Causality is an issue there, I would suggest that genetic auto immune issues that are rather wide spread can cause all of the above. I think people are finding that GLP-1s help with auto immune issues.
Like almost every psychoactive drug it really depends on the individual. I have ME/CFS from a strong genetic propensity to dysautonomia. I think that my ME/CFS is an autoimmune reaction to the dysautonomia where, counter intuitively, medications like melatonin and amitriptyline, by helping with dysautonomia, actually substantially increase energy levels and mental cognition during the day. My case is a bit extreme at ~1/20K but I think ~1/50 of the general population have a similar but much milder reaction. At N=120 a study like this would not be able to detect that. These ~1/50 people are more likely to have the sort of sleep issues / burnout that makes them more likely to reach for melatonin in the first place. So the more interesting study would be conditioned by the subset of the general population that have already decided they need melatonin.
I would assume that the task of being a taxi driver would act as a near constant test for Alzheimer’s, would be interesting to do GWAS studies on older taxi drivers and compare against taxi drivers who quit earlier in their careers.
I was unsuccessful because I wouldn’t pay the bribes, I had a number of independent local advisors give pretty consistent accounts to how things work there.
I wouldn’t be so worried about the corruption of my society if I thought there was something implicit that meant we wouldn’t be corrupted in the same way that others are.
Nor do I blame the Cambodians for their predicament. You’re tilting at windmills.
I am suggesting that it's more than the elites, then you'd have to take into account the people who would act in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity. As someone who has tried and failed to sell software into Cambodia I know from experience that the corruption there is very thorough and continues well on down to the lower strata of society.
By endemic I mean to its core, it’s the difference of having everyone being corrupt versus just the elites / political class being corrupt. If anyone thinks that the problem of corrupt elites could be improved by extending that corruption to everyone then I’m not sure what would convince them otherwise.
I would measure by relative destruction of wealth since corruption is an inefficient destructive process that can quite often yield very little left to steal.
A society that pretends it is not corrupt is better than one that has given up on that pretense. No matter how bad you think things are it can always get worse. I am not looking forward to the coming free for all.
The point of institutionalizing corruption is to reduce competition from competing corruption entities. Which is bad but not as bad as an endemically corrupt society.
I think it can be true that we have in effect far more corruption in the west than what is readily recognized at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
I think what the Trump admin is doing is horribly corrupt and I hope the lot of them go to jail for that and other things, but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.
I’m sure there will be attempts but I think our future will be dominated by separatist / spinoff societies. There is an economy of scale in functions of governance as well as a diseconomy of scale in bureaucracy. Using LLMs to make the expensive parts cheaper makes smaller self governing societies much more viable.
My field is lightly regulated but it is regulated and LLMs have helped massively in producing the documentation but also in reviewing the same documentation on the regulators side. This was always a disadvantage for small companies where the fixed regulatory cost couldn’t be amortized over a larger staff size and now because of LLMs it is less of a disadvantage.
While I disagree with the counter position I do believe it to be an honest account of their experience. I think the counter intuitive aspect is that marginal cost of software is practically zero so in an efficient market the consumption of it will be dominated by the best software written by senior devs with AI, even if the production of software is dominated by junior devs with AI. I think we are in a transitory phase where still employed juniors can be very productive shortly before becoming unemployed at which point that productivity drops to zero. If junior devs are productively producing software that then goes unused then how productive were they really. But I understand that the latter effect may not have been picked up in the general stats. Anecdotally again, I fired 3 juniors and went solo and I know of many others who have done something similar.
Another aspect is that once the easier work is complete then the remaining residual is the difficult work, and this changes the relative productivity to the point where a junior developer may not be able to make any further progress at all.
Overly bureaucratic companies tend to generate easier work for themselves to the point that this work dominates their total workload. If we are to measure productivity by opening and closing Jira tickets then I would expect the junior developers to get a much bigger ‘productivity’ benefit from AI than senior developers.
