The home production drops are really just two big ones, washing machine + dryer. Maybe honorable mention to dishwasher in the '90s (not visible in the graph though?). Pinker's Enlightenment Now cites some huge stat in women's time spent per week doing laundry, IIRC it dropped from 10+ to 1hr in a decade or two. "Great stagnation" is less applicable here, and a lack of progress is just more a fact of running out of things to automate. Home cooking /cleaning robot would be the next big one, but even in a techn-utopia 20th century it's hard to imagine that showing up in the '80s or '90s.
I'm old enough to remember when goalposts were on the goal line, and they moved them back to make FG's more difficult.
I believe football optimizes the game to keep the average points per games at 42. So more fields goals may make that easier. Unlike baseball, no one seems to care when football changes the rules.
> It seems like there should be a good free or cheap version of ‘play against a GTO heads up poker bot and get live +/- EV feedback.’ I imagine the ultimate version of this is where you don’t output a particular action, you output a probabilistic action - you say ‘50% call, 25% fold, 25% raise pot’ or what not, and it then compares this to GTO, after which it selects a line at random and you continue.
I suspect you know this, but if GTO outputs a nontrivial distribution there, then { call, fold, raise pot } all have equal EV, and so you get no EV-based feedback for getting the mix wrong. (I mean, you give up EV if your opponent knows that you are going to do exactly that distribution in exactly that spot and plays accordingly, but what even?)
Not disagreeing with the overall idea here, but in actual practice I think you get basically all of the training gains from "select all options that are >0% in Nash", plus a second stage where you decide whether you actually care about (a) locking down unexploitability with the right weights or (b) picking a mix that scratches against GTO and exploits the population-average typical leaks. Level Three is, how many hands does it take for you to be able to tell where this not-GTO is leaking, and do you know how you should rebalance your equal-EV-vs-GTO options to respond for edge?
As you might have seen by now, the Nobel Prize was not actually insider trading, but rather intelligent use of web scraping and image metadata analysis
I think it's a mistake on Zvi's part to characterize the free speech issues around Charlie Kirk's death as a distinct issue from other speech issues. It was obvious that in the days immediately following Charlie Kirk's death there was a political struggle to characterize his legacy. Many journalists suffered professional consequences for describing Charlie Kirk factually with his own words. So this was absolutely a critical free speech issue, and in particular a free journalism issue, and its a gross mischaracterization to say that people were just "mad".
Lower the cost of something, people do more of it.
Lower the cost of a car being on the road... gridpocalypse? It will be interesting.
(I originally wrote "... being in a car on the road", and this a major area where cost is saved, but also, cars being on the road with no-one in them (deadhead trips) are now much lower cost too.)
Safety through stasis. Also: you call that urban sprawl? Hold my beer.
Gridlock is a pure logistics coordination problem that can be solved with reliable inter-vehicle automated communication for automated vehicles, probably.
This is the view that brough me from 100% pro AVs to "cities need to add some serious guardrails first but then, please, yes". The urbanist circles I'm in are actually quite actively anti-AV, largely because of one Not Just Bikes YT video about it, because reducing the barrier to travelling by car will drastically increase car miles travelled, and car miles travelled have major negative externalities in noise and air pollution, even granting safety externalities being fully mitigated.
Worse, a large voting block of people who prefer making most trips via AV over bike or foot or rail will make the same sort of infrastructure demands of city councils that led to urban highways decimating cities in the 50s-70s.
Cities should design policies to push existing car trips to AVs without dramatically increasing car trips, and/or find other ways to mitigate the effects of more car miles driven on urban landscapes. Healthy cities still move primarily by foot, bike, and train (albeit with the potential for AV tech and trains to merge into some offshoot of Musk's hyperloop fantasies to allow maximal mobility without disrupting the urban fabric).
Yeah, my economics 101 perspective stems from 2008 when AVs were being discussed on the Oil Drum web site.
There are many issues of social trust to be sorted out with "human scale" cities. Maybe AI can help with those: Robocops dealing instant justice to men who harass women walking around. That kind of thing. But I doubt it; humans won't stand for being made to behave politely and respectfully.
Also, I am not convinced that mobility is something that should be maximised for best human flourishing. Fostering deep local connections seems to produce healthier, more pro-social humans to me. Just a feeling though.
Whatever. Policy must take humans *as they actually exist* as a starting point, not humans as we would like them to be. (So "AI alignment" is impossible, because "human alignment" does not exist.)
