This = this person is clearly morally corrupt, displaying a pattern of behaviour over decades of being untrustworthy, a liar, and taking advantage for personal gains.
People decided to elect that person, it's part of the package.
people in america have low political involvement after years of politicians ignoring their material needs. non-voters are the biggest group of voters. i think it’s by design.
I mean, Trump was all but outright saying "I am going to be comically terrible"; the people voting for him presumably knew at least the broad strokes of what they'd be getting, if not the fine detail.
I just tried chatjimmy.ai for a bit and while it is absolutely blazingly fast, it's also not a very strong model. I suppose that with time, stronger models will be able to run on such hardware, too.
I've noticed the same thing. I would have three, sometimes four sessions run at the same time. It would be great, but mentally exhausting. To help this, I've set a self-imposed limit of two active chat sessions at a time.
Another thing I found is that it is too easy to keep going. I would work for too long and get even more exhausted. It feels rude to just stop a conversation. LLMs don't really care about social norms like that, but it still felt awkward to me and I would worry about losing the context I had.
To help with that, I wrote my own little plugin that reminds me to start winding down at the end of the work day and starts prompting me (pardon my phrasing) to take the off-ramp; to relay any thoughts and todos I still have in mind and put them down to pick up the next day.
I think time and time again that incentives are most important in determining how a market and by extension a society behaves. These prediction markets incentivize the absolute worst in humanity.
These markets allow you to bet on when the invasion of a foreign country or the demise of a person happens. There comes a point where one bets against someone to die and you will see themselves incentivized to make that happen.
We're not talking about gambling-as-addiction. We're talking about gambling as big players paying participants to throw fights, paying referees to call shots, and the players are the real world and the referees are journalists.
What makes you think this is not "gambling-as-addiction"?
It seems to me that these players, big or small, either have too much skin in the game or are compulsive gambling. To me the threats only make sense in that context.
I used to be pro-betting legalization and now I see the light. It is a corrosive influence On everything it touches. I hope there's another opportunity to put the genie back in the bottle.
When you say "effectively uncertain outcome", do you include situations where the events are random but the odds are predictable?
Let me give you an example. On average, there are 14 storms big enough to be named in the 6 month long Atlantic hurricane season. If a prediction market was saying 30% odds of a storm big enough to be named every day for all 183 days, betting against that would be free money. Would you call it gambling to make the same bet on all 183 days? The day-by-day outcome is uncertain, but the overall outcome is extremely certain.
Yes, I would call it gambling simply because someone has to take the other side of the bet and lose.
The entire point of there being a gambling "line" is because two parties have to agree on a wager that they both think has positive EV. That's effectively gambling. Somebody has to lose for the other party to win.
Obviously if the counter-party is an institution with a legitimate need to hedge, it becomes an insurance policy, but that is a world of difference than just two counterparties wanting to make bets for fun.
I think you're close to a good metric, but you need to consider the situations where one person doesn't have a positive EV expectation, or where that expectation is provably wrong. I think those situations can empower a winning non-gambling actor.
One participant in a market can be gambling while another participant isn't gambling. In particular, casinos don't gamble.
Also for many things there exists a scale from fully random to fully skill-based. So in my opinion things can be semi-gambling with a lot of gray area.
I completely agree. I'm not trying to equate "casino gambling" to "gambling." Casino gambling is trivially stupid and should basically be illegal for large sums of money (again > $100 in expected losses/hour). I still think "gambling" is also bad for society, and I especially think it's bad when the payout structure is bar-belled where a lifetime gambling can somehow convince gamblers that they are "due."
>you need to consider the situations where one person doesn't have a positive EV expectation, or where that expectation is provably wrong.
I mean, this is de facto a discussion of the past. My point about "prediction market" is that their externalities start to spiral rapidly. Market reflexivity, where the gamblers starts effecting the outcome, or at least the oracle, is a very obvious and predictable result such that it's literally cliche to talk about athletes taking a dive for the money.
When it's sports, it's not really a huge deal because -- outside of gambling spaces -- we are ultimately just talking about entertainment. The problem with prediction market gambling, is that it starts affecting peoples lives. The price of oil, the leaders of countries, the results of elections. When you create legal avenues that incentivize organized crime to manipulate the outcome to future events, you've basically created a machine that fights back against pro-social, cooperative outcomes in politics and the economy that everyone benefits from. It's a horrible idea.
I don't follow. What's the definition of "pure" gambling here? Do you consider for example poker to be pure? Sports betting?
Personally I consider any monetary wager where the individual isn't personally invested in corresponding productive events to constitute gambling. By that logic poker, horse races, prediction markets, futures, and even the vast majority of day trading all constitute forms of gambling.
