markus_zhang

I used to talk to a supermarket chain COO (or whatever the guy who handles the operations of all stores of that brand) in China. He told me that supermarket has extremely low profit margin that sometimes a couple of unexpected bad days would turn the number of whole year off. I can imagine they would like to squeeze every cent out of it.

Thanks for sharing. It is well written.

I think with the advancement of LLM many of those AI prophecies have been fulfilled. I found it sad that I’m no longer interested in that future, though.

Bro few people are going to read an article behind a paywall, plus Substack’s paywall completely blocks the user on some mobile web browsers to go back or type another address, because those browsers require users to swipe up or down a bit to display the UI while substack paywall completely freezes the page.

I don’t know about metrics, but everything is way more expensive in my city comparing to pre-Covid time. I’m not talking about CPI level inflation but way more than that, which is definitely not normal.

And that boom? Well it’s so hard to find jobs across the board, not just IT, but including trades people too.

Selling shovels is definitely more profitable, less risky and easier than using it to earn money.

I did read from HN someone from Spain said that the system crashed very often that they had to rely on humans frequently.

I doubt Jensen is completely out of the scheme TBH.

That’s the deal. You are asking the hand to tax itself and for sure it’s going to make sure the rest of the body feels the pain.

That’s why it is extremely difficult to make even modest improvements in a dug-in system.

Tech is the least important thing even for a tech company. Unless you are a 10x better than anyone else in the game. This did happen once for a while but you can do it without AI anyway — and probably better for you because it’s a lot more difficult to copy yours. However, hardware oriented companies may be the outliers.

The ability to rent cheap AI capacities, the ability to push to a million consumers, the ability to persuade for large contracts, these are the most important ones.

Probably because you are self employed.

It shows 13 mins ago for me.

Oh that's for sure, I thought OP means literally living in a forest like people a few hundred years ago.

Actually, in the small towns that I described in my reply, people live in homes exactly like yours -- they don't have city sanitary pipelines so they use septic tanks.

I actually don't know about trash! Thanks for reminding me. And I agree with the food part, although I'll probably cook mine.

Long term? Definitely a No because nature is pretty harsh and we spent a few millennia to get out of it. Most common people are not fit or rich enough to live in a forest.

Short term? Yes that’s interesting. Maybe a couple of weeks in a cabin or something. I don’t mind chopping woods to make firewood but I need managed sanitary.

A good middle ground is to live in a small town bordering the wilderness. I’d like to live in some town that neighbours a forest and is about an hour from the sea.

I still have the luxury of reviewing every line of code. I still try to understand every piece of code AI writes —- and if I don’t I tell the stakeholders that part of this piece of business logic (in my domain it’s always the business logic that is too complicated, e.g. four layers of CASE WHEN THEN ELSE END) is better to be pushed to the next layer so that each layer is simple enough.

But if it’s someone else’s code then I don’t care much. Some people push 5K lines of code every day and there is no way I’m gonna look at any of that.

For my own project I do the reverse — AI designs the architecture and the steps to follow, and I implement. I always love the role of a senior engineer who takes a design and implement.

I’d say find like minded people in your local and befriend with them. Going go into the cave does push away whatever you don’t want to see, but leaves you with resentment that is unhealthy.

Get into offline meetings and promote your ideas. Give your voice to the locals as well as the online communities.

Other than literacy and Math, I’d say, if you are capable, and is willing, teach them about everything that involves some manual labor.

DIY, homesteading, animal husbandry, electronics repairs, survival skills, cooking, whatever that cannot be easily automated.

Also teach them weapon handling, surveying, map reading, ham radio.

Their propaganda is that they care so the point is that the other guys don’t care so people flock to someone who says they genuinely care. It’s hard to fix the economy so I don’t think anyone can fix it. And as history shows again and again I think whoever gets the government is going to sleep with the big corps anyway.

Exactly. The establishment doesn’t care about the people and wave them off, so populist parties took the advantage. This happened before and will happen again.

The great game never ends.

Yep, that's what I see in the CS field -- people at the top are advocating AI and don't understand why the hell the others are hesitant. I meant the top engineers, not the management. I look up to them because of their skills, but that doesn't mean I need to agree with everything they said.

I doubt demand expanded much. I mean there is just that many games/whatever apps that the whole humanity needs. Maybe ti will go up a bit, like 50%, but getting 10x (or very easily 1000x if we just vibe code them) in supply doesn't change that.

Instead, people who sell shovels win big.

I actually take this advice in real life. I don’t talk unless really needed. There are exceptions like to my kid, but that’s the general principle to non family/friend members.

Hi Phil, how are you? Really enjoy your tech blog. The following is my take of the article.

Overall it’s a good thing for us who live in the suburbs. And there are always other options in my city. I don’t always buy from Costco. I sometimes buy from local supermarket chains. As for farmer markets, they are a bit too far for my convenience. I mean I want to support local products, but not to sacrifice my own convenience.

And what’s there to argue about who does the storage? You want to buy in bulk and you need to store all of your stuffs. We don’t have dimensional bags.

Not sarcastic and yes I did admit there are a lot of holes.

The first time I read about this was about 35 years ago. I read about it in a computer science textbook my father owned. I was just a child so I never thought much about it, except that the name was pretty cool.

That textbook was sort of system textbook which describes a lot of low level stuffs such as networking, hard disks and such.

That’s true. I don’t have an answer for the that. Maybe GAI is mathematically impossible so none of them gets to be that big.

My (very limited and human-centered) theory is that all carbon civilizations would at least in their large part of civ-life would face the problem of:

Growing needs of resources >> resources acquired from current technology

Again I'm probably wrong and this is just my conjecture. So I can't really answer this question, as I presume that all civilizations want to expand (or collapse).

What I’m guessing is:

All civilizations would face the same problem of greed >> resources available under current technology, and form some sort of organization not too different from ours, that is a pyramid.

Eventually they would find AI and their elites would willingly or unwillingly jump on the wagon and push it as far as they can.

For the lucky ones, they managed to achieve GAI somehow, and the whole species got transferred or replaced by their GAI.

For the others, they failed to achieve GAI, but the damage done to the society is so big that the whole civilization collapsed, thus they never managed to get out of their solar system so we never met each other.

Of course there are so many logic holes in my theory that you can probably laugh it off.