mfitton

Well... yes, it would. In theory, efficiency gains are deflationary. Huge efficiency gains are hugely deflationary.

If we're producing 10x as much, why not print 10x as much money? The goods and services each dollar could buy would remain similar.

What it cost doesn't actually say what it cost. I wonder what models they used. Napkin math of Opus for everything (probably not true) with no caching suggests $67,000.

Cool article though!

And then you end up raising your grandkids instead of the kids you gave birth to. It's not something that comes without cost. And what if you don't particularly trust your parents to raise kids? I suppose you would have no idea whether you did or not, because they would not have parented you...

I just want to say that I'm in a similar position to you. 32 and divorced my wife a couple of months ago. We had gotten together at 18--I had lived with her my entire adult life, excepting college. Still not completely sure it was the right decision, but I had nagging unhappiness in the relationship that I couldn't seem to solve, even with personal and couple's therapy. I have to remind myself how lonely I felt in my marriage sometimes... solitude can be better than a feeling of rejection or alienation.

This is just to say... it sucks. It's really hard. It seems to get a little bit better over time, but at least right now, I still find it really hard. Some things that help:

1. Claiming the space you live in. Nest. Get some art you like. Put up photos that remind you of the significant relationships you still have, that remind you of good times with others.

2. Exercise. Whenever I'm having a particularly hard day, exercise is a huge reprieve for me. It saps whatever anxious energy I have and channels it into the movement and effort.

3. Observing yourself, the thoughts that crop up to you. "Oh, I'm having thought XXX again. I'm going to put that down for now." The more times you do it, the more it will occur to you that you can. Focus in on your senses, how your body feels. Often, when my mind is anxious or lonely, my body is feeling fine, and I can take some comfort in that.

4. Plans. Make plans with others. Lean into your friendships. Reach out to people more frequently. And, importantly LEAN INTO VULNERABILITY! If you're a man, like me, you might have put a lot of your "intimacy" eggs into one basket--your partner. Try to build these kinds of relationships with others. It won't always work, sometimes you'll face implicit or explicit rejection, but when it does, you'll find your friendships deepen. A lot more people are looking for this than you might expect.

5. Creative and emotional outlets (related). Journaling helps to ground, and somehow the act of writing to myself makes me feel less alone. Poetry and music have been great for expressing some of the pain. The act of creating can be very satisfying, and it's a solitary activity, for the most part.

6. Do nice things for yourself. Keep your place looking nice. Buy yourself things you might want. When you cook dinner, put out a place mat and eat at the table and light a candle--do things you would have done while you were partnered. Treat yourself like you're your own partner.

7. Read things that keep your mind engaged. I don't know about you, but one of the worst things about being alone for me is a tendency to ruminate when my mind isn't busy. Go over regrets, what I could have done differently, whether I made the right decision. One of the best ways to avoid this, for me, is to have books I'm reading that engage my brain when I'm not busy, in thinking over the material that I've read.

Some don'ts:

1. Rebound. I hooked up with a good friend about 2 weeks after divorcing. It got intense quickly (there had already been feelings) and then it crashed and burned (all within a month). I wasn't ready; she wasn't ready. Now we're trying to renormalize back into friendship, but it seems some damage was done. And now I'm carrying two losses in a way that's confusing and just amplifies things. That said, I had received this advice on all sides and didn't follow it... so why would I expect anyone else to? All this is to say, it's probably good to be "okay" with being alone (even if you don't want to be forever) before launching into something else.

2. Careful with substances. It's easy to get into the habit of drinking a bit every night (or at least it was for me), though tbh this had become a problem before the divorce too, since it was occupying me so much... But even in reasonable amounts, it adds up, makes your mood lower, makes the process of moving on and building a new life harder. I imagine the same applies for weed or practically anything else.

3. Social media. Looking at pictures of happy couples, seeing all the things others are doing, or brain rotting watching reels--none of these will make you feel better, but an app on your phone is super easy to reach for when you're feeling lonely as a form of dissociation.

Testing my LLM-detection abilities. Did you write this yourself? Or is this LLM produced?

