My favorite is the local tax office charges extra for paying online vs going in to the office to pay in person. At first, I thought it was a way to recoup the processing fees as you're obviously paying by card online. The last time I paid in person with a card, that fee was not added on though. So they are charging you extra for not having to pay an employee to process your account.
Until a few years ago merchants were not allowed to charge credit card fees. In that case, online fees make a legally-allowable proxy for credit card surcharges.
the whole allowed to/not allowed to charge extra to cover the processing fees is a yo-yo. One of the best known examples is gas stations showing you different prices for credit/cash on their signs. So the "until a few years ago" seems like some internet trope as I can remember the gas station signs showing cash/credit from back when I was a kid, and let's just all agree that wasn't "a few years ago"
It might also be that you’re just hearing from people in different states. More than half of the states allow surcharges, but that can change: for example, Oklahoma removed the ban just last year:
https://legiscan.com/OK/text/SB677/id/3231564
I won't go anywhere that wants you to pay with phone period, cause it's just annoying and usually means bad food/service. If they somehow hid this fact until the end and wanted a fee for it, I'd just slap a bill on the table and leave. Don't think that's even a crime.
Right? As silly as it might sound, I go out to interact with people. I don't want a mindless unthinking automaton as a server. I want someone who will check in on how the service is going, and also make recommendations if I ask. I really don't understand the push to make inherently social endeavors more isolating. I guess it's money. :(
I looked at buying tickets for a local hockey game last week, and the venue goes through Ticketmaster. The service fees were exactly the same as the actual ticket cost, maybe the total 200% of the list price.
I ended up going to the physical box office, where they still charged an extra 40% of the ticket cost in service fees.
I think that's exactly the point. They've charged you $2 to process the request. They did that work. Even if you get the money back for the event, they still did the job, so they won't refund the service fee.
And then the restaurant lobby got the CA one rescinded for restaurant junk fees, which were probably the biggest culprit most people encounter day-to-day.
I agree the country has rampant corruption, but I disagree that the US DOJ should be pursuing insider trading on these markets.
Why should my tax dollars be spent on helping a bookie run their gambling business? Insider trading laws and prosecution in the financial markets makes sense, because the fair and impartial enforcement helps all of our economy, and allows capital to do its job investing in productive ventures.
These prediction markets are not that. They aren’t sources of investment for a productive enterprise, it is pure gambling.
Why should the US government spend money making sure people can gamble? If people want their gambling to be fair, they can pay for their own enforcement.
I like the idea of insider trading running rampant on these platforms. Once people realize that the other side of their bet knows the outcomes in advance, maybe they will stop betting their money on these platforms and they can just die.
> Why should my tax dollars be spent on helping a bookie run their gambling business?
I mean, current laws do exactly this. The FBI has done investigations for major sports betting sites related to players throwing or fixing games, etc. If you commit fraud on a sportsbook you absolutely can go to jail.
Feedback from early readers was that the work was too large to digest in a single reading, so I split it up into a series of posts. I'm not entirely sure this was the right call; the sections I thought were the most interesting seem to have gotten much less attention than the introductory preliminaries.
I think these articles may benefit from a more thorough table of content at the beginning, or from some kind of abstract. If you briefly presented the whole list of topics in a single article, it would be more clear that your views on the topic are more complete. I initially thought the table of content would be scoped to the article itself rather than connecting it to the adjacent ones.
I had never heard of you, and this article appeared very biased to me. I found the information ecology piece superior, shame that it went unnoticed; I will try to go through all of them. I admire the breadth of topics you’re covering and appreciate the many sources. They’re clearly written in your own voice and that is great to see, I guess I mostly reacted to not being fully aligned with your view.
I'm not sure that HN vote count is a good indicator of interest? HN alerted me to the existence of the intro post. I read the intro, noticed that it was one in an ongoing series, and have been checking your blog for new installments every few days.
I suspect that if you'd not broken up the post into a series of smaller ones, the sorts of folks who are unwilling to read the whole thing as you post it section by section would have fed the entire post to an LLM to "summarize".
Sure, but 4 front-page posts from the same url in 4 days surely sits at the tail of the distribution. (I guess they all capitalize on the same 'LLM-is-bad' sentiment).
It's also aphyr, who is incredibly popular. Take one very popular author, have him write a series of posts on the zeitgeist everyone can't help but talk about, and yes, the outcome is that his posts are extremely popular.
I still remember his takedown of mongodb's claims with the call me maybe post years and years ago filling me with a good bit of awe.
Different URL, same domain, and exactly the kind of thing I’d expect a fair number of HN readers to have in a feed reader where they’d see it shortly after publication and decide to share it.
Also, if you think this is just “LLM is bad”, I highly suggest reading the series first. The social impacts they talked about at the start of the series should resonate with a lot of people here and are exactly the kind of thing which people building systems should talk about. If you’re selling LLMs, you still want to think about how what you’re building will affect the larger society you live in and the ways that could go wrong—even if we posit sociopath/MBA-levels of disregard for impacts on other people, you still want to think about how LLMs change the fraud and security landscape, how the tools you build can be misused, how all of this is likely to lead to regulatory changes.
FWIW Zero-3 refers to a common strategy for sharding model components across GPUs (commonly called FSDP-2, Full Sharded Data Parallel). The "3" is the level of sharding (how much stuff to distribute across GPUs, e.g. just weights, versus optimizer state as well, etc.)
It's important to note that pathological liars don't stop lying. In fact, when they're caught lying red-handed, they usually double down and lie even more.
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