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Big Tony
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Monthly Roundup #33: August 2025
Big Tony13d13

This acquisition isn’t just about a license; it’s Polymarket’s homecoming, returning stronger and ready to serve American users once again.

 

 

Aahh... smell the AI.

Reply1
My notes from "Energy: A Beginner's Guide"
Big Tony14d20

6CO2

...6O2?

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Why Every Politician Thinks They’re So Right (and Why That’s a Disaster)
Big Tony14d*30

Suppose these parties do certain things destructive to the country but effective for gaining power, for example, populism.

 

I don't understand this, and the use of 'populism bad' in general.

I understand populism to consist of appealing to the mass of ordinary people and promising them things they want, in exchange for votes - even if those things run counter to the interests of established institutions and agencies.

How is this different to any other rational action taken by politicians seeking to be elected in a democratic society?
In a democracy, you need votes, and lots of them. People will give you their vote if they feel you will do good things for them. You hear what they say and promise to enact it if you are elected. Other people are unhappy about that, but you do it anyway.
Is that populism, or is it describing every election ever?

I know this is overly simplistic! I don't understand it enough to steelman 'populism bad'.
What are the most compelling arguments for 'populism bad, and populism different to normal political activity'?

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GPT-5s Are Alive: Outside Reactions, the Router and the Resurrection of GPT-4o
Big Tony20d10

Anecdotal, but GPT-5 (mini, I guess? free plan with no thinking) is the first model to succeed at a poetry-based prompt I've tested on a lot of models.

I don't want to mention it publicly, but it involves a fairly complex rhyming scheme and meter.
All other models misunderstand entirely, but GPT-5 got it straight away.

Interestingly, when thinking mode kicked in after a few prompts, it performed a lot worse.

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Critic Contributions Are Logically Irrelevant
Big Tony2mo80

I don't think the coach analogy is apt. While they may have played the sport, their role is getting the best out of a team of people - a manager, rather than a technical contributor.

A better analogy may be an editor. Many editors are failures as authors, but are very good at critiquing starts, seeing where the flow and pacing needs improvement, and improving the overall work.

However in a world where many editors come to you and submit feedback with varying and contradicting messages, you need to quickly filter by something, so you can focus your limited time and resources on the most valuable submissions.

This is relative to the time and attention that each author has available. Someone with nothing to do will be happier to accept comments than someone who for whatever reasons just doesn't have time right now to engage.

Prior experience with creating the subject matter may not be the best filter, as you've pointed out in the post.

I'm curious what you think might be a better filter for assessing credibility and quality, quickly.

Or do you disagree with the notion that people need a filter?

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How To Believe False Things
Big Tony5mo102

I hold that — given my experience — I was more justified in my belief than anyone who claims that men playing against women for the World Cup would be unfair. All it takes is trusting that people believe what they say over and over for decades across all of society, and getting all your evidence about reality filtered through those same people. Which is actually not very hard.

 

So, given this happened - was there any update in your belief in the truthfulness of the other beliefs of those people?
What other embarrassingly unequal parts of reality are being politely ignored, except by science-illiterate jerks?

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Energy Markets Temporal Arbitrage with Batteries
Big Tony6mo40

Excellent review. This is an area that I've been thinking about, but don't know enough about the tech to make a start in a small way.

There's a company in NZ that takes an interesting approach to solar - Supa, https://www.supa.energy/ (not affiliated in any way).

Ignore all the marketing fluff on the website, how it essentially works is:

Supa approaches companies with large buildings, and gets them to install solar panels + batteries. These are dramatically over-provisioned, they install much more than the company uses
The company buys the solar panels and batteries through a 10-year programme of monthly payments through a finance company, and Supa repays the company monthly for all costs - capital and interest. At the end of 10 years, the company owns the equipment.

Supa arranges and pays for installation, and they manage the energy ongoing. With this, they charge the batteries from the sun (free) and overnight (when prices are lower), and:

  • Give the company a discount on their electricity
  • Sell electricity to households nearby, at a discount
  • Sell back to the grid when the predictable morning and evening spikes occur

The company gets solar, and cheaper electricity with no down payment. Supa gets locations all over the country generating power for them, without having to buy land or build solar farms. The households get cheaper power.

The factors that seem to make this work are (a) NZ's screwed-up electricity supply - prices are volatile and have risen a lot lately, leading some electricity-intensive businesses to shut down, and (b) cheaper to distribute power generation and storage throughout the country, than to generate in one place and deal with the high costs of upgrading transformers and surrounding infrastructure to support it.

We may see a rise in this - companies using financial engineering to increase uptake, rather than households running the numbers and investing directly.

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Any Trump Supporters Want to Dialogue?
Big Tony1y20

Not an American but support Trump from afar. Genuine curiosity here - if you were to steelman the rational Trump supporter, what would you say? (happy for pushback in the ensuing discussion).

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shortplav
Big Tony1y30

Or in other words, 'let's meet halfway'.

What do you think would happen to the rmin rate over time, in the absence of any methods of enforcing honesty?

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AI #74: GPT-4o Mini Me and Llama 3
Big Tony1y10

Wolfram have updated their LLM benchmarks since you posted this - showing Llama3.1-405b-instruct at #1 place.

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