I run a lot of data science-type analyses that can take up to hours at a time to run, so Claude is « monitoring » tasks most of the time. I have it on remote-control so I get notified when a task is done or need clarification, but most importantly whenever I have a new idea, I can just ask Claude to queue it up. Most of the time my hardware is the bottleneck, not the subscription quotas.
> take up to hours at a time to run, so Claude is « monitoring » tasks most of the tim
How is Claude monitoring them for hours? Claude runs out of context and extremely long sessions are prohibitively expensive even according to Anthropic (after they dispense with the marketing bullshit of long running tasks)?
It launches these tasks in the background. It became really good at it a couple of months ago, now it sets monitors on timer (not something I instructed, so I assumed it’s part of the system prompt for this kind of tasks) and then just wait for the next prompt, for the background process to be done, or for a monitor to trigger a checkup.
A single session running for multiple hours is prohibitively expensive, as per Anthropic. Regardless of whether it just waits for a prompt or does something.
Is the high expense coming from cache misses? If their workload does need to wait for a long time before it can continue, I wonder would starting new sessions and having to re-read the contexts and results anyway be any cheaper.
Prohibitively expensive is all relative. Pre-Fable, I was getting fine on the 5x plan for 1-2 concurrent long-running tasks plus interactive work (I do a lot of coding for work, but it is not my full work day). I don’t think a cache miss every hour on Opus hurts that much, even at 500-600k context. It would be nice if they got /clear working on remote-control.
I used to have some hooks for local notification, but lately I find that claude is pretty good at notifying through the app with remote control (but definitely not perfect)
There are so many neat use cases like this one that I'm skeptical of the AI-is-a-dot-com-bubble naysayers. Not to mention that, unlike in 2000, technical-adjacent people can now get a reasonable approximation of their ideas running quickly.
I almost never went back to read the history, but now I often have Claude go through the history when I wonder how we got to a certain point. It can point me to the relevant issues as well. Squashing is fine, up to a point.
Similar for me, I don’t want to babysit agents . I’m sticking with Python for the libraries (data science ecosystem), but I find that imposing ty and a few reasonable ruff rules (imposed with pre-commit so the agent can fix things automatically) improves agent-generated code a lot.
architecture matters more. at least for now, you should watch (not babysit) your agent, because it will slop up your architecture while you're not looking.
I agree that the style is somewhat generic, but for things like new release announcements, I find that the common structure allows me to skim through much faster. I value that and am happy with that tradeoff.
At my university, students with verified disabilities are allowed to use a university-provided laptop (properly locked-down, with allowed tools such as screen readers). But these are special cases. Computers for everyone would be costly and impractical given exams are punctual but all roughly over the same week or so.
Thanks! No, we haven't looked at the capital "locked" in these markets (which is important considering there is no margin trading, at least not yet). Most markets have a short horizon, but some have very long ones. It gets very complicated very quickly because it's not always the case that you open a position and then close it (you get partial fills, users closing partial positions, etc.). Taking that into consideration would make liquidity providers look even better than they do in our study. Not having their capital locked allows liquidity providers to trade more and earn more per trade on average. Trading on margin would allow liquidity takers to lose more money more quickly (this is an educated guess; you never know what the outcome of a new policy would be until you implement it).
The long horizon ones are also interesting on Polymarket because the vast majority don't have APY. As a result, prices should be discounted, but sum-to-1 doesn't allow for it. I'd expect a negative skew to the performance of traders willing to take those inflated prices (relative to what the odds DCF imply they should be). But there's also no upside for makers, so liquidity is pretty thin.
not AI slop, simply a copy paste if the abstract of the paper. journals in our field limit the allowed number of words, so the style can feel « unnatural » even when human-written
Yes, but the alternative (that some people are very good at forecasting) is also plausible. It's also useful to have a good prediction model and timely data sources when providing liquidity. We also find that some of the "biggest losers" also provide liquidity; they just aren't as good at it.
I don't know. Buffett had a good example of, if you organized a national coin flipping contest in the US, you would have people that won 25+ coin tosses in a row. Are these people good at calling coin tosses or is it just chance? You cannot reliably and long term predict if Bitcoin will go up or down within 5 minutes, or something similar. You can cheat maybe somehow, but that's not within the rules of the game.
That's true, but you can invest in your infrastructure and data sources to be faster than most traders, which allows you to provide liquidity with a smaller spread (and snipe the slower traders that try to provide liquidity)
Yes, power laws are everywhere. The exact shape of each distribution varies, however, and little is known empirically about the distribution of trading profits in financial markets.
