> This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI
You can’t separate the thing from how it will be used. It’s like arguing that cars on their own aren’t particularly dangerous, but the point of buying a car is to use it thus risking the general public.
But you can in fact argue exactly that. If (arbitrary example) pedestrians are being killed due to poor road engineering practices it isn't reasonable to point at cars and say "see those are the root problem" when in fact it's due to a willful lack of sidewalks or marked crossings or whatever. Being adjacent to something bad doesn't equate to being the root cause.
History shows the timeline of dependence here. Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths. So clearly it’s cars that are necessitating sidewalks, etc.
Same deal here, if something “becomes a problem” because of the introduction of AI, it’s AI that is the root case of the resulting issues. Many people are tempted to argue that flawed humans can’t implement the perfect system that is Anarchy, Communism, Recycling programs, or whatever but treating systems as needing to operate on the real world is productive where complaining about humans isn’t.
Well I (thought it was obvious that) I was referring to roads constructed relatively recently. If cars necessitate sidewalks and the city chooses to cut costs by not putting those in that isn't the fault of automobile designers or manufacturers or dealers or private owners or whoever.
To your example, technology changes and that necessitates infrastructure changing. That doesn't mean that fault for mishaps in the meantime can be attributed to the new technology. A user operating the new technology in an obviously unsafe manner is solely at fault for his own negligence.
The safest street designs still result in automobile fatalities. You can at best mitigate the issue with better street designs but not address the underlying issue.
Failing to acknowledge cars as the root cause may be comforting, but it blinds you to viable solutions.
Indoor shopping malls for example solve many of the issues with cars by forcing people to move around on foot in a little island surrounded by a sea of very low density parking. They are’t perfect solutions, but they still saved a lot of lives and time.
Saying people are misusing a new technology is just another way of saying that technology is flawed. This doesn’t mean you can’t utilize it, but pretending flaws don’t exist has no value.
> Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths.
Death by adverse horse encounter was very common before the 1920s. Not sure how many of those deaths can be blamed on poor quality road engineering. But putting a bunch of humans, carts, and excitable half-ton animals in the same crowded streets seems like poor engineering practice.
very common here is a gross exaggeration compared to cars.
After vast improvements in safety ~1.3% of American deaths are still coming from automobile accidents. Horses were never close to that, meanwhile back in 1970 cars where around twice as likely to kill you.
This article states higher per-capita horse deaths in 1900 New York City than automobile deaths in 2023. This stat does not account for the significant disease caused by all that manure mixing with water supplies. Its unclear if automobile pollution is overall worse from a public health standpoint than mountains of horse poo.
It’s not just the economy, the US population increased 20% over that period while the number of tellers dropped by around 16%.
Net result ATM’s likely cost ~30-40% of bank teller jobs.
Population is really important to adjust for in employment statistics. Compare farmers in the USA in 2025 vs 1800, and yes the absolute number is up but the percentage is way down.
“On average, 67% of all spending in experiences supports OR goes to developers.” Supports here does not actually mean they get paid that money.
Later it mentions the actual money going to developers as: “This enables us to return 28%* directly to the developers.” And yes that 28% includes an asterisk.
1: Roblox hosts your multiplayer gameservers in its pops for free, with a generous amount of free persistent storage and memory
1.a: Roblox handles scaling and SRE work for you for free - you're not going to be able to support millions of concurrent users yourself at that price point
2: when people buy robux on their phone the app store takes 20-30% of the dollar - but the player still gets 1 robux for each penny.
2.a: your game immediately is playable on iOS, android, PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, questvr, etc etc - no fees for you to get this distribution.
3: Roblox pays out creator rewards - a redistribution of revenue - to experiences that reengage dormant users or are played by paying users even if your game itself has no purchasable items.
Roblox's economic model has a redistributive nature that isn't common in other economies. If you're just looking at the devex rate and not building on the platform you wouldn't immediately appreciate it.
Hosting, storage, and scaling aren’t free; costs scale with active users, data egress, and state. In-app purchase splits and platform fees erode margin, so “free hosting” rarely survives at millions of concurrent players. Model revenue net of ops costs and, if needed, use a hybrid backend with careful risk budgeting, auth, and anti-cheat.
72% cut's still pretty steep for all that. Like, these aren't large corporations Roblox is working with, it's kids. It's their platform, and they get to charge whatever they want, and kids can choose not to use it, but 72% still seems exploitative to me. Not a parent tho.