I think there's a sad medium of density where there are enough people walking around that you get bad encounters, but not enough that people feel shame in harassing others or don't face intervention. Some of it is about levels of social trust, but some of it is also More Dakka: more people = more people to witnesses any foul play.
But you're right that the other side of Jane Jacob's "eyes on the street" concept is not just having the people there in the first place, but having them feel like there is some personal stake in keeping their neighborhood safe. You can't count on people to be selfless, but if you get them invested hyperlocally, you can count on them selfishly making their block a good one to live and walk and be social
Can you please be more careful about your comments about freedom of speech, or the NHS, in the UK. They are throw away and basically wrong.
It's like this: the (far-ish) right in the UK, supported by Elon Musk, are using recent charges and arrests against protestors who advocated online for burning down hotels where asylum seekers were housed, as a platform to argue the government is soft on asylum seekers and hates patriots (a familiar sounding playbook, right?).
Freedom of speech is very strong in the UK.
This issue is not even a big issue in the UK, outside of the rightwing blogosphere. It's getting a lot more coverage in the US than at home. Which is curious given the much more perilous state of free speech and even freedom in the US. We perhaps can put down to the art of distraction?
If by strong freedom of speech you mean anyone can say literally anything to anyone without consequence, then yeah, the UK doesn't have that. Nowhere does. And for good reason. Finding one or two examples on the internet of potentially overzealous policing, in a country of 60 million vocal, opinionated people, does not make a strong case. Seriously, why are commentators in the US so focused on this? Pulling out lots strands of internet stories to try and make a case for something that is trivial. Things are so much worse over there at the moment. I mean, I think I know why. It's Vance etc trying to distract from what they are doing there, and some of the mud is sticking and being reupped by the likes of Zvi and other commentators. Which is disappointing.
Obviously that is not my definition of very strong freedom of speech. What is your definition?
My definition of very strong freedom of speech is that it doesn’t exist in a country where someone has been a) arrested and b) prosecuted for posting rap lyrics as a tribute to a friend of hers who died. It just can’t happen by random chance no matter how large the population is. The arrest can be overzealous policing, but only in a place where police take it upon themselves to police social media posts. The prosecution is not just overzealous policing.
> If by strong freedom of speech you mean anyone can say literally anything to anyone without consequence, then yeah, the UK doesn't have that. Nowhere does.
This is such a weird dodge / strawman.
Having acknowledged every place has limits, obviously what we are debating is where the limits should *be*, and you didn't actually address that at all.
> Seriously, why are commentators in the US so focused on this?
And here we have another dodge / strawman.
People are interested in all sorts of random topics. That still has no bearing on the actual issue.
Do you actually want to engage in a conversation, or are you just here to complain?
I'm also from the UK and while some of the American takes on what's going on here are exaggerated, we very much Have A Problem, and I don't consider Zvi's links/takes on the UK to generally be unfair - I can only recall one such link a while ago where there was more to the story.
Are you from America? If so did you know the US state department recently stripped the visas of various people living in the US who media social media posts deemed derogatory against Charlie Kirk. You do not have freedom of speech. You can argue that by the specific letter of the law it's different, but if you are subject to harassment and restrictions on your rights for posting tweets then your freedom of speech is restricted. Put it this way: I would have absolutely no fear of recrimination if I criticised the government or officials in the UK. I would in the US. What you can't do in the UK is incite others to murder people. I'm not saying that there aren't cases where the enforcement has been always correctly applied. But to say that freedom of speech is at threat in the UK is ill informed; it's missing the wood for the trees.
In the US, when that happens it's unconstitutional and an aberration. In the UK app-rently you get people saying it's not a real problem.
Oh, and to be clear: people have a right to shout fire in a crowded theater. Morally and constitutionally. As it should be. I would need to know significantly more just to conclude the hotel fire posters were in the wrong.
the same judge sentenced a woman to 31 months for a bad tweet that was deleted in 4 hours, while sentencing someone who participated in a violent mob at the same time to just 20 months (ed: 31 f#£%^ng months!)
