I wonder why this post is worthy of staying on the HN front page but all the articles about Trump's threats that "A whole civilization will die tonight" got flag killed. I guess the president making genocidal threats isn't "interesting" enough to meet HN's moderation standards.
We all know he’d say something like that and that there’s a chance he’d actually do it. It isn’t really newsworthy. This isn’t the set of minds that needs to change to affect change in the short term anyway.
It's a problem that our society is designed for and judged in relation to capital. Most people are paid in dollars, not shares of the S&P 500. 38% of the population doesn't even own any stocks[1]. We can't act like the dropping dollar value is fine simply because stock investments are outpacing those losses. Maybe that tradeoff benefits the people reading this, but it hurts a huge number of Americans.
And by "real wages" you mean "Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over". You chose a number that specifically factored out the negatives like dropping participation rate[1] and underemployment (couldn't find the isolated number for underemployment in 30 seconds of googling, so here's one that's tempered by including unemployment too)[2]. It also glosses over the heart of the problem by using median. If 38% of the population suddenly had their wages drop to $0, it wouldn't show up when looking at the median values.
I also don't see why you're citing the nominal federal minimum wage. The nominal value is totally irrelevant to the conversation. $1 is still nominally $1, but according to the link it is also now $0.51 in purchasing power.
> by "real wages" you mean "Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over"
Yes.
> You chose a number that specifically factored out the negatives like dropping participation rate[1] and underemployment
I chose a consistent dataset. One of many. (Dropping participation rate is affected by stuff like demographics in addition to underemployment.)
If you have a credible source that shows declining real wages since 2000, I'd love to see it.
> don't see why you're citing the nominal federal minimum wage. The nominal value is totally irrelevant to the conversation. $1 is still nominally $1, but according to the link it is also now $0.51 in purchasing power
If $1 is 51¢ today, then $1.40 is 71¢ today. Rising nominal wages is how real wage gains are generated.
>If you have a credible source that shows declining real wages since 2000, I'd love to see it.
My original comment was about growing inequality and my second comment was describing why the metric you cited and median real wages in general don't address that issue. So no, I will not be looking for a better real wages metric, because it is not the appropriate measure to capture inequality. You can find plenty of numbers and charts on that problem here[1].
This is legitimately one of the strangest responses I have ever gotten on HN. You brought real wages into the conversation. My complaints weren't a non sequitur, they were a direct response to you. Now you're criticizing me for engaging with what you said? I guess I should have refused to engage from the start, but you know the proverb about the second best time to plant a tree, so I'm done with this conversation.
I guess I didn't see the inequality focus in your first comment. At least, not beyond the qualitative assets as cash and sundries vs assets as financial assets. I pointed out that real wages are up in response to your claim about people being paid dollars. (The dollars we're paid are worth more. They're individually less. But the total take home is more. Hence real wage.) I think it's a non sequitur to then turn around and say well I was actually arguing about inequality from the start.
Almost all BLS price indices, including CPI, include housing. (CPI measures the “rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, utilities, bedroom furniture” [1].)
That said, this is the second time I've come across this myth on HN in less than a week. Where did you hear that price indices don't track healthcare and housing costs?
The point isn't that CPI excludes healthcare and housing, CPI shelter sub-index https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAH1 and the medical care sub-index https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAM2 have grown ~500% and ~770% respectively in the same time frame. The _overall_ CPI they are blended into grew ~300%, which means real wages are deflated. So if personal spending is weighted towards healthcare and housing (anyone who rents or pays a mortgage below a certain income) then your purchasing power is declining faster than the real wage would suggest.
EDIT: saying real wages is deflated is ambiguous, the headline CPI understates the effective inflation experienced by people whose spending consumption is weighted towards housing and healthcare. So the "real wage" is inflated relative to the lived experience of those people.
> have grown ~500% and ~770% respectively in the same time frame. The _overall_ CPI they are blended into grew ~300%, which means real wages are deflated
If you spend a third of your income on housing and 8% on healthcare [1], then those components–assuming your 5x and 7.7x multiples–will raise your cost of living by 2.25x. That leaves 1.75x for the other components (to get to the overall 3x). That sounds reasonable as a median estimate.