Post-appstore cut it's 42%, which is high but doesn't seem crazy. The unsuccessful attempts and idle piddling all need to be subsidized to allow the successes to exist in the first place, and I suspect we all know better than to undercount cloud, hosting, SRE, and staffing costs. They're all ongoing and pretty painful, and getting a shot at creating something with effectively zero downside risk (vs making a game in Godot and building/buying all of the other parts yourself or with staff) will always come with a lower upside.
> Further there’s no App Store cut when people buy this stuff on PC.
Plenty of PC Roblox users use a version of Roblox downloaded through the Microsoft Store, whom charge a 12% cut on all money spent on gaming apps <https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/publish/publi...>. The only place where no app store cut applies is when purchasing Roblox products through the non-Microsoft Store PC app or through the website. Surprise, doing this gets the user ~20% more Robux than buying through an app store <https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux>.
If a user buys Robux through a platform where the app store fee isn't charged, then it isn't charged to developers either because the user will receive, and thus spend, more Robux. Creator rewards work differently to ensure that developers owning experiences played primarily by app store users aren't unfairly punished by this <https://create.roblox.com/docs/creator-rewards>.
The default app store cut for most other platforms (Google Play, Apple App Store) that Roblox operates on is 30% (and similar for other distribution platforms, such as Steam), so in the grander scheme 12% isn't even that ridiculous. Including payment processing fees, this averages out to the 22% mentioned at <https://create.roblox.com/docs/monetize-experiences> for all of Roblox's sales.
> 1 / 0.7 = 43% more money.
Can you clarify where the 0.7 is from? My assumption is that it's from the 30% fee charged by some app stores, though not every app store charges the same fee so not using an average figure isn't truly representative of how much more money Roblox & its developers would actually earn in the event that there were no such fees.
> except it clearly show the kind of Hollywood accounting going on in their other posts.
Do point out mistakes if you see any, I would be happy to correct them (-: I made another comment on how different methods of purchasing Robux affects the value at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340570> if that helps clear things up.
First no mention of the float between purchase of Roblox and transactions, but whatever platforms regularly pull that one.
As to Hollywood accounting. There is no single exchange rate between dollars and Roblox on a platform, a 5$ purchase = 5:4 on App Store, but a 100$ purchase is a 1:1. https://www.roblox.com/upgrades/robux
Of course they ignore this only saying app stores and payment platforms get a 22% cut. Ok sure you have some average numbers of Roblox per dollar and then work out an exchange rate sure that’s reasonable.
But wait on that page: users can now receive up to 25% more Robux when purchasing through gift cards, computer, or web. This extra Robux translates into higher revenue shares on Robux purchased on those channels. (As high as 25% or less than 7%) So now they aren’t averaging the exchange rate instead doing yet another calculation even though a 20$ purchase on their store has a worse exchange rate than a 200$ purchase on the App Store…
Meanwhile an account with 6k Roblox at time of purchase may have been filled by some gift cards and some App Store purchases at different ratios over time while the user is spending money on the platform meaning that 6k doesn’t actually correspond cleanly to either App Store or gift cards Roblox…
But like trust US bro even if we aren’t saying what the actual formula is it’s fine. I can’t help but wonder what the actual numbers look like if such a lopsided deal is still presented with such weasel wording.
> I was being sarcastic with my how ridiculous post.
I see. I apologise for failing to pick that up.
> There is no single exchange rate between dollars and Roblox on a platform
> Meanwhile an account with 6k Roblox at time of purchase may have been filled by some gift cards and some App Store purchases at different ratios over time while the user is spending money on the platform meaning that 6k doesn’t actually correspond cleanly to either App Store or gift cards Roblox
Indeed there is not any single fiat -> Robux exchange rate, nor has there ever been. I don't have any reason to believe this is a bad state of affairs, and you've provided most of the reason for why there isn't. Even on platforms with no app store fees, there will still be payment processing fees, which the larger "better-value" packages exist to reduce these fees to give more money to developers in the case that there's a flat fee for each transaction.
> Ok sure you have some average numbers of Roblox per dollar and then work out an exchange rate sure that’s reasonable.
