Nothing is free. We want both low cost and high quality healthcare.
This means we need to have ways in incentivize innovation (AI diagnostics, robotic procedures, drug discovery, deeper R&D).
Free Markets (with government controls against monopoly) are generally better than governments at delivering cost and quality improvements, but healthcare in most countries is somewhere between “100% not a market” and “70% not a market” (the US). In many cases, governments also actively create and enforce monopolies (eg AMA or local hospitals in the US).
There are a million other things but part of what is required for markets to work is skin in the game, which the UK, Canada, and the US all do bad jobs of in their own ways.
Some say medicine has no elasticity. I don’t think that is true for 90% of spend (for gunshot wounds, maybe, but most spending is on chronic diseases where multiple providers and approaches are available and people could price shop).
I would like to see more countries experiment with more free market healthcare. It’s remarkably effective for many pieces of healthcare.
My 2 cents, all these high level videos kind of suck, even the professional ones, when they don’t show the product. Even videos I produce for this purpose! I don’t think this is that bad. I’ve seen worse.
3.6 Flash would be a great model at 3.0 flash pricing. At this pricing, its thoroughly trounced by about 10 models on cost/performance including Grok 4.5.
3.5 Flash-ite would be a great model at 2.5 flash-lite pricing, as is, its trounced by many models including Deepseek v4 Flash.
As is, they are thoroughly outclassed for most usecases. I will say the one area where i do see Gemini punching above its weight class is in tasks that are effectively "Google this for me" / knowledge stuff. So it does have a role, and I do use it. So while I think Google is still in a strong position overall, they are really stuck as a tier 2 AI player right now with text models. They are tier 1 in bio, images, and video.
The issue is not investment at all, we want more investment into housing.
But you are absolutely correct you cannot both want housing to be a good investment (increase in value faster than inflation) and an affordable (drop in price lower than inflation).
Don’t subsidize demand. Allow more supply. Private homeowners, big developers, all of the above. Build.
I am generally for a light government touch, but I think excessive light and sound are forms of pollution and should be generally regulated in a not-overly burdensome way (give people fix it tickets etc). Policing excessive light, and excessive blue light, would be pretty trivial. And I think cameras that automatically ticket loud vehicles would be amazing.
I counted the other day and there were at least 12 different providers with "better than Opus 4.5 performance" on Artificial Analysis, Opus 4.5 being Anthropic's December release that many say kicked off the latest acceleration. Which is totally insane competition, particularly given how low switching costs. I personally think that Opus 4.5 level performance is sufficient for most apps and usecases, as they get deployed.
I’m not categorically against bans of this kind but I’m pretty sure everyone knows these are fake. I am worried about freedom of speech slippery slope issues, and also San Francisco (a relatively small eccentric city) trying to dictate US policy.
I actually think a reasonable strategy of Google is to focus on biotech, where the demand for compute is infinite, and focus on cost effective solutions with really good search for other verticals (eg legal, accounting, etc), and offer loss leaders in coding to undercut Anthropic/openai, with “cheap just behind the frontier” models.
They are not really doing this, but it makes sense to me.
This paints everyone as right or left, which I don’t find accurate or helpful. I think other labels even if they meant the same category, to be more helpful.
I don’t know if it’s a great business model but it makes perfect sense to me. Open models when fine tuned are capable at better than frontier performance at a fraction of the price for many (probably most) domain specific tasks. If companies help make that easy to implement, there is value to capture. But I kind of like Unsloths model here which is to be really good at just layer, and not bothering with building their own models.
This looks similar in concept to the Midjourney health, but much more about multiple modalities (different surface scanners). Its interesting, I do think it could be better then dermatologists at picking up skin issues if widely deployed.
I do think this would be interesting if they made these easy to finetune, as I do think this level of intelligence is likely sufficient for many applications and could be extremely cheap to run.
Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.
I would say that overall there are pros and cons to this, I really want to be allowed to use agents on my behalf, and don't want to see sites prevent me from doing this. On the other hand, I do recognize there are cases when its good/ok to have only humans allowed to take some action. In my opinion, the line is likely when you are representing you are a human, its ok to prevent bots. otherwise, you can't.
I stayed in downtown LA recently and looked like the set from the walking dead. Literally blocks of people wandering in traffic. I guess you could argue you definitely don't need flock cameras to see the problem, but also I don't know how anyone would not do everything possible to stop it.
I agree with parent, the full quote is: "The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for."
I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.