It barely makes sense, though? The idea is that it will surface insider information to the public. That happens only because the insider is financially incentivized to place a bet. But they will only bet if they can win money, and they can only win money if someone is taking the other side of their bet, which necessarily means someone without their insider information.
In other words, prediction markets require suckers to lose money to insiders in order for the public to learn new information. In this case, people lost over a million dollars to an insider so the public could learn that "d4vd" was searched a lot.
People with insider information often aren't necessarily aware they even have it. "Superforecasters" are often just "good at predicting" moves within a given vertical, because they have expertise and exposure to the trends of that vertical, and are good at making deductions and extrapolating trends. Those people make money from prediction markets just as often as people with true insider info do.
And the people they're both making money from, are people who think they have enough expertise + exposure to function as superforecasters — and who probably could function as superforecasters, in a market with fewer "sharks" in the pool — but who lose out simply because they were slightly less well-calibrated than whoever they were trading with.
Which is to say: prediction markets can still work and be worthwhile to participate in, even if everyone in them is rational. They don't require suckers.
But, in practice, they certainly do seem to attract them.
> And the people they're both making money from, are people who think they have enough expertise + exposure to function as superforecasters — and who probably could function as superforecasters, in a market with fewer "sharks" in the pool — but who lose out simply because they were slightly less well-calibrated than whoever they were trading with.
This seems like a complicated way to say "suckers". Of course they don't usually self-identify as such and think they act rationally.
They're not suckers; they can win, if there's nobody who happens to be more-well-calibrated than them on a particular bet. And that can happen more-often-than not, depending on how carefully they bet.
By the conventional use of the term, a "sucker" is always a sucker; suckers suck constitutionally.
But a professional gambler in a skill-based game (e.g. poker), is only going to lose money on net, if they happen to be playing against people with "higher ELO" than them.
And in the case of a prediction market, the "ELO" isn't absolute; people's expertise "rankings" are relative to each particular question. There's no "general factor of expertise" that makes someone able to beat the odds on every question. Each question forms its own market "niche", where only people with expertise will be interested in participating; and so each such niche is to some degree illiquid, with not enough trades to make an efficient market (i.e. the kind you wouldn't expect to find a $20 bill on the ground in.)
To be more concrete: while there are "specialists" (insiders, but also ordinary experts in hyper-specialized verticals) who might clean up by betting on the things they know a lot about, they'll generally be miscalibrated as overconfident on the things outside their specialty (see: any scientist who got famous for their research and now writes pop-science books about topics they know very little about, often making incorrect statements), and so will lose out vs "generalists" who can't successfully make the in-domain bets the specialists make, but who are better-calibrated on multiple topics (or on particular odd intersections of topics) because they spend less time hyperfocused on one niche, and more time flitting between various niches.
Which is to say: there's no "house edge" here to lose against. In a prediction market, everyone's going to be the "shark" for some questions and the "sucker" for other questions. Every question is its own game, and every game has an edge, but with that edge going to a different party. If you actually know what you know, then you can identify which questions you have the edge for (probably a finite number), answer only those, and make some (very small) amount of money. You may lose sometimes because someone knew even better than you (esp. for questions that go beyond yes-or-no, where there are 3+ mutually-exclusive prediction-categories you can buy into, such that others might "hit the bullseye" while you just "hit the ring"); but on average, if you stick to your "field of pre-eminent expertise" (presuming you have such), you would make a small positive gain over time.
That being said, anyone without a "field of pre-eminent expertise", who thinks they can place correct bets purely by being rational + doing the level of research one can accomplish using public Internet sources, is 100% a sucker, yes.
I think some may be using the terms "insider" and "shark" in different ways. To me:
* Insider: A person who is cheating because they actually know the answer in advance or have direct, non-public, confidential information which materially improves their odds over even domain experts. If caught, they can go to jail. Insider as in "insider trading" not just an "industry insider".
* Superforecaster: A person who has deep domain expertise and/or experience as well as strong research and estimation skills which increase their odds over a naive bettor. This may include historical data or first-hand investigation which is not commonly or easily available to others but has not been obtained illegally.
