Very cool - I've wanted something like this for a while. I currently use a patchwork of site specific extensions, so will definitely give this a go
Something in a similar vein that I would love would be a single feed you have control over, powered by an extension. You can specify in plain english what the algorithm should exclude / include - that pulls from your fb/ig/gmail/tiktok feeds.
> I currently use a patchwork of site specific extensions, so will definitely give this a go
Hopefully we can help you trim down the patchwork. If they're broadly useful, I'm happy to assist with the creation to share with others. Just let me know!
> You can specify in plain english what the algorithm should exclude / include - that pulls from your fb/ig/gmail/tiktok feeds.
The is the holy grail. Admittedly, we aren't there yet, but something like that might be possible as we keep building
Maybe the subsidized transit is normal in europe, and universal childcare in some parts of europe (definetly not all of western europe), but this article is stretching when claiming state run grocery stores are normal.
Its also conveniently leaving out the policy ideas on reducing policing, and introducing mental health crisis workers which have been tried in the US (SF) and worked disastrously.
On policing, Urban Alchemy is the company that was contracted in SF. Having worked directly with Urban Alchemy for years in LA, their staff are severly underqualified and 95% of the time will do nothing once arriving on site. The most I've ever seen them do is break up a fight. Is doing nothing better than actively harming people and making the situation worse, as the police often do? Yes. Is it improving the situation? No.
Also, what is your definition of success? No first responder can prevent a crime from happening, all responders arrive after crime has occurred. Putting people into cages as the only option actually leads to worse outcomes for crime. And after decades and billions of dollars spent on the failed war on drugs, we know that is not a viable or successful approach. Part of the job these alternatives are supposed to be doing, is addressing root upstream causes of crime.
On the other hand, the alternative to policing pilot in Denver, Support Team Assistance Response (STAR), has been a wild success.
I’m continually frustrated by the amount of press the grocery store thing gets. I’m probably against it, though it’s hard to know because there are not clearly outlined policy goals for what the grocery stores would try to accomplish and how. But that’s beside the point. My issue is that a government run grocery stores are one the least remarkable points of Mamdani’s platform. NYC already has a budget shortfall of ~$5bn and he wants to spend billions on free buses, tens of billions on child care, and (IIRC) borrow another $70 billion for housing development.
NYC tax revenues are not growing and even optimistic estimates of the proposed tax increases (which the mayor doesn’t have the power to impose anyway) top out at $8 billion.
This is the epitome of magical thinking. Even with the most optimistic estimates of revenue increases and conservative estimates for the proposed spending, the numbers are miles away from adding up. And we’re talking about some municipal grocery stores? Like even if he really screws it up, the cost is probably only in the hundreds of millions.
He's been very clear that he intends on raising taxes to cover the budget shortfall and additional services.
"Zohran’s revenue plan will raise the corporate tax rate to match New Jersey’s 11.5%, bringing in $5 billion. And he will tax the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers—those earning above $1 million annually—a flat 2% tax (right now city income tax rates are essentially the same whether you make $50,000 or $50 million). Zohran will also implement common-sense procurement reform, end senseless no-bid contracts, hire more tax auditors, and crack down on fine collection from corrupt landlords to raise an additional $1 billion."
Yea, I’m aware of that. Problem is that it is innumerate. Raising $6 to $8 billion in revenue is not enough to cover a $5 billion deficit and something like $50 billion in additional services and housing development.
Would be great if Democrats can stay the party of serious governance and not style drift to the post-truth style embraced by modern Republicans. I’m glad we’re nominating young, charismatic candidates, but we need to stay in reality.
A liquor store and a grocery store aren't the same thing, they were set up for different reasons, have different policy goals and are run differently. Also if the goal is helping with "food deserts" - which seems like a tenuous claim already for a city with a ton of bodegas there are better less costly solutions. When comparing actual state run grocery store pilots (in the US) they have been a disaster - see the kansas city example here (https://www.kcur.org/news/2025-08-12/kansas-city-grocery-sto...)
