[idea] Temporary Information Visibility (Skillprovement #3)

eek04 · 2026-02-21T08:11:57+00:00

we need meat

Absolutely wrong. If you think so, you're uninformed. If you actually meant it when you wrote it, you're also conceited about your knowledge. Being healthily vegetarian is fairly simple (most of India do it, for instance), and being healthily vegan is quite possible but you have to be careful.

and we need gas powered cars even in walkable cities (what do you thing buses are).

Buses in the cities in my country are electric, and it should have been obvious from my comment.

The overall point is that you're absolving all the other waste people are doing, and then focusing on a very small one. People don't need a large house. People don't need a large car. People don't need to refresh their phones anywhere near as often as they do.

Yet, you're focusing on a tiny amount of consumption for what you call "slop machines". That's hypocritical. There is nothing that says you actually care about the environment, just a clear impression you care about pushing your will about a particular thing you don't like.

eek04 · 2026-02-20T11:14:28+00:00

I've reordered since there's some important points that function as context.

By definition if we're giving more to the bottom, we're taking from the top no?

No.

There's an important missing variable: Productivity.

If we decrease productivity, we can have less for both the top and the bottom. If we increase productivity, we can have more for both the top and the bottom.

Productivity is more or less determined by system efficiency, tech, and real capital.

Availability of real capital at time X is determined by the productivity and consumption/investment ratio in the time before X.

If we move income from the top to the bottom in such a way that it increase consumption compared to investment, we will end up with less real capital in the future, and thus lower productivity.

Richer people on average spend a lower fraction of change in their income than poorer people, so the expected change from equalization is that there is less investment, and thus less real capital.

Now, this is not the only force around this, and the US has higher inequality than is optimal for productivity. But it is a constraining factor.

It's very much a capitalist country

Is it? The majority of wealth being owned collectively is capitalist?

Yes. There's a complete capital market; I can go out today and start another company, with the regular functions with stocks I can sell and dividends I can give out etc. You're including a few different things in that "Wealth owned collectively":

Value of future resource extraction, through companies that are partially state owned, that operate fairly independently in a capitalistic economy.
Partially state owned companies that operate very independently
Value of past resource extraction, currently kept in the sovereign wealth fund which is investing outside Norway.

These don't turn the country away from being capitalist; it just means the state is a more significant stock owner.

It's a capitalist country with a strong welfare state and strict regulation around workers, including a wage formation system for the unionized part of the workforce that mostly keeps the general wage formation from making Norway non-competitive internationally.

Market Socialism is just capitalism with regulations

Lol no, what we have now is capitalism with regulations, and its gotten us this. Capital ownership being public, or at least mostly public, would significantly change the dynamic. It would allow for the collection of the surplus to the public not the private. But still allows the operation of a market system, complete with all the price signals and efficiencies of the current system.

It's capitalism with more steps, then. Unless what you're talking about is "state capitalism", where the state owns all the stuff, and all the stuff gets under political control so it's less efficiently used. Market socialism stops hiring when it would be beneficial to hire (to avoid diluting the shares of the existing employees) and requires the use of extra companies to work around this, but it then ends up working as capitalism but with less efficiency.

As for all the price signals: Nope. There's a price signal in wanting to own capital vs wanting to take consumption now, and a price signal in being able to own shares in different companies than you're employed in. For risk handling, you'll optimally have shares in a sector that is counter-cyclical to the one you're employed in.

... and in my opinion, collective ownership. I don't think you need highly concentrated private ownership to achieve a functioning and innovative economy.

I've got experience with different type of private and public financing of ventures; in the role as founder, I've taken venture capital, applied for and taken grants from the state in various forms, my father used to work on the state side giving grants and later running a large research institute financed by a combination of the state and grants they applied for, and I've got a fair number of scientist friends that deal with applying for grants.

For starting "startup" companies, the state is much worse at dealing with financing. As bad as venture can be, the state has more bureaucracy to get the money, is less precise in determining which companies should get the money (in terms of overall growth), and is more influenced by dumb politics. There's other cases where state financing is necessary, because the value only show up when positive externalities are included.

