Oh, for sure. I’ve noticed a lot of other news sites simply citing them or republishing their content. To clarify, I didn’t mean what I said in any kind of “I didn’t respect them much before” kind of way. I heavily respect them, as well as ProPublica, like another person mentioned earlier. I just hold even more respect from them after this.
Gives me a little extra respect for AP than before. Don’t comply with fascists. Make them show just how incredibly sensitive and ridiculous they are.
Other nations that did away with smaller denominations simply round to the nearest denomination of the smallest unit they have available (e.g. $0.05), so $0.96 would come out to $0.95. When using card, prices stay the same, since digital money is easily divisible into smaller amounts without needing to worry about issuance.
There’s also the collective cost argument, which essentially means that since this cost to produce currency is a direct inflationary impact on the money we all hold, and is an expense by the government, which represents the populace, then if a penny costs $0.03 to make, if it takes you more than, say, 10 seconds to get pennies out to pay with them, your hourly wage is actually higher than the time you wasted just fiddling around with that penny.
Can we make a penny for less?
Probably, but what’s the point even keeping the penny around if it’s fundamentally useless to most transactions? Nobody can buy any individual item with a penny anymore, nobody pays for any items with a combination of just pennies since they’re still too tiny to easily amount to a value that’s worth your time to count (e.g. counting 25 pennies to buy a lollipop is extraordinarily tedious compared to just pulling out a single quarter, or two dimes and a nickle), and their primary purpose at this point is just to account for businesses pricing their goods at one penny under the nearest dollar amount to trick your brain into thinking it’s cheaper. It’s a fundamentally hostile currency to store, use, and receive change in.
If a penny gets used 4 times it covers its cost.
It does not, because each use does not generate $0.01 in revenue for the government. Let’s say it costs $0.05 to make a penny. Every 20 pennies produced collectively costs everybody $1. It doesn’t matter how many times that penny is used, because it still costs 5x more to produce than it will provide back to the government, as a result of its existence. Even if it’s used 5 times, will the government get $0.05 as a result of that? Of course not.
Let’s say each penny costs $1,000 to make. Making 1,000,000 pennies would cost a billion dollars. That means to produce $10,000 in pennies, you’d devalue everybody’s money, collectively, by $1B. Obviously, pennies don’t cost this much, but at scale, I hope you can see that even the estimated $0.037/penny it costs adds up to significantly larger amounts, and those amounts do have a meaningful effect on the economy.
It’s a matter of inflation. If it costs more to produce the money, but you retain the same demand to use money, then you will cause inflation, because you will have to create more currency, to fund the creation of currency.
It’s not a matter of cost-per-use, it’s a matter of cost-vs-revenue.
True, but I’m of the belief that we’ll probably see a continuation of the existing trend of building and improving upon existing models, rather than always starting entirely from scratch. For instance, you’ll almost always see nearly any newly released model talk about the performance of their Llama version, because it just produces better results when you combine it with the existing quality of Llama.
I think we’ll see a similar trend now, just with R1 variants instead of Llama variants being the primary new type used. It’s just fundamentally inefficient to start over from scratch every time, so it makes sense that newer iterations would be built directly on previous ones.
So are these techiques so novel and breaktrough?
The general concept, no. (it’s reinforcement learning, something that’s existed for ages)
The actual implementation, yes. (training a model to think using a separate XML section, reinforcing with the highest quality results from previous iterations using reinforcement learning that naturally pushes responses to the highest rewarded outputs) Most other companies just didn’t assume this would work as well as throwing more data at the problem.
This is actually how people believe some of OpenAI’s newest models were developed, but the difference is that OpenAI was under the impression that more data would be necessary for the improvements, and thus had to continue training the entire model with additional new information, and they also assumed that directly training in thinking times was the best route, instead of doing so via reinforcement learning. DeepSeek decided to simply scrap that part altogether and go solely for reinforcement learning.
Will we now have a burst of deepseek like models everywhere?
Probably, yes. Companies and researchers are already beginning to use this same methodology. Here’s a writeup about S1, a model that performs up to 27% better than OpenAI’s best model. S1 used Supervised Fine Tuning, and did something so basic, that people hadn’t previously thought to try it: Just making the model think longer by modifying terminating XML tags.
This was released days after R1, based on R1’s initial premise, and creates better quality responses. Oh, and of course, it cost $6 to train.
So yes, I think it’s highly probable that we see a burst of new models, or at least improvements to existing ones. (Nobody has a very good reason to make a whole new model of a different name/type when they can simply improve the one they’re already using and have implemented)
To be fair, honestly, I’d like to think that Fascists at least know that $0.03 > $0.01 is a bad trade.
This is what I think would be most probable too. It’s still too socially stigmatized to outright say something that effectively just means “I’m a Nazi,” so they’d have to play it off as some kind of joke.
I do, however, think a lot of them would suddenly, for no reason in particular, begin saying things like “Well, Hitler was a bad guy, but he did have some good ideas…” while going on to describe some of the worst ideas known to man.