Denver is the best example in the US that saw limited success, and one of the very few - in most places similar approaches were tried (in the US), we were worse off then just keeping police as the primary responders. In NYC specifically we tried a pilot recently, and it was (unsurprisingly) ineffectual - where police had to be called as backup 65% anyway(https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/audit-of-the-behavioral-...). So no in NY at least police don't make the situation worse thats a myth.
Government owned liquor stores were put in place because the free market was too good at supplying people with liquor, and governments wanted to put restrictions and guardrails around people's access to it.
Yeah we have state liquor stores in NH and they are much more expensive[1] than driving down to Massachusetts and going to total wine. The point of the stores is not to supply people in the Shire with liquor for cheaper. It's to make it more expensive and then use the profits to fund the state.
It's so thoroughly different in goals from the NYC plan that I'm in awe people would conflate them.
[1] For example Seven Deadly Zins wine is $19 in NH, currently very on sale for $13. Or its just $11.49 at Total Wine in Mass without any sale at all! Ketel One vodka is $38 in NH, or $28 in Mass.
Mamdani and politicians with similar 'progressive' positions are those advocating for reducing them (either through budget cuts, or moving resources to worse initiatives), while the most robust studies on crime have shown beat cops to be pretty effective for reducing crime (see the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment, and other meta analyses)
Per the article, they exist elsewhere, including elsewhere in the US. Most European cities don't typically really suffer from the problem that New York apparently has (where groceries in New York are apparently significantly more expensive than outside, and significant areas don't have proper supermarkets at all). If they did, in many countries there would absolutely be some sort of intervention.
Sidenote: Has there been serious research into _why_ these 'food deserts' happen (or at least their urban form; the rural version seems more explicable), and/or why they seem to happen in the US more than in other developed countries, does anyone know? On the face of it, even as a fairly market-sceptical person, this is one that I would kind of expect the invisible hand to deal with.
99pi has a nice podcast on food deserts. It puts the blame on the decision from the FTC to stop enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, and only use consumer prices as the metric for antitrust rulings.
>"State run grocery stores" perhaps aren't, but consumers' co-operatives [...] are
That's a pretty important difference you're eliding. "state run" is where most of the objection is. Coops get nowhere near the pushback (if any) that state run businesses (ie. "communism") get from Americans.
"state run" is also probably incorrect. AFAIK Mamdani will be the mayor of New York City, which is a city, not a state. Cities in Europe tend to run businesess outside of their core competency quite often. Is that not the case in the US?
>"state run" is also probably incorrect. AFAIK Mamdani will be the mayor of New York City, which is a city, not a state.
"state" in this case refers to "government", not US "states". You see this type of usage elsewhere, for instance "state" schools[1], which are often operated at the city/county level, not state level.
> You see this type of usage elsewhere, for instance "state" schools[1]
Schools operated at the city/county level are called public schools in the US, no? So in the same vein these stores should either be called public or city stores.
Note that the Guardian article instead talks about "city-run" and "municipal-run" grocery stores. And the reason I'm mentioning this is that "city-run" sounds harmless while "state run" is exactly what you mention: "Coops get nowhere near the pushback (if any) that state run businesses (ie. "communism") get from Americans."
>Schools operated at the city/county level are called public schools in the US, no?
Right, I'm pointing out that "state" in the english language isn't limited to just US states. If you're not convinced by that, there's also "state" owned enterprises in countries that don't even have "states" (eg. China).
>Note that the Guardian article instead talks about "city-run" and "municipal-run" grocery stores. And the reason I'm mentioning this is that "city-run" sounds harmless while "state run" is exactly what you mention: "Coops get nowhere near the pushback (if any) that state run businesses (ie. "communism") get from Americans."
The only difference between municipally and states owned enterprises (both the US state kind and "government" kind) is in scale. Objections to state ownership mainly revolve around state coercion (you can't opt out of a municipal grocery store, especially if it's funded by tax dollars), and potential for self-dealing. Both these concerns exist for municipal grocery stores, but not coops.