If the target is to have a consistent exchange rate, maybe this is doable for new Robux entering the platform. Perhaps moreso given that the price of Robux has remained remarkably consistent over the years, in no small part due to the various fees on the platform (mainly the Marketplace fee and experience pass/product fees) protecting it from hyperinflation. Yet there are billions of Robux already in the economy that don't follow these rules.
The Robux spent on an experience is probably earned from the purchase of Robux or Roblox Premium at a variable package exchange rate, also dependent on the currency of purchase. But it could be from Creator Rewards <https://create.roblox.com/docs/creator-rewards>, with the amount differing depending on when the player joined the platform and how many experiences they played that day. Or it could be old Robux from a package with an exchange rate that no longer exists. Or it could be from the Robux already paid out to an experience, which the experience developer decided to spend on another experience, thoroughly blending any previously distinct exchange rates. Or it could be from the legacy pre-2016 currency exchange system and not have any defined exchange rate. Or it could be from a user who previously owned a lifetime Builder's Club subscription, which is now grandfathered in to Roblox Premium, and receives Robux monthly despite only making a one-time payment.
My point here is to demonstrate that attempting to create such a fiat -> Robux exchange rate figure isn't really feasible, or that if one did exist it wouldn't be accurate. Nor would I think it to be particularly useful either; the main exchange rate that matters to developers is the Robux -> fiat one (for how much Robux is going into their experiences and how much they can DevEx from it), which is very clear and very well-defined – since September 2025, it's 0.0038 USD per Robux <https://create.roblox.com/dashboard/devex>.
> even if we aren’t saying what the actual formula is it’s fine. I can’t help but wonder what the actual numbers look like
The chart on the monetisation section of the creator documentation represents the "estimated utilization of each dollar spent in an experience on Roblox". Roblox has calculated this from their total user spending on Robux, the total Robux spent on games (which has also been through the experience pass/product fees clearly mentioned at the bottom of that page), and their total other expenditure (developer costs & support + their own share & investment), because as seen above, they don't have a consistent exchange rate to calculate player purchases based solely on the amount of Robux in circulation.
We don't have to trust them. We can make an educated guess right here based on the analytical data Roblox provides, both for the entire platform & tailored to each experience, the price of Robux, and the DevEx rate. This is far from the data we need to make a precise prediction, though we can still get a ballpark estimate and check it against Roblox's own figures.
The most popular Robux package is the 1000 Robux one. Well, not really, it turns out it's actually the Premium 1000 subscription, which for the same sales price provides 1000 Robux alongside Creator Rewards for the experiences they join for the next 60 days. This could be anywhere from 0 to 3 * 5 * 60 = 900 Robux <https://create.roblox.com/docs/creator-rewards>, alongside a 35% share of what they spent on the package if they're a new or returning user.
The price for Premium subscriptions and Robux packages differs regionally. For me, it's 9.99 GBP for Premium 1000, whereas in the US, where most Roblox users are based <https://create.roblox.com/docs/production/roblox-user-base>, it's 9.99 USD. We'll go with the 9.99 USD figure as it's most likely what a paying user is actually spending and it's in the same currency as the DevEx return rate.
Assume a user that purchases such a subscription then spends all 1000 Robux on one or more passes or products inside of an experience. We'll assume that the creator of the pass/product is the same as the creator of the experience, so the 10% affiliate fee + 60% creator earnings makes for 70% for the experience developer, with the remaining 30% taken by the platform. This could just as easily be substituted for anything else with an equivalent 70% fee, such as Marketplace products at their lowest fee rate, or plugins/paid access priced in Robux (pricing these in local currency wouldn't be subject to the DevEx fees). This deposits a total of 1000 * 70%, or 700 Robux, into the accounts/ownership groups of the experience creators. Assuming the developers immediately take this Robux and exchange it, this will give them fiat. This results in a total of 700 * the DevEx rate of 0.0038, or 2.66 USD. This is profit for the developer.
Now for the Creator Rewards. We'll start with the maximum possible Daily Engagement Rewards of 450 Robux. This goes directly to experience creators, with no Marketplace/product fee, who will DevEx it to produce 450 * 0.0038 = 1.71 USD. This is the maximum possible figure and is almost never actually achieved on the platform. Next up, the Audience Expansion Rewards, which will be 9.99 USD * 35%, or 3.50 USD, if and only if the user is new or returning to the platform.
To sum it up, this is 2.66 from DevEx + up to 1.71 from Daily Engagement + maybe 3.50 from Audience Expansion. The DevEx figure is now correct, whereas the Daily Engagement and Audience Expansion figures could use some work.