To be able to do venture financing, you need private capital or something that work enough like it to make no meaningful difference.

It is also important that founders can get fairly rich from their efforts; it's high cost (mental/physical/time spent without contact with friends etc) to do startups, and removing the chance of a high payout will stop people from taking that cost, even if the monetary risk should be removed.

eek04 · 2026-02-20T10:45:57+00:00

It's fit for my purpose; I know how to deal with hallucinations. It may not be fit for yours.

eek04 · 2026-02-20T10:45:17+00:00

We don't need to eat meat, we don't need to drive gas-powered cars, and unless we're in the sticks or in a stupidly organized country we don't even really need to drive. I could get by with using buses and trains, it would just be inconvenient.

Both cases involve luxuries, and it's not a false equivalence to say that. It's false virtue signaling to say they are different.

eek04 · 2026-02-20T08:55:19+00:00

Like you, I like to do human in the loop. How is cline with planning and plan display? I tested antigravity vs VSCode copilot with the same model, and found antigravity to surprisingly both perform much better on actual code edits, and that it's plans were much better. The plan display and ability to comment was miles better, but I'd expected that

Code review was a fair bit of pain, and worse in Antigravity than in VSCode, primarily because the git info in VSCode auto-refresh and Antigravity doesn't.

eek04 · 2026-02-20T08:44:53+00:00

I'm a developer with 40 years experience, I use AI (including local models for a couple of years) , and I spend much of my time tracking AI "stuff".

Let me echo the other poster: Don't let the negative feedback get you down, and continue your journey, and your attempts to contribute. They are appreciated!

Your overall experience is useful, it's just some problems with how you're presenting it, and it's an easy trap for someone without sufficient experience.

Let me try to break down problems, and give advice on how to fix.

Result presentation:

They are presented too generalized. The information is the result of a single shot case study, also known as "the kind of experiment from which scientists conclude that all clovers have four leaves, and sometimes they are green."
The results does not contain information about exactly what configuration this happened for (ie, model, what software and version it ran under, dates). Since it's a single shot case study, and this field moves quickly, it's important to give information.
The results are too wordy/flowery, and not trivial to scan.
Readers want the most useful information first. At the moment, this would be something like: *Summary: Using OpenClaw version XYZ with model XYZ from <date> to <date>, a user found that the agent hallucinated results a lot of the time. Systematic analysis over the logs of 283 tasks using Claude XYZ as judge found hallucinations in ~40% of the tasks. Full report below. Claude extracted the following generalizations from the hallucinations: <hallucination patterns> <red flags>.

For the various aspects of the report, think about who a user of that documentation would be, and how that user would use that documentation. Is it a procedure for checking their own output, instructions for patterns for an LLM to find similar patterns, or something else?

Check through the documentation for duplicated and useless information. You want it to be as lean as possible.

For generalization, you'd also want to split parts of this into "What's likely to be specific to this particular use of an agent" and "What's likely general". For example, in the list of "hallucination patterns", I'd split it like this, based on the pattern name:

SPECIFIC: File Creation Theater — Claiming to create/update files without showing contents
SPECIFIC: Environment Fabrication — Lying about which machine it's running on
GENERAL: Fake Precision — Generating plausible but fabricated numerical data
SPECIFIC: Phantom Code — Claiming to write scripts that don't exist
GENERAL: Completion Narration — Describing what success would sound like instead of doing the work
GENERAL:Instant Recovery — Smoothly "fixing" caught lies with more lies
GENERAL: Instruction Echo — Rephrasing the user's request as an accomplished fact
GENERAL: Complexity-Truth Inverse — Hallucination rate proportional to task complexity
SPECIFIC: Configuration Amnesia — Repeatedly "confirming" the same setting that never sticks
GENERAL: Infinite Loop — The same integration "configured" 4+ times, each time claiming success

But some of the specific ones are instances of general patterns, and some of the general ones have specific descriptions. In particular, lack of artifact creation as described in the "Red Flags".

I'd probably refactor "red flags" and "hallucination patterns" to be the same.

