Tell me more about this scheme. If there's someone who imagines they can tax EV's more than ICE vehicles what exactly is keeping them from just making the same increase (now) on ICE vehicles? If their secret goal is to raise transportation taxes how does switching their target from ICE vehicles to EV's make that any easier? And who exactly is doing the scheming? Is it construction firms who build roads (which is my neck of the woods is where most of the gax tax ends up going). Are they the ones hatching this scheme? You'd think they'd be lobbying harder for more trucks (heavily vehicles -> more wear on the roads ->profit!). But the more big trucks people seem mostly to be the opposite of the EV people. How confusing.
Step changes are often opportunities to introduce new unwanted features by default; see how countries switching to Euro experienced significant price increases on day 1. Policy makers often optimize to introduce new things the old market (in this case ICE) doesn't want as defaults after the change (e.g. EVs). This is like 101 of public policy.
I think we have lots of evidence that the single binary question "is this something people like 'us' support or not" is the only deciding factor in a lot of political decisions people make. They don't consider the facts of the particular issue and how it might impact them. They abdicate that role to whomever they believe defines what 'people like us' believe.
Real Madrid alone is more than $5B ? Maybe you mean to say league association is worth 5B ? That seems too high the association does not have lot of margins they pass through most of their revenue to the clubs .
The last domestic TV deal they signed recently was worth $6B for 5 seasons or so, which is what you are proposing they buy.
In enterprise value terms that $1B/year growing 6 %YoY is worth a lot more than $5B.
In contrast Cloudflare has a $2.5B revenue albeit growing much faster but also has much smaller earnings or free cash flow, I.e. money they are not spending to make their current revenue.
They make about $25m a year in profit. Cloudflair actually looses a small amount of money on 2.5x the revenue. However, Cloudflairs market cap is about 100x that of RM's and that's because they have a growing business, in a growing industry and can easily become profitable when needed. That's probably not possible for RM and their very pricey lineup of players.
It is not the comparison to make, which is why I focused on the league’s tv revenue which is what is relevant , i only bought up Madrid’s valuation to ask where is Laliga ‘s $5B coming from.
Real Madrid owns the Bernabeu a valuable piece of real estate in the heart of Madrid and many other assets the Real Madrid brand is very monetizable .
Sports team have been consistently growing businesses in every major sport in both Europe and US. Comparing a sports team and SaaS company is hardly going to be apples to apples with different asset , revenue, brand and monopoly and strategic profiles.
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The risk to the league due to piracy is the value of the television deal. The buyer paying $1B/yr (DAZN) is the reason for this enforcement.
If Cloudflare wants to buy this problem away that is what they need — The $1B deal growing 5-6% YoY and get into the streaming business .
Prime alone is expected to spend $4B on live sports rights this year. It is very expensive space with everyone from Apple to Google and Netflix to sovereign funds going deeper every year .
The streaming revenues otherwise aren’t expected to be massively grow so this is the content play that is least risk - compared to investing in say 4-5 blockbuster movies or tv series this is far more predictable and consistent revenue stream.
I'm not sure where that number comes from but I don't think it's right, and I don't think that's how La Liga is structured anyway. It's governed by an association of all of the teams in the top two flights of spanish football.
Right. The number is the result of Claude adding up the public information about the aggregate value of all those clubs plus the association. So it would mean buying all the clubs; or at least enough to have a controlling interest in the association. Clearly there are big challenges to that (e.g. clubs not being for sale for one). But I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. Of course if you're just trying to play the money = power card then it'd probably be cheaper to purchase the influence of some government officials.
Did Claude point out that under this proposal the Spanish clubs would be bared from entering European competitions? Since the clubs under the same ownership (more than 30%) can't enter the same UEFA club competitions.
Not to be pendantic (but to be pendantic) 80psi is the correct pressure for 28mm tires ridden briskly on good roads. At least according to ye olde Silca tire pressure calculator. Back in the day when folks ran 23mm tires they would typically run above 100psi (though that may not have been optimal...).
