It needs to be said that your opinion on this is well understood by the community, respected, but also far from impartial. You have a clear vested interest in the success of _these_ tools.
There's a learning curve to any toolset, and it may be that using coding agents effectively is more than a few weeks of upskilling. It may be, and likely will be, that people make their whole careers about being experts on this topic.
But it's still a statistical text prediction model, wrapped in fancy gimmicks, sold at a loss by mostly bad faith actors, and very far from its final form. People waiting to get on the bandwagon could well be waiting to pick up the pieces once it collapses.
I have a lot of respect from Simon and read a lot of his articles.
But I'm still seeing clear evidence it IS a statistical text prediction model. You ask it the right niche thing and it can only pump out a few variations of the same code, that's clearly someone else's code stolen almost verbatim.
And I just use it 2 or 3 times a day.
How are SimonW and AntiRez not seeing the same thing?
How are they not seeing the propensity for both Claude + ChatGPT to spit out tons of completely pointless error handling code, making what should be a 5 line function a 50 line one?
How are they not seeing that you constantly have to nag it to use modern syntax. Typescript, C#, Python, doesn't matter what you're writing in, it will regularly spit out code patterns that are 10 years out of date. And woe betide you using a library that got updated in the last 2 years. It will constantly revert back to old syntax over and over and over again.
I've also had to deal with a few of my colleagues using AI code on codebases they don't really understand. Wrong sort, id instead of timestamp. Wrong limit. Wrong json encoding, missing key converters. Wrong timezone on dates. A ton of subtle, not obvious, bugs unless you intimately know the code, but would be things you'd look up if you were writing the code.
And that's not even including the bit where the AI obviously decided to edit the wrong search function in a totally different part of the codebase that had nothing to do with what my colleague was doing. But didn't break anything or trigger any tests because it was wrapped in an impossible to hit if clause. And it created a bunch of extra classes to support this phantom code, so hundreds of new lines of code just lurking there, not doing anything but if I hadn't caught it, everyone thinks it does do something.
It's mostly a statistical text model, although the RL "reasoning" stuff added in the past 12 months makes that a slightly less true statement - it has extra tricks now to help it bias bits of code to statistically predict that are more likely to work.
The real unlock though is the coding agent harnesses. It doesn't matter any more if it statistically predicts junk code that doesn't compile, because it will see the compiler error and fix it. If you tell it "use red/green TDD" it will write the tests first, then spot when the code fails to pass them and fix that too.
> How are they not seeing the propensity for both Claude + ChatGPT to spit out tons of completely pointless error handling code, making what should be a 5 line function a 50 line one?
TDD helps there a lot - it makes it less likely the model will spit out lines of code that are never executed.
> How are they not seeing that you constantly have to nag it to use modern syntax. Typescript, C#, Python, doesn't matter what you're writing in, it will regularly spit out code patterns that are 10 years out of date.
I find that if I use it in a codebase with modern syntax it will stick to that syntax. A prompting trick I use a lot is "git clone org/repo into /tmp and look at that for inspiration" - that way even a fresh codebase will be able to follow some good conventions from the start.
Plus the moment I see it write code in a style I don't like I tell it what I like instead.
> And that's not even including the bit where the AI obviously decided to edit the wrong search function in a totally different part of the codebase that had nothing to do with what my colleague was doing.
I usually tell it which part of the codebase to execute - or if it decides itself I spot that and tell it that it did the wrong thing - or discard the session entirely and start again with a better prompt.
Ok, but given the level of detail you're supplying, at that point isn't it quicker to write the code yourself than it is to prompt?
As you have to explain much of this, the natural language words written are much more than just the code and less precise, so it actually takes much longer to type and is more ambiguous. And obviously at the moment ChatGPT tends to make assumptions without asking you, Claude is a little better at asking you for clarification.
I find it so much faster to just ask Claude/ChatGPT for an example of what I'm trying to do and then cut/paste/modify it myself. So just use them as SO on steriods, no agents, no automated coding. Give me the example, and I'll integrate it.
And the end code looks nothing like the supplied example.
I tried using AquaVoice (which is very good) to dictate to it, and that slightly helped, but often I found myself going so slowly just fully prompting the AI when I would have already finished the new code myself at that point.
I was thinking about this last night, I do wonder if this is another example of the difference between deep/narrow coding of specialist/library code and shallow/wide of enterprise/business code.