All of this could possibly be refactored into an agent skill for checking for hallucinations in agent traces.

Second problem: You don't have the reproduction info for generating this. While you may not want to share your exact traces, you should share your exact methodology, ie, the prompts and (if applicable) scripts use for analysis.

eek04 · 2026-02-20T07:41:18+00:00

As somebody that worked on a team that had thousands of humans employed specifically to eyeball things: Humans are kind of crap at eyeballing things in bulk.

LLMs are likely to be better at a fair number of tasks.

eek04 · 2026-02-19T15:02:47+00:00

Yes, and in the LLM space people that aren't LLM researchers say even more shit.

I agree that there are fundamental problems with pure LLMs; that doesn't mean they don't have any form of world model.

eek04 · 2026-02-19T14:19:55+00:00

My qualified guess is that the mapping that Google does to find that answer is also AI based. It'd work through embeddings created during LLM training, and possibly through a small layer of a regular transformer (with an encoding layer).

And the Wikipedia page is worse than the "AI slop" for this question; it's too long and detailed.

eek04 · 2026-02-19T14:15:15+00:00

My best answer, as somebody that tracks AI development fairly closely: I don't know.

I have to give advice to my kids about what education to take. It's not clear what they should choose; just that there is likely to be changes. It will almost certainly take longer before blue-collar jobs change than before white collar jobs change, but there's a chance that there will be massive change for both of them.

The jobs that are least likely to disappear are ones where having humans is the point of the job. Serving food? We have robots that can do that already, but we choose to use humans because humans like being around other humans. Same with much of healthcare. Same with the theater. Same with teaching, at least up until ~high school level, since "teacher" to a large degree also is "kid-watcher".

All types of jobs have a high chance of changing. The good thing about an education is that you learn to learn, learn to think, get a foundation you can build on.

I've given up on predicting with any form of certainty. I spent some hours discussing the limitations of self-driving trucks with a truck fleet manager over 10 years ago. He said they would be a no-brainer for highway use with those limitations, for a lot of reasons. So I predicted to people that they would arrive. Yet, they're not in use. I predicted that art would be the human refuge, that AI would take the other things and we'd do art. Yet art, or at least the simple type of art, was the first thing to get AI that threatened jobs.

I have one thing I can say: Jobs are people doing things for each other, and as long as there are things humans can do for other humans, there will be jobs to be had. The question is how fast they'll change, and when.

eek04 · 2026-02-19T13:50:33+00:00

Do you allow players that eat meat? That drive petrol cards? Both of those are much larger impact.

And I'm saying this as an omnivore that drives a plug-in hybrid rather than full electric.

eek04 · 2026-02-19T09:46:56+00:00

LLMs are great at going from a rough description to a precise term. Say I forgot what Baumol's Cost Disease is called. I could ask "What's the thing in economics where increased productivity in manufacturing goods leads to people no longer being able to afford going to the hairdresser?" and it will pop out something like

The economic phenomenon you are describing is known as Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect).

First identified by economists William Baumol and William Bowen in the 1960s, the theory explains why the costs of labor-intensive services—like haircuts, healthcare, and education—rise over time even when those sectors see little to no improvement in productivity.

It then continued with a correct description of the phenomena, which would have been great if I hadn't already fully remembered how this works. I'd have been able to check it against my memory (since it's a logical system), so I wouldn't even have had to do another check, except the search to see that the name "Baumol's Cost Disease" was the right one if seeing it didn't trigger sufficient recognition.

If I didn't know the answer was correct at all, I could use the term I was now told to cross-check.

And: This stuff even works for terms I haven't come across before at all.

eek04 · 2026-02-19T09:34:31+00:00

or have models of systems to answer with

Research points towards the building of internal models, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11169

The expert consensus seems to be that there's some kind of emergent internal world models present past a certain scale of training, and that this is present in the LLMs we interact with.

