A “one time tax” is pure third worldism. It’s like Chicago trying to close its deficit by selling off its parking meters. But Brin should propose an alternative tax that is sustainable.
Keep telling yourself that you are richer because the number is bigger. If you want to be even richer move to Zimbabwe where everyone is a zillionaire.
We are all poorer than 20 or 30 years ago. Most cities are filled with people chained to work, very few people are actually enjoying time off.
Roads, parks, beaches, rivers, the nice places people should be enjoying with family and friends are mostly empty but the roads and workplaces are overflowing.
The things you’re describing aren’t “alternatives to driving.” They perform a different function. Most Americans don’t aspire to live like Chinese people packed into high rises with 0.8 kids taking the train to work. They want to live where they want to live, then take their 2-3 kids to school and themselves to work 10-15 miles away without having to plan their lives around a public transit schedule.
I'm American, and I don't normally drive, because I use busses, bikes, and trains to get to my destinations. I sold my last (hopefully ever) car over a year ago.
I'm sorry to shatter the dreams of most Americans, but the world has finite resources. Buying a car when you're poor is hard, because cars are expensive, because they are extremely resource demanding. Even with all the subsidies drivers receive, they still usually struggle with the cost.
By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
> By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
I go to Japan once or twice a year. Even in Japan, many people take regional rail or (gasp!) busses, and those don't run every 5 minutes.
A majority of American households (58.4%) are childless and ~80% of Americans live in urban areas per the US Census Bureau. I think you might be misreading the desires of most Americans, based on the data.
I agree Americans love their cars, but will they love them with oil prices above $100-$120/barrel persistently? To be determined.
> Personal preference plays a significant role in changing attitudes toward parenthood. Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids, while 44% preferred to focus on other priorities. Financial concerns also weighed heavily, with 36% citing the cost of raising children—three times the rate among childless people over 50.
> According to the 2020–2024 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, approximately 286 million Americans (roughly 94 percent of the population) live in metropolitan statistical areas. Just 17.7 million people, about 6 percent, live entirely outside any metro or micropolitan area.
> The popular image of America as a land of small towns and open plains is, statistically speaking, a minority experience. The story of 21st-century America is, above all, a story of cities.
The census definition of “urban area” means nothing. I technically live in an “urban area” according to the census definition, but there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me.
The same is true for the definition of “childless” people. It counts my parents, who don’t have children living at home, but have my kids coming over to their house multiple times per week. Only 15% of women never have children. Most people arrange their living circumstances with the goal of eventually having kids. And once the kids grow up and leave, most people want to stay in the same area.
>Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids
Your 57% lacks relevance to the current conversation because it is 57% of a small
percentage of Americans.
42 to 43% of Americans are either under 18 or a parent of an under-18-yo. Plus of course some outside that group will soon become parents. And some are empty-nesters who prefer to keep on living in the neighborhood they lived in when they were raising their children.
A growing gap between how many kids people want and how many they have militates against copying the dense housing patterns of Asian countries that have the lowest birth rates in the world.
Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility. And realized fertility is trending lower globally, as shown by my numerous citations. I’m willing to bet on this if you want, as a demographic scholar.
> Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility.
Sure, people are having less kids because we banned building housing and then filled the housing we have with government subsidized illegal immigrants. What’s your point?
People are having less kids because women didn’t want them before, they just have the power to not have them now. This is covered extensively in the citations I provided in the comment you replied to. Housing might be a component, but it is not the root cause. Children are a luxury good now, not an extra hand on the farm.
~40% of annual pregnancies in both the US and internationally are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively), so even with fertility rates down in teens and the 21-40 cohort, we still have a long way to go in preventing unwanted pregnancies and children (which translates into a further declining fertility rate curve forward looking, model accordingly).
I assist thousands of folks a year seeking permanent birth control obtain it, mostly the childfree but occasionally someone who already has a kid or two, ama; this is the cheapest, easiest win as it relates to avoiding suffering around unwanted children, and the emotional, time, and monetary costs of unwanted children at scale is simply too high. The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate.