If you're writing specialist code (like AntiRez), it's dealing with one tight problem. If you're writing enterprise code, it has to take into account so many things, explaining it all to the AI takes forever. Things like use the correct settings from IUserContext, add to the audit in the right place, use the existing utility functions from folder X, add json converters for this data structure, always use this different date encoding because someone made a mistake 10 years ago, etc.
I get that some of these would end up in agents.md/claude.md, but as many people have complained, AI agents often rapidly forget those as the context grows so you have to go through any code generated with a toothcomb, or get it to generate a disproportionate amount of tests, which again you have to explain each and every one.
I guess that will be fixed eventually. But from my perspective, as they're still changing so rapidly and much advice from even 6/9 months ago is now utterly wrong, why not just wait.
I, like many others on this thread, also believe that it's going to take about a week to get up-to-speed when they're finally ready. It's not that I can't use them now, it's that they're slow, unreliable, prone to being a junior on steriods, and actually create more work when reviewing the code than if I'd just written it myself in the first place, and the code is much, much, much worse than MY code. Not necessarily all the people I've worked with's code, but definitely MY code is usually 50-90% more concise.
> If you're writing enterprise code, it has to take into account so many things, explaining it all to the AI takes forever. Things like use the correct settings from IUserContext, add to the audit in the right place, use the existing utility functions from folder X, add json converters for this data structure, always use this different date encoding because someone made a mistake 10 years ago, etc.
The fix for this is... documentation. All of these need to be documented in a place that's accessible to the agent. That's it.
I've just about one-shotted UI features with Claude just by giving it a screenshot of the Figma design (couldn't be bothered with the MCP) and the ticket about the feature.
It used our very custom front-end components correctly, used the correct testing library, wrote playwright tests and everything. Took me maybe 30 minutes from first prompt to PR.
If I (a backend programmer) had to do it, it would've taken me about a day of trying different things to see which one of the 42 different ways of doing it worked.
I talk about why that doesn't work the line after you've quoted. Everyone's having problems with context windows and CC/etc. rapidly forgetting instructions.
I'm fullstack, I use AI for FE too. They've been able to do the screenshot trick for over a year now. I know it's pretty good at making a page, but the code is usually rubbish and you'll have a bunch of totally unnecessary useEffect, useMemo and styling in that page that it's picked up from its training data. Do you have any idea what all the useEffect() and useMemo() it's littered all over your new page do? I can guarantee almost all of them are wrong or unnecessary.
I use that page you one-shotted as a starting point, it's not production-grade code. The final thing will look nothing like it. Good for solving the blank page problem for me though.
React is hard even for humans to understand :) In my case the LLM can actually make something that works, even if it's ugly and inefficient. I can't do even that, my brain just doesn't speak React, all the overlapping effects and memos and whatever else magic just fries my brain.
That matches my experience with LLM-aided PRs - if you see a useEffect() with an obvious LLM line-comment above it, it's 95% going to be either unneccessary or buggy (e.g. too-broad dependencies which cause lots of unwanted recomputes).
You can literally go look at some of antirez's PRs described here in this article. They're not seeing it because it's not there?
Honestly, what you're describing sounds like the older models. If you are getting these sorts of results with Opus 4.5 or 5.2-codex on high I would be very curious to see your prompts/workflow.
People have been saying "Oh use glorp 3.835 and those problems don't happen anymore" for about 3 years at this point. It's always the fact you're not using the latest model that's the problem.
I agree. I've seen people insist moving to a newer model or fine tuning will make the output more clever, "trust me", sometimes without providing any evidence of before and after for the specific use case. One LLM project I saw released was prettymuch useless, but it wasn't the use case or the architectural limitations that were the problem, nope the next thing on the roadmap was "fixing" it by plugging in a better LLM.
> You ask it the right niche thing and it can only pump out a few variations of the same code, that's clearly someone else's code stolen almost verbatim.
There are only so many ways to express the same idea. Even clean room engineers write incidentally identical code to the source sometimes.
There was an example on here recently where an AI PR to an open source literally had someone else's name in the comments in the code, and included their license.
That's the level of tell-tale that's its just stealing code and modifying a couple of variable names.
For me personally, the code I've seen might be written in a slightly weird style, or have strange, not applicable to the question, additions.
They're so obviously not "clean room" code or incredibly generic, they're the opposite, they're incredibly specific.
How does he have a vested interest in the success of these tools? He doesn't work for an AI company. Why must he have some shady ulterior motive rather than just honestly believing the thing they are stated? Yes, he blogs a lot about AI, but don't you have the cart profoundly before the horse if you are asserting that's a "vested interest"? He was free to blog about whatever he wants. Why would he fervently start blogging about AI if he didn't earnestly believe it was an interesting topic to blog about?