* Sucker: A person who bets despite having far less than a superforecaster's expertise, experience or knowledge. Probably over-estimates their knowledge while underestimating the degree of relevant knowledge which may be legally obtainable by others.
* Shark: Not really clear to me other than more skilled/knowledgeable than a sucker.
The other side could be someone with natural exposure to the question that wants to hedge, for example people traveling to/from the middle east were exposed to the Iran war question(s) and could get insurance against airspace closure through prediction markets.
This argument doesn't work for 90+% of the volume on PM/Kalshi but I think most of the questions there are just gambling.
Disclaimer: I have not read any literature on the economics of prediction markets, and I know nothing about the mechanics of Polymarket/Kalshi.
I would imagine that in theory, everyone thinks they have the best information at the time, something like:
House: "Odds that X happens? We'll put $1 on both sides to get it started. 50/50."
Someone comes along: "Oh dang, I'm definitely more than 50% confident that X is happening. Let me put $1 in." Now it's 67:33.
Someone else comes along: "Oh I'm more than 67% confident X is happening, let me put $1 in." Now it's 75:25.
And of course, you get people going: "I'm more than 25% confident that X is _not_ happening, let me put $1 in!" And now it's 60:40.
The murky part, I would imagine, comes when the odds and the payout actually act as something that influences the outcome, but in perfect theory-land, if everything goes as planned, this should move the odds to the most informationally-accurate measurement, which should, in theory, benefit observers by making this measurement public.
Sure but these things are not really "odds" anymore, right? The most searched terms might be a mystery to the general public, but not to the engineers at Google. It gets even murkier when you can influence the outcome. The exact temperature at an airport might be difficult to predict, but if you are able to hold up a hair drier to the sensor for a few minutes you can be pretty sure it won't be cold.
When the other side either has information that makes it not a bet, or if they have means to influence the odds, the best outcome for outsiders is to not play at all.
And of course, the entire conceit relies on the idea that more accurate information to the public is always good and always outweighs the negative externalities. But is it really all that important to the public good what the most searched artist is on Google in a certain year? Or if an announcer will say a certain word during the super bowl?
I don't think this is entirely true. Polymarket is extremely transparent on user accounts and markets so you can see who is betting what, their other bets, and so on. The article mentions that other users fingered him for insider trading. That itself opens up an opportunity for profit, by simply following the trades on what he seems to be an insider on. It'd be like if you could see in real time what Nancy Pelosi was investing it - shadow her trades and make big bucks with the soon to be announced market shifting government deal/regulation/etc.
The markets also open up the door for hedging, arbitration and other sorts of opportunities where you don't necessarily even care what the result is.
Right, and that is not some grand secret. Every person taking a side on the bet is aware of that nuance for any trivially gamed market. If you think the size of the market is sufficient to incentivize somebody to do so then that would obviously increase the yes odds.
It's akin to betting on penny stocks in the market where you are also aware that a single person could dramatically shift the market one way or the other if they wanted so you're betting not just on the stock's performance, but also on the meta-market.
it is good if the losers are voluntarily participating. They are not coerced (stupidity is not coercion) into it, and therefore, it is reasonable that they expected to win the bet.
The only problem i have with polymarket (and others like it) are that insiders can often remain anonymous. It should not, and if an insider earns, but their win requires they remain anonymous or face some social/reputational repercussions, then that should happen.
Therefore, as long as KYC is enforced for these markets, i would have zero issues with their existence.
In most modern societies, we regulate all sorts of things that people would otherwise willingly do to their own detriment. We ban drugs; we have labor laws; we have usury laws; we require seatbelts; we have securities regulations; etc. (Notably, until very recently, this included most forms of gambling.)
So the mere fact that losers are voluntary does not, IMO, make the situation good.
all of those things you mentioned have damages sustained on third parties that did not have consent. And tbh, my opinion is that the banning of drugs have done more harm than not banning it (but instead, allow it to be sold safely and cheaply).
Gambling to me, is like that. Banning it doesn't stop it, and it has barely any harm other than to the person who over-indulge. Regulating it is a good idea - where regulating means there's oversight on cheating, on the platform's governance etc.