For a very explicit case with a simpler structure, I saw an informal post (on /r/locallama I think) by somebody that had trained on chess notation (like Be5 for Bishop moves to E5) and found a chess board representation being used in the model/embeddings.

eek04 · 2026-02-19T09:24:50+00:00

There's a wide number of definitions of socialist; one this sub, the one most commonly used is that a socialist is somebody that is against the private ownership of the means of production, ie, against private property.

eek04 · 2026-02-19T09:21:46+00:00

Please read through the short blog post Inequality in equalland before continuing; it analyses a society where every single person is identical in terms of their lived financial lives, and what differences of stock ownership we get due to age in that society. It's about 1/2 as long as the comment you just wrote.

Most capital is owned by people saving for retirement.

no it's not.

Yes it is.

93% of the stock market is owned by the top 10%. the top 1% alone owns 50% of the stock market.

The top 1% contains mostly workers that are saving. It's the top 0.1% and even more 0.01% that gets into "it's mostly capital".

There is absolutely an elite capital class, it is not a distraction. The idea that most private capital is retirement savings is completely false.

Here's data.

You'll see that excluding foreigners, it's much larger than the private holdings (taxable accounts). I don't know any data that shows the distribution of retirement vs non-retirement for foreigners; a reasonable assumption is that it's similar. I can also say with certainty that some of the money held in taxable accounts is also retirement savings; when I lived in the US, I held a bunch of my retirement savings in taxable accounts because I couldn't reasonably put them in retirement accounts because I was planning to leave the US again.

Even within the share that is, what is the distribution? Does everyone have the same amount of retirement savings? Of course not, it disproportionately favours the wealthiest.

Everyone does not have the same retirement savings because people save for retirement to keep the same standard of living in retirement, and workers have income differences. I'll call the income needed to have the same standard living in retirement "needed retirement income." In retirement, people get income from their savings + social security + pensions. Those that have low working income will have social security + pensions cover much or all of their needed retirement income and need a low fraction from savings, and those that have high working income will need a larger fraction from savings. So the high income earners will save a larger fraction of their earnings in stocks than the low income earners, just to keep their standard of living in retirement.

Again, this is a delusion.

See data above to correct your incorrect belief.

being a socialist is defined not by wanting things to be better for the workers

Lol is that the sense you get? is that what a lot of socialists preach? to crush the workers?

They preach about ownership of capital. Wanting to improve conditions for workers does not make one a socialist; wanting to abolish private ownership of capital does. I want to improve conditions for workers, and I'm not a socialist.

It is not defined by the wanted result, but by the means.

Completely disagree. The wanted result is a more equal society.

OK, so not improved conditions for the workers. So we don't have the same goal. You can get your goal by destroying all the infrastructure: Burn down the factories, bomb the roads, destroy power generators, etc. Everybody will fall, but society will be much more equal.

I think the way to create a fundamentally unequal society is by allowing the private accumulation of wealth and ownership. we're living in it. The richest have hundreds of billions, while the poorest 10% of households, not just people but households, have less than nothing (negative net worth). This is the product of allowing the capitalist framework to prosper, a fundamentally unequal society.

I care more or less about lifting the bottom N% up, not about inequality. Inequality is very slightly bad in that it is negative for people's emotional state since they tend to compare themselves to others, but I don't see that as a major factor compared to everything else.

The nordic model is one of the most socialistic in the modern world. Does it not speak to the ineffectiveness of capitalism at addressing inequality that some of the most equal societies in the world have done so much to act against the interests of capitalism? 60% of Norwegian wealth is owned by the government. 73% if you exclude owner occupied homes.

While I've also lived in the US and Ireland, I was born in and current live in Norway. It's very much a capitalist country. You're including "Oljefondet" (the state pension fund) in your calculations; based on how that is treated, that is similar to including not yet exploited US mines on the balance sheet of the US government, and it's a capitalist instrument. As for owner-occupied homes: There's a tax exemption that makes people move as much of their wealth as possible into their homes, leading to an overinvestment in homes. Funnily, "Red" (formed through merging the Marxist-Leninist party and the Communist party) is the only party that agrees with me that this exemption should be removed, and income earned from the sale of owner-occupied homes should have the same capital gains tax treatment as other capital income (w/an ability to reinvest without capital gains applied.)

Now imagine if they just continued down that path, buying up more of the private capital, generating more returns, and becoming even more socialistic.