Arrested for wearing a star of David whilst the pro-savages mob were "demonstrating". I guarantee you no-one has _ever_ been arrested for wearing Palestinian, Muslim or even Hamas affiliations : https://x.com/addicted2newz/status/1979545441562943854
Useful immediate counter-example of plainly criminal speech under UK law (kill all the Jews, no less!) attracting no attention from police:
Self-checkout stigma: I buy it. We're just a store for regular groceries, no condoms or whatever, but every once in awhile I'll still get a customer asking for such in a hushed, extremely embarrassed, circumspect, roundabout, bush-beating way where you can just tell they're dying of mortification to even be possibly seen asking. Always couched in euphemistic terms too, like "sanitary napkins". This is exactly the sort of person who'd use self-checkout if we had it, and probably self-help item lookup, except then someone might peek at their screen and that'd be Just Awful. But, yes, the hourly to avoid trivial inconvenience seems low. Perhaps selection effect for the sort of person who has to buy their shameful hygiene products in a physical store?
Also, will commit to fewer + higher-calibre comments going forward so as not to create any untoward response obligations. Time is money, friend...
My hottest take: take feet out of football and remove all kicking. No more kickoffs, punts, FGs, or XPs. You get 4 downs to get a first, keep going until TD or TO. Instead of kickoffs figure out where to start so expected points are positive (might take a few seasons, maybe the 50 to start).
If that means there aren't as many late-game comebacks I'm not sad about it; right now losing teams don't try hard enough to win until the last third of the 4th quarter. I don't care about kickers or punters, I watch FB to watch displays of amazing strength and athleticism
The home production drops are really just two big ones, washing machine + dryer. Maybe honorable mention to dishwasher in the '90s (not visible in the graph though?). Pinker's Enlightenment Now cites some huge stat in women's time spent per week doing laundry, IIRC it dropped from 10+ to 1hr in a decade or two. "Great stagnation" is less applicable here, and a lack of progress is just more a fact of running out of things to automate. Home cooking /cleaning robot would be the next big one, but even in a techn-utopia 20th century it's hard to imagine that showing up in the '80s or '90s.
Nit picking but typo:
My biggest old takeaway, the first one on the list this time, that throwing a part (instead of party)
"Nathan Young: The UK Government has specific definitions of probabilistic words:
m"
Was this quote supposed to contain a list of the words? No link to the original post/tweet.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/monthly-roundup-35-october-2025
I'm old enough to remember when goalposts were on the goal line, and they moved them back to make FG's more difficult.
I believe football optimizes the game to keep the average points per games at 42. So more fields goals may make that easier. Unlike baseball, no one seems to care when football changes the rules.
The claim that the bay area is asexual is wild, it's the horniest place I've ever lived in by some margin
> It seems like there should be a good free or cheap version of ‘play against a GTO heads up poker bot and get live +/- EV feedback.’ I imagine the ultimate version of this is where you don’t output a particular action, you output a probabilistic action - you say ‘50% call, 25% fold, 25% raise pot’ or what not, and it then compares this to GTO, after which it selects a line at random and you continue.
I suspect you know this, but if GTO outputs a nontrivial distribution there, then { call, fold, raise pot } all have equal EV, and so you get no EV-based feedback for getting the mix wrong. (I mean, you give up EV if your opponent knows that you are going to do exactly that distribution in exactly that spot and plays accordingly, but what even?)
Not disagreeing with the overall idea here, but in actual practice I think you get basically all of the training gains from "select all options that are >0% in Nash", plus a second stage where you decide whether you actually care about (a) locking down unexploitability with the right weights or (b) picking a mix that scratches against GTO and exploits the population-average typical leaks. Level Three is, how many hands does it take for you to be able to tell where this not-GTO is leaking, and do you know how you should rebalance your equal-EV-vs-GTO options to respond for edge?
"...to which I reply that is a Skill Issue, you did it wrong, try again."
I like this as a general retort to many things.
Important note for the French wealth tax, it's only on the wealth above 100M€ AFAIK, so it would be banning being richer than 100M€ in the long term
As you might have seen by now, the Nobel Prize was not actually insider trading, but rather intelligent use of web scraping and image metadata analysis
I think it's a mistake on Zvi's part to characterize the free speech issues around Charlie Kirk's death as a distinct issue from other speech issues. It was obvious that in the days immediately following Charlie Kirk's death there was a political struggle to characterize his legacy. Many journalists suffered professional consequences for describing Charlie Kirk factually with his own words. So this was absolutely a critical free speech issue, and in particular a free journalism issue, and its a gross mischaracterization to say that people were just "mad".
Lower the cost of something, people do more of it.
