Ignoring the gamblers losing money because they lack insider information, the harm is that you changed the incentive for war. It is motivated by money for the gamblers, not military or political objectives. The difference between this and rigged sports gambling is that people die. They die on a whim and they die unnecessarily. I shouldn’t have to explain why people dying is bad.
- we can maybe get some limited information about the likelihood of events through a combination of wisdom of crowds and insider trading
cons:
- gambling addiction ruins lives, beyond a shadow of a doubt. People (often people with financial interest) like to argue this point, but I don't have space to write
- insiders essentially steal money from people betting based on other information. You might argue that those other people should have known. But why bet at all? its irrational. Yet people do it regardless, and they still don't deserve to have their things stolen. Poker where another player can see your cards is a stupid game.
- it clearly, unambiguously signals corruption to all and sundry. Connections let you get rich at the expense of others. Some people might not care as much but I truly think this is the biggest con of them all. Why behave the way we would all wish leaders would, if you have proof other leaders are making it big with no consequences. How would you not feel like a fool, for your morals? We should be making it as easy as possible to do the right thing that benefits all.
- it incentivises terrible behavior. Betting that a war won't happen, or a person won't die, or that there won't be an explosion at a crowded area in downtown x city at y time, is essentially the same as putting a bounty out for somebody to do it. They can bet that it will happen, and then go and make it so, and collect your reward money.
It's a rigged game. If there's a bet that player X will foul player Y, without proper safeguards, player X can bet on himself and then intentionally player player Y. The actual harm is that by the rules of the betting, no one should know the outcome who could also bet on the game, so the losers are being robbed of their money.
In this particular context, it's also possible that there are illicit transfers of money without being immediately noticeable. Bribery could happen at the highest levels with it being very difficult to trace and prosecute.
Like any insider trading you are transferring money from the public to yourself. More interestingly for the prediction market angle: you are leaking secret information by doing that. If you make big trades in anticipation of specific events other market participants can see it. That could be extremely serious if say it endangers a military operation.
If an insider, say a member of the Department of Defense (or War, duh) bets a certain date: they could internally influence the decision to execute on that date rather than possibly a better (earlier?) date that could yield less damage or loss to either side.
If you are not an insider with special info and special access, no matter what you do in the market, you eventually lose to the insiders. So, if you blur the details a bit, you're just giving your money to these people.
The rational move would be to just not participate in a market where insider trading happens. I don't really understand why people aren't avoiding these markets like the plague.
Insiders fleecing dumb people. Then dumb people get pissed their finances are destroyed and they'll never pay off their debt or support a family or attract a mate, and so they go down a rabbit hole of insanity and depression on social media, getting conned by influencers and AI slop and then vote for whatever the rage du jour some grifter politician is selling, or worse they shoot up a school...
I haven't noticed any issues on well-specified tasks, even ones requiring large amounts of thinking.
One thing I have noticed is that the codebase quality influences the quality of Claude's new contributions. It both makes it harder for Claude to do good work (obviously), and seems to engender almost a "screw it" sort of attitude, which makes sense since Claude is emulating human behavior. Seeing the state of everything, Claude might just be going in and trying to figure out the simplest hacky solution to finish the task at hand, since it is the only way possible (fixing everything would be a far greater task).
Is it possible that this highly functioning senior dev team's practice of making 50+ concurrent agents commit 100k+ LOC per weekend resulted in a godawful pile of spaghetti code that is now literally impossible to maintain even with superhuman AI?
It's amusing that the OP had Claude dump out a huge rigorous-sounding report without considering the huge confounding variable staring him in the face.
My intuition is that since AI assistants are fictional characters in a story being autocompleted by an LLM, mechanisms that are interpretable as human interactions with language and appear in the pretraining data have a surprising advantage over mechanisms that are more like speculation about how the brain works or abstract concepts.
Somebody needs to coin a new term for the scattershot zero-thought AI griping that is pervasive in online comments these days. Meatslop?
Obviously it's going to be more productive for a manufacturer to do a years-long curing test on 100 likely candidates instead of 100 random mixes. They obviously already screen candidates through traditional methods, but if this AI technique improves accuracy, all the better.
The current strategy of the AI hype machine is to exhaust people's reserves of attention by presenting a never-ending stream of hard-to-verify "positive" claims. It's Gish Gallop done on the Internet scale with a never-ending parade of tech influencers, proxy "journalists" and low-value accounts. The whole strategy aims for saturation and demoralized acceptance.
It's no surprise that people readjust their immediate reactions by expressing hostility and skepticism about anything AI-related without spending much time on analysis. In fact, it's an entirely rational repones.
Complaining about it without acknowledging the larger picture is disingenuous.
In this particular case, using the term "machine learning" would likely avoid the immediate negative reaction.
The Gaussian Processes underpinning this work are hardly a product of the 'AI Hype Machine' - they've been around for decades, have strong statistical underpinnings, and are being widely explored for experimental design across many disciplines. Reflexive and poorly-informed backlash to any variety of machine learning is no more productive than blindly hyping up LLMs.
Meta Platforms, Inc featuring this technology with a title announcing “AI for American-produced cement and concrete” is, on the other hand, 1000% a product of the AI Hype Machine.
Sure, it's clearly marketing. I think a private company pursuing marketing via open research with open source code (including datasets) is a good trade. A hypey blogpost + research is better than no blogpost and no research.
Was that the one immediately after the great paradigm shift of November 2025, and before the great paradigm shift of January 2026? I think I remember it.
There was no such paradigm shift. LLMs still suck just as much as they did before, in the exact same ways they did before. In 6 months you'll be trying to BS us about the "great paradigm shift of summer 2026".
Reddit's top contributors are decent, but there is an elite niche of people (granted, mostly of the technical variety) who somewhat regularly show up on HN but do not contribute much on Reddit.
It does help, of course, that HN is moderated in good faith and has a more pervasive commitment to self-moderation than Reddit has ever had (outside a few very niche subreddits).
They both share the same problem: nobody who gripes incorrectly like this suffers any consequences. So you may as well gripe at anything and everything. Griping feels good and you rarely ever get downvotes on HN because griping is such a part of the site culture, whether you're incorrect or not. There's a recent HN guideline about being curmudgeonly but we all know that guidelines on this site are rarely followed.
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