We've got plenty of state run businesses though, that's certainly normal as well. Just not grocery stores in particular, or at least I'm not aware of any around.
State-run liquor stores are quite normal in Norway. So at least there's that, it depends on your definition of groceries. I've just walked home with the kid and people are drinking beer at 11AM, which is… liquid cereal.
You can pick and choose what you see from the audit (though in no circumstances is it an astounding success).
The general points i'm trying to get across is
- Responder safety/back-up needs mean you can’t fully “swap out” police. This program still needed to bring in police most of the time.
- Coverage and scale are hard in an actually big city, like NYC. (also why denver's success in a tiny city is sort of a useless comparison)
So why not just equip police to better handle mental health cases instead of creating a different task force which doesn't have any of structure the police already has? This isn't rhetorical - the reason is idealogical stubbornness, there are better solutions for achieving mamadanis goals.
> You can pick and choose what you see from the audit
I don't think so: Pick something that supports your claim. Right now it looks like you linked to it without even knowing what it said, hoping nobody would read it and you could claim some authority.
> Responder safety/back-up needs mean you can’t fully “swap out” police. This program still needed to bring in police most of the time.
The audit specifically says that they can't evaluate that; they don't know because they lack the appropriate data.
Is there something else you base that claim on?
> why not just equip police to better handle mental health cases
Because it takes a lot of training that police don't have time or possibly the propensity for. Even police have long complained that they are given jobs that they aren't suited for.
> the reason is idealogical stubbornness
You answered your own question with that ... there is nothing more I can add!
I went to a middle eastern wedding recently and they gave everyone these phone pouches to keep their phones in that were locked for the event's duration.
One question i've had is if its given that we care about making humans space faring, why focus on getting to new planets and colonisation and not instead on building the massive megastructures mentioned in the article as an end in itself?
i don't know - I agree we haven't seen changes to our built environment, but as for an "explosion of new start-ups, products" we sort of are seeing that?
I see new AI assisted products everyday, and a lot of them have real usage. Beyond the code-assistants/gen companies which are very real examples, here's an anecdote.
I was thinking of writing a new story, and found http://sudowrite.com/ via an ad, an ai assistant for helping you write, its already used by a ton of journalists and serious writers, and am trying it out.
Then i wanted to plan a trip - tried google but saw nothing useful, and then asked chatgpt and now have a clear plan
> I was thinking of writing a new story, and found http://sudowrite.com/ via an ad, an ai assistant for helping you write, its already used by a ton of journalists and serious writers, and am trying it out.
I am not seeing anything indicating it is actually used by a ton of journalists and serious writers. I highly doubt it is, the FAQ is also paper thin in as far as substance goes. I highly doubt they are training/hosting their own models yet I see only vague third party references in their privacy policy. Their pricing is less than transparent given that they don't really explain how their "credits" translate to actual usage. They blatantly advertise this to be for students, which is problematic in itself.
This ignores all the other issues around so heavily depending on LLMs for your writing. This is an interesting quirk for starters: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape... . But there are many more issues about relying so heavily on LLM tools for writing.
So this example, to me, is actually exemplifying the issue of overselling capabilities while handwaving away any potential issues that is so prevalent in the AI space.
Hey co-founder of Sudowrite here. We indeed have thousands of writers paying for and using the platform. However, we aim to serve professional novelists, not journalists or students. We have some of both using it, but it's heavily designed and priced for novelists making a living off their work.
A much-improved version 1.5 came out today -- it's preferred 2-to-1 vs Claude in blind tests with our users.
You're right on the faq -- alas, we've been very product-focused and haven't done the best job keeping the marketing site up to date. What questions do you wish we'd answer there?
> We indeed have thousands of writers paying for and using the platform. However, we aim to serve professional novelists, not journalists or students. We have some of both using it
Your marketing material quotes a lot of journalists, giving the impression they too use it a lot. I have my reservations about LLMs being used for professional writing, but for the moment I'll assume that Muse handles a lot of those concerns perfectly. I'll try to focus on the more immediate and actual concerns.