From the most recent statistics available, Roblox has 36.7 million paying Monthly Active Users, or Monthly Unique Payers <https://ir.roblox.com/financials/quarterly-results>. However, only about 37.7%, or 13.8 million of these, are Daily Active Users. Thus we'll assume our average Premium subscriber is active 37.7% of the time, or about 11.5 days each month, so 22 of every 60 days. If they play only 1 experience a day, this is 5 * 22 = 110 Robux, or 110 * 0.0038 = 0.418 USD, and if they play 3, that's 3 * 5 * 22 = 330, or 330 * 0.0038 = 1.254 USD. To reiterate where these numbers came from, Daily Engagement is 5 Robux per day for 60 days after purchase, given to each experience played for more than 10 total minutes, with a maximum of 3. We're multiplying this by the DevEx rate as we assume that's what the developer does with it upon reception.
So 2.66 + 0.418 = 3.078 USD for the lower average, which we'll use for these calculation purposes, from DevEx specifically. That's the best estimate I can give with the time I have, the Audience Expansion figure I'll leave off entirely as it doesn't go through DevEx and I can't give any specific statistics for when it happens other than "sometimes".
So, normalised per in-experience dollar spent, that's a rough estimate of 3.078 / 9.99 = 30.8% which is exchanged through the Developer Exchange programme to be given to developers as profit. Compared to the 25-28% that Roblox shows on their Monetisation documentation page (pre-increase, this would be 27-31% now, also given there's some overlap with the Creator Rewards section of the chart which we also calculated the figures for), it's pretty close, without having to trust any of their figures (apart from their own earnings reports, which are heavily scrutinised and legally required to be sufficiently accurate). The remaining portion is split between Roblox and the developer, at a rate probably similar to that shown in the same chart. The same could be done for any developer which has a more accurate figure of Audience Expansion Rewards or Extended Services usage payments to work out more of the areas in the same chart.
> such a lopsided deal is still presented with such weasel wording.
It is very clear to any developer with experience with Roblox's economic system that this isn't at all lopsided, and is in fact fairly balanced. Based on an educated perception of an average user, I've derived similar figures to what is shown on their monetisation documentation, so I have strong reason to believe that they're accurate. If we want our very own estimates, the amount taken by the developer through DevEx is "about" 30%, and the amount taken by Roblox for their own investment is similar. This leaves "about" 40% to be spent on the developers for their own infrastructure. No real developer needs to calculate these figures for themselves, I've just done so here solely for demonstration purposes.
The combined payment of services and profit is the full package of what's provided by Roblox and it would be uninformed to claim it as anything else or try to say that the developer paying for their own similar services would be far more cost-effective. None of this is weasel wording nor exploitative of developers on Roblox's part. It's just a different deal with more supportive ways of earning and different parties paying for the same resources. If one were to prefer this deal, they should use the platform. If they don't, they shouldn't. It's not better or worse for either party, it's just different.
> Or it could be from a user who previously owned a lifetime Builder's Club subscription, which is now grandfathered in to Roblox Premium, and receives Robux monthly despite only making a one-time payment.
> My point here is to demonstrate that attempting to create such a fiat -> Robux exchange rate figure isn't really feasible, or that if one did exist it wouldn't be accurate. Nor would I think it to be particularly useful either; the main exchange rate that matters to developers is the Robux -> fiat one (for how much Robux is going into their experiences and how much they can DevEx from it), which is very clear and very well-defined – since September 2025, it's 0.0038 USD per Robux <https://create.roblox.com/dashboard/devex>.
If there is not some USD -> Robux calculation then there’s no way to say what percentage payout 0.0038 USD per Robux represents.
Ultimately the company can create Robux from thin air, what matters is the total amount created year vs the total money coming into the system each year. IE company could give every player some free Robux it’s just adding 0$ USD -> X Robux to the average.
Which is why the statement about treating some exchanges differently is so sketchy in terms of calculating what percentage a developer keeps.
I suppose it could be considered steep for anyone making a multiplayer game while managing the hosting for themselves on a tight budget. Developers with strong knowledge of monetisation strategies can make good revenue streams from games with self-hosted or self-managed servers. Maybe these developers wouldn't be able to get the same amount of revenue if they used Roblox instead.