> But it's still a statistical text prediction model
This is reductive to the point of absurdity. What other statistical text prediction model can make tool calls to CLI apps and web searches? It's like saying "a computer is nothing special -- it's just a bunch of wires stuck together"
> Why must he have some shady ulterior motive rather than just honestly believing the thing they are are stated?
I wouldn't say it's shady or even untoward. Simon writes prolifically and he seems quite genuinely interested in this. That he has attached his public persona, and what seems like basically all of his time from the last few years, to LLMs and their derivatives is still a vested interest. I wouldn't even say that's bad. Passion about technology is what drives many of us. But it still needs saying.
> This is reductive to the point of absurdity. What other statistical text prediction model can make tool calls to CLI apps and web searches?
It's just a fact that these things are statistical text prediction models. Sure, they're marvels, but they're not deterministic, nor are they reliable. They are like a slot machine with surprisingly good odds: pull the lever and you're almost guaranteed to get something, maybe a jackpot, maybe you'll lose those tokens. For many people it's cheap enough to just keep pulling the lever until they get what they want, or go bankrupt.
Fun. I don't agree that Claude Code is the real unlock, but mostly because I'm comfortable with doing this myself. That said, the spirit of the article is spot on. The accessibility to run _good_ web services has never been better. If you have a modest budget and an interest, that's enough -- the skill gap is closing. That's good news I think.
But Tailscale is the real unlock in my opinion. Having a slot machine cosplaying as sysadmin is cool, but being able to access services securely from anywhere makes them legitimately usable for daily life. It means your services can be used by friends/family if they can get past an app install and login.
I also take minor issue with running Vaultwarden in this setup. Password managers are maximally sensitive and hosting that data is not as banal as hosting Plex. Personally, I would want Vaultwarden on something properly isolated and locked down.
I can believe this, and it's a good point. I believe Bitwarden does the same. I'm not against Vaultwarden in particular but against colocation of highly sensitive (especially orthogonally sensitive) data in general. It's part of a self-hoster's journey I think: backups, isolation, security, redundancy, energy optimization, etc. are all topics which can easily occupy your free time. When your partner asks whether your photos are more secure in Immich than Google, it can lead to an interesting discussion of nuances.
That said, I'm not sure if Bitwarden is the answer either. There is certainly some value in obscurity, but I think they have a better infosec budget than I do.
So the AI Village folks put together a bunch of LLMs and a basically unrestricted computer environment, told it "raise money" and "do random acts of kindness" and let it cook. It's a technological marvel, it's a moral dilemma, and it's an example of the "altruistic" applications for this technology. Many of us can imagine the far less noble applications.
But Rob Pike's reaction is personal, and many readers here get why. The AI Village folks burned who knows how much cash to essentially generate well wishing spam. For much less, and with higher efficacy, they could've just written the emails themselves.
I'd bet many of the founders would've been amazed at the technology and insist on wide scale adoption. It could've further cemented the power of slaveholders over their slaves. It could've helped to track the movements of native groups. It could've helped to root out loyalists still dangerous to American independence.
One thing that especially interests me about these prompt-injection based attacks is their reproducibility. With some specific version of some firmware it is possible to give reproducible steps to identify the vulnerability, and by extension to demonstrate that it's actually fixed when those same steps fail to reproduce. But with these statistical models, a system card that injects 32 random bits at the beginning is enough to ruin any guarantee of reproducibility. Self-hosted models sure you can hash the weights or something, but with Gemini (/etc) Google (/et al) has a vested interest in preventing security researchers from reproducing their findings.
Also rereading the article, I cannot put down the irony that it seems to use a very similar style sheet to Google Cloud Platform's documentation.
> Again, we have moved past hallucinations and errors to more subtle, and often human-like, concerns.
From my experience we just get both. The constant risk of some catastrophic hallucination buried in the output, in addition to more subtle, and pervasive, concerns. I haven't tried with Gemini 3 but when I prompted Claude to write a 20 page short story it couldn't even keep basic chronology and characters straight. I wonder if the 14 page research paper would stand up to scrutiny.
I feel like hallucinations have changed over time from factual errors randomly shoehorned into the middle of sentences to the LLMs confidently telling you they are right and even provide their own reasoning to back up their claims, which most of the time are references that don't exist.
I recently tasked Claude with reviewing a page of documentation for a framework and writing a fairly simple method using the framework. It spit out some great-looking code but sadly it completely made up an entire stack of functionality that the framework doesn't support.
