Felt cute and open sourced by CI broker. Might delete later. github.com/benandbalto/also-…
Saves 80% vs blacksmith by sending jobs direct to ephemeral spot VMs on GCP.
Every one of our clients just takes our reporting package and drops it into chatgpt for analysis.
I now have Maynard publish a big json to make this easier. People love it.
benmaritz retweeted
The problem for legislative Democrats is that they never approach tax reform holistically.
Yes, we absolutely need a progressive income tax. But we also need to abolish the 1% cap on property tax levy increases, cut sales tax by 3-4 pts, and tax corporate profits, not revenue.
Supporters of WA's 'millionaires tax' insist it's not a Trojan horse for a broader state income tax, But some prominent Democrats have gone off script. seattletimes.com/seattle-new…
Yep. I am just a small business owner, tho I may flatter myself in saying I’m in the 0.1% of SMB owners that see what’s possible. And it is definitely dizzying.
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
I favor tax reform, but WA state law means we will need to do one of
1) cut state spending growth to below 1%
2) repeal the ban on prop tax hikes above 1%
3) expand the income tax
4) expand the hated sales or b&o revenue tax
Which do you think is most likely?
Supporters of WA's 'millionaires tax' insist it's not a Trojan horse for a broader state income tax, But some prominent Democrats have gone off script. seattletimes.com/seattle-new…
benmaritz retweeted
Supporters of WA's 'millionaires tax' insist it's not a Trojan horse for a broader state income tax, But some prominent Democrats have gone off script. seattletimes.com/seattle-new…
If you are building a software factory and don't have a 2d factory floor animated dashboard, are you really vibe-coding?
@colemurray pls contact me if you are interested in licensing this technology for open inspect
Crunching thru our extensive rental application data looking for predictors for non payment of rent. Really its credit score. Credit score dwarfs everything else in predictive power. Kinda makes sense.
benmaritz retweeted
rather than daylight savings time shifting the day forward or backward
we should just make the hours in the middle of the day longer or shorter at different times of year, so there is always precisely 12 hours of daylight
benmaritz retweeted
Useful visualization for policymakers and reporters tempted to frame rent control as a "renter protection," when in reality the evidence is quite clear that there are significant negative societal impacts downstream.
1) No reduction of homelessness.
2) Less housing supply and construction.
3) Higher rents for non-rent-controlled units.
4) Reduced housing quality.
5) Benefits only in-place residents (in terms of rent, not building condition.)
Be very careful how you frame a policy that is spun as one thing but that does the opposite.
Don’t believe these vicious standard time extremist lies!
DAYLIGHT time and sleeping in a bit is the American way.
Replying to @SenTomCotton
Thank you, Senator Cotton! 8:30–9:30am sunrises are unhealthy, unsafe, unsustainable. 🙏 Please file one of our bills for permanent Standard Time (one of which offers an option for FL to advance its own time zone if they insist)!
For all the doom about tech in an AI era- remember, there is A LOT more software being written now than ever before. An order of magnitude more than a year ago.
And like in any gold rush, it’s the people selling the shovels that will make money. 1/4
So I built a tiny test-running cloud. I rent VMs from google by second whenever I need anything tested.
It’s terrible! At best I’m 30% utilized. 70% of what I pay for is setup, teardown and idle time.
But it still costs me 1/6 of Blacksmith of 1/10 of GitHub would for this















