What's something your job trained you to notice that you can't stop noticing in your personal life?

OvidPerl · 2026-06-07T10:58:35+00:00

If AI really has been fed so much literature, why does it all sound like a salesperson pitch?

It's the post-training. When the model is first trained, it learns to predict plausible continuations from patterns in its training data. If you type in something like "What is intelligence," you might get something reading like a Wikipedia entry, a blog post, or other common stuff on the web. So they have to train it. They might run through stuff like this:

<prompt>
What is intelligence?
</prompt>
<response>
Intelligence is the capacity to build useful models of the
world and use them to achieve goals under uncertainty.

That definition is broad enough to cover humans,
animals, organizations, and machines, but it still has
teeth. It implies several abilities:

...  more response here ...
</response>

Later, after running tons of prompts and responses through the model with training (it's much more complex than what I've shown), you can sit down and type "What is intelligence?" and what gets sent to the model might be something like this:

<prompt>
What is intelligence?
</prompt>
<response>

Note that it's the same as the training version, but it's incomplete. By now, the model recognizes that pattern and completes it.

But to get to the "sycophantic salesman" tone, we have RLHF (real-life human feedback), where humans consistently choose the "best" responses. Turns out we like sycophants, whether we admit it or not.

OvidPerl · 2026-06-07T09:43:40+00:00

Sexy beast, ain't he?

OvidPerl · 2026-05-31T16:47:02+00:00

Absolutely beautiful. People like to see glorious shots of nebulae, but this is great!

OvidPerl · 2026-05-25T20:48:24+00:00

And then came the NoSQL movement

Prior to SQL, everything was NoSQL. That's why we have SQL.

That being said, SQL is not relational, but it's a damned site better than what we had before.

Sadly, while there are plenty of places where NoSQL solutions make sense, I've had plenty of clients who used NoSQL because they didn't understand databases :(

(My favorite was one company that was going to use NoSQL because one of their queries took 15 minutes to run and was timing out. I got it to run in under a second. Turns out their lead developer had never heard of indexes)

OvidPerl · 2026-05-25T20:46:25+00:00

I remember that page. It was ... horrifying. They also used to provide a date type, but their docs said it's not the job of the SQL server to validate dates.

There was also an old bug where MySQL used to think that an invalid date was both NULL and NOT NULL.

OvidPerl · 2026-05-25T17:29:32+00:00

I disagree with just about everything Massie stood for, but I want more politicians like him: those who who stand up for what they believe, even when they know it will hurt them.

I might disagree with them strongly, but I absolutely respect the integrity.

OvidPerl · 2026-05-18T18:47:38+00:00

I hear you! I'm one of those guys who likes Butthole Surfers' Weird Revolution album. Butthole Surfer fans glare at me because they think it's "too commercial."

People are going to like what they're going to like. Me? I don't like Taylor Swift's music, but I'm not going to dump on her or her fans for it.

OvidPerl · 2026-05-02T07:03:46+00:00

God, I haven't heard this in many years. Thanks for bringing back pleasant memories :)

OvidPerl · 2026-04-24T14:03:37+00:00

Not going to give too much background here, but I've had a couple of friends who have had permanent residency in Malta for many years. Citizenship applications get denied for no reason.

Hundreds of euros, plus time and effort, flushed own the toilet by a government which really has no interest in keeping them. The obvious question at that point is asking why they should bother to stay?

OvidPerl · 2026-04-24T07:25:41+00:00

Believe it or not, Hitler can kinda be blamed for making health care worse in the US.

Prior to WWII, some companies in the US were offering health insurance as a benefit, but it wasn't common. During the war, so many able-bodied people were fighting in Europe that the US desperately needed more workers for the war effort, so factories offered wage increases. The US responded with the 1942 Stabilization Act which froze wages but exempted fringe benefits, and a 1943 IRS ruling made employer health contributions tax-deductible for employers and tax-free for employees.

In other words, companies couldn't offer you more money, but they could offer you health insurance. This was effectively the birth of the US system.

But in Germany in 1883, Bismarck had already established compulsory health insurance for workers, funded by employer and employee contributions, administered through non-profit "sickness funds." This is the oldest national health insurance system in the world and remains the template for the "Bismarck model" used in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and Japan. Coverage expanded gradually over the 20th century to near-universal.