The conventions even matched the rest of the framework, so it looked kosher and I had to do some searching to see if Claude had referenced an outdated or beta version of the docs. It hadn't - it just hallucinated the funcionality completely.
When I pointed that out, Claude quickly went down a rabbit-hole of writing some very bad code and trying to do some very unconventional things (modifying configuration code in a different part of the project that was not needed for the task at hand) to accomplish the goal. It was almost as if it were embarrassed and trying to rush toward an acceptable answer.
I've seen it so this too. I had it keeping a running tally over many turns and occasionally it would say something like: "... bringing the total to 304.. 306, no 303. Haha, just kidding I know it's really 310." With the last number being the right one. I'm curious if it's an organic behavior or a taught one. It could be self learned through reinforcement learning, a way to correct itself since it doesn't have access to a backspace key.
Disappointingly, that is an exceedingly good story for a high school assignment. The use of an appositive phrase alone would raise alarm bells though.
It's nitpicking for flaws, but why not -- what lens on an old DSLR, older than a car, will let you take a macro shot, a wide shot, and a zoom shot of a bird?
In any case I'm not surprised. It's a short story, and it is indeed _serviceable_, but literature is more than just service to an assignment.
According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), 99,375 of the 205,728 reports forwarded by the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) were not criminally relevant, an error rate of 48.3%. This is a rise from 2023, when the number of false positives already stood at 90,950.
Indeed 50% false positive rate sounds surprisingly good, but this is under the "voluntary scheme" where Meta/Google/MS etc are not obligated to report. Notably missing from the article is the total number of scanned messages to get down to 200k reports. To my knowledge, since it's voluntary, they can also report only the very highest confidence detections. If the Danish regime were to impose reporting quotas the total number of reports would rise. And of course -- these are reports, not actually convictions.
Presumably the actual number of criminals caught by this would remain constant, so the FP rate would increase. Unless of course, the definition of criminal expands to keep the FP rate low...
I recall a half decade back, there was discussion of the quit rate of employees, maybe Facebook?, due to literal mental trauma from having to look at and validate pedophile flagged images.
Understand there is pedophilia, then there's horribly violent, next level abusive pedophilia.
I used to work in a department where, adjacently, the RCMP were doing the same. They couldn't handle it, and were constantly resigning. The violence associated with some of the videos and images is what really got them.
The worst part is, the more empathetic you are, the more it hurts to work in this area.
It seems to me that without this sad and damaging problem fixed, monitoring chats won't help much.
How many good people, will we laden with trama, literally waking up screaming at night? It's why the RCMP officers were resigning.
I can't imagine being a jury member at such a case.
Because of this issue, many departments put in much stricter protocols for dealing with this kind of material. Only certain people would be exposed to classify/tag it, and these people would only hold that post of a limited period of time. The burden on those people doesn't change, but it can be diluted to mitigate it somewhat.
Its a real and sad problem, but not one that I think can be fixed with technology. To much is on the line to allow for a false positive from a hallucinating robot to destroy a person(s) life.
(6) Online child sexual abuse frequently involves the misuse of information society services offered in the Union by providers established in third countries. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the rules laid down in this Regulation and a level playing field within the internal market, those rules should apply to all providers, irrespective of their place of establishment or residence, that offer services in the Union, as evidenced by a substantial connection to the Union.
The article links to the text of the revised proposal. It reads like they're openly planning to push it again, and soon, and worldwide. The UK and EU seem to be setting aside their differences at least.
(f) ‘relevant information society services’ means all of the following services:
(i) a hosting service;
(ii) an interpersonal communications service;
(iii) a software applications store;
(iv) an internet access service;
(v) online search engines.
(2) ‘internet access service’ means a publicly available electronic communications service that provides access to the
internet, and thereby connectivity to virtually all end points of the internet, irrespective of the network technology
and terminal equipment used
===
Calling it Chat Control is itself an understatement, one that evokes "well I'm not putting anything sensitive on WhatsApp" sentiments - and that's incredibly dangerous.
This bill may very well be read to impose mandatory global backdoors on VPNs, public cloud providers, and even your home router or your laptop network card!
(Not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. But it doesn't take a lawyer to see how broadly scoped this is.)
> (6) Online child sexual abuse frequently involves the misuse of information society services offered in the Union by providers established in third countries.
It's quite wild to see child sexual abuse continue to be cited as a justification for far-reaching, privacy-invading proposals, allegedly to empower government actors to combat child sexual abuse.