You’re overlooking the Gallup studies showing that the desired fertility rate has been stable at 2.7, well above the replacement rate.
> The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate
It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
> Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale
No. Globalism is bad. Better to have cars made domestically that are a bit more expensive to buy, but support local jobs. Better yet, ban electronics in cars so you can actually hold onto them and repair them yourself.
The US lost that global argument when it decided financialization mattered more than manufacturing. A majority of Americans cannot afford their basic needs to be met on their income, it’s not “a bit more expensive,” and it’s for legacy auto profits, not to maintain domestic production capacity.
No one is banning electronics in cars, and US legacy auto will never catch up. They made their choice to prioritize profits over investment.
> While the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—accounted for 92 percent of domestic auto share in 1965, this share would fall by half, to 46 percent, by 2015, and to 38 percent by 2024.
> From 1995 to 2022, China’s share of global automotive vehicle output skyrocketed eightfold, from 3 to 25 percent, while the U.S. share slid from 23 to 14 percent.
> In 2007, cars sold in the United States contained 38 percent U.S.- or Canadian-made content on average; that portion declined to 18 percent by 2023.
(BYD sells more EVs internationally than Ford does in total, and they intend to be the largest global automaker in the next five years)
Is coding "solved?" I've been using Fable and Grok to vibecode a library to improve text extraction for legal PDFs. (Which have things like line numbers in transcripts that messes up text extraction.) This is a simple, dumb problem that should be like killing a mouse with a nuke. But I got to "pretty good" with a few iterations of not looking at the code or design. The program works, pretty well. But the design and heuristics are only 80% of the way there. Now, the models are just "churning" on the existing design, making ad hoc changes struggling to get to the last 20%. It seems like I'm going to have to turn my brain back on and think about what I actually want to do, which I was trying to avoid.
It's better than writing assembly! But it still seems to be in the realm of "a new kind of tool" even for the actual coding part, without even caring about what the code looks like or security or anything like that.
Without knowing details of your approach, I would venture that your challenge is not with the coding per se but extracting structured data from PDFs. It’s a surprisingly hard problem because PDFs are optimized for preserving the visual structure and layout of the content for precise rendering and printing… NOT for preserving the logical structure of the data!
Which is why the best results these days for extracting structured data from PDFs is by having the model do it directly rather than writing code to do it. It literally takes that level of intelligence to be reliable at it.
A common approach is to provide the model with a template or structured schema describing the format you want the data in, and the PDF itself, and it should return a JSON with the appropriate values filled in. It won’t be 100% but probably higher than what you’re seeing now.
The use case is basically the same ones where a programmer would use grep on source files, and it’s too slow to run the model on it directly for the same reasons.
Existing tools do text extraction (pdftotext) but not that great when there’s internal numbering and stuff like that. It has to be a heuristic approach, and it won’t be perfect. But it’s an interesting data point that the model isn’t able to figure out the best heuristic itself. Or even make incremental progress towards one after a certain point.
I gave a blanket ban on pdftotext to my agents. The output can get so mangled that a smart human wouldn’t untangle it. Did you try understanding the output from pdftotext yourself?
My approach is just ocr-ing with Terra or Gemini flash + checking citations with source both ways. But if I wanted to avoid llm calls, I’d just tell Fable to build a pdf reader directly from pdf binary format. Should be way more robust.
A PDF is a command stream designed for rendering. Interpreting the command stream to get the positions of each glyph is deterministic and existing libraries (I use both pdf_oxide and lopdf) do that fine. Once you have glyph positions, you need to use various heuristics to reconstruct words, paragraphs, columns, headers and footers, etc. For example, in a patent document, there's two columns with a gutter in the middle of line numbers. If you interpret the document as having a single line, you'll get numbers mixed up with the text, which can throw off efforts to find particular phrases. PDF builders also insert all sorts of weird crap into the OCR layers that has to get normalized out.
It's just a pretty pedestrian data-munging problem where there's no closed form perfect solution and you have to use various heuristics to get the right result.