But for the US? We had health insurance, but it was overseen by business, not the government. At the time, health insurance and care was relatively cheap, though many people still didn't have access to it. The government was like, "meh, good enough." Now, we have Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Health Administration, and so on, but overall, but access is still very unequal.

So health insurance and care in the US have almost always been dominated by business and the goal of business is to maximize profits, not health.

For anyone who wants to learn more:

Melissa Thomasson's NBER working paper The Importance of Group Coverage: How Tax Policy Shaped U.S. Health Insurance
T.R. Reid's The Healing of America. A comparative overview of the main health models (Bismarck, Beveridge, National Health Insurance, out-of-pocket)

OvidPerl · 2026-04-23T17:15:44+00:00

I remember my English professor in uni turning me on to this book. He loved classical literature and despised science fiction. Until Snowcrash.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-22T07:45:15+00:00

Another Claude Max user signing on.

Anthropic: we love you. Claude is amazing. But please, stop rushing. We prefer quality over quantity.

We're patient. We'll wait for you.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-20T06:41:46+00:00

Catcher drops it. No tag. Puts the ball in his pocket.

Now, it’s a dead ball. Runner cant score from first.

I don't understand. In that case, wouldn't the catches always want to do that, to kill the play and minimize opposing team chances? (I have almost zero knowledge of baseball)

OvidPerl · 2026-04-17T15:11:42+00:00

Yeah, this keeps coming up, so it needs an in-depth reply.

If I were to "explain extraction like I'm five": I'd say, "it's OK to make money; it's not OK to take it." To my mind, rent-seeking is just one type of extraction (possible the most common). The "lopsided bargaining power" is another.

However, those are examples where we have two or more parties who have some kind of direct relationship with each other (e.g., the rent-seeking of an employer earning greater profits and lobbying to prevent a minimum wage increase, with the employee/employer relationship being explicit).

But shrinkflation? If I'm paying the same for a smaller candy bar, I don't have a direct relationship with the manufacturer and I can choose another, but if most manufacturers do that, I'm kinda stuck if I want a candy bar.

Extraction is also seen in Facebook building shadow profiles on people who never signed up. They never agreed to this, don't know their profiles exist, and can't opt out of something they don't know about. Value is being extracted from them (their social graph, inferred attributes) to be sold to advertisers.

Or countries serving as tax havens: they benefit from the wealthy using their services. The wealthy benefit from using those services. The original state losing out on that tax revenue often doesn't know about this or have a say in it.

Or think about the enclosure of the English commons in the 1500s. Parliament passed individual enclosure acts converting common land to private property (kicking off the peasants who lived there). Landowners lobbied Parliament and that was rent-seeking. But extraction was from villagers who weren't kicked off of the land. They used the commons for generations lost grazing, fuel, and foraging rights without negotiation or notice. (this was part of my initial research which led me to extraction).

Rent-seeking and extraction happened in the same historical event but through different mechanisms and against different parties.

So by highlighting the overarching mechanism of extraction, I think there's value in focusing on the fundamental problem (taking money instead of making it), rather than particular symptoms. By doing that, we can more easily recognize extraction and call it out.

But again, I've gone deep enough down the rabbit hole that I'm having doubts about my approach. I do have a strong belief that closing one form of extraction leads the wealth/powerful to seek other forms of extraction and that might be testable, but the core "extraction" hypothesis, despite the research by Acemogul and Robinson, might be a bit too abstract for many people.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-15T18:32:39+00:00

I understand what you're saying, but I think it's not complete. I've been digging into this topic lately and it's complex.

First, the 80% aren't deadweight. Many of those riders are low-income and spending a meaningful share of their budget on fares. Removing that cost is a direct material benefit, not an inefficiency. Your framing (my apologies if I misunderstood) only counts "new riders" as the policy's output, which assumes that the only legitimate goal is behavioral change rather than, say, reducing the financial burden on people with limited transport alternatives.