Meanwhile, we have copious and ever-increasing evidence of actual child sexual abuse being perpetrated by people with the most power in these very institutions, and they generally face few (if any) consequences.
Laws targeting service providers usually always apply to all providers providing services in the respective jurisdiction. It would be unusual if it was any different.
I am going to assume your question is genuine and not rethorical hyperbole.
Every sovereign nation has legal supremacy over its own territory. Any company doing business in the EU, no matter its origin, must follow EU laws inside the EU. However, these laws do not apply anywhere else (unless specified by some sort of treaty), so they are not forced to comply with them in the US when dealing with US customers.
If they still abide by EU law elsewhere, that is their choice, just like you can just choose to abide by Chinese law in the US — so long as it does not conflict with US law. If these rules do conflict with the first amendment, enforcing them in the US is simply not legal, and it's up to the company to figure out how to resolve this. In the worst case, they will have to give up business in the EU, or in this case, prohibit chat between US and EU customers, segregating their platform.
I mean this (mostly) as a joke, however, I kinda wish US businesses would just firewall off the EU at this point (yes, I know this would mean losing some customers/marketshare and thus would never happen).
But the near daily proposals getting tossed out in their desperate attempt to turn their countries into daycare centers is just annoying to people trying to build things for other adults.
> I kinda wish US businesses would just firewall off the EU at this point (yes, I know this would mean losing some customers/marketshare and thus would never happen).
This would involve them taking about a 30% hit to revenue (or more, depending on the company), so yeah, entirely implausible.
But, it's also worth noting that the US constantly does stuff like this. Like, the entire financial services panopticon of tracking is driven almost entirely by the US, and has been around since the 70s. Should the EU then wall off the US?
Personally, (as an EU citizen), that would really hurt if they did, but getting completely off the dollar based financial system would remove a lot of the US's control (and as a bonus/detriment reveal to the US how much of their vaunted market is propped up by EU money).
Most governments are bad, and these kinds of laws are international, so I'm not sure walling off the EU would make your life much better.
And let's be honest, you should expect the tech industry to end up as regulated as the financial industry over time, the only difference will be how long it takes to get there.
"First Amendment Rights" only applies to the State, not private companies.
For example, Hacker News has no obligation to preserve your "First Amendment Rights" on this website. They are free to mute you, ban you, or even just surreptitiously change what you say without you knowing.
If a website which otherwise wouldn’t censor you begins to censor you because of threats from foreign nations, that’s a foreign nation pressuring an American company into suppressing rights of American citizens.
That’s a foreign nation imposing on your rights. In the past that used to require an invasion, so it was a bit more obvious what was happening, but the result is still the same.
Yes it’s through a website, which is owned by a company, which technically speaking owes you nothing.
In the digital age though, where are you going to use your speech, if not on a website?
What you (and others) are doing is trying to reduce the significance of a major transgression over a minor technicality. Way to miss the forest for trees.
The EU can stuff it on this one. And I supported (still support!) the GDPR.
Semantics are literally the only reason we write laws down and argue endlessly about exactly which words to use
Outside of law, I have never once heard "that's just semantics" in a context that made sense, or said by an intelligent person. Not once. Maybe it turns out semantics are never "just semantics", and instead it's something that always matters.
So you’re just going to accept a digital invasion happening and not care, because of some semantics and details somewhere in a document which was penned 200 years prior to the internet being invented?
I don’t know about you, but to me that seems kind of naive and short sighted.
You can still care about forthcoming invasions of one's privacy and while still understanding that the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution is only intended to prevent state and federal governments from censoring you. Not corporations.
Semantics are very important when it comes to legal matters.
You can object to the "digital invasion", but using the phrase "freedom of speech" as some sort of magical shield is pointless.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The U.S. federal or state governments, courtesy of that amendment, have very limited authority to control your speech. That's where the legal authority ends.
So you see no problem with using jurisdiction washing like Five Eyes to remove our rights?
If we don't tolerate a government we elect abridging our freedom of speech, why would we accept a foreign government doing that?
When foreign governments try to force conpanies to abridge free speech by Americans on American soil, that is an attack on something that we deem important enough to have enshrined in our constitution.
But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes.
A fraction of the proceeds of losing bets from a fraction of Maryland's citizens contributes almost the same to state services -- EMS, education, road maintenance, etc -- than the total corporate taxes levied on all businesses.
Do I misunderstand, or is this just actually incredible?
No to both. You probably understand it but it’s not that amazing. States don’t tax corporations much (it’s often fairly easy to move your company to the next state over if taxes are lower) the federal government does. They tax things like sales, homes, gambling and other vices, etc.