Your pricing specifically has a "Hobby & Student" section which mentions "Perfect for people who write for fun or for school". This is problematic to me, I'll get to why later when I answer you question about things missing from the FAQ.
> What questions do you wish we'd answer there?
Well it would be nice if you didn't hand wave away some actual potential issues. The FAQ also reads more like loose marketing copy than a policy document.
- What languages does Sudowrite work in?
Very vague answer here. Just be honest and say it highly depends on the amount of source material and that for many languages the result likely will be not that good.
- Is this magic?
Cute, but doesn't belong in a FAQ
- Can Sudowrite plagiarize?
You are doing various things here that are disingenuous.
You basically talk around the issue by saying "well, next word prediction isn't exactly plagiarism". To me it strongly suggests the models used have been trained on material that you can plagiarize. Which in itself is already an issue.
Then there is the blame shifting to the user saying that it is up to the user to plagiarize or not. Which is not honest, the user has no insights in the training material.
"As long as your own writing is original, you'll get more original writing out of Sudowrite." This is a probabilistic statement, not a guarantee. It also, again is blame shifting.
- Is this cheating?
Way too generic. Which also brings me to you guys actively marketing to students. Which I feel is close to moral bankruptcy. Again, you sort of talk around the issue are basically saying "it isn't cheating as long as you don't use it to cheat". Which is technically true, but come on guys...
In many contexts (academia, specific writing competitions, journalism), using something like sudowrite to generate or significantly augment text would be considered cheating or against guidelines, regardless of intent. In fact, in many school and academic settings using tools like these is detrimental to what they are trying to achieve by having the students write their own text from scratch without aid.
- What public language models does Sudowrite use and how were they trained?
Very vague, it also made me go back to the privacy policy you guys have in place. Given you clearly use multiple providers. I then noticed it was last updated in 2020? I highly doubt you guys have been around for that long, making me think it was copy pasted from elsewhere. This shows as it says "Policy was created with WebsitePolicies." which just makes this generic boilerplate. This honestly makes me wonder how much of it is abided by.
It being so generic also means the privacy policy does not clearly mention these providers while effectively all data from users likely goes to them.
*This is just about current questions in the FAQ*. The FAQ is oddly lacking in regards to muse, some of it is on the muse page itself. But that there I am running in similar issues
- Ethically trained on fiction Muse is exclusively trained on a curated dataset with 100% informed consent from the authors.
Bold and big claim. I applaud it if true, but there is no way to verify other than trusting your word.
There is a lot more I could expand on. But to be frank, that is not my job. You are far from the only AI related service operating in this problematic way. It might even run deeper in general startup culture. But honestly, even if your service is awesome and ethically entirely sound I don't feel taken seriously by the publicly information you provide. It is almost if you are afraid to be real with customers, to me you are overselling and overhyping. Again, you are far from the only company doing so, you just happened to be brought up by the other user.
Wow, so many assumptions here that don't make sense to me, but I realize we all have different perspectives on this stuff. Thank you for sharing yours! I really do appreciate it.
I won't go line-by-line here defending the cutesy copy and all that since it's not my job to argue with people on the internet either… but on a few key points that interested me:
- language support: I don't believe we're being disingenuous. Sudowrite works well in many languages. We have authors teaching classes on using Sudowrite in multiple languages. In fact, there's one on German tomorrow and one on French next week: https://lu.ma/sudowrite Our community runs classes nearly every day.
- student usage - We do sometimes offer a student discount when people write in to ask for it, and we've had multiple collage and high school classes use sudowrite in writing classes. We'll often give free accounts to the class when professors reach out. I don't believe AI use in education is unethical. I think AI as copilot is the future of most creative work, and it will seem silly for teachers not to incorporate these tools in the future. Many already are! All that said, we do not market to students as you claim. Not because we think it's immoral -- we do not -- but because we think they have better options. ChatGPT is free, students are cheap. We make a professional tool for professional authors and it is not free nor cheap. It would not make sense for our business to market to students.
