mr_toad

All of them? It’s basically a parody of knowledge work.

You’re not going to get venture capital funding by using auto.arima

IP has very low marginal cost, emeralds don’t.

Historically, more efficient technology has led to a greater demand. It began with more efficient steam engines that required less coal for the same amount of work. That didn’t lead to a reduction in demand for coal, instead the acceleration in demand for coal changed the world.

However you measure it, in LOC or in MB or in ops per second, demand for more software always seems insatiable. This trend will likely continue up until software can be produced with zero humans at all. But I can’t see that happening unless we invent actual real artificial intelligence.

Even they can be replaced. They probably won’t even be last to go.

> The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.

It probably began with cave painting. Once Grog discovered cave art he realized that he didn’t actually like his fellow tribesmen all that much.

> Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization.

It’s much easier to radicalise someone who is already disaffected.

Why would you assume that he was working for the Saudis? Spy agencies will recruit people of any nationality. Much more likely he was working with (or planning to work with) one of the two countries that are building AI.

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

This guy’s handlers, or whoever he was planning to sell this tuff to probably put in some effort. They’re less likely to be caught, and more likely to have gained something.

Should the founders have looped in the British authorities? Or shouldn’t they have been plotting sedition?

I have never cursed at a website for a rendering issue.

I have cursed too many websites to count because of their broken form designs (like assuming a particular postcode format) or reliance on cookies from ad vendors for basic functionality. If your website needs to generate “a new google recaptcha cookie” (whatever that means) before I can enter payment info, then sorry, no es bueno.

I have to say your head security guy was way ahead of the curve.

Anywhere I’ve worked it was firewall everything and use VPNs, and most places still do this. SFTP was in the too hard basket. And of course that led to people emailing files around as standard practice (and the only option) and inevitably some got emailed to the wrong recipients.

Many people don’t realise that Adam Smith’s most famous work was a criticism of the prevailing economic policies of the era.

> Ireland wasn't that great.

A lack of resources useful to industry didn’t help. The industrial revolution didn’t benefit everyone equally.

AI companies are all limited liability corporations of one sort or another, and the liability of the owners for any decisions is … limited.

Look! There’s a dead cat on the table!

Don’t mind high oil prices, inflation and the debacle in Iran.

Google doesn’t own the FABs, like Apple they outsource the manufacturing.

According to one article I read TSMC makes the TPU itself, Samsung and SK Hynix make the RAM, and Foxconn assemble the package.

Sand is a pretty good heat conductor. It’d probably be ok on hot nights, but not so much in winter.

> the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits

Anyone who advanced that ‘defense’ has a poor understanding of economics.

Risk is not an essential element of capitalism. Some investments are effectively risk free. ‘Disproportionate’ return seems to be something you’ve just made up. There’s no mention of the proportionality of returns in any economic treatise I’ve ever read.

Lastly, there’s nothing to defend. There’s simply the observation that if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital. Nobody has ever come up with a working alternative.

In October 2001 Wikipedia only had 12,000 articles, compared to 7+ million today.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:Number_of_English_Wi...

A million solar masses of stuff (stars and gases) orbiting within a parsec of the black hole would be quite a view even without the accretion disk.

The Venetians also essentially opened the door to the Ottomans, and the Ottomans then proceeded to dismantle the Venetian empire.

This is going to replace many layers of management who were pretty keen to use AI to replace their employees. So, poetic justice?

I’ve been in queues behind people who can’t find their tickets in their email, or whenever they saved it, or can’t get an internet connection to open their email, cloud drive, or whatever. So it doesn’t seem like a solved problem for everyone.

> dont increase the price of the product?

Literal empty shelves. And resellers on Ebay making bank.

Google and Amazon have tied up all their capital (and then some) in data centre investments, they don’t have more money to spend on fabrication. Plus they have a lot of experience running data centres, and zero experience running fabs.

You don’t lower your prices on the off chance a competitor might enter the market in the future. You wait until they have invested capital but before they start making profits and are at their most vulnerable.

> Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones

Bronze is harder and more corrosion resistant, but forged iron (and especially iron that has been reforged) has a higher yield strength and is lighter, allowing longer lighter weapons. Compare the profile of bronze age and iron age swords in any museum and you can see that the bronze blades are shorter and wider that the iron weapons, and they would be considerably heavier.

Seems to be pretty much in line with human reaction times?

> In other words: only <20% of pur neuron budget goes to higher cognition (thinking, language, seeing, hearing). 80% is spent on motor skills.

Probably why robotics is harder than making a language model.