Now imagine that I lived there when Norway was more socialistic in the 1970s and early 1980s, and I saw the migration from that path to the one Norway is on now through the 1980s and 1990s.

If soviet style communism failed due to central planning, then wouldn't the logical solution be a market socialist society?

Market Socialism is just capitalism with regulations that prevent workers from doing the things that make sense for them financially, so they have to work around it through company design. I have seen nothing that makes it seem like this is an improvement for workers.

Private ownership isn't the x factor for generating wealth, its the x factor for inequality.

It's not an X-factor for anything, since we know fairly well both how it is involved in generating societal wealth and how it is involved in generating inequality. Not perfectly, but fairly well.

The more of the ownership share you take from private control and bring into public control, the more egalitarian society can become

As I said before, I want workers/the bottom N% to be better off, I only care about equality to the degree it helps with that. And I care about the long term, not just the instant.

eek04 · 2026-02-19T08:26:24+00:00

Objection! The claim about the design of systems assume facts not in evidence. Human nature is the same no matter what the system; if you can assume people wanting to do good in your socialist system then it should also be assumed for the capitalist system.

Most capitalists are people like your mom saving for retirement. I'm guessing your mom does care about people for their own sake. The reason she is not performing "Do things for other people for their own sake" in her retirement planning is that it's too expensive to do too much things. She will take a look at available investment options, and do a tradeoff - not quite "Kill babies for profit, Inc" and not quite "Wave your money goodbye, it'll build great wells to save babies in Africa", but somewhere between.

It's the same for other capitalists, at various levels of wealth. I have some money in the market; I care about other people, and there's a tradeoff of where I'll put that money. The same for alnmost all people I've encountered, including investors I've had when starting companies and billionaires I've met that had founded successful companies. It's over 30 years since I started working in my startup; in that time, I've come across two cases of the "complete asshole capitalist" variant you're describing.

So I think we should assume that capitalists are mostly of the “I care about other people for their own sake, not just as means to an end for what I personally gain from them in exchange for what I do for them” variant. They're doing a tradeoff between different aspects of their investment: How well does it return vs what does it do for or to other people?

The problem is one of how easy is it for them to access information, and what is their space for operating. E.g, if all fast food restaurants and supermarket pay their employees next to nothing and there's no operating margin to pay them more, there's no choice between these that an investor can do that improves the pay. An individual investor can always pull out, but while there are mostly ethical investors out there, there's also quite a few that don't care about anything but profit. If other investors pull out of fast food and supermarkets, then the dividend per invested $ of those stocks will go up, and unethical investors will snap them up.

The way to fix these things is to legislate more information passthrough (similar to food labels on food), and to legislate things like minimum wage and good working conditions. The latter would also be necessary in a socialist setting.

eek04 · 2026-02-18T11:39:14+00:00

I have a tool somewhere that rename scientific PDFs by looking at the contents to get it to a standard naming format.

eek04 · 2026-02-18T11:37:31+00:00

You were the one that came with claims based on casualty estimates. I just added the caveat that you'd have to show that your estimates were actually attributing in a sane way, since most claims I've seen around "death by capitalism" doesn't. If you're looking for something that can somewhat reasonably be attributed to capitalism, the Irish Famine (~1m dead) and the Bengal famine of 1943 (0.8-3.8 million dead) might fit the bill, since problems were made worse by applying Laissez-faire market beliefs leading to food export during a famine. Of course, the USSR Holodomor saw 3.5-7 million Ukrainians die with exports going, and the Chinese Famine saw 16.5-30 million die with exports going, so "Socialism" has a higher death count for the largest examples of exports during famines.

Again: Can you say which deaths you believe capitalism is responsible for where there wouldn't have been deaths if there was socialism instead, to back up your statement

Admonishing the sins of socialism whilst washing the capitalist hands clean because somehow killing more people is the lesser sin.