I find that productivity follows a Pareto distribution (80:20 rule) and that AI is a sharper tool in that it enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive and this effect increases as the intelligence of AI increases. So 80:20 becomes a 90:10, 95:5, 99:1 etc. I also think that corporate bureaucratic change is laggy so change there will still be rather slow. I think where change will be rapid is when the most productive employees leave the company to create a new smaller company to compete with it, so there will be a displacement of medium to large companies by much smaller ones. On one hand this greater competition of more efficient companies will result in an increased in consumer surplus, on the other hand it will result in mass economic displacement and a collapse of the tax base. I think AI has only recently been good enough to do this and it takes time to spin up competing companies so I wouldn’t expect to see this effect in any lagging indicators just yet. From personal experience, I’m well down the path of commoditizing my niche industry where I can practically give away a better version of the top tier software and still personally make a lot of money. Additionally it would be counter productive to alert my competitors to this new reality. I know I’m not the only person doing this, so this multiplied by a bunch of industries would be absolutely world changing.
I think it’s a socially acceptable costly signal for communicating that power, less about the power itself. Perhaps a different culture could have settled on a humiliation ritual. Either way it has to be costly otherwise it won’t be seen as a true signal though it is likely possible to find a more efficient costly signal.
This is no longer true in that I’ve now completed the bulk of my easy work the residual is the tough stuff that Opus cannot do and even Fable struggles with it.
(Not GP) I would, a lot of my work now is at the edge of what Fable is capable of and even then only with a lot of hand holding. Opus has no chance. I’ve been using Sol and that has been better than Fable in that it needs much less handholding and is much less likely to burn its tokens spinning its wheels.
It takes a huge amount of money to compete with Google in search and all Google has to do to destroy that investment is to dial back the sandbagging. They really did have a moat.
They made search worse on purpose to make more money, then tried to gaslight everyone by blaming SEO. It was getting rather hard to find things with it, I would have to explain to people that search wasn’t always this bad. I have negative sympathy for them.
I would pay vastly more, I think it’s incredible value. If I had no other choice I think I’d pay up to $1K per day. The amount of work I’m getting through is absolutely immense.
I only use Fable on things Opus 4.8 would struggle too much with, and as my harness improves that’s less and less. That or they dialed up the intelligence on Opus.
This is the second time you posted essentially the same message 40 minutes later, are you stuck in a loop? I wonder if people are looping in addition to their AI agents.
I call it 3 scams in a trench coat pretending to be a real economy. Though obviously there are more than 3 going. You kinda have to be in one of the grifts in order to pay the costs of the others, like work in military contracting in order to pay for healthcare. That’s why crackdowns on fraud, collusion, and other such grifts, rackets, and anticompetitive actions in the US is doomed to fail, those who benefit from it tend to be the most reliable political donors. It’s hard to go after one and not go after the others and that would upset a lot of politically powerful people, this results in an armistice and not going after any.
I actually do, I completely and elegantly solved a core problem of my niche industry that had been plaguing it for over 40 years. I was already planning on doing it and had put aside 4-6 months to do it. I did it with the help of AI in 3 days. The AI couldn't do it on it's own I had to walk it through the process piece by piece, and it kept trying to avoid doing as I asked by lying to me, so I kept chastising it. It eventually relented and it worked. There was a deep theoretical underpinning which I believe was beyond AIs ability to originate but once it understood what I was doing it was great at the mechanics of it. I've tried to explain similar ideas to humans with much less success.
Now I've massively expanded my scope and I'm still worried I'll run out of work by the end of the year. It's so much fun. Previously I would have to try to convince people with money to fund such applied research and often the strings they'd attach would doom it to failure. I was worried I would never have the resources to test out my ideas in my lifetime and I would die not knowing if they were any good, and since one of the big ones has already worked I'm pretty stoked.
If there is any it’ll be rather small. I'm ideally placed to benefit from the commodification as I was planning on doing it anyway, now I'll just get there a lot faster with the help of AI.