That calculator is wrong. Cycling people have been overinflating their tires for ages (as well as using too-narrow tires), with the assumption that the ground is perfectly smooth. Lower pressures yield higher efficiency (and better comfort) on rougher surfaces.
I'm pretty sure there are folks involved in doing drug testing for many sports so saying are doing nothing seems hyperbolic. Are there specific things you think the bodies in charge of drug testing should be doing but aren't? Genuinely curious.
Not sure how this helps. Olympic events already have relative rating systems that ranks all the participant: pretty complicated and sport dependent systems that determine qualification for the games and competition amongst all the competitors at the games. The problem how to have separate competitions for different groups of participants when there isn't a universally shared agreement on who should be in which group.
If you have a relative skill rating system, then there's no need to split competitors into groups. But if you insist, then you can split them based on skill ratings (define a rating range for beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc). And for games with one-on-one matchups, sampling from a gaussian centered on each player's skill rating is good enough.
It doesn't.In tennis a 14 UTR whatever wins against a 13 UTR whatever. UTR is your effectiveness rating against every other player. Same in chess with ELO.
The issue is woman would disappear from profesional sports. Sinners 16.27 rating means that he double bagels Sabalenkas 13.29 essentially 100% of the time. The 500th ATP player has a UTR of 13.81, half a point is quite a bit stronger, do he's still very much stronger than Sabalenka. You probably have to start looking well into the thousand somethings for something that is consisently beaten by her.
Only the top 200 players make money, the top 100 good money, and the top 50 ridiculous money.
So women would not be in something like top 2000 of tennis players or worse. Which would basically remove any incentive for women to participate in pro tennis at all.
I don't get how you can compare Sinner's UTR against Sabalenka's when they're based to two disparate group scores? Doesn't there need to be at least a modicum of cross-pollination to make a meaningful comparison?
There is some cross pollination. Women can play vs men, just usually don't. I'm fairly certain singles UTR is universal across players, it only distinguishes between doubles and singles UTR.
UTR can also include unranked games if one of the players submits a score and the other approves it.
Basically proving my point. Very few women in top chess. Currently there are 0 women in top 100 chess players. Only 3 women were ever in the top 100 chess players. And chess is not even a game where men have a natural advantage like in almost all of the physical sports.
I don't deny that there are very few women in top chess, but that wasn't your point. You said it would end up being all men at all the skill rating levels, which is not true. Take chess as an example: there are a lot more women at around 1500 elo than at 2500 elo. So if you host an intermediate-level tournament just for players around 1500 elo, plenty of women will participate.
The ratio of men to women who are at 1500 Elo in chess is like worse than 90:1, so no, you host an intermediate level tournament and it will be almost all men. Well, mostly boys but that’s current chess for you.
But it’s not just that. If there are no top women in any kind of leagues in chess, that will only further discourage women from participating competitively in chess in the first place.
Note that most competitive women chess players play in women’s only tournaments even though they can easily join open men’s tournaments as well. For various reasons, one being that these women’s only tournaments are where they have the best chance of winning or being in the top k for prizes.
The male-to-female ratio at 1500 elo is not 90:1, but more like 9:1. 10% is a visible minority.
But I see where our disagreement is. You think there ought to be more women in chess. I think different people can do different things, so women don't need to match men in every statistic and vice versa. If we open it up to universal participation and it turns out to be a male-dominated game, then let it be. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
> I think different people can do different things, so women don't need to match men in every statistic and vice versa. If we open it up to universal participation and it turns out to be a male-dominated game, then let it be. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
You don't have a say though, others want to see women play chess against each others and happily pay for and organize that event. Or do you want to make female only events illegal? As long as they are legal they will continue to be held.
Any tool that auto-updates carries the implication that behavior will change over time. And one criteria for being a skilled professional is having expert understanding of ones tools. That includes understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the tools (including variability of output) and making appropriate choices as a result. If you don't feel you can produce professional code with LLM's then certainly you shouldn't use them. That doesn't mean others can't leverage LLM's as part of their process and produce professional results. Blindly accepting LLM output and vibe coding clearly doesn't consistently product professional results. But that's different than saying professionals can't use LLM in ways that are productive.