Good idea to impose piguouvian taxes, not a good idea to impose sale taxes as that's regressive.
Property tax's a mixed bag since it taxes both land and building when ideally you only want to tax land.
States that impose income taxes are choosing not to imposes taxes elsewhere like land, which is the ideal tax. Income taxes have negative consequences since you're taxing economic activity.
Why shouldn't we tax the buildings? It seems like there's lots of real estate out there with relatively moderate land value but astronomical building value.
Taxing the buildings incentivizes urban sprawl and blight. People with money to park will park it in empty lots, waiting for the land to increase in value instead of paying the extra property tax to develop it themselves.
The result is a downtown with empty lots, abandoned buildings, and short buildings, right next to skyscrapers making much better use of their footprint and surrounding infrastructure
When a pedestrian has to walk one block further because they're walking past an empty building or empty lot that a rich person has dibs on, it produces negative value for the city
You can, but it's a tax on real wealth, which incentivizes a reduction in real wealth. More concretely it incentivizes fewer buildings because people want to pay less tax. If you want fewer buildings then fine.
The amount of land is fixed. Taxation on land does not decrease land, but rather incentivizes efficient land use and decreasing land values (which improves efficiency of land use).
Most of the value of urban land comes from the public infrastructure and economic life around it, not from the promoter's actions which are very common. Besides a tax of land incentivizes usage (so wealth creation), rather than thesaurization.
Yes but states provide the roads, EMS, schools, etc the commenter was talking about, not the autocratic regime.. and the corporations benefit from those services way more than gamblers do.
The incredible part is how that's only a tiny fraction of the profits the owners of that gambling operation are extracting from the citizens of maryland. Gambling addiction is a big in the human firmware, and we shouldn't allow private businesses to benefit from it, to the extent stem bwe can reasonably prevent it. Make the state the only source for gambling, make it low-dopamine, and get all the benefit for the state, with a sizable chunk devoted to treating gambling addiction.
Sounds like a win to me, you can leave more for productive activity to grow and attract more, there less incentive for illegal gambling, and no one is forced to do it.
If there’s a massive burden with addicts, you can still impose that the gambling industry pays more to offset.
This logic always bugs me because no one truly lives in a vacuum. People are flawed and generally need help from a community. A small community can't really fight back a well endowed company like gambling companies. The whole(stated) reason android is losing unsigned side loading is because grandmas in SEA are sideloading gambling apps.
It's obvious to me that gambling is generally a vulnerability in the human psyche. For many, it short circuits something in their brain and forms genuine addiction.
It's actually insane to me to use this vulnerability as a tax base to fund roads and schools, because regardless of the funds, your incentives will still be perverse and those incentives will dictate that more people need to be losing their money to out-of-state firms because a small portion of it might fund roads and schools.
The incentives basically state: "A percentage of our population must become sick and addicted to risk and reward in order for society to function". Is this not basically the concept of Omelas?
I read the Omelas story differently but maybe is the same. It's just a predatory dominance play. Some people get the dopamine hit from dominance, so for them it is a double win- their stuff is funded by others and it is the "weakness" of others (perceived by the dominant) that produces the funding. Having and eating the cake, etc.
I'd have to look for it. At the very least, the pilot program is happening there, and I've read on here it's a big scam to have sideloaded gambling apps take people's life savings.
The goal of the governement is to facilitate conditions where as many people as possible are happy, safe and healthy.
The economy of a state is in service of that goal, not the other way around.
Having a government tax base funded significantly from the exploitation of addictive behavior and siphoning money away from productive consumptive purposes is also bad, but less easy to make a sound bite from.
Zero taxation is just as bad. There's a certain amount of taxation that has to be met, and it's best if it comes from as harmful activity as possible, because whatever gets taxed is discouraged. If there isn't enough harmful activity to meet tax needs, then start taxing normal activity.
Except when the behavior is too common, in which case it will become a relevant revenue source for the government, incentivizing them to encourage the vice. Case in point, here's the Japanese tax agency asking for ideas how to incentivize young people to drink more alcohol. https://soranews24.com/2022/08/17/japanese-government-worrie...
Damning which way, though? Are gambling taxes too high, or are corporate taxes too low? And since corporate income is surely higher than gambling income, I’m inclined to think that gambling taxes are too high AND corporate taxes are too low, creating this odd fact.
