Activity

Read:
“The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.”
Minas Karamanis in ergosphere.blog. Published .
People call this friction "grunt work." Schwartz uses exactly that phrase, and he's right that LLMs can remove it. What he doesn't say, because he already has decades of hard-won intuition and doesn't need the grunt work anymore, is that for someone who doesn't yet have that intuition, the grunt work is the work. The boring parts and the important parts are tangled together in a way that you can't separate in advance. You don't know which afternoon of debugging was the one that taught you something fundamental about your data until three years later, when you're working on a completely different problem and the insight surfaces. Serendipity doesn't come from efficiency. It comes from spending time in the space where the problem lives, getting your hands dirty, making mistakes that nobody asked you to make and learning things nobody assigned you to learn.
Posted:

The CFTC (the US commodities regulator) has just sued Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois for their efforts to "outlaw, regulate, or otherwise restrain" prediction markets like Kalshi.

This is another escalation by newly appointed CFTC chair Mike Selig (and sole Commissioner at the agency), who has taken it upon himself to assert the CFTC's sole regulatory authority over prediction markets. Recently, the CFTC filed a supporting brief in Crypto​.com's lawsuit against Nevada.

As I wrote then, "Since the CFTC has filed no enforcement actions against prediction markets after embracing the sector following Trump’s election, Selig’s jurisdictional claim seems designed to shield the sector rather than regulate it."

Nevertheless, the CFTC's press release accompanying these lawsuits claims that state regulatory intervention could result in "poorer consumer protection and increased risk of fraud and manipulation".

Read:
“CPAC Had the Stage in Texas—but Not Much of a Crowd”.
Steven Monacelli in D Magazine. Published .
When CPAC chairman Schlapp asked the crowd, “How many of you would like to see impeachment hearings?” they erupted in cheers. “No, that was the wrong answer,” Schlapp said. “Let me try again. How many of you would like to see impeachment hearings?” Some in the crowd cheered again. “No,” Schlapp said, clearly frustrated.