burroisolator

My guess is if they haven't cured cancer, achieved world peace, colonized Mars, you'll still have a job.

"it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet." Jevon's paradox probably will mean that lower costs will lead to more use.

"Productivity gains are real when you understand that augmentation is better than replacing humans..." Isn't this where the job losses happen? For example, previously you needed 5 tech writers but now you only need 4 to do the same work. Hopefully it just means that the 5th person finds more work to do, but it isn't clear to me that Jevons paradox kicks in for all cases.

"You're absolutely right!" Thanks for pointing it out. I was expecting that kind of perspective when the author brought up horses, but found the conclusion to be odd. Turns out it was just my reading of it.

"In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines.

And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.

I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did."

I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to prosperity over the long term but not in the short term. My fear is that the pace of change this time around is so rapid that the short term destruction will not be something that can be recovered from even over the longer term.

In short, the others have a huge margin if you ignore training costs. See https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... for details.

Why have spot H100 prices been going down then? It was roughly $3/hr a year ago and now it is closer to $2.2/hr.

I'll admit I immediately thought of https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ after seeing this blog post.

That is my interpretation.

Regardless of whether you think imposing a $100k fee on H1Bs is a good idea or not, there is no way that a 2 day deadline makes sense from an implementation perspective. On a weekend too. This is just going to cause panic and confusion at the border.

AI only got big, especially for coding, because they were able to train on a massive corpus of open source code. I don't think it is a coincidence.

This is a common myth. This might explain why Harvard or MIT tuition is high but not the average college. Tuition mostly reflects staff costs and those have been going up due to Baumol's cost disease. Dentists, along with many other industries with its main cost being highly educated staff that haven't managed to scale production like online brokerages, have had a similar price increase since 1970.

Does it help to submit duplicative arguments? I see some pretty strong arguments in the comments already. I wish there was a way to just upvote an existing comment.

While debatably unprofessional to blame your vendor, I found this read to be fascinating. I'm sure there are blog posts that detail how data centers work and fail but it's rare to get that cross over from a software engineering context. It puts into perspective what it takes for an average data center of this class to fail: power outage, generator failure, and then battery loss.

What incentive would there be to take the risk of being the first in the market?

One idea I've been mulling is a progressive corporate tax. It would encourage companies to split up if there aren't massive synergies to justify the increased tax.

This is a great introduction to how valuation of public stocks works. In short, market capitalization is positively correlated with gross margin rates and negatively correlated with earnings volatility and the discount rate, which is a leading indicator for FFR.

It doesn't lead to a more secure network because the costs to attack the network are the same. Attackers will have access to the same technology and have similar costs.

Right, I'm not saying there will be a new ASIC; just that there will be no innovation in the Bitcoin space (unless they switch out of PoW) that leads to less energy being used.

I don't think they do if you're just referring to how difficult it is to pull off a 51% attack. Assume the status quo is that it costs X to secure 51% of the hash power. If there is a new ASIC that can hash twice as fast with the same energy use, then suddenly it will cost 0.5X to secure 51% of the hash power. But if the price of Bitcoin remains the same, then miners will have an incentive to double their hash power as that was their breakeven point before. And so now you've gone back to the previous status quo. Assuming the attackers have access to the new ASICs, it still costs X to 51% attack the network.

If a car can be more efficiently produced, the energy spent producing cars will go up because either more cars will be produced or more features will be added to the car. This is a win for the car consumer. This is very different from Bitcoin where any improvements to the efficiency of mining it (such as transitioning to ASICs) does not lead to a tangible benefit for the Bitcoin user. All major non-ASIC miners will eventually be out-competed out, but the amount of energy wasted will always be correlated to the price of Bitcoin.

I would certainly take a look. It would be amusing if you released it using the interface itself.

How does the author know it isn't the driver that will get the short end of the stick here? To put it differently, what would happen if the restaurant mistakenly charged the driver who is picking up the food more than listed and then the driver pays that mistaken amount with Doordash's credit card? Will they be penalized/fired once Doordash discovers the accounting error?

If supply drops far below demand, prices rise and producers come back into the market. The process will not be smooth and the feedback mechanism is lagged but hyperinflation should not happen unless some severe structural issues interrupt the process. Note that a decrease in real GDP is not the same as inflation.

With 3) society is basically admitting that it is built on top of "slave labor". If no one wants to do the "dirty jobs" because they have UBI, then wages for those jobs will rise. Prices will indeed rise but is that such a bad thing? Few people complain that they want more child labor to be used in Bangladesh so that they can have cheaper t-shirts.

