cool_dude85

Reminds me of a stand-up comic's joke about chess engines being better than humans: that this is in a human game and it's impressive that they're already better, when he'd stand no chance in a contest of converting word documents to pdf.

You just read an article describing how egg prices were not set in response to market conditions, and were instead manipulated by egg producers. Are you saying that you think, based on the rhetoric, that in an alternate reality where egg prices were actually increased due to market pressures, that people would still complain? I mean, probably.

On whether LVTs are passed on to tenants: "For instance, if landlords reflexively pass on costs (including holding costs like land value taxes) as higher rents, doesn’t that also imply they should cut rents when their costs decrease?"

One wonders whether they are rebutting their critics' actual arguments - I simply cannot imagine that a serious critic would make the quoted claim.

OK, but making money, though it may be less than a PE company would, is. Where do most doctor's offices fall?

What does it mean in this context to be more intelligent and shrewd than the existing owners? Delivering better profit margins?

Relevant, interesting problems that we have some immediate hope of making genuine work on might be, if not finite, quite difficult to produce. And it's also plausible that AI will not do as good a job of producing these as it does at solving them.

The other problem that Tao identifies is that math has typically been an unusually open subject in many respects. This openness may not work if big AI labs can afford to throw $X million at a problem to scoop you if the rumor gets around that you think you have something promising. Hence, less collaboration, and less chance of identifying these exciting new problems, infinite though they may be.

The chart is as non-specific as could be. It improved in some very vague metric by some amount at different (increasing) levels of training.

Wasn't this all supposed to be decentralized? How can a foundation choose to unilaterally "pause the sidechain"?

Got to the place where he says "As you can see, this is identical to the d/dx() operation except that the result is not divided by dx."

What does it mean with his d() operator to "divide by dx"? All of a sudden it seems like he has changed dy/dx from unfortunate notation that sort of looks like a division into something that actually is dividing two meaningful things, dy and dx? And so what the hell are dy and dx?

No offense to you, but we had to do these kind of exercises in grade school on days when a sub was in. You'd get together in a group and work through the logic puzzle on a structured form (i.e., it let you represent what you know about the person wearing green shoes, or the person from Morocco, etc.)

The union is negotiating with management, i.e. those with hiring and firing authority who direct the work of others. Same as a for profit.

>my general understanding is that the unions are protectionist dreaming of things that were true before but not today, but they want to keep things as they were.

This mindset really baffles me, as a unionized guy with a white collar email job. Don't you, like, want things that your employer doesn't want to give you? Job protection? Better than CoL wage growth? Work from home? Internal job progression? Clear, understandable job factors agreed upon in advance?

The union negotiates for what its members want. There's nothing magical about unions that mean, like, a white collar union is going to be negotiating for all its members to get a new hard hat every year, just because that's what auto worker unions do.

I said contract negotiations, you said strike. Even in this example, and there is an army of scabs outside the door, if a strike and its associated costs would cost the employer 75 million, it would be rational to give the union its 50.

Anyway, I agree with you that simultaneous productivity gains and deskilling as a result of AI efficiency, if it comes to pass, would work against labor power. The claim is that unions would hold no purpose under such an arrangement. I'd say if anything they'd be more important. The question is, would an employee rather have union protections if this comes to pass, or not?

>What’s a union going to do if (doing a lot of work there) AI significantly reduces the demand for software engineers or tech workers generally?

Aside from general job protection stuff, the general answer would be that they can ensure that some of the productivity gains go to employees rather than employers. Let's say the company has been so much more efficient thanks to AI that they earn an extra 100 million in revenue with the same level of spending. So, the union goes into contract negotiations asking for a 50 million increase in salaries per annum, and employees get part of that windfall.

Yes, but it's uncommon enough that doing so is called "voluntary recognition" of the union, acknowledging that the expected process is to file the cards and then do the NLRB election.