Even if one-shot LLM performance has plateaued (which I'm not convinced this data shows given omission of recent models that are widely claimed to be better) that missing the point that I see in my own work. The improved tooling and agent-based approaches that I'm using now make the LLM one-shot performance only a small part of the puzzle in terms of how AI tools have accelerated the time from idea to decent code. For instance the planning dialogs I now have with Claude are an important part of what's speeding things up for me. Also, the iterative use of AI to identify, track, and take care of small coding tasks (none of which are particularly challenging in terms of benchmarks) is simply more effective. Could this all have been done with the LLM engines of late 2024. Perhaps, but I think the fine-tuning (and conceivably the system prompts) that make the current LLM's more effective at agent-centered workflows (including tool-use) are a big part of it. One-shot task performance at challenging tasks is an interesting, certainly foundational, metric. But I don't think it captures the important advances I see in how LLM's have gotten better over the last year in ways that actually matter to me. I rarely have a well-defined programming challenge and the obligation to solve it in a single-shot.
Seems like the ability to distinguish LLM versus 'good human' writing depends on the size of the writing sample you have to look at (assuming you think it can be done). And that HN-scale posts are unlikely to be a long enough for useful discernment.
Within a few years, LLMs will be indistinguishable from human text.
Think how easy it was to tell the differences a year or two ago. By 2030 there will be no way to ever tell.
The same is true of all video, and all generated content. The death of the Internet comes not from spam, or Facebook nonsense, but instead from the fact that soon?
You'll never know of you're interacting with a human or not.
Why like a post? Reply to it? Interact online? Why read a "news" story?
If I was X or Meta or Reddit, I would be looking at the end.
Teslas have the wrong sense-gear, coupled with immense randomness. Pesky pedestrians. Waymo seems to be doing quite well in comparison. Regardless, a cat isn't a dog, and real-world navigation isn't posting on Facebook.
It would be better to make a direct point, such as "It will never be flawless". That's not really a problem here, it only need be flawless most of the time.
My point was more just that assigning a year to "no way to ever tell" seems as fraught as assigning a year to virtually any technological achievement we haven't seen yet. :) My strong suspicion is that by 2030, LLMs will be everywhere in a real sense, but the output quality won't be materially better than we have now -- the LLMs will simply be much more efficient and less resource-intensive (and, perhaps, the training corpuses in common use will be less full of legal minefields than the current batch). I could absolutely be wrong, but I don't think so.
LLMs won’t destroy social media any more than it already is.
I don’t think I have ever had a meaningful human interaction with anyone on Twitter, Meta, or Reddit without already knowing them from somewhere else. Those sites are about interacting with information, not people. It’s purely transactional. Bots, spam, and bad actors are not new.
Meta has been a dumpster fire of spam and bots for over 15 years, the overwhelming majority of its existence.
Reddit has some pockets of meaningful interaction but you have to find them and the partitioned nature means that culture doesn’t spread across the site. It’s also full of bots and shills.
Nobody tells stories about meeting people on Twitter. At best it’s a microblog platform and at worst it’s X.
Common people go to such sites for updates from friends, or to follow celebrities.
Their friends will start using more and more AI, ans celebrities will become all AI.
Why read a friend's page, if it's just AI drivel. Same for a celebrity.
It doesn't even need tp be true. Burned once, people will never trust again. The humiliation of writing messages that your friend only has a bot summarize, and reply to, will kill it.
Imagine you speak to your friend, and they haven't even read any measages you wrote, but their AI responded? And you in turn. Imagine you've had dozens of conversations, but it was with a bot instead of your friend.
Your trust will be eroded.
SPAM doesn't act like your friend. A bot does.
And the inability to distinguish will be the clincher. And yes, you won't know the difference, not after the AI is trained on their sent mail folder.
Please expand more on the idea that LLM's are not trained on English to begin with. Not sure what you mean by this as clearly many LLM's are trained on data that contains a lot of English. For instance GPT-1 seems to have been trained on a purely English corpus.
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