> all of those things you mentioned have damages sustained on third parties that did not have consent.
The family that suddenly finds themselves homeless because one parent decided to go deep into debt to fuel their gambling addiction sure seems to have "damages sustained on third parties that did not have consent."
Gambling addiction has impacts beyond the person gambling, because we live in a society. They might gamble away their kid's college fund, lose their house, or resort to stealing money from family members. When they take out loans that they default on, it impacts the balls and raises costs for everyone else.
All of these are very similar to secondary and societal effects of hard drug addiction. It should at the very least be regulated. And most being is worthless from an information standpoint, so isn't providing any societal upside - a man doesn't hurt us. The world was strictly better before we had rampant gambling everywhere.
Imagine bad (incorrect and potentially harmful) information is public knowledge. Examples are "X cures cancer" or "Is Y dangerous to consume".
A prediction market will be seeded by public knowledge (of course it cures cancer or its safe to consume), which you describe "suckers". History is filled with many examples of bad public knowledge that turned out to be false (e.g. DDT is safe pesticide).
An insider (someone who knows the drug trial results, or works at the Corp creating the harmful substance) is incentivized to trade on that knowledge, which creates a better informed public (via people who pay attention to prediction markets).
Why does secret(insider) knowledge exist? To the benefit of the organization that wants to keep the knowledge secret. Insider trading laws purpose is to keep Corp and gov orgs in power. They prevent the dissemination of true information (for private power). Prediction markets incentivize the dissemination of true information, a public good.
That is the beauty of the Resolution part of prediction markets. If evil DDT Corp bets money to skew the market, then they lose even more money on the Resolution (assuming the resolution is deterministic of harm and has not been manipulated).
Oh good, the entire premise of the value of the system rests on an axiom with such giant and obvious flaws that you could drive a supertanker through it.
Does the resolution use the scientific paper that says "DDT is safe" or the one that says "DDT is unsafe"? There's no objective resolution of scientific facts.
"Prediction markets provide better information" in the exact same way that "Markets are efficient". You need to interrogate what "Better information"/"efficient" actually means even if you take the claim at face value, and also it's just not a model that maps to reality well.
The public didn’t even learn the most searched term from the market. The public had a better idea it might be “d4vd” from the market, but only slightly before they learned it for real from Google.
What I can’t figure out is why this person is being charged but the companies running the bets are not.
Thanks for listing all this out. I took issue with it in theory, but now that I see it written out, I don't find any of it objectionable. People act we though the nonprofit doesn't exist anymore.
The main reason this is an issue is that it's a lemon market. Many sellers claim their sites will require "no time to maintain" and that future returns will likely continue, but it's often a lie and thus you don't get the multiple that is truly justified. Even without lies, no one knows the truth of your business like you do. The unfortunate result of this -- and I've been in a similar position in the past -- is that you are incentivized to lazily run things into the ground slowly rather than find a new owner who may bring new passion.
>Many sellers claim their sites will require "no time to maintain" and that future returns will likely continue, but it's often a lie and thus you don't get the multiple that is truly justified.
This, the numbers they show are often a result of a pump that isn't sustainable. I've watched a bunch of youtube videos from people on the buying and selling side of things, and it's readily apparent that the values are temporary for most of the sites. The scam sites outnumber the legitimate long term ones and both are sold on the same platforms.
For instance: Back in the Bad, Old Days, charging phones (especially smart phones) wasn't quite as simple as today.
The aftermarket cables were shit. Brands came and went overnight (they still do, but they did then too), and even if a person eventually found some cables that worked then it was hard to get more of them later.
The aftermarket charging bricks were shit. I had some that would make capacitive touchscreens go crazy. Some that barely worked. Some that got stinky-hot.
The phone might have a USB port that looked about like all the others, but that didn't mean much: Different phone models had different ways for signalling/confirming/accepting charging capabilities, and they rarely lined up with the method a random charging brick used.
Get the wrong combination on this double-locked mystery box, and it was possible to plug a phone and have it say it is charging -- even though the reported battery SoC is dropping before your eyes.
