steveBK123

TBF, Americans say "NIMBY" to everything

I think the US labs are going with scare marketing as a regulatory moat.

Force US into putting laws in place that block out China firstly.

But secondly create regulations that have some cost to comply with such that the big 2-3 labs are grandfathered in by their scale.

So true. Brawndo, its got what devs crave!

Boomers in the US are a scapegoat because they benefited during the great build out of housing in suburbs by moving there, and then became NIMBYs insisting everything remain "just so" now that they own all the houses.

For example, the "housing crisis" might be a crisis for people looking for housing, but it is not a crisis for land owners and land owners are the real estate market.

This is an interesting way of framing the demographic problem, yes. In the US for example, from WW2 thru roughly GFC, working age population grew faster than the retired age population.

So there was relative political power in the working age, and a large/growing group to sell houses to. Further, pre-GFC there was a big trade-up market even for existing homeowners.

Now demographic & politic power in the west are in the hands of the older, homeowner retired/near retired baby boomers. Incentives to reduce the value of their largest asset are not strong. Also this is why we keep electing dinosaurs in the US.

We finally found the ROI!

Golden era of software productivity they say

I started buying physical media again, first vinyl and now CDs too.

It started as an impulse purchase and then evolved into hunting down various electronic remixes from the 90s heyday that are not available (legally) in electronic form.

Then I started to notice more & more how my streaming services were revoking songs out of my playlists, which reminded me I don't own anything I can't hold with in my hands.

My final annoyance with the enshittification of streaming music is just the UI/UX of these apps now. I don't want the buttons to move, I don't want a notification, I don't want a popup. I want to press play and listen to music like a big boy. Despite our phones being 100x faster, it seems to take longer and longer to simply do that.

+GPUs have significantly shorter useful life spans than say, all the dark fiber laid in the 90s

Thanks my reading comprehension was low last night it would appear

Legacy SATs were about 30pts lower per Harvard Crimson in 2023 https://features.thecrimson.com/2023/freshman-survey/academi...

Sure, but not at the admittance rate that legacies get. There's been stats & studies showing for example some Ivys with ~3% admit rates having something closer to ~12% for legacy applicants.

Most people applying to an Ivy are already self-selecting as pretty exceptional applicants (putting aside the delusional) and the legacy admits had same/worse SATs, etc.

edit: just looked it up, Harvard is at ~34% legacy admit rate versus regular 6% admit rate..

Exactly.

All this stuff is self identifying too, so there are far more dishonest applicants than someone with a single LatAm grandparent marking themselves hispanic.

Right, these are actual physical real world problems that aren't going away just because it would be easier for agentic workflows.

Another example - agentic food ordering. How much more convenient would this make your life vs how much of an error rate would you tolerate if the cost/repercussions are on you?

Would a customer be happy if 2% of the time it sends 20 pizzas to a random address in their contacts list instead of 2 pizzas to their own home? Or 5% of the time it completely ignores your dietary restrictions/allergies and orders an entire meal of food you explicitly told it you cannot eat?

Real world problems don't go away just because it would make the tech neater & tidier.

To reply to myself here..

I can STILL replicate this behavior in Google AI summaries 10% of the time:

"is <SOMEPLANT> ok for cats"

to which it replies: "Yes, <SOMEPLANT LONG SCIENTIFIC NAME VERBOSE PHRASING> is toxic for cats"

The other one going around this weekend: "how long hot dogs on grill"

Summary: "The hot dogs on your grill are likely around 5-6 inches long .. "

So scale this category of error to unsupervised agents with access to your credit card.

This to me is the big leap from being good at coding to being good at many other tasks.

Coding could be treated as a low stakes (time & money consequences for retries) closed loop system where most other tasks cannot.

If it screws up booking your flight/hotel room, how does the agent verify this, and even if it verifies.. there is an actual cost to changes/cancellations.

Similar with agentic e-commerce, lots of ability to screw that up and just seems ripe for fraud / being picked off by bad actors.

Yes we are living in a kleptocracy / kakistocracy hybrid

Correct - they sub it out to a sub who subs it out to a sub who...

Therefore the responsibility is always 5 steps removed

It'll be about a week before the first reported incident of some operator sending it into bathroom/bedroom while occupied to watch.

Rights management in a physical media world = I have the media in my hand (caveats for some DRM systems)

Rights management for digital media = companies remotely deleting paid content from my account & keeping my money / songs disappearing out of my streaming playlist / etc

Right, a steady low level of inflation is a driver for risk taking, which drives investment cycle, hiring, etc. This cascades thru economy from firm to firm, in a virtuous cycle of growth.

Zero inflation even as a target would be hard to hit, as it would imply some absolute perfect match of supply/demand for goods.

Deflation leads to the opposite behavior - hoard your resources, don't invest, don't lend, don't hire. This then cascades through economy in a downward spiral.

In Japan, giving your employees a raise is very rare and a sign of great respect.

Incredible timing with the news they are discontinuing disks in 2028.

You will own nothing.

Iced mugicha on a warm day is fantastic

Anecdotally was discussing with friend circle recently how our Macs have "you must restart now" updates far more often than 1/2/5 years ago.

Not sure how much is that quality of dev went down vs quantity of threats went up.

Which is the problem when that's what's happening, and why we should maybe change the law to infer the collusion from the outcome in cases where prices are high yet nobody is responding by increasing their market share.

No one has a crystal ball. Soviet planners figured that out eventually. You cannot punish people for lack of crystal ball outcome foresight.

Are we going to punish Micron for not planning a new fab 3 year ago when they had no margin and Apple was squeezing them to the bone? Do we co-indict Tim Apple?

Or wait, they were already trying to build one in Upstate NY that is stuck in NIMBY red tape. Do we co-indict Kathy Hochul?

This is probably the one moment in time there really doesn't need to be any price fixing / collusion.

If demand for your product has temporarily spiked so high you can have 80% margins, then its not like your competitor has any reason to price compete.

Particularly in an industry where spinning up new capacity is a multi-year $10s of billions investment.

My new startup, SPECTRE.

It's a new SaaS play - Satellites As A Service. That is, your satellite gets to stay in orbit as long as you pay me.

Otherwise my satellite killer eats them.

I wonder if this is a bigger risk/more widespread in the AI era? Could a bad actor with a copy of someone else's proprietary source code train an LLM on it and come out with code that does not show enough evidence of theft?

Very sad to hear.

He had a great creative spirit between business ventures, writing and photography.. a man of many talents.