All these stories about VR, then metverse/crypto, then ai, and now gambling. It seems like Zuckerberg is trying to recreate the early success he had in an emerging field but, at a fundamental level, does not understand that facebook was successful largely due to luck and timing.

Sometimes I think America cannot be a good place to live until the myth of the “tech genius” is thoroughly broken.

80/20 is around $6.00 per lb on the east coast (at least near me), and 90/10 was over 10 bucks a pound last I checked. Though I have not bothered to look in a while.

Cow. Ground beef got so expensive. Good for me in the sense that I am eating less red meat, but bad in the sense that meal prep takes longer now.

I don’t think my colleagues are going to be replaced by ai. I think they are going to continue to use llms to generate “output” that needs someone like me to constantly fix until that becomes too expensive. At which point they will go back to doing their work the way they used to.

These llms are impressive word guessing machines, but the are nowhere near as capable as their companies say they are.

If my experience with it at work is anything to go by, no. Increasing amounts of my time are spent fixing the sloppy output of coworkers who use AI. Far from being “left behind” I’ve become one of the few people who is actually able to solve complicated problems.

If you are just wanting to spam a bunch of copy over a network, quality wouldn’t matter. Say for example if you are running a propaganda campaign to undermine trust in the electoral system among American Conservatives quality does not matter. Just get the vibe right and spam out as much as you can.

Another obvious case is marketing. If you just need a bunch of Twitter accounts to say “B R A N D N A M E” over and over quality would not matter

This is the value proposition of llms in general. They are great if you don’t care about quality. They second quality matters their time-saving value drops off to near 0.

Bartering won’t really work well for an economy with a high degree of specialization, since the complexity of required exchanges will increase with the degree of specialization.

Of course you could get around that problem by introducing a new specialization, that of a broker who warehouses goods and give trades based on what people have on hand but that is just a more complicated version of money.

For some reason people have this mindset of “I must be in my car when I charge it”. I see it a lot when I go to DC fast chargers, which really only make sense on road trips. People sitting there in their car charging it up to 100%, which they do every time it needs a charge.

I’ve had conversations with people at charging stations where I explained that they should be charging at home and the reacted like it was the first time they even considered the possibility. If you only use fast chargers of course you are going ng to have a bad experience. That is a terrible way to operate an EV day to day, but it somehow became the default for a lot of people.