Polymarket's purpose was specifically to let the best of the best take the pot by predicting events with real world impact. So, ideally, it's "gambling" in the same way day trading is gambling.
Contrast that to normal "sports betting" - which aims to block skilled betters, and squeeze suckers for their cash.
It's betting but even better for the house: they don't need to put anything on the pot to lose it, just taking a cut from the zero-sum game others are betting on.
That's why Kalshi/Polymarket don't care about winners, they don't lose money to them, others do.
It's all gambling, as most of day trading also is.
Yeah, on the spectrum of ways to make money, running a sports betting site is pretty bad. It's zero-sum (unlike, say, founding a company and getting rich from shares that were initially worthless), doesn't really incentivize discovery of any truly valuable info (if you find out a player is injured an hour before everyone else ... ok?), and seems to disproportionately hit people who are already not doing very well.
Seeing the statistics about young American men's betting habits makes me feel old.
If you take $1000 from a few gambling addicts? You spend your own time and effort doing that - while the negative impact of that loss on their livelihood is likely to be larger than positive impact of your gain on your livelihood.
It's why gambling is usually regulated so heavily. Some people must have thought that sports-flavored gambling is going to be different - or were financially incentivized to think so. Turns out it isn't.
> while the negative impact of that loss on their livelihood is likely to be larger than positive impact of your gain on your livelihood.
What's your point? /s Negative things happening to other people is "0," as long as you are getting something from it. In some cases, it may actually be "good," if you don't like the people suffering negative consequences.
This is not a trait that only applies to gambling. Almost every corporation on Earth takes the same attitude.
Not parent but I think the point they’re making is that there is no productive value from gambling (regulated or not). Unlike, say, plane manufacturing which provides a positive good to society and also benefits from heavy regulation.
Zero sum is still a hell of a lot better than broken windows negative sum economic activity. A lot more stuff than you'd think falls into that category.
At least sports gambling is fairly "pure" in that regard.
There's a lot of indications that robotics AI is in a data-starved regime - which means that future models are likely to attain better 0-shot performance, solve more issues in-context, generalize better, require less task-specific training, and be more robust.
But it seems like a degree of "RL in real life" is nigh-inevitable - imitation learning only gets you this far. Kind of like RLVR is nigh-inevitable for high LLM performance on agentic tasks, and for many of the same reasons.
Sure, many things evolved to be less edible. But humans themselves are hunter-gatherer omnivores - who evolved to be very good at eating a lot of very different things. There are adaptations in play on both ends.
There are, in fact, many countermeasures that would deter other animals, but fail to deter humans. In part due to some liver adaptations, in part due to sheer body mass, and in part due to human-specific tricks like using heat to cook food.
If your countermeasures just so happen to get denaturated by being heated to 75C, good luck getting humans with them. It's why a lot of grains or legumes are edible once cooked but inedible raw. The same is true for many "mildly poisonous" mushrooms - they lose their toxicity if cooked properly.
Those countermeasures don't have to be lethal to deter consumption! If something causes pain, diarrhea or indigestion, or some weirder effects, or just can't be spotted or reached easily, that can work well enough. So the evolutionary pressure to always go for highly lethal defenses isn't there. It's just one pathway to take, out of many, and evolution will roll with whatever happens to work best at the moment.
Human takeover of the biosphere is a recent event too, and humans are still an out-of-distribution threat to a lot of things. So you get all of those weird situations - where sometimes, humans just blast through natural defenses without even realizing they're there, and sometimes, the defenses work but don't work very well because they evolved to counter something that's not a human, and sometimes, the defenses don't exist at all because the plant's environment never pressured it to deter consumption by large mammals at all.
And with the level of control humans attained over nature now? The ongoing selection pressure is often shaped less like "how to deter humans" and more like "how to attract humans", because humans will go out of their way to preserve and spread things they happen to like.
A big part of what makes Google Search awful is just the usual SEO shitters, trying their hardest to rig the game on any search result that's anywhere close to common or profitable.
Google's main failing there is that they don't put enough effort into their search to keep up with that, and fail to raise the bar on garbage content and search engine manipulation.
LLM output in search results I'm not against. Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? For many of the more common and more trivial requests, LLM output is well in "good enough".
>Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function?
That's exactly what Google is implying, isn't it?
By placing a redirect to an LLM at the top, and following it with bad search results, Google is saying "don't bother with the web, asking an LLM is better".
It is a very shortsighted thing to say, as a company whose moat and expertise is search. Particularly so when LLMs aren't yet proved to be a viable path to profit and there are other players in the game.
Their basic model is a user asks a question and they put up results along with some ads. Maybe it doesn't matter so much if the results are page rank search or LLMs?
Google had two choices, and one of them was "bury your head in sand and hope this entire LLM thing goes away". They weren't dumb enough to take that choice.
I don't think it's already clear which is the dumb choice.
LLMs are clearly a useful product, I'm not arguing that. That's not sufficient for being the new Search.