Lower the cost of a car being on the road... gridpocalypse? It will be interesting.
(I originally wrote "... being in a car on the road", and this a major area where cost is saved, but also, cars being on the road with no-one in them (deadhead trips) are now much lower cost too.)
Safety through stasis. Also: you call that urban sprawl? Hold my beer.
Gridlock is a pure logistics coordination problem that can be solved with reliable inter-vehicle automated communication for automated vehicles, probably.
This is the view that brough me from 100% pro AVs to "cities need to add some serious guardrails first but then, please, yes". The urbanist circles I'm in are actually quite actively anti-AV, largely because of one Not Just Bikes YT video about it, because reducing the barrier to travelling by car will drastically increase car miles travelled, and car miles travelled have major negative externalities in noise and air pollution, even granting safety externalities being fully mitigated.
Worse, a large voting block of people who prefer making most trips via AV over bike or foot or rail will make the same sort of infrastructure demands of city councils that led to urban highways decimating cities in the 50s-70s.
Cities should design policies to push existing car trips to AVs without dramatically increasing car trips, and/or find other ways to mitigate the effects of more car miles driven on urban landscapes. Healthy cities still move primarily by foot, bike, and train (albeit with the potential for AV tech and trains to merge into some offshoot of Musk's hyperloop fantasies to allow maximal mobility without disrupting the urban fabric).
Yeah, my economics 101 perspective stems from 2008 when AVs were being discussed on the Oil Drum web site.
There are many issues of social trust to be sorted out with "human scale" cities. Maybe AI can help with those: Robocops dealing instant justice to men who harass women walking around. That kind of thing. But I doubt it; humans won't stand for being made to behave politely and respectfully.
Also, I am not convinced that mobility is something that should be maximised for best human flourishing. Fostering deep local connections seems to produce healthier, more pro-social humans to me. Just a feeling though.
Whatever. Policy must take humans *as they actually exist* as a starting point, not humans as we would like them to be. (So "AI alignment" is impossible, because "human alignment" does not exist.)
I think there's a sad medium of density where there are enough people walking around that you get bad encounters, but not enough that people feel shame in harassing others or don't face intervention. Some of it is about levels of social trust, but some of it is also More Dakka: more people = more people to witnesses any foul play.
But you're right that the other side of Jane Jacob's "eyes on the street" concept is not just having the people there in the first place, but having them feel like there is some personal stake in keeping their neighborhood safe. You can't count on people to be selfless, but if you get them invested hyperlocally, you can count on them selfishly making their block a good one to live and walk and be social
Humans can generally be forced to behave. It's Americans that you can't force to behave.
I had in mind videos I have seen of street life in Paris, France.
Can you please be more careful about your comments about freedom of speech, or the NHS, in the UK. They are throw away and basically wrong.
It's like this: the (far-ish) right in the UK, supported by Elon Musk, are using recent charges and arrests against protestors who advocated online for burning down hotels where asylum seekers were housed, as a platform to argue the government is soft on asylum seekers and hates patriots (a familiar sounding playbook, right?).
Freedom of speech is very strong in the UK.
This issue is not even a big issue in the UK, outside of the rightwing blogosphere. It's getting a lot more coverage in the US than at home. Which is curious given the much more perilous state of free speech and even freedom in the US. We perhaps can put down to the art of distraction?
Just because you can point to examples of bad speech being punished doesn't mean there isn't lots of innocuous speech being punished.
Example here, in which a woman was prosecuted for posting rap lyrics in memory of a friend of hers who died: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
Yes it is just one example, but that example could not happen even once in a place with strong freedom of speech
If by strong freedom of speech you mean anyone can say literally anything to anyone without consequence, then yeah, the UK doesn't have that. Nowhere does. And for good reason. Finding one or two examples on the internet of potentially overzealous policing, in a country of 60 million vocal, opinionated people, does not make a strong case. Seriously, why are commentators in the US so focused on this? Pulling out lots strands of internet stories to try and make a case for something that is trivial. Things are so much worse over there at the moment. I mean, I think I know why. It's Vance etc trying to distract from what they are doing there, and some of the mud is sticking and being reupped by the likes of Zvi and other commentators. Which is disappointing.
Obviously that is not my definition of very strong freedom of speech. What is your definition?