Betting on which card will be on top of a freshly shuffled deck is pure gambling. It is a game of pure chance.
Betting on sports is not pure chance. If I play a game of tennis against roger federer, I am sure to lose. I can predict this event with 100% certainty.
Bitcoin up or down is another non-chance event. I can easily sway the price of bitcoin by just buying some.
Recently there was a market to predict how long the US government shutdown would last. This is not gambling--you can look at historical data of shutdown durations and form a prediction based on researching each politician's views.
Sure, an idiot might gamble by just picking an option at random, but the game itself isn't gambling because it's not a game of pure chance.
Okay. So by that logic poker is gambling but not "pure" gambling. Fair enough.
So as previously stated I can tell the difference but still have no idea what point you were originally trying to make. Prediction markets are still a form of gambling however impure, no? Just as betting on a horse race is.
Is the bookie gambling on the race? Is Jim Simons? Gambling is not innate to the games themselves, it's only gambling if the player chooses to treat it like a game of pure chance.
Lotteries are pure gambling because you can't influence things, I guess that is what he meant. The examples you mentioned are then "impure gambling" since its inherently possible to influence the outcome without breaking the rules. It isn't illegal to bet on a hose that you gave extra good shoes and so on.
Technically you can't bet on the demise of a person, at least in the US, as participants recently discovered when the previous supreme leader of Iran was killed and their "leadership change" bet did not pay out.
This is true for Kalshi but not for Polymarket. Also Kalshi voided the bet and it got sued. By the way prediction markets are commodity securities where Matt Levine mentioned it should not allow death contracts. Here we are though..
Kalshi doesn't pay out for demise of a person (though, arguably inconsistently[1]); Polymarket does (probably in violation of US regulation, but there are no rules anymore).
[1]: For example, they did pay out on a bet over whether Jimmy Carter would attend Trump's 2025 inauguration; he didn't, at least in part because he was dead.
Polymarket is headquartered in NYC; it's a US company; it has many US customers, and it knows that, even if it did a wink-wink dance "disallowing" that prior to 2024. Since then, it has explicitly expanded into the US market[1]. It is unambiguously subject to US regulations (if we had a regulator who chose to enforce those regulations).
[1]: "Following the end of the investigations, Polymarket announced the acquisition of QCEX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange and clearinghouse, for $112 million. The acquisition allowed Polymarket to legally operate within the United States under regulatory compliance. The company received an Amended Order of Designation from the CFTC in November 2025 and began actively expanding in the United States market."
Yeah but we can see right through all that lawyer bullshit right? Gambling markets like polymarket are morally corrupt and we having given them too much space in our society already.
That particular part isn't lawyer bullshit. They're beta testing a completely separate system that runs under US regulations. It looks like it'll be legal in a non-bullshit way.
Moral issues are a different topic, and weak geoblocking on the international version is another different topic.
Then this person better bet their entire life savings on them dying, since it would reduce incentive (profit). Crazy thought experiment, gave me lots to think about
This post resonates with me. I recognize everything you said except for the metrics part, since my employer luckily doesn't do that.
It's addictive. You're fast, efficient, you feel like you're in control. All while you're slowly losing grip.
I love how nuanced your takes are. The biggest challenge of this new programming paradigm is not to see how you can use it to its fullest extent. It is to find out what a sustainable pace is, both sort and long term.
I've tried writing a few blog posts just to mostly learn about writing. Any feedback is welcome. Most posts are written to an imagined audience of people familiar with the topic.
I've also written a very basic terminal, just for laughs. It's nothing special, but I had fun making it.
The last two images you linked to are fake, and clearly designed by someone who doesn’t know Spanish and has never been to either Chile or Spain. No signs look like that in either country.
Nobody would dare capitalise “de” in Santiago de Chile for instance.
Confirming, the image linked by grandparent is tagged as 3d illustration on shutterstock[1]. A similar illustration with lowercase “de” spelling exists too[2]. Actual road signs in Chile have lowercase “de”[3].
Your last two links are fake. And you can check on your own Wikipedia link that for Spain's direction signs, only proper nouns are capitalized: full uppercase on conventional roads for historical reasons, otherwise the usual capitalization rules such as on highways or town roads. Whereas full lowercase is reserved for service directions (e.g. service road, airport, hospital, beach). The exceptional capitalized service directions are really old town signs.
Bitcoins in practice are not truly limited. The amount of gold on earth is not likely to change much, despite the efforts of alchemists in the past. However, new bitcoins (with new limited supplies) are introduced all the time.
It seems very easy to just blame this on the voter like this.
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