bargainman

Tangential question. Given you and several others are Canadian, is there a "Canadian affairs" thread? Is it worth making one? I've been following a fair amount of the US/Canada drama, but there are plenty of more Canadian centric topics with other countries, and inter/intra provincial. This thread gets heavy traffic but there's so much about the American influence I think any other topics get lost.

I'm curious what alternative Thiel provided to the massive and growing gap between the haves and have nots? For all this personal faults, Gates' foundation was very focused on measuring impact and was know as the equivalent of 'venture capital for non profit'. He spoke at length about fighting the 'fairy dust approach' of regular non profits. Plus has anyone shown that Gates did anything illegal in association with Epstein? It's not like he's the only one the guy bamboozled. He did have several affairs, but so have many others. (Probably includes Buffett depending on how you define 'affairs')

Feels like it doesn't matter if "they also know that will never work. They cannot go after private property in city/populated regions." The fear and uncertainty it creates seems to be having serious side effects from a financial perspective no? Isn't the land off of Burrard bridge aboriginal now? I heard they were developing some large property? What is the high level of why the current government is so idealogical and favorable towards the Indigenous? Are they not worried about the effects on their own Canadian citizens? I was hearing from someone that they are paying the tribes up north 3x(?) for their lumber than they would normally, and the tribes are just hiring Canadians to do the work at a regular rate and just pocketing the difference. I also wonder, what kind of gov do they have? I've read comments about the chiefs basically being autocrats is that true? I'm also curious about this: "have access to both large amounts of private/public capital for projects" Are they listing companies on public markets, or how do they get investments?

Wow, thanks for that. I just got a gemini summary for the video. Sounds like a real sh*t show. If you start taking away property rights you're starting to talk about people defending themselves by any means possible. Could go south real fast? This part sounds scary: "Furthermore, Isaac highlights a 2023 BC Supreme Court ruling (referenced in the text as the Cowichan decision) which suggests that Aboriginal title could be a senior interest that burdens the land, potentially jeopardizing fee simple home ownership " fwiw here's the summary, I'll dig in more later. The panel explores how recent court decisions have created legal uncertainty regarding private property rights and the future of major natural resource projects.Key Discussions: Unsettled Land Claims in BC: (15:39) Isaac explains that roughly 85-90% of BC is subject to assertions of Aboriginal title (unceded territory), creating a 'legal question mark' for landowners and investors. Threat to Private Property: (23:38) A recent court decision in Richmond, BC, suggests that Aboriginal title could supersede fee simple title, meaning the Land Title Act might not apply to claimed lands. This is described as a direct threat to the concept of private property ownership. The Role of DRIPA: (44:37) The discussion covers the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) in BC, with Isaac arguing that it interprets BC laws through a non-binding international document, creating further confusion alongside existing Canadian constitutional protections. Economic Impact: (51:30) The panel highlights the necessity of doubling or tripling the size of the BC economy to afford reconciliation costs and infrastructure development, urging a shift away from an 'anti-development mindset' to ensure future prosperity.Market and Job Updates: (1:21:09) The hosts briefly review Canadian and US labor market statistics, noting that while the unemployment rate is often cited, factors like participation rates, private vs. public sector job growth, and wages are more critical for investors. Revisions to US job numbers showed significantly fewer jobs created last year than originally reported.

@Parsad I'm curious if you and other folks in BC/Vancouver are following the BC Land Cowichan rulings? what's your take?

Hey Minnesota is already up close to Canada. Plus GDP is almost 1/4 of Canada's! https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MNNQGSP Mayo Clinic is there, and a pile of high quality companies head quartered there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Minnesota#Public_companies If you got Cali you'd need to build a bridge all the way on the pacific past WA and OR. Or get WA and OR too, and then you're just being unreasonable!

You're funny https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-largest-economies-including-u-s-states/ Cali's economy is almost 2x all of Canada. Populations are about neck and neck though https://www.visualcapitalist.com/population-of-us-states-compared-with-countries/

And what if the whoever is AI? What makes you think a smarter entity is going to stay subservient to a less smart one? Here's a video that goes over this scenario by ai researchers trying to extrapolate things https://ai-2027.com/

Careful... you're discussing a very stable genius...

That's kind of hilarious. You clearly didn't watch this. We're on a value investing board. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. Right now with mines and drones Iran is buying dollars for pennies. To counter that the US are sending multi million dollar cruise missiles to knock out 10k drones. Mines cost them nothing, but they cost the US and global economy probably billions. That's some serious cigar butt investing for the Iranian regime. The chances that even a regime change could prevent pockets of the 1million republican army from continuing to deploy these guerilla tactics are slim. ie... of course they can clear the mines and of course they can hit missiles with missiles, that's not the point.

Regarding mines and why they are so difficult to deal with, this guy gives a good overview. Contact mines and influence mines.

Indeed. They can cause massive asymmetric damage at little to no cost. They just threaten to mine Hormuz and it shuts down shipping (insurance companies won't insure any ship that goes through. Hormuz is close enough that they can launch a cheapo explosive drone(s) from almost anywhere in the country. It's basically guerilla warfare with the world economy at stake. Drones to Hormuz require a response in the seconds to neutralize vs to their neighbors where they had minutes. Plus the 1 million person republican guard who've been happy to kill their own people, what are the chances they switch to support the zionists and americans? No idea what's going to happen but it's not going to be pretty.

Not sure if this was posted already but here's Anthropic's actual article https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts You can read this 'all those jobs are going away!!!" or as "those are the jobs where people are using AI and going to create so much more because they can now 10x what they used to do". I suspect it depends on the job type as well.