The phrasings stick out to me as super GPT-like.

I think it's quite common that a company has way too many things that it could work on compared to what the amount of people they should reasonably hire can get done. And working on more things actually generates more work itself. The more products you have, or the more infrastructure capabilities you build out, the more possible work you can do.

So you could work on more things with the same number of employees, make more money as a result, and either further increase the number of things you do, or if not, increase your revenue and hopefully profits per-employee.

I'm not sure that follows from this article. In fact, I think the logical conclusion of the article is that, by trying to grow (address weaknesses and turn them into strengths) you're actually creating strengths, which in turn creates a weakness.

I think it's possible to grow in positive outcomes of behaviors, but I also think this article is trying to get at something intrinsic within each one of us. Identifying where our personality quirks lead to strengths and weaknesses, and accepting that, is related but not quite the same as identifying concrete positive and negative outcomes of behavior, and trying to change our behaviors to align more to the positive outcomes.

Not sure if the link I'm trying to make here will be clear, but... I had an interesting conversation with my wife the other day. She conceives of who she is largely through the behaviors she expresses, a kind of de facto self-definition. I tend to have a self-conception that's a little bit more abstract and rooted as much in my feelings, thoughts, with some aspirational quality, that my behaviors sometimes live up to, and other times don't.

Do you think normal people (think, your average investing American) are trading based on this news? They probably shouldn't be... I would think that by far most of the trading these past few days has been institutions, so, a big transfer from some financial institutions to others?

I think this would be expected though, no? Sure, there's flight to safety, but you're also reducing exports to the US, reducing the number of dollars flowing to foreign nationals, which reduces the demand for treasury bills, which an excess of dollars would often be used to buy to have an inflation-"proof" store for your dollars without currency risk. You would also expect devaluation of the dollar from tariffs / trade-war, which I would also expect to cause selling of t-bills in favor of local currencies

You're answering a question that wasn't asked so you can bring your view on unionization into the conversation. The implicit question is whether management should, not whether they can.

I have a public transit commute, but at the end of the day it's 8 minutes of walking to the train, a transfer after 7 minutes, and then a 7 minute walk to the office from the train. Never enough unbroken time to get into a book :(. I've learned something new about public transit commuting--look for a commute with as long a single stint on the train as possible, while still trying to minimize total time.

Could they not make sure that enough of their assets are in cash-flowing assets (think, rent-yielding assets, or treasuries, or dividend-yielding stock, etc.) that need not be sold and whose cash-flow can be utilized?

As far as the change over time goes, I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you that social mobility used to be higher. I think part of the reasoning for that was an incredibly strong domestic economy compared to the rest of the world, as well as a lower baseline (strides in standard of living and pay get harder and harder to increase the further you increase them).

As far as the comparisons globally, they're ranking countries based on "education, access to technology, healthcare, social protection and employment opportunities" which has the implicit assumption baked in that those 5 metrics are proxies for social mobility. They might be, but why not actually measure the thing you care about? Social mobility to me means changing social classes based on income. Something like moving from a 25k/yr household to a 75k/yr household, or moving from a 75k/yr household to a 200k/yr household, maybe another jump up to 500k or a million/yr.

It seems to me that there is a much more equal distribution of incomes and outcomes in the countries you linked. That makes me think it would be much harder to go from being middle class to upper class in those countries than in the US, simply because almost everybody is part of the middle class. Thus, I think if you measured what most immigrants (and what I) actually care about when we hear about "social mobility," then the countries you mentioned would have great social mobility into the middle class, and basically no other social mobility.

I've had consistently bad experiences with Apple support.

I'd say your set-up is probably more rare than people whose own code and whose company code are both stored on Github.

I think it's confusing because person 1 was talking about America, person 2 was talking globally. That said, I eat dangerously close to .66 of a chicken every day.

Aha, maybe I'm putting dramatically too many grounds into my coffee, haha.

A few cents a cup?! Where do you buy your coffee? I buy coffee at about 12 bucks a pound. A pound makes about ten carafes of 4 cups (tbh, I use the term cup loosely, because a mug for me is more like 1.5 to 2 actual measuring cups) each. I get to more like 30 to 40 cents a cup. It seems like there might be potential for major cost savings.