The Nazis could claim you are in violation of your laws if you support “pedophiles” (by which they mean “trans”). Or supporting “enemy invaders” (by which they mean “immigrants”). Even mentioning “Luigi” could qualify as a violation.
Nazism, however, can be more objectively defined than single-word terms, as you’ve used here.
For instance, if someone says the words “Heil Hitler” while raising their hands in a traditional Nazi salute, there isn’t exactly room for a fascist to go “weeeeelllll but you saying ‘black lives matter’ with your fist up is the same thing, actually,” if the law explicitly states that saying the exact words “Heil Hitler” while raising your hand in that salute is the specific thing required to get you imprisoned. Laws can be more objectively defined than “pedophiles,” “supporting enemy invaders,” or “Nazis.”
Never give the government a power that you would not give to the Nazis.
Nazis simply ignore the law. Trump is quite literally doing it right now, He’s passing executive orders he doesn’t actually have the legal capacity to enforce, which is then leading to things like congresspeople being prevented from entering buildings they have a right to enter, or databases being given to people without legally required security credentials. They don’t care what the law was, they care what it will be once they’re done screwing with it.
Whether or not you pass a law prohibiting explicit behaviors that are categorically harmful to society will not change whether or not they are then capable of manipulating the laws to do what they wanted to do to you regardless.
It will, however, heavily reduce the chances of them coming into power, and having the ability to misuse any laws or power they may have in the first place
That conclusion does not arise from my arguments.
And yes, it obviously does. You stated that we should not censor Nazis because Nazis in power later on could use that law to suppress others. The same logic applies to any other regulation or prohibition. We shouldn’t pass gun control legislation because it’s possible someone uses it to take the good people’s guns away. We shouldn’t imprison people for rape because someone could redefine what rape means to mean non-married people having sex. We shouldn’t jail pedophiles because they could redefine trans people as pedophiles simply for existing.
It’s the same logic all the way down. There is nothing different when it comes to imprisonment for Nazi-aligned speech/actions, or other dangerous speech/actions. All of them can be prohibited to an extent, even though there’s a possibility that the power dynamic could then be reversed later on by the same group of people being prohibited.
Look, I’m not going to keep going on this because I think it’s clear neither of us are changing our stances. Send a reply if you want, I’ll gladly read it, and give it some thought, but I’m done trying to continue a conversation if you think we shouldn’t try to stop Nazis because Nazis could possibly get in power and stop us instead. That applies to any regulation against any group that could possibly come into power, and I would encourage you to look back at the examples I provided, stop, and think about just how different the logic really is to the idea of censoring Nazis, because I think you’ll find it is, in fact, not different at all.
This argument boils down to “You want the government to do a good thing, but bad people can abuse the government to do the opposite.” Sure, that happens sometimes.
But following your logic, I guess all laws shouldn’t exist then. After all, if we give the government the ability to do anything against any citizen, they might use it in a bad way! This argument is fundamentally unworkable, because it doesn’t just apply to enforcing rules regarding speech, it applies to all rules.
Yes, I believe the government should enforce the standards I believe are correct. No, I do not believe that simply by enforcing such standards the power is magically granted for them to use it incorrectly, in a way that they wouldn’t be capable of had my preferred regulation not been implemented. Whether Nazis are or aren’t allowed speech won’t stop a bad government from simply censoring acceptable speech, if the government is acting in bad faith. They will do so regardless of if anti-Nazi speech regulations were in place prior.
Should we never attempt to implement any positive policy if it grants power that could theoretically be abused?
I don’t think it’s a good idea to police it through the use of governmental force.
Oh it absolutely is.
If you don’t think it should be socially tolerated, then great, regulations are how we enforce social tolerance in a manner that isn’t just “I don’t like you, please stop, but also I won’t do anything to you if you keep doing it.”
Furthermore, and this is something you’ll probably see brought up a lot when using that talking point, there is a paradox of tolerance that cannot be avoided when it comes to issues like Nazism. Nazi rhetoric is inherently discriminatory and intolerant. If you allow it to flourish, it kills off all other forms of tolerance until only itself is left. If you don’t tolerate Nazi rhetoric, it doesn’t come to fruition and destroy other forms of tolerance.
Any ideology that actively preaches intolerance towards non-intolerant groups must not be tolerated, otherwise tolerance elsewhere is destroyed.
(This mini comic explains the paradox well, as well.)
To anyone bemoaning BlueSky’s lack of federation, check out Free Our Feeds.
It’s a campaign to create a public interest foundation independent from the Bluesky team (although the Bluesky team has said they support them) that will build independent infrastructure, like a secondary “relay” as an alternative to Bluesky’s that can still communicate across the same protocol (The “AT Protocol”) while also doing developer grants for the development of further social applications built on open protocols like the AT Protocol or ActivityPub.
They have the support of an existing 501c(3), and their open letter has been signed by people you might find interesting, such as Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).
By “convince,” they mean:
Yes, very convincing, heavily coercive even!