WTF-Beta

It's gotten so bad now there's a book about it:

https://a.co/d/698JowW

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/books/review/cory-doctorow-enshittification.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/upshot/sports-betting-prediction-markets.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rU8.UTxW.pjmj8AfS6l0i

Calling it "sports betting"? It's illegal in many states.
Calling it a "prediction market"? It's legal -- regulated federally and out of the reach of state laws.

How does an operator or a "prediction market" distinguishes its practice from "sports betting"? It claims that in "sports betting" the bookmaker keeps the money when bettors lose their bets, where as a "prediction market" maker facilitates trading of futures contracts tied to sporting outcomes between users and take a cut of the proceeds as "service fee."

Do you buy this?

Maybe expect more "sport betting" operations to restructure themselves into "predictive markets."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/10/04/sanae-takaichi-japan-prime-minister/

[Sanae Takaichi] is poised to become prime minister later this month, succeeding Shigeru Ishiba, who last month announced he would step down after less than a year in the role, following two crushing parliamentary defeats that cost the long-governing ruling LDP its coalition majority in both legislative chambers. She would be the fourth prime minister in five years.

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/tunisian-sentenced-death-facebook-posts-criticising-president-2025-10-03/

Tunisian sentenced to death for Facebook posts criticising president

The Tunisian President, not Trump.

@jon-nyc said in Reich's take on Democrat's centrist positions:

Huh, I was expecting equity to give every one the same number of boxes.

Oh, can also cut the fence down or remove the fence entirely.

Saw someone posted a short clip showing James Talarico talking about the political divide. I cannot find that old post, so I will just post the NYT profile on Talarico in a new thread here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/opinion/james-talarico-religious-left.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qE8.VsYy.GuENbCMmbS51

@Bernard, congratulations on getting the new car!

One little (really quite minor) disappointment is I can't hook up my iPod (I'm so old fashioned) with the usb cable like I could in my older car. It looks like bluetooth is the only option for connecting auxiliary devices.

Yeah I noticed that with newer cars these days. USB is now "charging-only" in newer cars. Data functions have to go over Bluetooth.

Any advice on how to determine the proper size to get when it comes to compression socks?

For every regular socks, I stuff I get from Target has a pretty large range, like I get a big bag of socks they says "fits shoe sizes 6-12" and be done with it.

Can I play it similarly fast and loose with compression socks too or is there a more exact method to figuring out what size to get when it comes to compression socks?

I have a lot of respect for the author, Tim Berners-Lee. It’s not that long ago I gave a talk on the HTTP, the underlying invention of his that made the WWW possible; and many in high-tech won’t have the careers they have absent Berners-Lee’ invention.

Tim Berners-Lee came from a time when low cost impactful innovation was possible in the field.
As he said himself, he wrote the code for WWW on a single computer in a small room by himself. Much of the technologies that underpin today’s IT infrastructure were invented by very small teams with shoestring budgets. But this is much harder to do now. The low hanging fruits have mostly been plucked. Now the AI arms race requires multiple $billions for credible admission. I don’t see quantum computing being cheaper than AI. It’s easy for a small team to give away the fruits of a few person-years of (part-time) work, but a lot harder for a multi-$billion corporation to give away the fruits of a multi-$billion investment.

Meta did the AI world a lot of good open sourcing LLaMA, but that’s an exception rather than the norm. I don’t see many other companies open sourcing their AI models. Even Zuckerberg indicated that Meta will be more selective about what parts/features of future AI models to open source. The future for this vision about freely sharing IT innovations with the world does not look that bright at the moment.

raise taxes on the wealthy to finance what most Americans need

I really want to see Reich’s math on this.

I like the idea of padded heels, but I almost never find a pair where the supposedly padded heels actually end up at my heels. Usually the socks are little too long or a little too short so the parts meant to pad the heels end up a little before or behind my actual heels.

I standardized on Hanes ankle socks.
I get them in bulk -- 20 pairs per pack -- from Target's.

At $400 a pop, I will wait.

No, not on your own body, but in a "bioreactor."

https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/gadget-grow-meat-at-home

Growing your own fruit and veg is nothing new. But what if you could grow your own meat from the comfort of your own home? That’s what a company in Japan wants to make possible.



The Shojinmeat Project helps people grow their own meat, almost like a plant, without an animal having to die.

I suppose, someday, it will be as common as "making your own bread" or "brewing your own beer."

Wonder how HHS Secretary JFK Jr. feels about this.

Haven't noticed the pointy piece so far.

Re: the USDA ending the food insecurity survey
It is consistent with the “small government” philosophy.
I can see old school Conservatives supporting a move like this.

By happenstance YouTube algorithm, I stumbled upon these two related videos:

Video #1 — a respected AI researcher’s lecture given to Standard engineering students (in English):

Video #2 — a YouTuber’s retelling of that lecture (in Mandarin):

I noticed Video #2 first, but realized very quickly that Video #2 is a retelling of Video #1, so I figured why view Video #2 when I can just view the original Video #1.

I very quickly got my answer: as good a scholar as the presenter of Video #1 is, his lecture is quite hard to follow. The pacing, the storytelling, the command of the language, the structure of the presentation, the presentation, etc. are not very good. A brilliant researcher, but not a very good lecturer. I gave up decided to try the alternative 10~15 minutes into Video #1.

Video #2 is 1/3 the length of Video #1, but overall presentation is much nicer. Some terms of art I have to mentally translate back to English to map them back to what I am more familiar with, but with key slides being shown in the original English, that’s not too hard to do. Watched through Video #2 at 1.5x speed and got what I wanted in maybe 1/5 the time I would have spent on Video #1 had there not been Video #2.

There probably is a lesson somewhere in this experience for multilingual LLM machine learning/reasoning, but I don’t know what that is yet.