I can really relate to this. Thanks for sharing your story.

I'm getting shot in the foot by this right now as our team embarks on tackling some long-term tech debt.

The approach we've found that works is health checks and manually looking into cases when we think we've fixed a bug, as it will often point us to a piece of duplicated code we missed that we can wrap into the fold.

Isn't this flawed, though? If a venture company has a billion dollars in LP funding secured, then instead of having that 1 1 billion fund, they could have ten of the 100 million funds listed in the article. Sure, it's more work, but it's also, hypothetically, a vastly larger return, both for GPs and LPs. Not to mention, doing the billion dollar, lower-returning fund makes VC less attractive to the LPs that put up most of the money, as they're paying more in management fees for a lesser return.

It seems to me that funds getting larger is driven by a flawed expectation from VCs that large funds will perform as well as small funds, not based on a cynical extraction of money from their LPs, but maybe I'm mistaken.

Does it not? Given their current profits, we would expect 25b in rolling year profits. Their market cap is 1.2t. Apple, with about 80b in rolling year, has a market cap of 2.8t

Given the kind of revenue and profit growth forecast NVDA has given, these numbers don't seem terribly far off.

Worth noting that NVDA's profits 8xed in a single year. A lot of people are basing their NVDA valuation based on the past year's revenue, which does make them look extremely overvalued. However, if NVDA has enough sales and enough of a moat to double their profits again, suddenly they'll be biting at Apple's heels profit wise with a much lower valuation.

It doesn't seem like a totally crazy valuation to me, despite the uncertainties involved.

It's true that it isn't always the case. We have no more than 2 people on the team at any given office, and are spread across 5 offices and a few full-time remote on a broader team of about 10.

Probably not always, but in general, yes.

I think you're right about this, but there are companies that are putting distributed teams back into open offices just so that... they can sit in zoom meetings with their team. But now, they're less likely to have ad-hoc collaborations over Zoom because it's a pain in the neck to find a conference room and feels borderline disrespectful to one's neighbors to carry on a long call when they're trying to focus.

It's all situational. I agree with you that in-person collaboration is beneficial, but bringing people to the office doesn't necessarily do that without restructuring teams that were built on a distributed basis, which can be super disruptive and lose a lot of organizational context.

At my place, there are desks (about 4 feet wide, set in rows of 6, with people's backs facing each other and no dividers). There are about 200 desks, and about 250 employees. Desks need to be reserved, keyboard, mouse and charger all need to be brought by the employee to their desk each day. 50 or so people don't get desks and have to sit on couches, stools in the kitchen with no backs, or the floor.

The CEO said that we should just feel grateful that we have an air-conditioned office with snacks to come back to, poo-poo'd the concerns over: a lack of desks, the high noise-levels, the fact that most teams are distributed and so much of the open office is sitting in a remote zoom call talking over one another...

It's an incredibly hard environment to work in, and I was shocked that my company's CEO was so out-of-touch. Of course, he has a private office.

You might want to look into Ray. It's a Python library lets you deploy actors (classes) and tasks (functions) and abstracts away the management of resources, message passing, lets you define automatic repairs, etc. that is entailed with deploying an arbitrary amount of intercommunicating processes in Python.

Admittedly, I haven't worked with Erlang or Elixir, so their solution to this might be much more usable. Ray is aimed primarily at ML use-cases, though it is quite general.

Guessing, but he could know someone else is going to pursue it anyway, frets about it, thinks "at least I can do something about it if I'm in charge."

The problem is that this shows you how long it takes to get to a single place, rather than showing a map visualization like this site. I've often really wanted this on StreetEasy especially. I don't want to know how long it takes just to get to work, I want to know how long it takes to every neighborhood I regularly travel to.

I'm completely ignorant about nuclear power plants, so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but when we say that nuclear power plants today don't have the possibility of a similar meltdown, are we taking into account actions of an adversary?

For instance, if someone dropped a sufficiently-sized bomb on a well-designed, modern nuclear power plant, would it melt down?