shuckles

It’s true employees at the big AI firms are living in the future, but since this disclosure is in marketing materials to sell their stock to investors, it’s important to note that almost all the money in personal computing was made in mobile which didn’t use any of these ideas, and in desktop computing the money was made by Microsoft who treated the GUI as ancillary and competed on distribution.

I think the point stands: does it seem like they are increasing operating excellence at 5x-10x the rate they were in January? Or is the volume supporting having agents do the same work in 5-10 the commits that a human + agent was doing in 1 commit in January? There is some interesting data people pulled by comparing weekday to weekend contributions in the chart (much of the increase seems to be in the baseline rate).

Yes Anthropic’s chief compute officer said nice things about one of Anthropic’s chief providers of compute. Recall that compute constraints are one of their existential risks.

In particular, harvesting identities for online fraud is an industrial market for various criminal organizations.

This is a superficial complaint. In practice, the US doles out enormous amounts of social assistance. Disability, social security, and healthcare are an enormous part of the federal budget. Maybe it will be gated behind make-work or some other scheme.

It’s kind of useless to argue through metaphors here. There are a hundred researchers with more significant contributions to theory and practice than Karpathy. If you disagree, I’d love to see what papers or implementations you think he’s offered that pushed SOTA.

He can be at the frontier while just having a regular job. Every other option is a lot more work.

GPT-1 presumably, which was released a year after he left. Prior to focusing on GPT, OpenAI was pursuing a lot of research directions.

No it doesn’t? It matches his skills to the lab’s needs. Karpathy is a media personality, manager, and educator far more than he is a hands-on researcher.

Average people don’t want to spend their lives managing permissions. You could go ahead and use Android or ChromeOS.

No average person cares about your side project, and most people prefer Apple’s product decisions over the ones you’d like them to make.

Browser vendors have been able to ship their own engines in the EU for almost 2 years now. What great benefit to consumers has that enabled?

You aren’t going to run a network connected 24/7 online agent from a laptop because it’s battery powered and portable.

OpenAI did not "bet" on Jony Ive. They bought his company io Products.

The people complaining about Safari often are running enterprise crapware that requires some esoteric Chrome API or bug to operate correctly and should actually be an app on iOS but cannot be funded as such because its creators don’t care about its users.

It’s also strange because I highly doubt Google has manufactured a billion physical units of anything. Most of their consumer hardware is designed and built by partners, including Pixel.

In case of a natural disaster, it’s guaranteed that human drivers will abandon their cars on the road and cause gridlock. It happens all the time. Emergency vehicles are built to handle it.

Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.

It took me a while to realize you were using "$WORK" as a shell variable, not as a reference to Slack's stock ticker prior to its acquisition by $CRM.

Great then you have even bigger problems to wrestle with regarding solvency. Americans won't choose cost effective treatments, and if you force them to pay out of pocket for experimental therapy you will be accused of running death panels. Good luck with that. On top of all that, they are also unhealthy due to a variety of lifestyle factors including that their primary mode of transportation likes maiming them.

> I'm saying "increased rents + rent control not applying = more people should want to build"

This is false. People will want to build more on the margin, but that doesn't mean they want to build. If the profitability requirement (hurdle rate for getting investment from institutions) is greater than the the market rent, people will not build even if market rent is high. Indeed, that's what's happened in the last 5 years as costs have increased much faster than rents.

Surely you are capable of thinking there are tradeoffs here where one can set a level without dealing in absolutes. Put differently why not expand Medicaid to cover every American regardless of income? 400% is just as arbitrary as 1000000%.

This is right. More supply is bad for landlords. In particular, housing developers and landlords are different economic actors!

Central to the challenge of UBI and housing costs is the law of rent. UBI could work if all its redistribution was not immediately captured by landowners. There are ways to make that possible.

Rent controlled apartments being held by tenants no longer using them as primary residences is pretty common. A famous case of this was Cleve Jones in San Francisco who tried to make it a huge political deal when his landlord raised his rent to market because he was 1. living in Guerneville full time and 2. subletting the apartment. The media environment is one where it's ok for a master tenant to be a de facto landlord and make money on real estate, as long as it's not the landowner themselves!

Casual is a perfectly reasonable descriptor of economic conclusions based on vibes and anecdotes about apartment building in Montreal. I don't think it's reasonable to read it as an insult.

Income isn't wealth. Someone making $62,000/yr in income without working at 55 (i.e. no Social Security) is likely comfortable. That's >$1m in invested assets plus whatever is owed to them as retirement income when they reach retirement age. It's especially unclear if everyone else's payroll taxes should be spent allowing this person to retire a few years earlier.

This is all before including the other large personal expense (housing) for this person is likely imputed rents from homeownership which aren't counted as income but function that way.

You've just listed a set of specific circumstances under which some number of people might find housing more affordable, but that's a lot more like "investment outperformance" driven affordability than "broad based housing price decrease" affordability. That can happen even without a recession. A small number of people could've found Bay Area houses more affordable in the last decade if they were HODLing some 10x stock.

Did you write an entire comment by misreading "casual", the word I used, with "causal"? Otherwise, I have no idea how your reply relates to mine, as I didn't make any claims about the existence of such research.

Rent control absolutely causes a reduction in supply: there's a reason rent controlled buildings have apartments in poor condition that owners do not renovate (so a reduction in quality supplied) and many are held off market or converted to owner occupancy through condos and TICs (so a reduction in quantity supplied). Not to mention the units underused by long term tenants who maintain them as secondary residences.

This comment just indicates the difficulty of making accurate conclusions based on casual analysis like you're doing.