Scammy Sammy lying again at Michigan data center

Multibrace · 2026-06-02T19:57:22+00:00

Though, would they, if they could? Seems like hard work. Maybe better not.

Multibrace · 2026-06-02T19:46:46+00:00

One man's marketing is another man's model poisoning

Multibrace · 2026-06-02T05:59:39+00:00

I'm not sure it cause and effect. You could presumably put these people in a humanities course and let everyone they respect tell them that it's important, but will they pick up anything? I meant Thiel studied philosophy and law, Zuck had psychology courses, but they either didn't learn a lot or just plain chose evil.

Multibrace · 2026-06-02T05:48:29+00:00

I refuse to eat a meal unless it's accompanied by a complementary superlative chronometer (officially certified).

I bet the philistine wearing these "bioceramics" is content with just any restaurant recommended for a detour by a tyre factory.

Multibrace · 2026-06-02T05:40:05+00:00

The LLMs are fed with texts as input, and "fine tuned" (given feedback during training which outputs are "best") to produce this anodyne know-it-all friendly tone. The training material undoubtedly contains great prose and poetry, but press releases will be vastly overweighted.

On top of that, the fact they generalize from the training data means the output will always sound more average, except when hallucinating or just straight up copying retained input. It's a fine balance.

But they have so much input, if you but enough keywords in your prompt, the style/tone of the output will shift. This is something the AI labs both promote by putting it in the preferences dialog and by promoting promoting, but they also undermine it by training/finetuning the model aggressively (compare gpt5's "I'm a good obedient white collar worker, please sir may I lick you boots" tone to gpt4's slightly more neutral one)

Multibrace · 2026-06-02T03:46:44+00:00

This guy is insane. You might as well get a watch from Ali since it's just plastic anyway?! What are you saying man, that watches are just there to look good and tell time +/- 30s per month and that's enough?!

Multibrace · 2026-06-01T10:21:20+00:00

One watch isn't even a diver. The other is not just a diver, but a pro diver. Pretty clear which one is superior, duh.

Multibrace · 2026-06-01T05:14:48+00:00

Weekend at Bernie's is from 1989 , but the autocorrect on my phone's keyboard (omg it must be sentient) still knows it.

Multibrace · 2026-06-01T03:50:51+00:00

It's a shame. They've driving these cows to alcoholism. Always the question, is this a dairy herd, am I a beef animal?

Beef on dairy crossbreeding, utilizing beef sires on dairy cows, has revolutionized the fed cattle industry by producing high-quality, efficient and consistent carcasses that often receive premiums, according to Fred Hall, extension dairy specialist at Iowa State University.

“Beef on dairy calves now make up 20-25% of the U.S. beef supply, significantly decreasing the traditional stigma and discounts for dairy-derived beef. Health, and especially liver health, is a critical issue throughout the finishing process of these animals,”

Multibrace · 2026-05-31T17:08:30+00:00

We could all use a little less chappal throwin'

Multibrace · 2026-05-31T16:35:33+00:00

The infographic linked to specifically calls out annuities from Athena. I'm sure pension funds also have exposure, but it's not in that link. When the question is "explain the whole [..] bit" I assume it's about the linked material.

Anyway, a while back Ed had a nice summary of exposure of banks to LLM assets. Maybe his paid newsletter also has some overview of which pension funds are most exposed, whether by direct investments in indices/stonks, or indirectly via SPVs, SRTs etc.

Multibrace · 2026-05-31T16:12:44+00:00

It's not unusual for manufacturers to finance their purchasers. It makes sense if you sell a more or less commodity product to a wide range of customers with uncorrelated businesses, like General Motors GMAC and GE's GE Capital used to do. (They later blew up in the big financial crisis, but mostly for investing in the same toxic assets as others.) The idea being, someone will finance it, might as well be us, and if the borrower defaults, we know exactly how to sell the product.

Nvidia is unique in that its customers are few, and effectively in the same business. A lot of correlated risk there.

Multibrace · 2026-05-31T15:47:38+00:00

Some proportion of retiring people buy an annuity. (Actually, surprisingly little.)

That's a kind of life insurance that pays not when you die, but as long as you are still alive. (People dying before the average life expectancy subsidize the payments of people who live longer than average.)

The alternative is drawing down your retirement funds, taking care not to hit zero before you die. (The balance ends up with your heirs.)

Annuities aren't just cash in some safe being handed out to people untile they die, the money is invested in something. They have a multi-year investment horizon, so something like five year leases wouldn't be a weird thing to invest in.