Yeah if you look at the Boltzmann Wealth Model, where every actor gives away 1 dollar to a random person, and you repeat this, then if you start with an equal wealth distribution, you end up with an exponential wealth distribution. That shows how strong exponential curves are :) A few "lucky" individuals become very wealthy, while the vast majority of people end up with very little or nothing.
The effect is so strong that I'm starting to wonder if we should have laws against power laws, like we have in engineering when we try to make things stable.
I believe a power law acts differently from an exponential distribution. I think wealth distribution is commonly approximated by a Pareto distribution.
In your model, the exponential distribution is caused by the fact that you cannot go below zero; otherwise, it would be a normal distribution.
I don't agree with your opinion about laws against power laws, but that is another matter.
Not in a 'oh the rich don't so they control the media and so we don't' sorta way. But like in a 'lets educate people on the pluses and minuses, debate a while, and then come to an informed conclusion' sorta way.
Like, deep down, does the average person actually want a stable economy? Because it seems to me that there is an even split historically between the folks that want stability and a little patch of land and weekly rhythms, and the folks that just want to drunkenly burn couches in the street every full moon, or some such thing.
Not to be glib here at all. I like, would actually like to know the answer. Sorry if this comes off the cuff seeming.
I have a dumbed down version of this question as variant of the Voight-Kampff test (Bladerunner) that goes like this.
You have 2 choices for how the world is shaped, pick 1:
A. You have a modest but comfortable home, a job that pays you enough so that you have what you need and can afford occasional luxuries (e.g., an annual holiday abroad), have good health insurance, access to education and childcare, etc. Everybody else has the same thing, and because of this you live in communities where the arts flourish because nobody has to worry about becoming homeless or destitute.
B. You live in magnificent mansion, one of dozens you own around the world (accessible via one of your personal Gulfstream jets). You have more money then you could ever spend in a lifetime (even recklessly). Your homes are staffed with obedient servants who cater to your every desire. I mean anything. You own them. Your mansions are on palatial estates with secure walls and guards to keep out the rabble outside -- who fight for scraps and are desperate enough to do any kind of work to keep your factories humming and printing cash.
I wouldn't hesitate to choose A because that's a world I'd love to live in and the world of B horrifies me. I don't say this as virtue signaling, it's my innate reaction.
I think that a significant portion of the population would love to choose B. And in some ways, some already have.
I really hate to call people stupid, but I would actually go ahead and call people who choose option B idiots.
I'm sorry if that offends anyone reading this, you can downvote me out of spite if that makes you feel better.
I say this because I read a while ago (like years) an article in the Economist showing that happiness in a society is correlated with equality - (sorry for the dash I am a human I just happen to use em dashes sometimes) not just amongst the poor, but also for the rich.
You'll note that rich people in highly unequal societies tend to struggle with mental illness more than in equal societies.
Money doesn't buy happiness. Being filthy rich won't heal the hurt in your heart. If you're too stupid too realize that, that's fine, enjoy your suffering, but I'd appreciate you having the honesty to admit that you're a deluded moron instead of trying to create completely false arguments for why the misery you're creating for yourself and others is actually a sign of anything less than pure human stupidity.
I couldn't find the original Economist article, nor the study it cited, but here's a link I found on Google.
Its a completely false dichotomy. You can have everyone choose A and still get B. The same faulty thinking always leads to populism, then extremism, then atrocity. So for the love of all that is holy, learn some economics or STFU on the topic.
I have a hard time seeing how "I'd like to live in a world where everyone is equally cared for" accidentally leads to "others must suffer for me to be better cared for than any other human who has ever lived", but then again I'm not exactly an intelligent person so I can struggle to understand these sorts of things :)
Not sure if you are serious. But consider a tragedy of the commons situation for the production of a commodity. Now consider that that commodity's price is influenced by weather. In such a situation, price will likely be volatile a lot of the time. You can mandate that your own producers follow certain laws to conserve your commons. But other places (ie governments) can choose to not follow those laws. And so you have a situation where everyone in a certain society can choose A but you still get B.
BTW, if you think that's somewhat arbitrary, I just described the global ag and fishing industries. So most food production has this quality. So any society that's largely agrarian will follow this pattern.
I think most people want to earn more the harder they work, and I think that is fine.