There are a number of tasks like rebuilding infrastructure that most people agree is necessary. There is some set P of people that would be willing to do this in exchange for a $24k salary. There is also a subset S of people (of set P) who would be willing to volunteer to do these tasks (for "free") assuming they receive $24k a year from UBI. If the subset S is almost equal to P, the government should be able to start a large scale volunteer program that would be structured like the WPA. If the subset S is much smaller than P, the government cannot do this. Do we know what the size of S is compared to P?

Inflation in the US is lowering because of reduced demand: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

I think if there was proper planning in place, you could have money sent out to people in a day, especially the demographic that would most likely be investing the extra cash. People already electronically pay their tax returns. Payments are taken up by the next day if you so specify; there is no reason to believe the same thing can't be done in the reverse direction. You don't need to physically cut checks for everyone, only those who specify or can't be reached with other means. Betting against investors to be able to quickly find investments is almost like betting against capitalism itself. If you're slow to invest, then you'll lose out on making money. Additionally most people while thinking of something more specific to invest in will probably be depositing this money into a generic savings accounts at first: while this happens, banks will be able to reallocate this capital to fit their needs.

If I knew that the policy was going to be that every time there is a liquidity crisis people will be getting checks (or electronic payments), then I wouldn't be scared of any runs in the same way. Again, is the argument that the Fed is better than private households in being a distressed investor?

Helicopter money can be taxed back. I know that is unlikely but so is the probability that the Fed's balance sheet going to zero: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL.

QE is revenue neutral in theory just like helicopter money along with taxing that same amount back on a future date is revenue neutral in theory. In practice it is more like "buy $4 trillion worth of assets with created cash and never be able to sell it for fear of creating a liquidity crisis": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL.

Why wouldn't helicopter money solve the liquidity problem? Imagine you're a rich investor and you get a check from the government. You see a Company X that is suffering from liquidity issues but otherwise is doing great. Company X's stock is now plummeting because of fears of its insolvency. You, along with other investors who also received checks from the government as part of this helicopter money policy, decide to buy Company X stock. Company X is now better able to do an equity capital raise thanks to the money that you have injected.

Is the argument that the Fed is better than private households in being a distressed investor? Or that wealthy households would decide to cash in the check from the government and literally store it under their mattresses instead of investing it (directly or indirectly) and add to the liquidity?

I fail to understand why any economist would prefer QE over helicopter money. Give everyone a check. If they need it to purchase everyday goods and services, great. If their everyday needs are fulfilled already, they will invest that money into stocks, bonds, treasuries, etc, adding the needed liquidity to the market.

I understand if you're against the idea of giving people money. But this is just giving money to mostly the rich. Neo-trickle down economics.

I feel like the quote you pulled out of Youtube is slightly unfair in the extent to which he endorses the idea. In my opinion, it sounds like he full-throat endorses the general method and aim of the idea just not the exact transfer amounts and the method to raise revenue (sales/VAT tax vs carbon tax). Here is the quote in more context:

"The plan is just a version of the negative income tax. Milton Freedom first proposed it...and as a student 40 years ago I thought it was a pretty good idea. And it turns out I wasn't alone in that judgement...In 1968 a 1000 economists endorsed a negative income tax along these lines. What Andrew Yang is proposing is a version of what these 1000 economists endorsed back in 1968. Could 1000 economists all be wrong? Laughs Well yes they could. But I don't think in this case they are. My own view is that a universal income financed by an efficient tax, something like a value added tax, might well be worth considering. And I'm one of the signatories...of a plan to do something similar with a carbon tax."

Mentally freeze time at when A receives 4 and pretend you are B. When A receives 4, you don't know yet whether A received 4. Hence, you can assume the worst and assume that A didn't receive 4. You know that A has sent 3. However, you can assume the worst and assume that A thinks that A has failed to send you 3. After all, you don't know that A has just received 4. You know that A has received 2 because you received 3 from A. But does A know that you know that A has received 2? As we said earlier, you think pessimistically that A thinks A has failed to send 3 to you (even though you did receive 3!). And so you think that A doesn't know that you know that A has received 2. In other words, you think that A thinks that you think you have failed to send 2. And so on.

I found it helpful to draw it out. Draw a human with the letter B on their T shirt holding a letter labelled 3 and create a cartoon thought bubble on top of their head. Inside that thought bubble write the text "I wonder if A got my letter 4 but assuming they didn't this is how I picture them..." and draw a human with the letter A on their T shirt holding a letter labelled 2 and create a cartoon thought bubble on top of their head.... The final thought bubble should say "I wonder if B got my letter 1 but assuming they didn't I will not attack."