My definition of very strong freedom of speech is that it doesn’t exist in a country where someone has been a) arrested and b) prosecuted for posting rap lyrics as a tribute to a friend of hers who died. It just can’t happen by random chance no matter how large the population is. The arrest can be overzealous policing, but only in a place where police take it upon themselves to police social media posts. The prosecution is not just overzealous policing.
> If by strong freedom of speech you mean anyone can say literally anything to anyone without consequence, then yeah, the UK doesn't have that. Nowhere does.
This is such a weird dodge / strawman.
Having acknowledged every place has limits, obviously what we are debating is where the limits should *be*, and you didn't actually address that at all.
> Seriously, why are commentators in the US so focused on this?
And here we have another dodge / strawman.
People are interested in all sorts of random topics. That still has no bearing on the actual issue.
Do you actually want to engage in a conversation, or are you just here to complain?
I'm also from the UK and while some of the American takes on what's going on here are exaggerated, we very much Have A Problem, and I don't consider Zvi's links/takes on the UK to generally be unfair - I can only recall one such link a while ago where there was more to the story.
The UK imprisons people for tweets. You do not have freedom of speech.
Are you from America? If so did you know the US state department recently stripped the visas of various people living in the US who media social media posts deemed derogatory against Charlie Kirk. You do not have freedom of speech. You can argue that by the specific letter of the law it's different, but if you are subject to harassment and restrictions on your rights for posting tweets then your freedom of speech is restricted. Put it this way: I would have absolutely no fear of recrimination if I criticised the government or officials in the UK. I would in the US. What you can't do in the UK is incite others to murder people. I'm not saying that there aren't cases where the enforcement has been always correctly applied. But to say that freedom of speech is at threat in the UK is ill informed; it's missing the wood for the trees.
In the US, when that happens it's unconstitutional and an aberration. In the UK app-rently you get people saying it's not a real problem.
Oh, and to be clear: people have a right to shout fire in a crowded theater. Morally and constitutionally. As it should be. I would need to know significantly more just to conclude the hotel fire posters were in the wrong.
The Trump administration is acting illegally and unconstitutionally when it comes to speech. There is no absolute protection for speech in UK law.
I am a UK citizen currently living in France and yes, the UK has a problem with free speech.
Fined for burning a coran: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9v4e0z9r8o; no jail for the person who physically assaulted him, with a knife!!
A whole article of examples:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/two-tier-justice-is-taking-over-the-courts/
the same judge sentenced a woman to 31 months for a bad tweet that was deleted in 4 hours, while sentencing someone who participated in a violent mob at the same time to just 20 months (ed: 31 f#£%^ng months!)
https://x.com/AGHamilton29/status/1930053344103674237
Arrested for wearing a star of David whilst the pro-savages mob were "demonstrating". I guarantee you no-one has _ever_ been arrested for wearing Palestinian, Muslim or even Hamas affiliations : https://x.com/addicted2newz/status/1979545441562943854
Useful immediate counter-example of plainly criminal speech under UK law (kill all the Jews, no less!) attracting no attention from police:
https://x.com/GnasherJew/status/1979650107235852677
Need one go on?
Self-checkout stigma: I buy it. We're just a store for regular groceries, no condoms or whatever, but every once in awhile I'll still get a customer asking for such in a hushed, extremely embarrassed, circumspect, roundabout, bush-beating way where you can just tell they're dying of mortification to even be possibly seen asking. Always couched in euphemistic terms too, like "sanitary napkins". This is exactly the sort of person who'd use self-checkout if we had it, and probably self-help item lookup, except then someone might peek at their screen and that'd be Just Awful. But, yes, the hourly to avoid trivial inconvenience seems low. Perhaps selection effect for the sort of person who has to buy their shameful hygiene products in a physical store?
Also, will commit to fewer + higher-calibre comments going forward so as not to create any untoward response obligations. Time is money, friend...
The Judgement of Solomon is an example of the *anti*-Mellow Heuristic.
My hottest take: take feet out of football and remove all kicking. No more kickoffs, punts, FGs, or XPs. You get 4 downs to get a first, keep going until TD or TO. Instead of kickoffs figure out where to start so expected points are positive (might take a few seasons, maybe the 50 to start).
If that means there aren't as many late-game comebacks I'm not sad about it; right now losing teams don't try hard enough to win until the last third of the 4th quarter. I don't care about kickers or punters, I watch FB to watch displays of amazing strength and athleticism
and thus the transition to "handegg" will be fully complete, with no feet touching the not-ball at all!