Even more 'disquieting' when you take into account who's currently the president of US.

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will." - Donald Trump

When I was reading https://ai-2027.com, which is quite a scary read, I couldn't help but think the US president being mentioned in the story acts too rational compared to the real world. It can get a lot crazier than this fictional piece.

The art of the deal, baby

These people are willfully ignorant to ignore what was obviously going on here, that it was a negotiating tactic.

And every time it works, they still don't acknowledge it. Would he have blown up bridges and power plants? Quite possibly. Would he have dropped a nuke? Obviously not.

Yeah this is bad timing for frontier progress.

It does send an analytics event when you’re swearing based on a keyword filter (something like is_negative:true), presumably as a signal that the model isn’t performing well this session, but who knows?

With hardcoded flags like “sendClaudeMessages” and “sendChatgptMessages”, they weren’t even trying to hide it.

WBD price at this moment is just $25.28. I think there are some complicated conditions associated with the terms.

The exchanges are also closed.

Premarket open

If Waymos do not use local models it would be a horrible decision.

Don’t forget the tax savings.

Dunno why I can't reply to your other comment explaining what you mean but hot damn. False evaluation of a cheap painting to save on taxes? That's mental.

What tax savings? How does that work?

Different tax loopholes depending on region etc, but basically like this:

I’m a billionaire earning $100M this year.

I owe $40M as taxes for that. (Too much!)

I find a dumb banana painting by a starving artist.

I buy it from him for $1000.

I wait 6 months.

I go to a museum to get it appraised by “professionals”.

I pay the professional appraiser’s wife $50K as a gift.

The appraiser says the painting is now worth $30M!

Wow that’s awesome, I have such a keen eye for art.

You know what, I’m gonna donate this painting to a museum instead because I’m such a patron of art and culture.

Oh, look at that, I get a tax rebate for the value of my donated painting ($30M)

Now I only have to pay $40M - $30M = $10M in taxes on my $100M income.

There’s more nuance to it in practice, but that’s the gist of it.

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Edit: For some reason I can't reply to the comments below so I'm gonna do it here.

> That wouldn't explain the price here, since in your scam the whole idea is to buy cheap and donate dear. not buy for 139M

Now we're getting in the details but it's very suspicious for an appraiser to appraise a work of art from an unknown artist at millions. But it's not that suspicious if they take Van Gogh's Starry Night which was previously appraised at $500M to now be valued at $1B. this way the deca-billionaire still gets to save his taxes while appraiser avoids suspicion.

> As far as I know, that's not how taxes work. You can't get a rebate for the amount of taxes you would have paid, you can get a deduction for the amount of money you made.

There are a lot of loopholes in the complicated tax system for the ultra-wealthy, not for us. This video (still a simple explanation in an animated way) covers a few more of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHy07B-UHkE

As far as I know, that's not how taxes work. You can't get a rebate for the amount of taxes you would have paid, you can get a deduction for the amount of money you made.

So:

You made $100M owe $40M in taxes.

Your painting is worth $30M! You have such a keen eye for art.

Now you made $130M and owe $50M in taxes.

You donate the painting, you're back at having made $100M and owing $40M.

Otherwise we'd all choose not to pay tax and donate our tax money to charitable institutions instead.

I’m pretty sure he’s right in how taxes work. There’s no moment where the value of the painting is realized but you are allowed to deduct the FMV if you make enough and if the donation goes to the charity’s exempt use (which it will if it’s a museum or whatever).

So if you buy painting for a dollar and wait a year then next year you make $3m and the painting is now worth $1m then if you donate it, your AGI is reduced to $3m-min($1m, 30% of income) = $3m-$900k.

You don’t count the appreciation of the painting as income. You don’t even count it as LTCG if you don’t sell it.

I think it also applies to stock option awards. When the startup I was at was acquired some people were talking about it.

There was a subtle mistake: the 30M would be deducted from taxable income (in Canada I was only able to deduct from capital gains)

That wouldn't explain the price here, since in your scam the whole idea is to buy cheap and donate dear. not buy for 139M

Yes, there are lots of “loopholes” available if you are willing to commit tax fraud! But that’s something anyone can do, it’s not particularly harder to lie about the value of charitable donations if you’re not ultra-wealthy.

Loopholes are by definition legal.

Bribing an appraiser to get a larger deduction on a donation is cut-and-dried tax fraud. It’s not a “loophole”.

Correct. Fraud is fraud, loopholes are loopholes. One is legal, the other is not.

Or put another way - a loophole in law/regulations is found, then the law/regulation gets changed to close the loophole. If it were not legal this change would not be necessary - you would just prosecute.

Your scheme involves getting a fake appraisal for a value higher than the market price. But this does not explain high prices at an auction.

This item didn’t get sold yet or? It’s says it’s valued at 9million. So somebody gave it that number.

> Now it has become the highest-priced comic book ever sold, fetching $9.12m (£7m) at auction.

Interesting they didn’t post any benchmark results - lmarena/artificial analysis etc. I would’ve thought they’d be testing it behind the scenes the same way they did with Gemini 3.

Too small for Google to care about.

Large tech molochs don't care about any name, it seems. Their power and weight makes the name point to them. Seek on "Amazon" and find that, oh the 7th Wonder of Nature the "Amazon rainforest" is ranked second after some random Big Tech company run by a guy named Jeff. The "lungs of the earth" vs. cheap package delivery and AWS dashboards.

I mean, yeah. What percentage of searches for "Amazon" in today's world do you think is going to not be about acquiring cheap shit very quickly? I would expect the tech company to be a better answer than most when someone searches for Amazon. Searching for "the amazon" gives the expected results as that's how it is more commonly referred. So it does seems like your search query as performed was just a bad search

I bet it would be a few percent less and the world would be a fraction of a percent better if the first result was the rainforest.

I wonder how much they pay Google for the top spot.

Amazon does not need to pay Google for this. There is no world where Google puts an organic result about the rainforest in the top spot, because it's not what most users are looking for.

At most there might be a world where Google puts someone else's ad above the organic results.

Well, we also know Google isn't trying to help the user leave Google's site as quickly as possible, because they get more ad money when the user clicks on a few pages or does a few searches before finding what they want.

The website does label some relatively harmless elements as ‘dark patterns’, but out of your ‘really bad ones’, I don’t see ‘Competition’ as being a dark pattern.

Competition is a fundamental part of Play. Humans (and other animals) are social creatures and learn via playing and competing with others.

Can people play games by themselves? Yes.

Is competitive play bad or a dark pattern? Not at all.