The ending is in praise of dads. Wonderful. I lost my dad when I was 8. I still miss him every day. It’s hard to know beforehand how cool it is to watch your kids grow and change. I hope I get to see how cool my kids are in their old age.
Well I do that frequently, as you can tell by the post actually I forgot to clean that LLM response lol... But honestly I tried many LLMs, Claude is my go to choice, I tried creating projects and so on, but it's just like Apple Notes, I don't feel it scales or that later I can actually do something with that content, those apps are not ready for that, they are more generic, don't you think?
We are having a huge amount of technological change (we haven't even learned how to handle social media as a society yet...). We're experiencing a global loss in trust, and things may fall apart for a bit until our society develops a better immune system to such ills. It is scary.
I think we may revert back to trusting only smaller groups of people, being skeptical of anything outside that group, becoming a bit more tribal. I hope without too many deleterious effects, but a lot could happen.
But humans, as a species, are survivors. And we, with our thinking machines will figure out ultimately how to deal with it all. I just hope the pain of this transition is not catastrophic.
I love Cal. I really, really take his thoughts on many things to heart for well over a decade now.
I think he's being a bit harsh here. And there are some confounding factors why.
Yes, we have an AI bubble. Yes there's been a ton of hype that can't be met with reality in the short term. That's normal for large changes (and this is a large technological change). OpenAI may have some rough days ahead of it soon, but just like the internet, there's still a lot of signal here and a lot of work to still be done. Going through Suna+Sora videos just last night was still absoutely magical. There's still so much here.
But, OpenAI is also becoming, to use a Ben Thompson term, an aggregator. If it's where you go to solve many problems, advertising and more is a natural fit. It's not certain who comes out on top of the space (or if it can be shared), but there are huge rewards coming in future years, even after a bubble has popped.
Cal is having a very strong reaction here. I value it, but I wish it was more nuanced.
LLMs are only valuable to me at the moment explicitly because ads are not part of the scene. Maybe for a while others will use it, but it will be on the exact same treadmill as anything else ad-based: you will become the product, any recommendations are worthless trash, and it is oriented to show as many ads as possible, rather than providing useful content.
Ads destroy... pretty much everything they touch. It's a natural fit, but a terrible one.
Most automatic human behavior uses very simple logic. I spend a lot of time "not present" as my conscious part is often lost in something complicated. My automatic, unconscious actions are, well, pretty simple and subject to failure when I'm not "present."
I really really want this other part of my unconscious behavior modeled well. Would be very useful.
One good way to model your unconscious behavior is to examine the ways adversaries exploit your unconscious behavior.
By examining the common attacks on distracted people you can build a simple rule set that accounts for a large part of unconscious behavior.
The attack I love to hate is the “subscribe now” popup. It inserts into your OODA loop at exactly the moment when your mind is engaged with important or interesting concepts. It is designed to compromise your decision making. I would use that as the foundation of my model because it sets out not only the behavior but the conditions under which the behavior is active.
Another set of rules can be inferred from ways phishing tricks people. (Activating urgency, fear, irritation, authority, avarice)
A third source of rules might be inferred from the practices of illusionists and cup and ball scams. Attention is finite, I’ve got it here so it’s not available in the important direction.
Most people watch unemployment to gauge the economy. The problem is, by the time jobs fall, the recession has already begun.
This post looks at the smaller part of the economy that turns first: residential construction and durable goods and why it’s one of the best early warning systems we have. I also built a simple ML model to track it while the BLS is offline. That will be the second article.
Don't use P/E as an estimate of a bubble... profits often mean revert.
Use something closer to market value to GDP (with some adjustments). That is a much better estimate. John Hussman has imo the best of such metrics. Here's his thoughts from August: https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc250814/
Yes. A lot now depends on when "growth" stops. But GDP is very hard to grow at an sustained high rate justifying higher valuations. Even through industrial revolutions, assembly lines, transistors, and the internet.
Naming things Iroh… Immediately I like it regardless of what it is. P2P connectivity? Great.
What shirt am I wearing right now? A Jasmine Dragon Tea shirt.
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