That's how Costco rolls with just about everything. THey tell the supplier, "hey, you want all our customer's business? We'll give it to one supplier, make us an offer!". They had amex exclusively for years, then switched to Visa which gave some better benefits (higher percentage refund for gas, costco purchases and some others. Although seeme like everyone's dropped the extended warranty )

oof. everytime I get a notification from one of the people I follow that they posted in that thread I can't help but look, and boy it goes south quickly. I have no idea how you all hang out in there. Talk about the best way to make reasonable smart nice people into polarized irrational nuts... get them to talk about politics and only politics! LOL. sorry, not you Parsad

Hmm, I suspect you'd be fine with linux if you really wanted to switch, unless it's because of gaming? Yeah, every product and now LLM has its view of the world, sometimes driven by the people at the company and sometimes by other pressures on that company. It's good to have different perspectives. When LLMs are trained there's a lot that goes into trying to get 'diverse' data, and yes that's a loaded term, but a lot of it is just making sure the data is in different places in an embedding space, and if there are data points under represented they might need to be amplified to help the descent gradient. Then of course there's inference time stuff that happens, and that's probably what you're referring to. But everyone does it, it's a matter of what degree. I'm curious what duckduckgo does. I wonder if there's a 'political/sosiologiac' heatmap rating for LLMs, I wouldn't be surprised if there was one.

Interesting how they have a local moat. I do my best to avoid westjet when I can, they totally screwed us over a few years ago when their mechanics went on strike right at the worst time ("it was not planned that way..." sure....). Cancelled our flight at 2:30 am for a morning flight and left us scrambling after not having travelled for years due to covid. Not impressed...

The costco kirkland brand grassfed butter is pretty good, but not sure if that's available in Canada due to the trade dairy restrictions. Visa or MC is tricky, I guess you could do interac for those not accepting Amex?

Well there are parts that could be hardcoded and other parts that could be read from memory, it's more about the architecture of the LLM and the subsequent hardware. Beyond the one time loading of weights I doubt having that hardcoded would add much time. It's the calcs (prefill and generative) that takes all the time and the kv cache that takes the memory.

Interesting. I wonder how they'd deal with models changing so quickly, hopefully they'd be able to update their weights. I tried it and it was fast but didn't give me very good answers compared to Gemini Pro recently. Could be lots of reasons for that. I poked around a bit and it claimed it was BERT and llama based and had only 1.5billion parameters. So it's unlikely that's the actual 30+B model. But these days even 30+ is 'tiny'. It also gave me very unsubstantial answers about LLM architecture so, yeah small model.

So what are you all doing about your coffee? Espresso folks? Any interesting home machines? Aeropress enthusiasts, french press? what say you?

Jensen just said something like this in an interview. "Imagine when we get androids in the kitchen. They aren't going to build a cuisinart, they'll just it. Same with a toaster, they aren't going to build a new toaster. So the software today are the tools. Software companies are exposing them to the LLMs which will use them to do things and as such the software will get used even more not less." S/w companies are already exposing their stuff to LLMS vs MCP and others. APIs exist and are the foundation but you need more than that for the LLMs to talk directly to them, but not that much. I've pointed Cursor ai at online api docs and had it build out an app in minutes to communicate to the api. Adding it to an MCP or agentic flow is a bit more work but everyone's doing it.

Well MSFT is trying to build copilot into excel and python too When I last tested it (6+ months ago) copilot sucked and didn't look at the spreadsheet content, more just help file stuff). But MSFT just needs to add enough AI/MCP whatever integration to prevent mass migration away. I suspect they're working to get xls and llms to work better together since they can access all chat gpt's IP.

What do you mean by MSFT is getting impacted? That could mean a number of things, I'm just curious. Here's one example. https://business.adobe.com/products/firefly-business/firefly-foundry.html https://business.adobe.com/products/firefly-business/custom-models.html Adobe offers their customers the ability to train models for them using the customer company's data/assets. Remember a lot of these are large media companies with proprietary assets they don't want to share. These companies are going to have a hard time getting top tier ML talent probably(?), much less the GPUs, frameworks etc to do what it takes to properly train and tune multi modal models. Anyone can download sample code from huggingface and try to train stuff, doesn't mean it'll be any good. Nevermind the legal challenges on using public models trained on data. I think the coding agents are a big plus to experienced engineers and a real challenge for folks getting started. But Andrew Ng recently commented that it's not like agentic coding is easy cognitively, in fact it can be rather exhausting. You're just thinking at a higher level. Essentially each agent is now like a really smart intern you have to manage. I think it could be great for tiny startups too which can create a lot from a idea very quickly. It's going to be an interesting few years that's for sure.

Do you think all that electricity is currently unused or sitting idle? If so, your statement could be a factor, but if not there's another economic cost. I'm guessing it's their manufacturing sector taking up all that energy now? Anyone have numbers on that? Also https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/rubin-platform-ai-supercomputer claims that The Rubin platform harnesses extreme codesign across hardware and software to deliver up to 10x reduction in inference token cost and 4x reduction in number of GPUs to train MoE models, compared with the NVIDIA Blackwell platform. That's pretty dramatic. What that means in energy usage I'm not sure but a lot of the cost is energy usage. So say it's only half and Rubin is 5x less expensive per watt, so China, if it has the previous generation would need 5x as much power? What about training? Anyway, handwaving here, but I don't think it's as easy an 'inference' to make...