However, power laws basically spoil it because it gives a hard worker an exponential advantage, where they can (and will) use that money against other people who made different life choices.
> power laws basically spoil it because it gives a hard worker an exponential advantage
s/hard worker/person with more capital/
I can make 500 euros from a day of consulting as a software engineer. That's a typical day, working remotely, 9AM to 5PM, with a nice long lunch break.
Minimum wage in Bangladesh is around $133 per month. Many workers in the Bangladesh garment industry work 12 hour days. I look at what they do, and think "wow that's really hard I could never do that, glad I don't have to work that hard to live".
Yet somehow, I have exponentially more money than they do. And, thanks to the beauty of our current system, I can go ahead and invest that in the stock market, and get even richer while basically doing nothing.
It would be nice if we lived in a word that rewarded hard work, but as far as I can tell, we don't, and never have.
Look at the institution of slavery. For literally thousands of years, there was "those who worked", and "those who had".
The system rewards decision making, not hard work.
Now, if you're a young tech worker working on an important project at a big company, yes, choosing to work hard, IN THAT SPECIFIC CASE is a good decision, and it'll be rewarded.
But if you're a child laborer in a Third World sweatshop? No, your extra hour at the office probably won't get you anything extra.
If you're a Roman Senator in the year 30BC, you don't get rewarded for your work, you get rewarded for deciding to have your slaves spend more time farming grapes for wine and less farming wheat because wine sells for a higher price, which means that with your good decision making, you can now hire more slaves, to farm more grapes, to make more wine, which you can make for more money.
And if you look at rich people today, what they have is probably closer to the Roman Senator than the Third World sweatshop laborer - they find a thing that people like to buy, and invest lots of resources (their money, other people's labor) into making that thing and selling it, and are rewarded with money.
Just adding a note that making things is what people do naturally, and is what makes us human. People often say that without monetary incentives nothing would be made, but you just have to look at open source to know that that is just not true. (And yes, people make some money in open source sometimes, but you certainly won't find any filthy rich people there.)
there is the other (significant) issue, that wealth (and its many benefits) are inherited, and by all indications the exponential advantage seems to pass down through generations (at least recently).
I agree that people want to be rewarded for their effort, and should be.
But putting in 12 hour days being an EMT and saving peoples lives vs 12 hour days working with Claude to boost conversion pipelines have wildly different economic rewards.
I'm not suggesting a Harrison Bergeron economy but its also clear that the current system is trending towards B and the game is rigged to ensure that.
We don't live in a meritocracy -- there's a fair amount of luck involved (being in the right place at the right time).
You could go do A right now at a local level. You don't though, because you don't actually want to live that way. It reeks of virtue signaling despite your protest.
> You could go do A right now at a local level. You don't though, because you don't actually want to live that way.
"A" by its very nature is a "group effort". I could definitely be a better citizen and volunteer more and donate to causes, but that is a drop in the ocean.
And I pretty much do live that way myself. I have a modest home that I still have a mortgage on and live pretty simply. I drive a refurb'd EV, dress like slacker, and seek community and connection over flashy toys. I admit that when I walk through the first class section to my seat in coach I am not without envy.
> It reeks of virtue signaling despite your protest
The test in my mind is the cost of B, of living in that kind of world. The fact that you only see virtue signaling in my words says more about you than it does me.
Seems like you left out the "millionaire next door." There are a lot of people who want to save up enough money to retire. Some of them want to retire early. This doesn't involve any mansions or extravagant living, but it does mean investing well.
How many people think multiple mansions is a realistic option for them? Not that many, I'd expect.
Many Americans consider themselves to be temporarily distressed millionaires ;-)
I'm not trying to knock "personal ambition", the test was for who would knowingly and willingly choose to subjugate everybody else to misery if it meant that they could gorge themself on a firehose of wealth and power.
If you ask people what they want, they'll request some impossible combination of attributes without consideration of any tradeoffs.
They will also try to push all negative externalities on to people wealthier than themselves. Most people see themselves as middle class or lower middle class, even up to relatively high income levels. If you ask each of them where the tax rate should be increased, the answer is usually a few steps higher than their own income.
UBI is a topic where this becomes very obvious. When you explain UBI to most people they assume they will be receiving the UBI and some abstract combination of billionaires and corporations would pay for it. Then you show them the math that it wouldn't work and they start to become less enamored with the idea. (Or lately: They just don't believe you and retreat to their imagined ideal free of pesky economics)
