option and it likely exists because public transit isn’t something many Microsoft employees want to deal with.

we define transit by accidents, because it's a bad argument to say "you don't experience harassment by yourself." by that logic we may as well close down parks and libraries and privatize those with single rooms.

> Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges?

People who actually understand politics and who realize that the extent to which politicians keep their campaign pledges is usually related to how their parties end up performing in the legislature, rather than just being dishonest.

This is everything in Italy, not just banking. I remember studying abroad there, it took us a week and a half of “domani” to get the wifi password for the dorm!

I'm Italian and both the previous story as well as your comment trigger me.

1) You could've asked the password to literally anybody in the dorm.

2) Unless this was geological ages ago, by law, all you need to close a bank account is a certified email (or PEC) or a certified letter (you go to the post office with a document and a simple form that specifies where you want your stuff transferred) you don't need to go in person anywhere at all.

Regarding closing the account, it's probably just like you describe. However, the author was told something else. Not everyone knows the "proper" procedure by heart, and many people rely on what they are told from officials in a given institution.

The fact that the bank personel in the first bank did not share what you just shared only adds to the misfortune.

It was a long time ago but from what I remember it wasn’t that simple. We needed the IT guy to set us up with individual accounts, and we could never get a straight answer on when he would show up.

What is your definition of "evidence" here? The evidence, in my view, are physical (as in, available computing power) and algorithmic limitations.

We don't expect steel to suddenly have new properties, and we don't expect bubble sort to suddenly run in O(n) time. You could ask -- well what is the evidence they won't, but it's a silly question -- the evidence is our knowledge of how things work.

Saying that improvement in AI is inevitable depends on the assumption of new discoveries and new algorithms beyond the current corpus of machine learning. They may happen, or they may not, but I think the burden of proof is higher on those spending money in a way that assumes it will happen.

It's a logical fallacy that just because some technology experienced some period of exponential growth, all technology will always experience constant exponential growth.

There are plenty of counter-examples to the scaling of computers that occurred from the 1970s-2010s.

We thought that humans would be traveling the stars, or at least the solar system, after the space race of the 1960s, but we ended up stuck orbiting the earth.

Going back further, little has changed daily life more than technologies like indoor plumbing and electric lighting did in the late 19th century.

The ancient Romans came up with technologies like concrete that were then lost for hundreds of years.

"Progress" moves in fits and starts. It is the furthest thing from inevitable.

Most growth is actually logistic. An S shaped curve that starts exponential but slows down rapidly as it reaches some asymptote. In fact basically everything we see as exponential in the real world is logistic.

True, but adoption of AI has certainly seen exponential growth.

Improvement of models may not continue to be exponential.

But models might be good enough, at this point it seems more like they need integration and context.

I could be wrong :)

At what cost though? Most AI operations are losing money, using a lot of power, including massive infrastructure costs, not to mention the hardware costs to get going, and that isn't even covering the level of usage many/most want, and certainly aren't going to pay even $100s/month per person that it currently costs to operate.

This is a really basic way to look at unit economics of inference.

I did some napkin math on this.

32x H100s cost 'retail' rental prices about $2/hr. I would hope that the big AI companies get it cheaper than this at their scale.

These 32 H100s can probably do something on the order of >40,000 tok/s on a frontier scale model (~700B params) with proper batching. Potentially a lot more (I'd love to know if someone has some thoughts on this).

So that's $64/hr or just under $50k/month.

40k tok/s is a lot of usage, at least for non-agentic use cases. There is no way you are losing money on paid chatgpt users at $20/month on these.

You'd still break even supporting ~200 Claude Code-esque agentic users who were using it at full tilt 40% of the day at $200/month.

Now - this doesn't include training costs or staff costs, but on a pure 'opex' basis I don't think inference is anywhere near as unprofitable as people make out.

My thought is closer to the developer user who would want to have their codebase as part of the queries along with heavy use all day long... which is closer to my point that many users are less likely to spend hundreds a month, at least with the current level of results people get.

That said, you could be right, considering Claude max's price is $100/mo... but I'm not sure where that is in terms of typical, or top 5% usage and the monthly allowance/usage.

> True, but adoption of AI has certainly seen exponential growth.

I mean, for now. The population of the world is finite, and there's probably a finite number of uses of AI, so it's still probably ultimately logistic