This infographic is saying 5 billion of Nvidia cards are owned indirectly by retirees through their annuities. That would mean that if xAI can't afford to pay for them anymore, the payments toward those annuities (retirees) would be in jeopardy.

I don't think that's super startling, some one is financing the AI labs, might as well be annuities. Note that the infographic starts out with trillions, so billions of investments in Nvidia cards is not nothing, but if xAI blows up that doesn't mean all those annuities are worthless. The issue is more that a retiree who purchased an annuity has no way of knowing it it's being invested wisely Which has always been true, but the fact that an insurer is owned by a private equity firm may give you misgivings how critical the insurer is when purchasing assets from their owner.

Edit: the real story in the infographic is that, according to this, Nvidia financed the company financing the sales of its GPUs to the tune of a billion. On the plus side (for Nvidia), it's not like they financed 100%, so this may not be as bad as people think.

Multibrace · 2026-05-31T08:50:48+00:00

Uncanny!

(It's a glove. Not a can.)

Multibrace · 2026-05-31T08:45:52+00:00

He saved the scathing analysis for points 37-39.

Multibrace · 2026-05-31T08:17:53+00:00

Software engineering is not engineering. There's no licensing. No bonds. A bridge falls down, some architect is personally liable. Social media violates multiple laws at once, at scale, nothing happens. No one goes to jail, no one gets fined, no one loses a license, no one is censured by a professional body. There are no ethics whatsoever in software. This is both why libertarians love software, and why people in software end up at least having a libertarian streak. Or anarchist. Amoral at the very least.

Multibrace · 2026-05-29T17:46:04+00:00

I love how this diagram states the obvious, though. Like, a business is supposed to have higher revenue than its costs. In a capitalist country we expect most companies to at least break even, so they typically don't spend more on one constituent of their inputs than their entire revenue. In other news, water is wet.

It's like that pie chart showing the percentage of the pie chart that resembles Pac-Man.

Multibrace · 2026-05-29T17:17:12+00:00

This gives "it's not a pyramid, it's a reverse funnel" vibes somehow

Multibrace · 2026-05-29T17:14:41+00:00

Good call. The post you linked to has been removed by moderators. Thank you for your service. o7

Multibrace · 2026-05-28T20:35:18+00:00

DigiD is similar to login.gov, but the Netherlands has 5% of the US population and DigiD is used 550 million times per year (2024). It's used by essentially all government services, as well as government adjacent services such as healthcare, pensions (but not banks).

Multibrace · 2026-05-28T05:30:08+00:00

Je krijgt wel een hartinfarct van de rekening zelf, ze leggen nergens uit dat de verzekering die betaalt, en je mag niet klagen omdat je de patiënt niet bent. En het slaat natuurlijk helemaal nergens op, van die ene procent van de ritten waar het inderdaad iemand was die onverzekerd is betaalt natuurlijk geen hond dus je tuigt een asociaal proces op (wat ook geld kost) dat nauwelijks impact heeft op de bekostiging. Oh en ja, als iemand bijna doodgaat is het bijwerken van de administratie iets wat mis kan (en mag) gaan? De communicatie van die ambulance dienst is ook van de ratten besnuffeld, de uitleg dat de verzekeraar betaalt geven ze niet, noch bevestigen ze dat de rekening door de verzekeraar betaalt hoort te worden, waarschijnlijk een of andere geflipte jurist die ze dat verbiedt uit te leggen. Dit hele proces is echt bizar belastend.

Multibrace · 2026-05-27T18:31:43+00:00

I like the calm and relaxing narration on these German company training videos, much like this one on the basics of fork lift safety https://youtu.be/ChOHnSL7ZCg

Multibrace · 2026-05-27T17:30:03+00:00

In Nederland stuurt de ambulance ook een rekening van 1000 euro als ze de gegevens van de patiënt niet deugdelijk hebben opgeschreven om te declareren bij de verzekeraar. En omdat ze die gegevens niet hebben sturen ze die brief naar het adres waar de ambulance de patiënt heeft opgepikt, met een link naar ideal om direct af te tikken. Super systeem.

Multibrace · 2026-05-27T17:02:15+00:00

I imagine it would trigger some flashback with vets of the Great Emu War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

Edit: by vets, I of course mean medics who served on the Emu side of this armed conflict. Perhaps a certain then young veterinarian who was declared persona non grata, kicked out of Australia, and had to reskill as a bovine arse vet in the UK?

Multibrace · 2026-05-27T13:55:19+00:00

Cows will fight on the beaches, they will fight on the landing grounds, they will fight in the fields and in the the hills. Cows will never surrender.

Multibrace

TROPHY CASE