> if personal spending is weighted towards healthcare and housing (anyone who rents or pays a mortgage below a certain income) then your purchasing power is declining faster than the real wage would suggest
Sure. If you spend a lot on imported dates, your purchasing power will currently be declining faster than the median American's. This is a problem. But it's almost by definition not one that can be widespread.
> the "real wage" is inflated relative to the lived experience of those people
Well, yes. There are regional CPIs and income-indexed CPIs and all manners of privately-calculated costs of living. Paying attention to lived experiences or whatever is important, especially in politics. But it's no substitute for broad measures when conducting a national economy.
> Well, yes. There are regional CPIs and income-indexed CPIs and all manners of privately-calculated costs of living.
Great. So we agree, you are just dismissing the distributional analysis and equating fungible goods with inelastic ones. You can't substitute away from something like region-locked housing supply so those folks face higher effective inflation (BLS R-CPI-I).[1]
> you are just dismissing the distributional analysis and equating fungible goods with inelastic ones
No, I'm not. You're the one moving goalposts.
The thread started by someone claiming, wrongly, that housing and healthcare aren't included in CPI. (A common myth.) I showed that was wrong. You said it's underweighted. I pushed back. You're now saying it's underweighted for some people, which, like, is how distributions work.
Variance doesn't make a central tendency meaningless. And the truth is for most Americans, real wages are up. Lived experience and all. It's painfully not for a section of Americans in housing markets locked by policy from expansion or in bad health and luck. That's unfortunate and deserves attention. But it doesn't negate the whole.
> You can't substitute away from something like region-locked housing supply so those folks face higher effective inflation
Straw man. Nobody claimed universality.
If we were having a discussion about the Midwest, I'd quote different numbers and reach a different conclusion. That's how scoping works. Americans, as a whole, have experienced real wage growth since 2000. That doesn't mean literally every single American has. And it doesn't mean that people outside America have.
> It's a problem that our society is designed for and judged in relation to capital.
Cash is also capital.
If you were trying to say it’s a problem that our economic system favors deploying capital into investments instead of hoarding cash, I disagree. An economy where everyone is incentivized to hoarde cash instead of deploying it to investments doesn’t progress because the smartest thing you could do with your money is to not invest it in new businesses or buildings. It doesn’t work.
> Most people are paid in dollars, not shares of the S&P 500.
You’re conflating income and savings.
It wouldn’t matter if you got paid in dollars or in S&P 500 shares of the same dollar value. You can exchange one for the other. In the year 2026 you can do that instantly from your phone with an app and not pay any fees.
The point was not that S&P 500
shares are a superior unit of trade, because they’re not. I’m trying to explain that long term savings needs to be in an investment, not sitting around in actual cash.
I think the problem here isn’t the preference that we create with the way inflation is chosen as a target but that we try to exert influence at all. It should be possible for many people to lead good lives without investing cash in the stock market. And the stock market should be a good place to raise capital. But when our retirement savings are bundled up in the stock market it creates a perverse incentive to manipulate the market to prevent us from losing our retirement savings.
The problem I was hitting on is that large portions of our population don't have any investments are therefore are being left further behind by this tradeoff of stocks in favor of cash. You can't just tell people not to leave their cash sitting around when they don't actually have any cash sitting around.
One thing that stands out when reading profiles like this is the number of positive and negative descriptions of the subject that agree. For example, there seems to be little dispute that Altman will happily say something that he knows/believes isn't true, there's just a lot of people who are willing to forgive any lies if the lies are in service of something they themselves agree with.
I don't know if it's just getting older or some deeper change in society, but more and more the reading of how my peers view the world depresses me. Even beyond the specific issues with prediction markets, there is a whole lot more to understanding our world than merely knowing the rough odds of possible outcomes.
Or perhaps a more appropriate analogy, its sounds like the sycophantic language of most of these LLM systems.
Which makes me wonder whether these companies actually dogfood their own tools with this sort of stuff? Was this announcement written by ChatGPT? Honestly, I would find either answer to be a little concerning in its own way. It's either vaguely insulting to their customers or showing a lack of faith in their own product.
Poe’s Law meets The Big Short’s convergence of confessing and bragging[1]. It adds up to being completely opaque in terms of veracity and intent, but either way it highlights the real problem at the center of this story.