- press quotes -- Yes, we quote journalists because they're the ones who've written articles about us. You can google "New Yorker sudowrite" etc and see the articles. Some of those journalists also write fiction -- that one who wrote the New Yorker feature had a book he co-wrote with AI reviewed in The New York Times.
> I then noticed it was last updated in 2020? I highly doubt you guys have been around for that long
So many of these objections feel bizarre to me because they're trivial to fact-check. Here's a New York Times article that mentions us, written in 2020. We were one of the first companies to use LLMs in this wave and sought and gained access to GPT-3 prior to public API availability. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/science/artificial-intell...
> Wow, so many assumptions here that don't make sense to me, but I realize we all have different perspectives on this stuff.
I realize they don't make sense to you, otherwise the website would contain different information. If I had to try to frame it more clearly I'd say that for a company whose core product revolves around clear writing, your website's information is surprisingly vague and evasive in some areas. I simply think it would make for a stronger and confident message if that information was just there. Which, might I remind you, I have said is true for many companies selling LLM based services and products.
> language support: I don't believe we're being disingenuous. Sudowrite works well in many languages.
I am sure it does, those languages with the highest presence in the training data. French and German doing well doesn't surprise me given the numbers I have seen there. I think this FAQ section could be much clearer here.
> we do not market to students as you claim.
I guess that your pricing page specifically has a "Hobby & Student" tier which mentions "Perfect for people who write for fun or for school" doesn't count as marketing to students?
> I don't believe AI use in education is unethical.
Neither do I, if it is part of the curriculum and the goal. For many language related course including writing using assistive tooling, certainly tooling that highly impacts style defeats the didactic purpose.
> So many of these objections feel bizarre to me because they're trivial to fact-check. Here's a New York Times article that mentions us, written in 2020. We were one of the first companies to use LLMs in this wave and sought and gained access to GPT-3 prior to public API availability.
Okay, I already went out of my way to go over the entire website because you asked. I am not doing a hit piece on you guys specifically as I specifically said you just happened to be linked by the other person. It was an assumption on my side, but reasonable given the age of most LLM companies. More importantly, that is not the main point I am making there anyway.
Since 2020 the landscape around LLMs changed drastically. Including the way privacy is being handled and looked at. You would think that this would result in changes to the policy in that period. In fact, I would think that the introduction of your own model would at the very least warrant some changes there. Not to mention that using copy pasted boilerplate for 5 years to me does not give a confident signal about how seriously you are taking privacy.
While you are not obligated to respond to me as I am just one random stranger on the internet. I would be remiss if I didn't make it clear that it is the overall tone and combined points that make me critical. Not just the ones that piqued your interest.
If I had to choose one, I'd easily say maintaining video coherence over long periods of time. The typical failure case of world models that's attempting to generate diverse pixels (i.e. beyond a single video game) is that they degrade to a mush of incoherent pixels after 10-20 seconds of video.
We talk about this challenge in our blog post here (https://odyssey.world/introducing-interactive-video). There's specifics in there on how we improved coherence for this production model, and our work to improve this further with our next-gen model. I'm really proud of our work here!
> Compared to language, image, or video models, world models are still nascent—especially those that run in real-time. One of the biggest challenges is that world models require autoregressive modeling, predicting future state based on previous state. This means the generated outputs are fed back into the context of the model. In language, this is less of an issue due to its more bounded state space. But in world models—with a far higher-dimensional state—it can lead to instability, as the model drifts outside the support of its training distribution. This is particularly true of real-time models, which have less capacity to model complex latent dynamics. Improving this is an area of research we're deeply invested in.
In second place would absolutely be model optimization to hit real-time. That's a gnarly problem, where you're delicately balancing model intelligence, resolution, and frame-rate.
Something in a similar vein that I would love would be a single feed you have control over, powered by an extension. You can specify in plain english what the algorithm should exclude / include - that pulls from your fb/ig/gmail/tiktok feeds.
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