Recent submissions

Comment · 11 days ago
It's surprising what a small team can accomplish, but there are some projects that need a large team to be feasible. It would be nice if there was a clear path on how to grow a game studio and continue to deliver quality.
Comment · 11 days ago
The term "platform" implies a level of neutrality that doesn't exist in modern social media. The algorithm is making heavy decisions about what messages to amplify and which messages to suppress, on top of the possibility of a human putting their thumb on the scale.

This isn't a new problem. We've always had a few gatekeepers that steer the public narrative. This is a problem that the internet provides a clear opportunity to help solve, but has seemed to fall short. It's a clear blow to all of us techo-optimists.

Comment · 28 days ago
How seriously people treat this risk will play a major role into the fate of the major labs. It's going to be used in the argument for bailout. It could be used to spin a more extreme narrative, pushing for a flavor of nationalization. At least one lab will survive in the defense sector, but it could be a secondary lab that is a M&A target of an established company.

If the risk is serious or not has little impact on how seriously we treat the risk. Just another way that AI is disconnecting us from ground truth.

Comment · 28 days ago
1. Investors lose interest and many companies lose access to capital.

2. A lot of the purchases from AI companies are being made with investor capital. As this dries up companies with high debt scramble to service the debt and focus on profits to achieve this goal. This means higher prices and less investment into infrastructure.

3. This has large ripple effects across the broader financial markets, which forces federal intervention. Maybe bailouts for the tech sector. Maybe just some quantitative easing.

4. There will be a second wave of AI companies in the wake that focus on delivering value under constrained capital markets. These will be well positioned 10 years later to catch a major updraft in the next finical cycle.

5. Overall western R&D activity in AI decreases under these conditions, lower hardware costs allow foreign labs to operate at much lower hardware costs. This increases the systematic risk that Artificial Super Intelligence is eventually developed in a rival nation state.

Comment · 1 month ago
Yes, it happens. It's even happened with alcohol in certain population cohorts. I would just want to see stronger data before predicting alcohol consumption going to zero. Alcohol is a tradition lasting millenniums.
Comment · 1 month ago
Generally speaking, the longer something has been common the more time it will continue to be common. A fad vs a trend vs a tradition. Of course alcohol use can change. We see several cohorts with very low alcohol consumption. It's just that if we've been doing something for thousands of years, we're likely to continue to do it for thousands of years.

This is far from the first fluctuation of alcohol consumption rates we have data for. This is a major trend that will last decades but not a march to long term 0.

Comment · 1 month ago
> We say something like:

> GitHub Actions: 12 hours affected in the last 30 days (98.31% uptime).

This is trying to shine the most favorable possible light onto a deteriorating situation. It doesn't take away from the fact that most businesses have measurable missed revenue in downtime. Customers that shop somewhere else, ads that were never severed, leads that grew a little colder. 12 hours of downed GitHub results in millions of dollars of lost developer productivity that was externalized by Microsoft to other companies.

We shouldn't be trying to spin downtime as "just a few hours a month." Those hours cost real dollars.

Comment · 1 month ago
The Manhattan project was divided into smaller problems that were solved by experts without them fully understanding the nature of the project. Then, the solution was reassembled by a handful of experts.

You can divide a missile guidance system into smaller subsections and then either stitch the solution together by hand, or using a local AI w/o the restrictions of Claude.

Comment · 2 months ago
I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a selling point for everyone to switch to it?
Comment · 2 months ago
I've been using it since about February, still using it. It's running on my old M1 MBP. I have a lot of automations on OpenClaw, things like "Every week summarize this data and send me a message about it" or "check when a new version of an NPM package comes out and submit a PR to update it."

It's quite expensive from a value per token perspective. It's quite cheap from a "send one message from my phone and it does something probably productive" perspective. No major security breaches yet.

Comment · 2 months ago
I don't think these things are luxury at all, but can be packaged as luxury. For example, you can find quiet parks in most metro areas or you can go to a retreat in a resort in the mountains.

For years I've been buying only 98%+ natural fiber clothing. I can still find t-shirts for about $10, but I do have to spend time examining the tag on clothes. I also noticed that Nordstrom's app can filter by fabric type, but the clothes there are sold at a premium.

Comment · 2 months ago
1. Do any of the cost savings recommendations you address come close to $1T/yr impact? This is the scale we should be aiming for.

2. If you think this modeling is inaccurate or incomplete you can directly discuss that. That would be a much more interesting discussion than "it might be incorrect."

Comment · 2 months ago
The non-healthcare sectors of the economy do.
Comment · 2 months ago
Social Security is another great example.
Comment · 2 months ago
> The problem with US healthcare isn't who pays for it, its how damn expensive it is

Saving $1,000,000,000,000/yr is directly addressing how damn expensive it is.

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