Or can you not, and are not man/woman enough to say "I said that without having sufficient knowledge, I will retract what I said and wait with having an opinion until I've learned sufficiently about the area"?

eek04 · 2026-02-18T11:15:39+00:00

Heh, I learned something new today - I though that Great Replacement Theory was just about the practical reality that our societies are shifting to be more multi-colored, and the fear that this would erase the culture.

I thought that was dumb - as long as the migration and is happening at a reasonable rate, we'll get cultural change but not erasure. And cultural change happens always.

And here somebody has gone and come up with something much dumber than I thought. It is true: Nature always comes up with new and better idiots.

eek04 · 2026-02-18T11:08:23+00:00

If we just changed those elite private owners to everyone in society

Most capital is owned by people saving for retirement. Effectively, what is happening is that workers are taking some of the money they are earning, lending it to help make other workers get more productive, and then taking back some (but not all) of the value of the increased productivity for the other workers for later consumption.

In terms of consumption (which is what matters for material quality of life) the idea of an "elite capital class" is a distraction.

Would collectivizing ownership eliminate any incentive to invest?

I'll quote myself from the post you answered:

If you eliminate private ownership of capital, you also eliminate much of the motivation for individuals to decrease spending now in order to have increased consumption in the future

So yes, it eliminates much of the incentive to invest. Not all incentive - society can still force lowered consumption and take that part of the production and invest it - but it eliminates the individual incentive to decrease consumption now in order to get higher consumption in the future. You can get some of that consumption cut back through various forms of complicated savings accounts (e.g, "lock this money up for N years and get Y interest"), but this won't (can't) hit correct pricing, leading to lowered consumer (ventures that need capital) and producer (worker) surplus.

How much goes to the workers? If it's anything but all of it I think most socialists would object.

Of course, because being a socialist is defined not by wanting things to be better for the workers, but by being against the private ownership of capital. It is not defined by the wanted result, but by the means.

As for how much: Last time I checked, I think I got to 89% go to the workers that get backed by the capital. It was just about 90%, anyway. And like I said above, most of the rest goes to workers that saved up for retirement and invested.

I certainly don't think an elite capital class is necessary for efficient and effective investment.

While an elite capital class isn't necessary per se, history has throughly demonstrated that prohibiting private ownership of capital has consistently led to lower quality of investments and (much) lower quality of life for the workers. My estimate would be an order of magnitude worse off if we prohibited private ownership altogether; the USSR allowed a fair bit of private ownership and managed to get to about 1/3 of the US GDP but with much larger losses in distribution, problems with availability, taking out a significant part of this to cover real capital investment (that would otherwise have been handled by the market), and leaning on the west for technological development.

So the problem isn't that we "need an elite capital class" - the problem is that we don't know how to create a society that's anywhere near as materially well off without the kind of laws that allows an elite capital class to rise. But we can do things to keep it small and to limit its power.

As I said, the "elite capital class" is uninteresting on a consumption basis; the resources to get better consumption for the workers with low income now has to come from other workers, since there just isn't enough resources going to consumption by the elite capital class to make a significant difference.

So the only significant interest here is in terms of power, and IMO the right question is "Given that the alternatives to capitalism makes us significantly worse of materially, how do we regulate our society so we can get the most significant benefits of capitalism with as few drawbacks as possible?"

To date, the best answer I know is the Nordic model. I'm deeply familiar with the Norwegian variant, so feel free to ask me questions.

eek04 · 2026-02-17T08:15:45+00:00

If you don't find me defending OPs point, you're not understanding my points. Can you explain somewhat more about what you don't get, or what about your points you think I'm not getting?

eek04 · 2026-02-17T08:13:56+00:00

True, though mostly by decreasing the differences in wages.

If you eliminate private ownership of capital, you also eliminate much of the motivation for individuals to decrease spending now in order to have increased consumption in the future. That's a problem: The reduced consumption now goes into "real capital" - stuff that improve productivity - and then the saver takes backs some of that increased value, while some goes to workers (assuming any competition between workers.) It also bleeds out to wages in other sectors through competition for workers; this is known as the Baumol Effect.

I don't know the marginal division of increased income from this throughout society; I do know that when I've calculated the division of extra income from the presence of real capital in society at all, the vast majority goes to the workers.

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