What Roblox provides is a platform to upload experiences to with minimal risk or skill required, and services that are heavily subsidised by money redirected from their most successful experiences. The barrier to entry is lowered to the floor, and most kids using the platform to learn game development wouldn't have otherwise learned about it if they had to manage servers, study networking, etc.
Cloud services are a thing, but they're usually expensive and Roblox is paying for them for you. Free cloud services are a thing, but they're usually very limited and what Roblox is providing is essentially unlimited.
For me, the killer app for Roblox is none of this. It's Creator Rewards <https://create.roblox.com/docs/creator-rewards> (previously Engagement-based Payouts (previously Premium Payouts)), a programme where any player that pays for a Roblox Premium subscription (or is a new/returning user and buys anything on Roblox in the future) results in money earned for the developers of the experiences they play. This happens without requiring any monetisation strategy, microtransactions, or paid in-game products to be created by the developer. Nothing similar is provided by most other popular game engines or platforms.
For myself as a smaller Roblox creator with no interest in creating such monetisation strategies on my own experiences, Creator Rewards makes up a much bigger income proportion than it does for most large developers on the platform. Instead of ~10%, it's more like 90% for me, and I suspect that most kids learning to code games on Roblox without having good marketing skills are in the same bucket, and so the cut won't be nearly as steep for them.
> Supports here does not actually mean they get paid that money.
What 'supports' here does mean is that the difference between what Roblox takes as their share to pay their own expenses and what is paid out as profit directly to the developer via DevEx or Creator Rewards, namely incoming app-store & payment fees (paid when Robux goes into the platform, mainly from purchase of Robux or Roblox Premium, in the case of Roblox Premium then Creator Rewards also should be accounted for) and platform hosting & support costs would, on a platform that pays a revenue share instead of a profit share, have to be paid by the developer instead of by Roblox. It's true that developers never receive this money for themselves. However, it would be the same if they developed their experience outside of Roblox – this money to pay for their operating expenditure would come out of whatever revenue share they earn before it becomes profit. I personally feel it's disingenuous to attribute these costs that Roblox pays on behalf of the developer to profiteering or that the money goes towards their own investment. The share that is taken by Roblox for these purposes, and by consequence not directly to developers or support of their experiences, really is 33%.
I'm taking greater pains here to clearly differentiate between the profit-share model used by Roblox and the revenue-share model used by most other platforms in the industry because of the unique way the Roblox platform operates. This is one of the most widely misunderstood aspects of the entire platform, and Roblox also makes this clear on the same page:
> If you develop outside of Roblox, you may have to pay for hosting, servers, moderation, and customer service on your own. You also have to dedicate time to managing these services; on Roblox you can focus on building your experience.
The tradeoff here is not Roblox taking a draconian cut to suck developers into their walled garden so they can have access to Roblox's exclusive platform and market. They're just paying for what the developer would have had to pay if the same experience was on a platform that didn't provide the same services or was selfhosted. This is, in essence, the same normalised tradeoff that most large technology companies make today through cloud services. This makes a lot of sense given that Roblox is using the cloud (primarily AWS) to provide some of these services.
Roblox is extremely clear and accurate about what these costs are and what tradeoffs the developer is making by using the platform, and that the developer is accepting a profit share rather than a revenue share.
The ONLY exception – the sole, singular exception to the 'profit share' rule that applies across the entire platform – is for experiences that surpass Roblox's default service limits (these default limits are never hit for 99.9999% of experiences). This is 30-50 experiences <https://devforum.roblox.com/t/announcing-roblox-extended-ser...> across the entire platform (for context on this number, >200 experiences have reached 1 billion visits), almost all built by huge teams. These experiences need to apply for Roblox's Extended Services solution <https://create.roblox.com/docs/en-us/cloud-services/extended...>, and pay extra based on the quantity of services they use. This is done so Roblox can heavily subsidise smaller experiences on the platform and give them each a better chance at success. It's the kind of thing people advocate for in real societies and I'm glad it exists on Roblox.
> And yes that 28% includes an asterisk.
The asterisk here is that this is the minimum possible profit share – the cost for both Roblox and developers is higher if the money is taken outside of the platform because of the various taxes, currency exchange fees, and transfer fees that need to be paid by Roblox (or by their payment processor, Tipalti) before the profit ever gets given to the developer. These are detailed at <https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/27985018895124>.
> is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entire global economy if paid.
