tedggh

There’s no real productivity increase because that project was not worth pursuing before AI. It’s like wanting to build a tunnel in the 1700s by having 200 people digging it by hand, vs actually building it using machines in the 2000s. We don’t say there was an increase in productivity. The technology enabled a project that used to be a dream.

I believe if you teach your kids to read and write well, and some fundamentals about finances, you can rest assured they will do well for themselves.

The amount of hours devoted to sports in US schools is unbelievable. I have friends who are ALWAYS busy with either training or leagues, including holidays. Most of these kids will not be athletes. I understand the team building skills, maybe the monetary benefit of scholarships, but investing so much time and money in something of so little value for 99% of kids once they become adults, doesn’t make sense. I will certainly not be doing that with my kids.

I think future technology will allow the car to detect another car or pedestrian too close to the exhaust system and disengage it. I don’t know, some wild thought I just had.

Good anthropomorphism.

Once they have deported the last undocumented immigrant this system won’t be just decommissioned, it will be repurposed.

My experience has been different, most retailers have accurate delivery times, unless you shop for things like furniture at C&B or WestElm for which they don’t keep local inventory. The only appeal Amazon has for me is the subscribe and save option and that you can find almost anything. For example I have a legacy air filtration system for which I cannot find replacement filters for, except on Amazon. For anything else there seems to be a better alternative today.

The value was driven by the size of the user base. We gave each user an arbitrary price but didn’t understand how to turn that into actual money. So if you had a website with 30M users it was valued at $900M. The late 90s early 2000s were wild times in VC, and some lucky people realizing how nonsensical all that was cashed out on time.

I use Amazon to buy cheap stuff like zip ties, printing paper and ink and some cleaning products. Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store. For example, I would never buy photography gear on Amazon. I go to Adorama or BH. For my favorite brands in say hiking or running gear I go to REI or RunningWarehouse or visit my local brick and mortar store. Amazon has truly become the convenience store for me, my average purchase is under $10. Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.

I think of my wife and myself as extroverts and we do have a very large social circle. Still we don’t host as often as we wanted, maybe once every two months. One of the reasons is it can get very expensive. The last party we threw was a Sunday brunch for about 15 adults and a handful of kids, and we spent over $500 just in pastries. People still bring stuff but we don’t expect them to. Dinner can get even more expensive particularly if you cook meat dishes these days. Then all the time it takes which also translates into money. To host a dinner party it takes me part of the week shopping and the entire weekend cooking and organizing. So most times is better just to call a couple of friends and go out to a restaurant.

I have a reliable system running for years on a Surface Pro 2022, so not sure what your experience with Windows was. It does take a few tweaks to remove some of the junk but otherwise it is a solid work environment IMO. The same can be said of Linux, it can be a real PITA finding and configuring drivers for something that should not take more than a few seconds. So both environments can definitely be a shitty experience unless you know what you are doing.

These are nice little initiatives that don’t seem to last anywhere I see them. But good luck to the Dutch, maybe they are different.

You definitely want to take breaks from Creatine. It’s not something people should take year around.

I already cancelled Netflix and HBO, I guess Hulu is next. It feels almost like a yearly 10-20% increase across streaming services and the content hasn’t improved. There’s just more crap to filter out. I think I may just be happy with Criterion only once I’m done with a couple of shows on Apple TV.

I thought keeping details away from c-suit regardless of how technical these people are was the standard thing to do. Your job is to make these guys work the minimum. We fucked up, we fixed it and it won’t happen again. They don’t need to know anything else. You could upload the forensics report to a share drive and make the link available if they want to see it, but most times they won’t bother.

Rider was my IDE for years until they started pushing their AI tools while not letting you bring your own models. Then it seems they listened to the complaints and for a while I could use Codex but then the next update took it away. So I ran out of patience and switched to VS Code, and that was the end of JB and my dear Rider for me.

Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.

It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.

The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.

“Higher rates means financing/borrowing is more expensive. Mortgage rates will go up,…”

This is highly inaccurate. The 10 year US treasury is a better metric for predicting mortgage rates. We saw this during the past interest rate cuts, interest for loans and mortgages still went up, remember? I do, because I was borrowing at the time. And why was that? Because the 10-year treasury continued going up, and that matters more than short term interest rates. The 10-year treasury is about expectations about the future, so we need to look at how the market responds before screaming mortgage rates will go up, they could actually go down.

Yeah speaking of history. Let’s pretend that the US and Canada have never been in conflict before. We literally went to war, had multiple territorial disputes, plans of invasions, tariffs and trade wars, not to mention all the disagreements in foreign policy including Vietnam, Cuba and Iraq. None of this has prevented the two countries to have one of the most peaceful and cooperative relationships between two sovereign nations in modern history.

The current regime is due 2028. For most of their history Canada and USA had cordial relations. This looks like a reactionary measure rather than a long term strategic one. Europe is in decline and facing political irrelevance, not the type of partner you want to have particularly if your border neighbor is one of the two current global super powers. It’s yet to see if the UE’s economic reforms will pay off, even of they do, is still decades away, with no cheap energy and having to invest in their own defense. You don’t want to hang out with the losers. Put your emotions aside, be patient with the current US government and get ready for post 2028.

Not a fan of Amodei myself but calling Anthropic a scam is a bit of a stretch when their revenue growth is unprecedented in the history of tech. They are also technically a profitable business.

Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews.

I wound pay not to have TiVo at all.

Most people under 40, 30 and even 20 I know are on Instagram, and many under 40 and 30 are on Facebook. Maybe it varies with country, education level or some other factors.

It appears LLMs are much better at writing during a debate than when explicitly asked to write. The moment LLMs are tasked with composing a blog article or intro for a book they introduce all the nuances that identify the output as AI slop.

Humans think too highly about themselves particularly when judging other species. How can we judge something we can’t experience ourselves? like multiple distributed consciousness of octopuses or emergent descentralized logic of ants?Some species even with tiny brains or no brains at all can solve problems for which humans spent years of engineering and planning. See study below of slime replicating the Tokyo rail network in 26 hours optimizing by cost efficiency and fault tolerance.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1177894

“ Claude accurately remembered the first source when it was stolen during the training process”

I see…

As a naturalized American who lived in 3 other countries including two in Europe and who travels often all over the world, married to a European, etc I must say the US has its perks and it’s definitely in my top 5 countries to live. I lived mostly in the south and the east coast so I don’t have a full picture of the US as a resident. But it’s the same in Europe, living in Berlin is very different than living in Sicily, even Milan is very different than Sicily being the same country. So to be fair the US should be compared to Europe not to a particular country. The car culture in the US I think is fine because the country is built around it, the interstate system is pretty good and gas is cheap. I do like road trips very much, at my own pace not having to worry about train/flight schedules. In Europe taking long family road trips by car as we do in the US would be prohibited and even stupid in the eyes of many Europeans. I also like that you can talk to Americans everywhere and get to know people. In Europe you start talking to a stranger they look at you like you went crazy. Being social is part of having a good quality of life too, so the US ranks pretty high there.