Yes, but the edge cases are infinite and so heuristics don't scale well. As an example, at some point you would likely find yourself with "dueling" heuristics, forcing you to tune them, which is brittle, or find yet another heuristic as a tie-breaker, which ratchets up the complexity. (I just spent a lot of time on an adjacent but much simpler problem before finally giving up on churning heuristics!)
As an example, many times it is impossible to determine the order of some words from just position data without considering the meanings of those words. This is why LLMs / VLMs are so much better at this task, because they can look at the document holistically like we can.
Also, funny that you mention patents, something I've worked on in the past as well! If you're looking only at US Patents, the USPTO data resource is much, much better: https://data.uspto.gov/home -- they provide the text in XML format (https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/xml-resources) which is also pretty complex but wayyyy easier to parse than PDFs!
> This is why LLMs / VLMs are so much better at this task, because they can look at the document holistically like we can.
Totally agreed. But in this use case, PDFs are the working format, not just an archival format. An offline batch process to ingest the PDFs isn’t feasible. Unless there are some super fast LLMs I’m not aware of that can handle tens of PDF pages per second. It seems like Grok and Claude don’t try to read the PDF directly, they use pdftotext or some Python wrapper over pdfium. But maybe I’m missing something!
Yeah that’s why heuristics should work on the lowest possible layer, not on pdftotext. If you use pdftotext you’re stripping positional data and other stuff.
Do you use a public set of documents? I bet I could almost oneshot this with my harness :p
Yes, the tool I’m describing works on what the pdf_oxide crate returns, which includes glyph positions.
Here’s a public appendix from a recent Federal Circuit case. It has a representative assortment of documents (opinions, briefs, patents, transcripts) but contains only cited pages to the appendix pagination is non-consecutive: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68048163/15/ecofactor-i...
The underlying docket is usually 100 to 1,000 times larger than this but it’s similar types of files and the appendix shows the various types of headers and footers that can exist.
>It's just a pretty pedestrian data-munging problem
In other words, how complicated could it be?
Well, if Adobe has been introducing complications and making the format brittle and inflexible over the last 35 years to make it hard for its competitors to write software to process PDF files, quite complicated.
Personally I use only one family for code editing, other families for code navigation.
Models tend to reason about the code using their own intuition and putting other families onto the same codebases may end up with them getting confused. Esp if that other model is as unhinged as Grok.
Also, harness matters a ton. Use a wrong harness with a good model and you’ll get terrible results.
my reflex was to think that sounds like a lie israel would tell to get trump to go to war with iran, but i realize my reflexes aren't always right, so i looked it up and it turns out, yes, it's obviously an israeli lie and the only reason you'd believe it is because you really want to.
> In a world where technology has made gentle imperialism untenable, your system has chosen honest imperialism. Wishing you didn't have to deal with this contradiction won't work. You will have to choose between getting rid of the "autocracy" and keeping the empire.
This is one of the most insightful posts I've seen on this app. Thank you.
> A lot of Chinese do have a policy of "as long as we're comfortable (economically, etc), we'll let the government do whatever they want.", some justifying it by saying "society needs their government to be a strict parent".
On a spectrum from like Appalachians at one end to the CCP on the other, most societies in the world are closer to the Chinese end of the spectrum. Appalachians will forgo civilization to avoid government. But most people in the world do want government to be a strict parent and maintain order and a well-functioning society. This is something that Americans completely do not understand.
> First, the vast majority of the locals hated the protests and didn't support them. This isn't reported by the western media. The media reported it as all HK people were being wronged.
Not everyone is an American, and that's fine. Asians--on average--just care more that things "just work" than having more freedom to faff around. It's like Apple users versus Linux users. The Chinese government is a good government for the things that most Chinese people actually care about: economic development, building infrastructure, keeping trains running, etc. At the end of the day, most Chinese people in Hong Kong aren't missing the political freedoms that Americans would miss in their shoes, and value the things they do have that the government is good at.
The way you've talked about the average Asian it seems like you're describing a cultural predisposition but representing it as a racial one.
And it's easy to see why HK citizens would have cultural preferences towards independent legal systems and political freedom. Their 'being Asian' is independent of this.
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