Where did you get that idea. Global economy is ~200T/year PPP. 0.1% of that split across every artist you want the training data from would be insanely difficult for the vast majority of them to turn down. Which makes sense as art isn’t that big a percentage of the global economy compared to say housing, food, medical care, infrastructure, military spending etc.
Obviously the incentive to take without compensation is far more appealing, but that doesn’t mean it was impossible to make a reasonable offer.
For all the people represented in the training data to receive royalties would be an incredible wealth transfer to the Extremely Online. My forum posts, StackOverflow answers etc are also contributing to the model outputs. The training data, by volume, mostly belongs to blog authors, redditors, Wikipedia editors, to us!
The people in that counting to infinity subreddit would get compensated a lot if this were fully automated - their posts were so overrepresented in the training set that many of their usernames became complete tokens (e.g. SolidGoldMagikarp).
I object to calling people chatting online artists.
However, ultimately nobody is going to pay them more than the value of their posts to the AI company which puts a severe cap on what that’s actually worth. People who post a great deal of online content might be worth compensating a few thousand dollars, but it would be hard for them to then turn that down.
I think the lower bounds of someone signing away rights to their whole art portfolio is more towards $1m than few thousands. Few k is just a month's salary that they can "make" themselves. Offers that small would be almost off-putting.
There are definitely >1m artists worldwide, some popular some less so, and $1M * 1m =1T, not 0.1% * 200T =200B.
Hard cap of 200B divided by 1M equals 200k, and that would be sure more reasonable, but we aren't hearing artists responding favorably to hypotheticals in that range, so I'm skeptical that "ain't nobody gonna turn that down".
I think the vast majority would agree to let AI companies train on their art for 10k let alone 200k. Don’t forget the average global salary is way below what you see in the US.
Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary. Of course the vanishing tiny percentage people care about would want more, but that’s a separate question and not particularly valuable to AI companies.
> Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary.
Didn't that exact social experiment took place in the US last year? I thought the result of that was disastrous if media reports are to be believed.
OTOH I remember creator of Wordle closed the "low few mil" deal instantly, so I do believe it unlikely that people turn down few _hundred_ months worth of salary. But those artists are not from regions with 50-100x less median income and/or wider income distribution relative to US - I think they're concentrated in relatively high-income-low-disparity regions - so I don't think there's backwater wherever that lifetime income there is equivalent to no more than 6 months worth in US that has abundant supply of artists.
And IMO those artists are basically engaged in a geo-scale dumping of media contents. It's the same phenomenon as how moving consumer electronics manufacturing to US instantly multiply costs by small integers instead of just incurring premiums in percentages. If that phenomenon were to be quenched and those effects were integrated into economy anyhow, that will change the global balances of power to some statistically significant degrees, like, we'd be seeing flying rocket amphibian McBoatfaces everywhere. That might be interesting, but I'm not sure if that's an interesting kind of an interesting thing to see.
Wordle involved actually selling the rights to something not just allowing AI to be trained on it while he kept the website.
That’s really not a reasonable comparison to what is being sought.
As to global artists, I was suggesting the majority of artists globally make ~20k USD or less per year as artists. To get to millions of artists you need to use a generous definition, so now Hollywood is full of actors how many of them made 20+k last year as an actor? If you disagree fine let’s double it and 6 months salary is still only 20k and would I suspect be a seriously tempting offer when you retain all rights to past and future works.
Systems don’t necessarily react based on the legal situation. A red light camera that’s improperly installed, poorly maintained, etc could essentially act randomly from a drivers perspective.
Which is why they are supposed to have a sworn officer review the camera footage. I have certainly had a camera flash me while waiting to turn right on red, still outside the intersection. They never sent me a ticket however since I had clearly not done anything illegal.
... which is why they are supposed to be regularly calibrated by an independent third party - with tickets automatically being void if law enforcement can't prove that it was functioning properly.
It seems unlikely that we would be more efficient at achieve consensus than evolution which can hand craft neural structures via feedback loops across millions of generations.
Especially when this demo needs 200k neurons when organizations with vastly fewer neurons have more complex behaviors.
The problem with that logic is that evolution iteratively builds on top of old systems. The foundations are often remarkably crufty.