That was the market. It was fragmented and dysfunctional, and the only sane method to simply charge a phone was to use OE cables with OE power bricks, for real money.
---
Then Anker showed up, kind of out of nowwhere. And they were all like "Uh, guys? We sell stuff that actually works."
And they were right. They put together cables that consistently didn't suck (which should not be hard, except...). They started selling charging bricks that worked well with most or all of the phones on the market -- fooling them into thinking they were talking to their OE brick so they'd behave themselves.
It had been a terrible mess. A complete crapshoot.
And then, Anker products just plugged in and worked. They did all the things they said they'd do.
They did it so well that they raised the bar for the entire industry.
And, nowadays, it's not so bad. It's easy-enough to get a reliable cable or a charging brick that isn't a complete turd from a variety of names. That's not a thing that most of us think about much, if at all.
But man, it was fucked up for a long time before Anker stuff became common.
Didn't it come out that their cameras were uploading everything to the cloud even though they swore it didn't? I feel like I remember being very disappointed with Anker for something...
They own Eufy which sells cameras with main feature being “no subscription needed”, that are very unreliable and full of ads (which isn’t being advertised as much as lack of subscription). They do also go big on labelling a lot of simple features as AI where in reality it’s something as simple as “detect a person in a photo”.
I have Eufy cameras and it’s complete garbage, sadly competition is also mostly garbage.
Bold unsustainable claims at st the core of their business, it’s not just thumbnails.
I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_rAXF_btvE to be more balanced than the LTT video, but I think it mostly depends on your expectations of the cameras. The videos themselves are stored locally, not in the cloud. But if you have thumbnails turned on in the notifications, then the thumbnails have to be stored somewhere temporarily (I think this is an Apple/Google requirement), and they're being stored on a cloud server rather than in your home network (which would require opening up a port).
Anecdotally, I've always been reasonably pleased with their products. I think I've owned a couple of powerbanks, and a USB/HDMI hub. Of the <Insert_random_smattering_of_letters> brand names on Amazon, I do tend to lean towards them a bit more.
edit: having said all of that, relating to this article, I don't want AI anywhere near the products of theirs I'm currently buying.
Anker is a brand where buying a product feels like pulling the lever on a slot machine. I'm either going to get a product that works great and I love it, or it's going to feel half-baked and fail early.
Best chargers on the market, hands down. Best cables too.
But they've gone into high end stuff. They make the Eufy brand of LiDAR smart vacuums for instance. All done in house, and consistently in the top rankings against market leaders like Roborock and Dreame.
They're killing it.
They're doing home security systems, and all sorts of stuff under the Eufy brand.
I love my Eufy camera: no subscription fee, plug-and-play, never a problem, just a crystal clear view of my driveway with never a glitch. Cost me around $35 a couple years ago.
Did not realize the Eufy brand was affiliated with Anker. Feels like a missed opportunity, Anker has earned some goodwill from me that might sway my purchasing decisions in the home automation category
Love my Anker chargers. I like them even better than my Apple chargers now. Liked their wireless phone charger too, though the blue light on that was excessively bright. I have lots of Anker USB cables, no problems with them.
Didn't know they made Eufy. That would make me highly consider Eufy for anything.
Same. I ended up getting something called "FLANCCI LED Light Blocking Stickers" on Amazon that had some 80% light blocking circles that were just the right size. The brightness is definitely a design flaw, Anker should work on that (and maybe have the color change when charging is at 100% too).
Aside from that everything just works, and it has multiple ports (2 USB-C + 1 USB-A) & that build quality seems excellent... the Anker chargers I use are really small, highly portable, and they have a straight up-down design. I'm using the Nano II 65W and the 737 GaNPrime 120W.
Something like the Apple MacBook chargers assumes there's lots of space below the power outlet for the charger to hang down. But often that isn't the case in a cafe, or sometimes even an airport, where the power outlet is almost level with the base of the desk you're working at. In those cases, you can't plug a MacBook charger in directly. You could use an extension power cord, but that means you're now carrying extra cables.