Edit: and I know it sounds weird to say that gambling taxes are too high, when one could argue that high taxes are meant to disincentivize a thing - but if that thing is highly addictive, and if no other state action is taken to disincentivize that thing, then it’s actually a really sticky income source for the government who now doesn’t want to get rid of their cash cow. Tobacco ads are outlawed, which did more than taxing tobacco. Gambling ads are absurdly common.
When you lose (most people, most of the time), you don't have to pay tax on winnings because there aren't any. But gambling itself seems like sort of a regressive tax that preys upon those susceptible to gambling.
Edit: at least with state lotteries the state gets most of the money so it is more like a tax; in the case of corporate sports betting the corporation takes the money and then pays a small corporate tax on it.
There is a theory that talk of "those susceptibile" to gambling is in fact astroturfing by gambling corporations to make it seem like they're only damaging the weak willed.
And you're not weak willed are you? So nothing to worry about. Bad things only happen to bad people.
Good point - random or unpredictable rewards are known to be compelling/addictive for rats, and the same trick seems to work on most humans as well.
Though as I understand it much of money in gambling is made from "whales" - players who lose lots of money and keep playing anyway. The same term is used for f2p game players who spend a lot of money on in-app purchases, often tokens for virtual slot machines for desirable in-game items.
For modern gambling (not including some prediction market setups) its actually all of the people (still allowed to play), most of the time.
Because if you win regularly they limit or outright ban you from playing. If they keep letting you play they have determined algorithmically that you're statistically a loser over time.
So not only is this easy access to online/app-based gambling financially devastating for those predisposed to become addicted to it, its also effectively legally rigged in that the house has no obligation to take bets from people who are actually good at it, and they have all the data they need to detect that very quickly.
Do you have proof to back up this claim? I know there are professional people and organizations (companies) that are heavy into prediction and sports betting, they are not getting throttled.
It's a very common thing, it's called gubbing in the circles I know it from.
There are services called betting exchanges that essentially facilitate peer-to-peer gambling, they make money from commission so they don't care at all about your betting strategy, big players and companies are probably operating on those platforms.
This might not be the case for crypto market because crypto, but all the centralized sports betting platform do it.
Otherwise they wouldnt be able to give out "free bets money" for marketing purposes all the time as you could just play opposite bets on multiple platforms.
Federally, That's not even true anymore. In the BBB there was a tax code change that says you can only write off 90% of your losses from sports betting now.
If you win $95 on one bet and lose $100 on another, you owe taxes on $5 of that $95.
We're kind of in the middle of that shift, but yeah, prediction markets are futures contracts and handled differently.
The main sportsbooks you see advertising on TV like Draft Kings, Fan Duel, etc are still the old sports betting model where you're betting against the house. That's still taxed as sports betting. Kalshi, Polymarket, and some smaller sports focused apps like NoVig and Sporttrade are prediction markets that allow sports predictions and those would allow a full write off.
That said, I've heard that most of the major sportsbooks like Draft Kings and Fan Duel are building out their own prediction market platforms, so I think it's only a matter of time until everyone is in that model. Even ignoring the tax implications, it's lower risk and more consistent revenue for the books since they can structure things so they make money on every trade (if they want).
The difference is there's a clear societal benefit to stock market investment, whereas there's a clear societal detriment to sports gambling as it exists today.
Regressive taxes can be counterbalanced by redistributive policies. Sales taxes are regressive too for example and bring much much more revenue. The issue is sales taxes disincentivize consumption whereas gambling taxes disinventivize gambling.
> Sales taxes are regressive too for example and bring much much more revenue.
That's because "tax the rich" is actually pretty bad tax policy because the rich really don't make a lot more income than the upper-middle to lower classes.
If you look at countries with robust social safety nets, they don't get there by taxing the rich.
They dont get there by making rich untaxed, uncontrolably powerful and above the law either. Taxing the rich is a necessary component, just like the justice system that applies to rich too.
They do on the other hand hold a significant portion of the wealth. Unfortunately wealth tax is complicated, both because actually measuring the wealth for tax purposes can be hard, and the rich can (and will) just move away from any sufficiently effecient tax scheme.
The really bad part is that the middle/upper-middle class is the real cash cow, the top ~75%. These people are incredibly numerous and have good to incredibly good disposable income.
But since they are such a large cohort, you cannot form a policy around increasing the burden on them. And after all, the tech family pulling $450k/yr are still a "working grunts".
So it's all eye's on the top 1%, but a true wealth gap fix would actually come mostly from harvesting the wealth of the top 20-30%.
It's easy to tax certain assets, such as land. LVT is actually the ideal tax in many ways, since a LVT is undodgable. Actually it doesn't matter whose name is on the title.
