HN user
This is the Century of Consequences. You can check out, but you can't leave.
In accounting this is the concept of "materiality". If some asks "is this material?", they are asking if it's worth spending significant time looking at it or deciding.
Remember to * 3 when assessing. Choose wrong, and you do the job, undo it, and do it again.
Early on Raspbian didn't specify noatime or even relatime; every time something was read off disk, a write happened.
Let alone things like putting /var/tmp and/or /var/log in RAM, or long commit intervals.
No idea what the current situation is; Pis are too dear for the likes of me now.
On doctors, I read a substack by a doctor who stopped using an AI notetaker after trying it for a year. They weren't his notes, and there was too much extraneous detail.
Can't find it with a quick search, but the point of the essay was that making the notes by hand reinforced the essentials of each case in the doctor's mind, so they were there for the next appointment two weeks later.
Baron von Masoch was European.
Yes. Many industries are zero-sum-ish in nature,have winner-take-all dynamics or reputational costs for cheaping out. Financial trading. Big law. Military. National Security. Big insurance. Management consulting. Advertising.
For others even a small edge can be important. Pharma and Biochem research. Research in general. Any industry where there are major reputational risks.
It may not make sense to use the most expensive model to replace your payroll clerk, but there are plenty of use cases for the best available.
Cheaper until you factor in security and liability, which are going to get increasingly salient over time.
Deepseek's price looks unsustainable. Ant have said their operating margin is 70%. A leaner company could maybe raise that to 90%.
Most of the cost of supplying inference compute is depreciation of the GPUs. Maybe Deepseek is anticipating a 50 year life for theirs.
Far canal, why is this news?
"Comeback" or "quip" for a low-latency sub-Haiku model.
Industrial market economies.
The demands of work have eaten childhood (in zero-sum education races) family life, neighborhoods and social life (people moving all the time for a better job), spiritual life (exhaustion).
Market liberalism has pushed more and more debt (e.g. student loans), risk (debts for other things like housing), and uncertainty (random layoffs, zero hours contracts, gig economy) onto individuals and households.
Edit: Japan, China, Korea, and Thailand are speed-running the process. Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines and India are not far behind - all states of India except Bihar already have sub-replacement fertility for instance.
Fear the time when lobbyists realise they can use AI to draft new laws...
Good question.
With a lot of old people, healthcare costs go way up. In practice that means taxes go way up.
(Maybe smart AI can magically cure a lot of degenerative diseases like dementia and atherosclerosis and COPD and osteoarthritis and cancer and diabetes and kidney failure. Let us hope.)
The infrastructure we have (roads, bridges, water supplies, power lines, etc.) need maintenance. With a falling population, a greater percentage of the population needs to be dedicated to these tasks, so career choices get restricted.
(Maybe robotics can help here. Let us hope.)
With a falling population demand for any given product is falling on average.
When the population is growing, there is an implicit cushion for investment. 2% growth means that the population (TAM) doubles in 36 years, making investment less risky. With falling population, new investment is taking market share from existing vendors: competition is zero-sum at best, mostly negative sum.
Every investment is more risky so the rate of interest on loans goes way up.
With falling GDP, wages are stagnant or falling. At present young people take on debt to buy houses and things, partly in the expectation that their wages will rise so the debt gets easier to pay off over time. Falling wages make debt repayment harder, not easier, so people will not take out loans. so sales will be lower, leading to a downward spiral.
Difficulty accessing birth control is greatly overstated by UN and other development agencies.
In surveys by far the dominant reasons for not using it are "my husband does not want me to" or "my family does not want me to". Those are included in "unable to access".
Traditionally, female years of education, child mortality, and GDP per capita (in order of importance) explain 85% of fertility, and the residual is not biased in either direction.
source: Lant Pritchett, long-time development economist.
Edit: I don't think anyone outside the Taliban seriously wants to reverse the trends in any of those 3 factors.
requires
A dead node. I don't think I've turned it on in six months. Hmmm...
No. The French Revolution was a revolution of lawyers, writers, and administrators, the elite who were shut out of the very highest positions. And it was unstable. The great majority of people were just cannon fodder for Napoleon.
This is true surprisingly often.
Nurse Ratched was not a sufficient argument for ceasing to protect the mentally ill from themselves, it turns out.
It also fails to point out the temporal fallacy, that energy that is available only at certain times, and not reliably so, is a substitute for energy that can be reliably and safely stored for decades and used when needed, not when generated.
The robotics Turing test: change the nappies of the designer's and company owners' baby daughters or grand-daughters.
Nuclear war is immanent to our civilisation and human nature, but perhaps not imminent.
Domestic appliances were extremely disruptive. (vacuum cleaners, fridges, washing machines, air conditioners, ...) Domestic servants were eliminated. But there was no paradigm shift.
People still live in houses and prepare and store food, and clean their houses and clothes. Minor tasks of domestic servants (making beds, tidying, etc.) were folded in to the job of the homemaker, who was demoted from a supervisory role.
Mainframe computers emptied out accounts departments in large companies, eliminating invoicing clerks, general ledger clerks, stock control clerks, payroll clerks and many more specialised roles. No paradigm shift. Accounting is still accounting.
Typing pools were emptied by the introduction of the Lasrjet printer and the personal computer. Their minor tasks (spell-checking, grammar correction, etc.) were taken over by other people. No paradigm shift, just a task automated.
Telephone operators were eliminated by automatic exchanges (central and customer-premises). No paradigm shift, that came later with digital radio phones ("smartphones"), and didn't cause wholesale job elimination.
The binary distinction between task replacement and paradigm shift is flawed. Reality is much more varied and fluid.
Domestic appliances killed domestic service jobs.
Telephones killed messenger-boy jobs.
The automatic telephone exchange killed telephone operator jobs.
Movable-type presses killed the job of scribes despite the huge expansion in book production.
Various farm machines together killed arable farm labour.
The Laserjet and Wang word processor killed typist jobs.
Mainframe computers killed invoicing clerk, general accounting clerk, and inventory control clerk jobs.
We could go on.
In each case, the minor tasks in each job that were not automated were just folded into other jobs.
Focusing on ATMs and claiming no impact is egregious, tendentious cherry-picking. Machines almost always eliminate occupations.
Last I checked, the tractor and plow are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers, yet we've got more jobs and grow more food.
We do not have more jobs for horses.
In this context we are the horses.
they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs,
Back in the 1980s this was called "systems analysis". The role disappeared a bit before the web came along, and coders were tasked with the job or told to just guess what the exact needs are, which is why so much software is trash.
I don't know, though, Claude Opus is most of the way to being a good systems analyst, and early reports say that having an AI provide descriptions/requirements to a fleet of code-writing AIs gives better results than having a human do it.
You never wrote any scripts to write code?
jobs destroyed will be replaced with new jobs
Not for horses though, or at least not the majority of them. Some were kept as pets or essentially status objects. In this case we are the horses.
They are getting cheap electricity from PV and batteries and cheap air conditioners to run on the electricity.