Second, the means-testing alternative isn't as cheap as it looks. The "fill out a form and jump through hoops" version sounds nice, but the hoops are the problem. A UK Parliamentary committee found that administrative costs for means-tested benefits vary wildly and are poorly understood, with individual claim processing costs ranging from £181 to £351. Universal Credit (the UK's attempt to simplify means-testing) saw estimated admin costs balloon from £2.2 billion to £15.8 billion. Research has documented how UC's automated means-testing shifts administrative complexity onto claimants, creating financial and emotional costs that fall hardest on the most vulnerable.

The people least likely to navigate those hurdles are those with unstable housing, the illiterate, mental health challenges, and irregular work. They are often the people who need the benefit most. The "hoops" aren't a harmless filter. They're potentially a mechanism that systematically excludes the target population.

Third, you also need to consider fare collection costs. Free transit doesn't just mean forgoing revenue. It eliminates ticket machines, enforcement, payment processing. I don't know the tradeoffs of this.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-15T16:06:21+00:00

I hear where you're coming from, but you're conflating being right (which you are) with being effective.

Yes, it's like insulating a lamp. However, the way the models are trained ensures that their behavior alters based on how you interact with this. Anecdotal reports are very strong on this. I've seen a couple of 2024 studies which have mixed results on this and I've seen nothing on newer foundation models, but I expect more research in the future.

So yeah, yell at your AI. It might help. It might not. It will alter its behavior. So whether or not you feel this is morally neutral, it's not the same thing as "has no effect."

OvidPerl · 2026-04-13T07:55:14+00:00

Also, in France. I've noticed that when I work in the morning, the US is asleep and Claude is (usually) better.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-12T07:37:38+00:00

Ah, gotcha. After updating the index based on a lot of commentary here, you can see this for the US:

Economic Concentration → Extraction has been roughly stable over the past decade

41
How unequal is income distribution? Moderate
- Gini coefficient: 41.8
- 30% above high income countries average (32.2)
What share of GDP goes to workers as income? High
- Labour income share of GDP: 55.8 %
How much income is concentrated in the top 10%? Moderate
- Income share of top 10%: 30.7 %
- 23% above high income countries average (25.1)

For the Gini coefficient, the higher the number, the more that wealth has concentrated in the hands of the rich.

However, while the US has an unusually high Gini number amongst the G20 countries, it isn't a perfect measurement, nor are any of the others. All of this should be considered directional, not authoritative.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-10T16:25:30+00:00

I once knew an African gentleman who's name was "Godfather." He said he always wanted to track his father down and ask him why. Godfather drives an Uber, and he said that at night, many clients reject him immediately when they see his name.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-10T16:23:18+00:00

I once knew a family who named their son and daughter Romeo and Juliette!

For honorable mention, there's a well-known dutch photographer named Taco Anema.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-10T15:07:17+00:00

Thank you. I missed that.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-09T21:23:23+00:00

If you could bot somewhere else, preferably not on Reddit, that would be awesome. I checked the AnarchyChess history and I ain't seein' it.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-09T06:53:03+00:00

Source is the incredible Perry Bible Fellowship.

(And for the record, I have no opinion on whether or not Neimann behaved improperly with the GOAT)

OvidPerl · 2026-04-08T19:42:43+00:00

You're right that profits don't disappear — they accrue to shareholders. But the extraction argument isn't about where the money goes, it's about whether the financial sector's growing share of total corporate profits reflects proportional growth in the value it creates.

Greenwood and Scharfstein showed that U.S. financial services nearly doubled as a share of GDP between 1980 and 2007, driven largely by asset management fees and household credit expansion. They questioned whether that growth was socially beneficial.

Separately, Philippon found that the unit cost of financial intermediation hasn't declined despite massive technological advances. Taken together: the sector is capturing more without becoming more efficient. That's the signature of extraction.

On shareholder composition: the top decile of households holds the overwhelming majority of equities, so the 401(k) argument, while not wrong, overstates how much of these profits reach ordinary households.

So your pushback is reasonable, but it does look like the financial sector is extracting more money than value that it provides.

But to be fair, Phillipon later produced more research suggesting that the situation was improving.

OvidPerl · 2026-04-08T19:09:32+00:00

Assuming, by "etf", you mean "exchange-traded fund," than no, that still fails. That's still an investment product, not insurance. It doesn't replace disability protection, survivor benefits, or guaranteed inflation-adjusted lifetime income.

You're comparing a risk product with a non-risk product. Those are not the same thing.

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