To be the new Search, they also need LLMs to be performant enough to be profitable. And yet, stay unperformant enough that it isn't feasible to run them locally. And they have to stay useful long term, after the web is flooded by slop or content dries up because people stopped consuming the web directly. And a monetisation path needs to be found and survive legislation.
But more importatntly, it's not A or B. Gemini could have been pushed without sacrificing their golden-egg goose for the cause.
They probably care more about purging SEO slop. But, also, Kagi has a total of 4 active users. Which means they don't have a SEO target the size of the entire Internet painted on their backs.
There isn't a small army of adversarial SEO sloptimizers eager to skirt the rules or bypass whatever Kagi does to purge SEO spam and downrank content mills.
So Google are trying lots of things to improve their search results but don't have the ability to out-think the spammers? That sounds like what you're saying?? Any evidence?
It seems like they know how to improve (their offerings were way better in the past for me) but have moved to optimise for advertising revenue. IMO they've gone too far, they'll crash out of search in the next couple of years and won't be able to backtrack fast enough to keep their users.
Then they won't have cash to burn to fund the other [moonshot?] projects.
It feels like when VCs buy a company, coast on the name whilst stripping away all that made that name bankable; then they eventually run it into the ground, latch on to the next victim and on, and on. Except here Google are leeching off themselves.
>but don't have the ability to out-think the spammers
Out thinking everyone else is very hard. The number of enterprises by spammers these days may exceed legitimate data being put on the internet. Much in the same way attempted spam far exceeded non-spam emails years ago.
At the same time who is even close to providing the services google provides?
I'm saying that out-thinking the spammers consistently takes actual effort, and a lot of it, applied continuously. Google isn't willing to put that much effort in.
Well by not opening the blog post or whatever page that nicely explains the JavaScript sort with examples, you just deprived them of page views and probably income. So what will happen in 5 years when you’re searching for human written and thoughtful content on something more complex and all you get is slop?
You haven't really been getting 'human written and thoughtful content' for a vast swath of search topics for probably 15-20 years now. You get SEO-hyper-optimized (probably LLM-generated for anything in the last 3 years) blog spam. In terms of searching for information and getting that information, there are a lot of topics where an LLM-generated result is vastly better just by virtue of not being buried inside blog spam. The slop ship sailed years ago.
No we don’t need to open an entire website to learn x simple thing. However we DO need meaningful competition among information providers. I am not looking forward to the enshittification phase of AI.
A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.
Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person.
They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world.
Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front.
Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business.
They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web.
To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us.
Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed.
Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads.
Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this.
Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too.
Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics.
This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.
I'm glad 95% of URL bars don't just default to Google Search and immediately get hit by ad bidding war taxes. Would certainly suck if you had a well-recognized brand and just wanted your customers to access your website through the URL bar.
72% Chrome --> Google
15% Safari --> Google
5% Edge --> Bing
2% Firefox --> Google
2% Opera --> Google
...
This alone implies a divestiture of Chrome should be in the cards.
Or maybe Google would be so kind to remove queries with URL bar origination from ad sales if there's a registered trademark (within some edit distance) within the query?
In mobile I have been upset by the way AOSP is being deprioritised by Google and the fact they've increasingly moved features into Google play services.
In the browser space I'm pleased that Firefox exists but they are so dependent on Google that they barely qualify as competitors.
In the search space though,
competition is heating up for the first time. LLMs are a good alternative to a web search for many types of questions and Google is far from the only player here. Open AI, Anthropic, etc are competitors to Google. They are competing with Google in a way which Yahoo and Bing never really managed.
Anyway I do very much agree that Google enjoys multiple monopolies and that they shouldn't. My point is that with so much easy money out there it's refreshing to see them continuing to innovate. They don't really need to.
Thing thing that gets me about people who complain about google (generally, not in just the tech bubble), is that 95% of the people complaining have used Google for decades, maybe even spending 2% of their waking life using a Google product...
and have never paid Google a single penny for anything.
That's why Google is so dominant. That's why they are so skilled at data collection. The built a system that converts user data into dollars, so users don't have to pay. And users love, absolutely love, like their first born child and high school sweetheart combined into one, not having to pay for things.
Google is not the reason google sucks. People's unwillingness to compensate for services they use is. And before you comment with how you use Kagi, and Nebula, and Patreon. Yes, thank you. You are in the <0.1% of internet users who get it.
Maybe not directly but if hotels and the like have to pay 15% of their turnover to Google for ads to get visitors, either directly or via booking.com etc, then you end up paying that when you stay there.
That kind of stuff is where Google's billions come from.
Government is not the solution, government is the problem. There is no such thing as a healthy functioning regulatory body - they all regulate too much and some should not exist. Don't call your legislator because the most dangerous words in the English language are, "I'm from the goevrnment and I'm here to help."
I currently live in a place where, when walking on the street, I routinely almost get hit by vehicles while crossing crosswalks with the cross light on.
However, I used to live in a place where every local driver did an 'after you' that included pedestrians, regardless of road rules, and generally drove the speed limit (and usually less).
The internet lens tends to distort what's happening on the ground quite a lot. I would expect the people living there have different things to direct their ire to.
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