With the Anker models I have, I just carry the charger itself and a short USB-C cable. The charger and cable fit into the zipper section of a small Lacdo USB Flash Drive Case I carry with me, so I have my charger & cables & USB sticks all in one small case. I usually take the 65W Nano II, which only has enough wattage for my laptop. But if I use the 737, I can charge my laptop and also charge my phone, plus maybe a Pebble watch while working.
And this is all in the size of something that's maybe half as big as my old Apple MacBook power bricks and their single USB port.
I did like how the Apple chargers had interchangeable heads for traveling overseas though. You can't do that on the Anker chargers. But the Anker ones do support international voltage, so you only need to plug a prong adapter on the end, no step-down converter or anything. I can fit an adapter for one country into my Lacdo case as well. It's nice to be able to grab just the one case and run out to the cafe when traveling.
I've been using the same Anker charger brick since 2014. It was $13.99, delivered.
It has two USB A ports. It has always charged everything at a good rate, regardless of brand, model, or age. It's reasonably-compact, the prongs (it's made for US plugs) fold for convenience when traveling, and it is UL listed.
Its present duty includes keeping an iPad running 24x7 and also charging my phone every night. It has charged my phone many thousands of times so far.
I'd update it to something newer, with USB C and USB PD and the bee's knees, but this old Anker thing is exactly the right kind of consistent and boring.
I don't think about it much because it has given me no reason to think about it.
That kind of boring behavior is remarkable, I think. So many other charging bricks I've used were just trash to use (slow or fickle, causing me to waste time with a USB power analyzer before giving up), or they died prematurely.
Same with the powered Anker USB 3.0 hubs on my desk. Those have only seen about 5 years of continuous use but so far they've been resolute in their trouble-free performance.
This stuff seems to be very much buy-once, cry-never.
Pretty much what one of the posters above summarized. They were one of the first aftermarket brands for phone chargers that you didn't have to worry about what protocol your phone was going to try to use for fast charging, it'd just work™ and be more affordable than OEM. Add in mostly decent build quality and they got a surprisingly strong base for it.
They are one of the main players in cords, chargers, power banks, robot vacuum cleaners, smart home devices, and headphones and earphones, and also make a bunch of other stuff. They have $4B annual revenue. Some things are under the Eufy brand.
I didn't read the article but based on the title and subheading I assume they say "accidentally" because he was trying to reverse engineer the communication protocol to use his own device and he did not expect to find something as dumb as master credentials that would work on others' devices.
What are companies needing all of these hard drives for? I understand their need for memory, and boot. But storing text training data and text conversations isn't that space intensive. There's a few companies doing video models, so I can see how that takes a tremendous amount of space. Is it just that?
Hearing about their scrapping practises it might be that they are storing same data over and over and over again. And then yes, audio and video is likely something they are planning for or already gathering.
And if they produce lot of video, they might keep copies around.
All the latest general purpose models are multimodal (except DeepSeek I think). Transfer learning allows to improve results even after they exhausted all the text in the internet.
Everyone moved to SDDs or NVMe. If you're right, that includes manufacturers. HDDs still have advantages over SSDs for specific needs, like more reliable long-term unelectrified storage. It's also possible that the high price of SSDs made HDDs an option again.
Really if you're writing large solid files hard drives aren't that bad. If you can have the system split out one file per drive at a time then you'll avoid a lot of the fragments
Speaking from personal experience.. we treat cloud storage like an infinitely deep bucket. At rest data efficiency is not really a consideration because compute costs are so absurd. Why worry about a $2M year storage bill when your compute bill is $500M? It’s not worth the engineering time to optimize
I think the somewhat hallucinatory canned response is that they distribute data across drives for a massive throughput. Though idk if that even technically makes sense...
Problem is, once it's a trend you may be too late.
In saying that, a lot of the stocks I purchased over a year ago peaked about 3/4 months ago but have had massive sell-offs since. Still trading above what I paid so I'm considering doubling down on some as the timeframes to production are still years out.
In other words, prediction markets require suckers to lose money to insiders in order for the public to learn new information. In this case, people lost over a million dollars to an insider so the public could learn that "d4vd" was searched a lot.
Is this good?
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