in the first few years of any new technology only highly innovative companies (startups) use it.
people still were using punch cards when tape was invented, and still using tape when floppy’s were invented
and those were relatively small innovations not requiring substantial changes to the work. AI is another ballgame, this makes me more bullish on it than ever.
There are new technologies that don’t go anywhere and then there are new technologies that are useful. Built into your post is the assumption that AI is a new technology that is useful because of the comparison to innovative startups that have benefited from the early adoption of useful new technologies.
However, there are startups that have bet on the wrong technologies and perished, which is not addressed. This is survivorship bias. So if we’re going to have a serious discussion, we need to talk about both sides before anybody should get convinced about being bullish on it.
You know i used to think Ray Dalio was really smart, but literally every single article he writes is exactly the same
“this argument is laid out in my book” blah blah blah
This guy is so obsessed with being right about his sole theory that he has staked his entire identity on it.
When you only have a hammer, everything is a nail - Ray has been shopping the same theory without updating anything whatsoever about it for over 10 years.
it’s genuinely shocking how much time is spent coming up with ideas like this, implementing them and making everyone report on it - for no outcome whatsoever
I was there in the 90s. I built a few bad static HTML pages. It wasn’t hard. There are lots of stories of non-CS / non-technical people making stuff from the dotcom era.
Making a dynamic page was harder. Integrating with a payment system was almost magical; there’s a reason PayPal became big.
But what was truly hard, and continues to be hard, is building a page, either static or dynamic, that people actually want to visit.
Building static pages that worked in both Netscape and IE 4, and could function well with constrained dial up speeds, may not have been "hard", but it did come with a number of challenges.
Ahhh that lines up with a thought I had recently: you get out of life what you put into it. I am beginning to believe that there's some kind of metaphysical rule here that is true everywhere, all the time.
So maybe the solution is: find the hardest stuff to do and do the crap out of it.
The entire pitch of LLM companies is that that’s not true. The LLM does the hard work, and you pay the LLM company for the tokens. So the gate is just, can you afford enough tokens.
Not saying that’s what will happen in reality, but that is the marketing pitch
Even though many of these players are not publicly traded, they're clearly manipulating the public equity markets with their funky receivables and equity swaps, inadvertently creating what has become the largest "company" in the history of the World and setting us all up for a Greater Depression. https://d0k5l7l4820swi.archive.is/3GCs7/463302388f7f218ff374...
Like the USSR before it, China is a force to be reckoned with and certainly we need to increase national productivity and workforce participation in order to keep up with our debt, but this is not how we countered Sputnik as the memories of the 1930s and two World Wars were still top of mind. Look your children in the eyes and ask if the risk that's being put upon us is worth ...them. https://youtu.be/lNXTKVxOmfk
Consensus can be faulty yet still affect the system. If a large number of investors are expecting companies to replace workers with AI, then that's exactly what many CEOs are going to (try to) do. Since the CEO's boss is the shareholders.
Hiring illegal immigrants is risky and hurts businesses that choose not to cheat.
This article makes it out like neither the immigrants or the businesses that hire them have broken the law - when in fact they all have.
I’m no fan of ICE, the tactics are disgusting. but this article does not mention even once that both coming illegally and hiring illegal immigrants is a serious crime… in any other country you would deported for over-staying and no one would bat an eye. Why is the United States any different?
The flip side is: efficient capital allocation is better for our economy as a whole than trying to save certain jobs for emotional reasons.
Struggling businesses that can’t operate effectively and provide a poor return on capital should be shuttered - the only way to deal with the mountains of paperwork involved is to incentivize very smart people to work at very bad companies. smart people don’t like to work at failing companies. how to reconcile this and ensure efficient capital allocation? huge monetary compensation.
Is what they’re doing efficient capital allocation?
I’m not convinced anymore.
Market economics aren’t working the same when the government has turned particular knobs to a degree that nobody ever shows back up to serve the market once someone quality disappears……
for an incredibly long article on a niche topic readers are unlikely to be familiar with, astonishingly the author never bothers to describe what ABA actually is or provide more than 1 vague example.
people still were using punch cards when tape was invented, and still using tape when floppy’s were invented
and those were relatively small innovations not requiring substantial changes to the work. AI is another ballgame, this makes me more bullish on it than ever.