64 karma · joined February 4, 2026
I don't disagree. Not in the same class, but the audience overlaps.
> one could make a modern amplifier reproduce any quirky behavior of vacuum tubes, e.g. a higher and frequency-variable impedance or certain kinds of distortions, but usually nobody bothers to do this, because it would be expensive
In other words, the willingness to pay for OG tube amplifiers exceeds the willingness to pay for the sound thereof. I'm not sure you disagree with me either.
- Fiber: ^
- Dairy: v
- Coffee: ^^
- NSAIDs: vv
- Ice cream splurges: vvv
Much of the value of a human crew is as an implicit dogfooding warranty for the passengers. If it wasn't safe to fly, the pilots wouldn't risk it day after day.
To think of it, it'd be nice if they posted anonymized third-party psych evaluations of the cockpit crew on the wall by the restrooms. The cabin crew would probably appreciate that too.
As the value of labor plummets, more GDP will accrue to capital. But to whose, exactly? Let's categorize individual investing performance as a function of luck, corruption and skill. Only skill is meritocratic, and there is no good reason to reward the other two. Things have trended away from skill in recent decades.
As AI automation progresses, it provides more of the skill. Eventually all investing decisions will be AI-based, democratizing the process but effectively leaving luck and corruption in control of who wins.
At that point, there's just no good reason to reward individual investment performance. Since luck averages out, corruption will largely determine who the 100 trillionaires are.
The solution is to tax away the portion of investment returns that are not based on skill, which will trend towards 100%.
Benchmarks are on the honor system. Even the tightest benchmark can be cheated. If the benchmark is so secret and air-gapped that it can't be cheated by models, it can be cheated by its own authors. You can't use benchmarks to gate out cheating.
If you don't have the honor system in mind when you're reading scores, you're wasting your time. Is it some unknown outfit with wild claims? Is it connected to Epstein, Russia, the real estate "industry", or sleazeballing in general? Do they have previous history of ratgaming the numbers? Replace its scores with asterisks and move on.
If you're OK with victim-shaming here, doesn't it say more about you than Altman? What does it say about your viewpoint?
You can't price dollars in gold to measure value. Gold doesn't measure value better than the dollar at any point in time, let alone over time. Just use the price index for one currency, or the relative price indexes across currencies.
AGI is like the Holy Grail. Either in the Arthurian Hero's Journey sense, or in the sense of having been a myth all along.
At least until next week when Mythos and GPT 6 throw it all up in the air again.
I guess I'm still excited. What's my new profession going to be? Longer term, are we going to solve diseases and aging? Or are the ranks going to thin from 10B to 10000 trillionaires and world-scale con-artist misanthropes plus their concubines?
A more interesting question is whether there's really a future for running a coding agent on a non-highest setting. I haven't seen anything near "Shall I implement it? No" in quite a while.
Unless perhaps the highest-tier accounts go from $200 to $20K/mo.
My feelings exactly. I still play it regularly for this reason alone. A really amazing game under the hood.
The Rhodes Unfinished scenario is probably my favorite. On the highest-difficulty level, it starts out as a hard map, then becomes an insatiable resource grab. By the end you're building vanity suspension bridges over chasms and digging tunnels the width of Kilimanjaro.
The year is 2030, when LLMs are more pervasive. The first specialist now asks you to wait, heads into the other room and double-checks their ET diagnosis with AI. Doing so has become standard practice to avoid malpractice suits. The model persuades them to diagnose PV, avoiding a Type-II error.
But let's say the model gets it wrong too. You eventually visit the second specialist, who did graduate at the top of their class. The model says ET, but the specialist is smart enough to tell that the model is wrong. There is some risk that the second specialist takes the CYA route, but I'd expect them not to. They diagnose PV, avoiding a Type-I error.