DoughnutHole

Most of the time I’ve gotten major value or insight out of a book it’s because it’s said something truly unique or insightful that I genuinely never would have thought of if I hadn’t read it. Your prompt is useless because I might think I care about area A but I’d have my mind blown by area B which your prompt will drop unless it somehow has a perfect theory of my mind.

Sometimes you just have to read to damn book.

The amazing thing about AI is that you don’t even need AI superfans to shoehorn it into a conversation that doesn’t even touch on AI. Detractors will do it for them.

The Soviet Union was able to innovate in the areas they chose to sink resources into but innovation was clearly not as widespread as evidenced by their decades of stagnation from the 60s onwards.

They were still innovating in military technology in the 80s but analysis since their collapse analysis that they were at least 20% of GDP on defence, if not as high as 40%.

The West managed to match and surpass Soviet military and scientific advances without sacrificing consumer goods or the economic wellbeing of their people.

Nuclear advancements slowed down due to PR problems from clear and sometimes catastrophic failure of commercial power plants (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima) and the vastly higher costs associated with building safer plants.

If anything the weapons kept the industry trucking on - if you want to develop and maintain a nuclear weapons arsenal then a commercial nuclear power industry is very helpful.

Russia didn’t start this war with the intention of getting into a protracted slugging match over 20% of Ukraine - they got into for the whole thing.

Luckily Ukraine beat back the drive on Kyiv. But if Russia’s success metric at the outset of the war (the complete capitulation and conquest of Ukraine) carried a credible risk of losing Moscow or even smaller cities closer to the front would they have been anywhere near as likely to have made such an attempt?

If those attack vectors are intrinsically less effective at causing mass destruction then that’s an improvement.

A plane hijacking can evidently cause enormous destruction with minimal equipment and personnel. Even just a bomb on a plane can easily kill 200-500 people depending on the plane’s capacity.

Ground-based attacks since 9/11 have been evidently less effective because a bunch of guys with guns attacking a train station or a rock concert can’t do as much damage as quickly as a hijacker essentially flying a cruise missile into a major office building.

Homer used to complain about the big things. He tried to kill himself in the third episode due to losing his job. The first 2 seasons are honestly comparatively depressing with some of the heavy topics they touch on.

The Simpsons just leant so far into 1-note characteristics that they became caricatures of themselves - and the term Flanderization was born.

Coe is insightful and good at violence, but also (!spoiler for latest season) responsible for the most hilariously unfortunate cock-up of the show so far…

Not particular unique - this is a common practice in a lot of agricultural industries. e.g. there are wine co-ops in France where many vineyards commingle their grapes to produce a commercial volume of wine under a particular label.

What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.

Companies can have additional motives to profit, and they’re more likely to when control is concentrated just because individual people have multiple desires.

This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.

The blindness is to reality and nuance.

If you stare at your GPS and don’t pay attention to what’s in the real world outside your windshield until you careen off a cliff that would be “blindly” following your GPS. You had data but you didn’t sufficiently hedge against your data being incomplete.

Likewise sticking dogmatically to your metrics while ignoring nuance or the human factor is blindly following your metrics.

This is Japan selecting itself to develop a critical industry.

Being deeply embedded in global supply chains and your allies’ economies makes it a lot more difficult for them to justify abandoning you to your enemies.

> Most humans code crap.

My biggest frustration with AI coding tools is that bad engineers are no better at judging the quality of AI code than they are at writing code themselves. So, their output has shot through the roof without an improvement in quality.

The productivity of good engineers has gone up as well but good engineers tend to actually think about what their tools are doing, which slows them down. Bad engineers are now able to output more shit code than ever before.

I feel like I’m watching my company building a house of cards in real time.

> It can’t replace a human for support

It doesn’t wholly replace the need for human support agents but if it can adequately handle a substantial number of tickets that’s enough to reduce headcount.

A huge percentage of problems raised in customer support are solved by otherwise accessible resources that the user hasn’t found. And AI agents are sophisticated enough to actually action on a lot of issues that require action.

The good news is that this means human agents can focus on the actually hard problems when they’re not consumed by as much menial bullshit. The bad news for human agents is that with half the workload we’ll probably hit an equilibrium with a lot fewer people in support.

I have to assume this is entirely because American architectural practices are ultimately derived from England’s, where courtyards are not particularly helpful.

They make perfect sense in warm, sunny regions like the Mediterranean because they provide a shaded and comparatively cool area on hot sunny summer days.

The courtyard giving shade is a negative in England since it seldom gets very hot and so people are actively trying to enjoy the sun, not hide from it. And as a double whammy a courtyard means more exposed walls so a home that’s harder to heat in colder winters.

Of course plenty of Americans live in places much hotter and sunnier than England - but their English heritage has left them with standard building practices unsuited to their environment.