Sufficiently high LVT will deter speculation, leading to collapse in land price and encouraging efficient usage of land and drastically affecting our political landscape.
That’s not the only reason. Well to an extent it is, because the rich are much better at optimizing taxes, however you can close the “loopholes” and such, then there are wealth taxes.
The problem is that the rich are ultra mobile, just like their capital, so unless you restrict that they’ll just move somewhere else where taxes are low.
So countries basically end up competing with each other by lowering taxes to attract them while destroying their middle classes..
Do they, though? The vig is 10%, very transparently shown in the odds, and paid immediately. It proves very little disincentive. The tax is paid annually and only if you win; for most people, it is 0%. Are we really going to argue that the tax is a serious factor in discouraging the behavior?
Taxing something almost always decreases usage. By how much depends on the rate and the elasticity of demand. Gambling demand is probably very inelastic, much like cigarettes and alcohol. (Your argument supports this too) If the rate is low too I can see your point about not having much effect. But it still has an effect. Excessive sin taxes can be the sign of a nanny state, but otherwise I agree with it. All taxes are bad anyways, some are just less worse.
When you describe a tax that is "paid annually and only if you win", that's plain generic income tax.
That's not the gambling-activity-specific taxes that Stoller's article discusses - typically applied to gambling businesses' revenues, not bet winners specifically.
Huh? Cigarette and alcohol taxes are levied on the vendor in exactly the same way a gambling tax is. Make your own alcohol and drink it yourself, share some with your friends, and you'll never pay an alcohol tax.
Cigarette and liquor taxes are levied on the purchaser, just like gas taxes. Gambling taxes are taxes on the gambling houses/platforms not excise taxes.
Damning in that pretend I told you my household income was supported by Vinny the bank robber who gives me cash and I launder it for him, and that pays for 6% of my household income. If I told you you can't make bank robbery illegal because I need that money, would you take me seriously at all?
I think this is a pretty good approach actually. Give people the freedom to gamble, but discourage it through taxes. It's best to tax things you want to discourage. So it's preferable to tax gambling rather than productive economic activity.
For one, alcohol tax is applied at point of sale, so there is a friction on consumption. Gambling taxes are applied as though gambling is an investment activity and losses can even be justified. Second, most recent studies that look at the question classify gambling as more dangerous and addictive. There is much more of a path from gambling to suicide.
>alcohol tax is applied at point of sale, so there is a friction on consumption. Gambling taxes are applied as though gambling is an investment activity and losses can even be justified.
Not sure what this means. Why can't gambling taxes just be applied at point of sale to create friction?
corporate tax makes no sense for states where you can hire a lawyer to change the home of your corp in a day. States impose income taxes which are harder to dodge and do less to disincentivize investment from corporations. What needs to change is federal capital gains tax, thats the main reason business owners pay such low tax percentages.
This part seems disingenuous. The article is primarily about sports betting, and the author reports that the amount that a much larger category brings in amounts for 6.4% of Maryland’s budget. Without close reading it leaves the reader with the impression that sports betting is responsible for 6.4% of the budget.
In one sense, winning bets. If you lose, you lose: your money is gone either way. If you win, the fact that the probabilities sum to about 1.05 means you win less than you would have in a fair game. The state just takes a cut of that extra 0.05.
If it's a win / lose outcome and both win and lose have a probability of 1/100, I'll make 99x my stake by betting on both win and lose at the same time.
If both outcomes have a probability of 0.999 (summing to almost 2), I'll barely make any money if I'm right, and lose my money if I'm wrong.
So when probabilities sum to less than 1, it's good for the gambler, and when they sum to more than 1 it's bad for them (and good for the bookkeeper).
In my opinion, AI-coding is basically gambling. The odds of getting a usable output are way better than piping from /dev/urandom/, but ultimately it's still a probabilistic output of whether what you want is in fact what you get. Pay for some tokens, pull the slots, and hopefully your RCE goes away.
People post comments like this hoping for the dopamine shot of creating a “gotcha” moment. The problem, however is that these comments are: insulting, reductive, and just a straight up lie
There's a learning curve to any toolset, and it may be that using coding agents effectively is more than a few weeks of upskilling. It may be, and likely will be, that people make their whole careers about being experts on this topic.
But it's still a statistical text prediction model, wrapped in fancy gimmicks, sold at a loss by mostly bad faith actors, and very far from its final form. People waiting to get on the bandwagon could well be waiting to pick up the pieces once it collapses.
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