Yes, but is it "intelligence" is a valid question. We have known for a long time that computers are a lot faster than humans. Get a dumb person who works fast enough and eventually they'll spit out enough good work to surpass a smart person of average speed.
It remains to be seen whether this is genuinely intelligence or an infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters situation. And I'm not sure why this specific example is worthy enough to sway people in one direction or another.
Someone actually mathed out infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters, and it turns out, it is a great example of how misleading probabilities are when dealing with infinity:
"Even if every proton in the observable universe (which is estimated at roughly 1080) were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons might no longer exist), they would still need a far greater amount of time – more than three hundred and sixty thousand orders of magnitude longer – to have even a 1 in 10500 chance of success. To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10^360,641 observable universes made of protonic monkeys."
Often infinite things that are probability 1 in theory, are in practice, safe to assume to be 0.
So no. LLMs are not brute force dummies. We are seeing increasingly emergent behavior in frontier models.
> It is unsurprising that an LLM performs better than random! That's the whole point. It does not imply emergence.
By definition, it is emergent behavior when it exhibits the ability to synthesize solutions to problems that it wasn't trained on. I.e. it can handle generalization.
Emergent behavior would imply that some other function was being reduced to token prediction. Behaving "better than random" ie: not just brute forcing would not qualify - token prediction is not brute forcing and we expect it to do better, it's trained to do so.
If you want to demonstrate an emergent behavior you're going to need to show that.
Which government? State, Federal, City, or a Port Commission? There is in fact a significant distinction between the responsibilities and capabilities of each of these levels of government and you can't lump them all together. My home airport is operated by a port commission, which is government, but the port commission's task is to operate the ports.
>There is in fact a significant distinction between the responsibilities and capabilities of each of these levels of government and you can't lump them all together.
But all private businesses have the same responsibilities and capabilities and therefore can be lumped together as one entity? The asymmetry in how you're critiquing the way this is discussed ends up revealing your bias.
I still have no idea what you're attempting to convey here, but the way you answered a genuine question with what reads like an attempted insult tells me that I shouldn't care about whatever you were trying to say.
But context is important. "Low-hanging fruit" doesn't mean the solution is "easy" in a vacuum, it just means this specific aspect is the easiest and/or most obvious place to start attacking a problem.
Or to stick with the language of the analogy, every fruit tree has some fruit that is lower than the others. That doesn't mean all "low-hanging fruit" is within arm's reach of the ground, some fruit just doesn't require as big of a ladder as other fruit.
This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case. I don't know enough about ATC to have any confidence in my opinion on the viability of replacing humans with software.
I disagree with you entirely. "Lowest-hanging fruit" isn't the same as "low-hanging fruit". The phrase "low-hanging fruit" does specifically mean that the solution is easy, in a vacuum - the fruits are "low", which is not relative to the other fruits or the height of the tree, but relative to the ground.
>the obvious or easy things that can be most readily done or dealt with in achieving success or making progress toward an objective
So not only can it be "obvious" rather than "easy", it is also in the context of "achieving success or making progress toward an objective". There is nothing in the definition that requires either this specific step or the overall goal to be easy.
I think you're mistaken. That whooshing sound must have been my comment flying over your head.
That was my first comment in this thread, so there was no established goal to change. My sole goal was to clarify the meaning of an idiom that the comment I was replying to was misstating.
I even included a disclaimer that "This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case", so I don't know how you could have received it as such.
Just yesterday I finally got tired of all the browser security warnings and decided to buy a domain name and set up SSL in my local network. I spent like 10 minutes flummoxed by why my reverse proxy couldn't get a new cert from Let's Encrypt until I looked in the logs to see that Let's Encrypt refused because the account my reverse proxy had been using since I set it up had the email address as "admin@hostname" because this was all for my own personal use and my local reverse proxy doesn't need an actual email address, it just needed some value for some entry in some database.
This is my long-winded way of saying, "Who cares?" Give it whatever age you want. When people object to these type of initiatives for political reasons, they should state the political argument for why they are bad. But rebelling against them for practical technical reasons always seems a little silly to me and can end up being counterproductive when it shifts the conversation away from the central issue.
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