My favorite concrete example is "unusual" amino acids. Quite a few with remarkably useful properties have been demonstrated in the lab. For example, artificial proteins exhibiting strength on par with cement. But almost certainly no living organism could ever evolve them naturally because doing so would require reworking large portions of the abstract system that underpins DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis. Effectively they appear to lie firmly outside the solution space accessible from the local region that we find ourselves in.
I agree with your second point though that this system is massively more complex than necessary for the behavior demonstrated.
We already know we can be more efficient than evolution at many tasks. Pelicans after all never developed jet turbines. We may not be able to access a simulation space as vast as evolution does but for small solution spaces we do quite well.
When aircraft can carry onboard oil refineries and drilling rigs you can more reasonably compare them to birds. Without that you need to consider ATP vs jet fuel or crude oil vs a dead fish? Skeletal muscle can be 40+% efficient depending on what exactly you’re measuring.
Going head to head vs evolution in a similar design space with similar tools and goals, arranging neurons for useful thinking, is vary different than increasing top speed while sacrificing just about everything else.
>When aircraft can carry onboard oil refineries and drilling rigs you can more reasonably compare them to birds.
This is a fair point in general, but the whole point in this context is not that human design is more efficient at duplicating an entire organism, but that it can be more efficient at narrowly defined tasks. Evolution has never had the goal 'evolve human consciousness as quickly and efficiently as possible', it just had the goal (and even calling it that is stretching things of course, but let's say an emergent goal) of reproducing organisms.
My point was in narrowly defined task of turning chemical energy to motion, a Jet engine is less efficient than muscle fibers if you use ATP as the point of comparison. Biology got really efficient at that very narrowly defined task.
> Evolution has never had the goal 'evolve human consciousness as quickly and efficiently as possible'
Evolving as efficiently as possible isn’t the goal. But turn an egg into human consciousness as efficiently as possible is definitely a goal, of course it gets to leverage everything else the brain needs to be doing rather than starting from scratch here.
The problem is there is no guarantee the warehouse worker at a food bank is doing anything of value. So we can’t assume such things are productive without direct evidence.
I think the material point of HN User Yuliyp's comment is that the organization claiming to be providing us with "Charity Sense", for some reason is not providing us all of the data we need to make sense of charities. Even worse, it seems to be deliberately disingenuous in presenting the data it does give us.
At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're presenting. Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? When you remove them, the numbers and percentages radically change. Not only that, it doesn't feel like the average person sees a food bank and a university, or a hospital, (and certainly not a university hospital), as the same sort of "charity". When you start digging deeper into the numbers, it just looks like they were lumped in to make the less resourced charities like food banks look bad.
Maybe there was some other reason they had for using this amalgamation? But they should be forthcoming with what that reason was.
If you’re making sense of something you need to include everything in that category.
It’s perfectly reasonable to create different subdivisions / buckets based your own definitions or NTEE code etc, but all those sub categories combined must add up to the same thing as how charities are defined.
The question was not why did the IRS amalgamate those organizations.
The question was why did Charity Sense amalgamate those organizations.
What value is it adding if it does nothing other than report data we could get from the IRS in any case? Saying, "Hey man, we just re-post the data we get from the IRS." Is the same thing as saying, "We didn't really do any analysis."
Yes, non-profits is a superset of "charitable non-profits". The IRS puts all 501(c)(3) organizations under the same filing framework. Hospitals and universities are in there alongside food banks and shelters. Breaking them out by NTEE code gives a more granular picture is a great idea.
501(c)(3) is just one of 29 types of non profits defined by the IRS. Many non-profits aren’t charities and some of them can even distribute profits.
501(c)(7) IE non profit social club for example could be just about anything from knitting circle to a S&M sex club. Have that club buy property and then at some point in the future sell that property at a profit which is then distributed to those members.
If the change is not designed to educate the student, then the point isn’t education.
As a general rule when changing complex systems, you sacrifice what you aren’t trying to optimize. If you make a random change to a car without consideration for gas mileage it’s very likely to reduce gas mileage.
Schools are not merely in the business of maximizing education, they have their own prestige to uphold, and they would like to give degrees with their name on it to students who have actually upheld their end of the contract.
(The other side of that contract is, kids are not merely attending schools to learn, but to earn a degree that carries some degree of prestige)
>> How is this the fault of AI?
> This particular "AI bogeyman" isn't just AI; it's cops with AI
You can’t separate the thing from how it will be used. It’s like arguing that cars on their own aren’t particularly dangerous, but the point of buying a car is to use it thus risking the general public.