jackcosgrove

That's not weird at all it's the difference in most cases between products and services produced by local labor vs products and services produced by more abundant, cheaper labor elsewhere. I don't complain about $20 meals because I think inequality is bad enough.

The only thing in your list that could be cheaper without underpaying local workers are pharmaceuticals.

I am a total neophyte when it comes to LLMs, and only recently started poking around into the internals of them. The first thing that struck me was that float32 dimensions seemed very generous.

I then discovered what quantization is by reading a blog post about binary quantization. That seemed too good to be true. I asked Claude to design an analysis assessing the fidelity of 1, 2, 4, and 8 bit quantization. Claude did a good job, downloading 10,000 embeddings from a public source and computing a similarity score and correlation coefficient for each level of quantization against the float32 SoT. 1 and 2 bit quantizations were about 90% similar and 8 bit quantization was lossless given the precision Claude used to display the results. 4 bit was interesting as it was 99% similar (almost lossless) yet half the size of 8 bit. It seemed like the sweet spot.

This analysis took me all of an hour so I thought, "That's cool but is it real?" It's gratifying to see that 4 bit quantization is actually being used by professionals in this field.

Complexity can lead to "more is different" outcomes at higher strata. I would not say reified concepts are "made up" as they can have very real effects on both higher and lower strata.

The fallacy of reification is treating something emergent as a thing-unto-itself rather than a process or interaction born from constituents at a lower stratum. A reified thing can be recognized and changed for this reason. A mental concept needs only a change of mind to mutate, or to be destroyed.

Religion may well prove to be a reification that is destroyed once it is recognized as such. But I do believe that you cannot reduce that which is real and not real to only those things that have physical antecedents at lower strata, as we see emergent phenomena in the physical world as well.

Food prices have been subsidized for decades by farmers' pride in their work and holdings, hesitancy to make a change, and attempts to maintain a family legacy. Had those farmers sold their lands off forty years ago and invested the proceeds in the S&P 500, they would be far wealthier than they are today.

I was using life expansively to refer to artificial, robotic life.

It's far more practical to adapt life to space and other planets, than it is to adapt space and other planets to human life. The problem with writing a story about artificial life exploring the universe is that it's unrelatable without humans in it.

I think humans are stuck on earth permanently because there are no other environments in the solar system we can live in as easily as earth. Traditional sci-fi explained this away using overpopulation pressures, but overpopulation is fading as a reality and plausible narrative device. And forget about interstellar travel, it's too dangerous and takes too long.

If intelligent DNA-based life is still around on earth when it starts getting too hot because of the sun's expansion and it all needs to flee, it will have continued to evolve such that it will be unrecognizable and unrelatable to us. And by then I expect artificial life to have spread to such an extent that biological life on earth is basically a historical footnote.

I actually think life in the broadest sense will spread from earth to other places in the galaxy, but it will be completely alien compared to human life.

Don't index funds trail market changes though? I thought their allocations are reactive. In other words, the Mag 7 are being bid up by people trying to beat the market. I don't see how index funds could move prices.

I do understand how they can stabilize allocations where they are, which I think is the concern. Zombification rather than a positive feedback loop.

And anyone who thinks they can consistently predict who will be among the 4% is... mistaken. Diversification is how one manages risk when a system has a power law distribution of outcomes.

Trying to beat the market is playing a zero sum game. Someone has to lose for you to win. I understand savvy winners add information, but most winners are just lucky and it still makes me uneasy to play a zero sum game.

When you simply try to match the market, you float on the tide that mostly raises all boats and sometimes lowers them. That sits much better with me.

I have investigated taking Amtrak for a family trip to do something different. "The journey is the destination" or something like that. I was branding it "slow travel" to the family so we could use it as a sort of modern life/digital detox. I also looked into a trans-Atlantic passage on the QM2.

I'm sad to report that renting a family bedroom or two joined bedrooms on Amtrak to take a journey on say the California Zephyr didn't pencil out. It is costlier than flying (about $2000 vs $1600 at the low end for both options, resp.) Even if you account for the cost of staying two extra nights at the destination it about breaks even.

With children I don't want to risk the days of travel becoming an ordeal as opposed to hours of flight time. The "digital detox" might quickly go sideways and require hours of screentime pacifiers. Maybe when they are older.

Happily the QM2 actually made financial sense and there would be more room to move about and explore the ship.

I think rail travel makes the most sense in the Acela context the article opened with - routes between cities that take less than a day. For cross-continent travel the time savings of air travel make rail travel a harder case to argue.

It was always my understanding that software careers are shorter than other technical careers, and the higher wages compensate for this. More than compensate, if you invest early.

If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.

The economy functioned without large numbers of office workers in the past, and there are regions of the country where this is still the case. To an extent they will sell their services to each other. To another extent they will be selling to the owners of AI (imagine an electrician building out a data center). The economic surplus will still be there - it will be larger in fact - and there will still be a need for their services. The players involved will change however.

I received both the worst and the best pieces of career advice when I was an undergraduate.

The worst advice was that writing software, after the dotcom bust, was dead as a career. This taught me a lot about the value of "conventional wisdom" vs looking at the underlying supply and demand dynamics of a career. Sort of adjacent to the theme of the essay, I think the best careers are those that you can tolerate and those that have favorable supply-demand curves.

The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.