domain:gurwinder.substack.com
quiet_NaN
17m ago
Unemployment is low and humans have been replaced by machines for 250 years.
Until a few years ago, mechanization has only been competing with some human skills. Skills which were automation-proof, such as truck driving, were well within reach of the median human. Sure, you would need to employ a lot more people to transport 40 tons of goods using horse-drawn carriages, but this was compensated by an explosion of shipping (as per-unit costs plummeted).
In the future Altman envisions, humans do not have a moat which prevents AI from eating their lunch. Perhaps there will be a minimum wage labor market for people being biodrones (just wear AR glasses for eight hours and follow the instructions) until robotics or neural interfacing catch up and provide better options. But in the long run, being a sex worker for an AI billionaire with a human fetish might be the only paid profession left, and that will obviously not scale to billions of people.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
18m ago
There are outright communists on the left.
Who spend most of their time denouncing each other.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
20m ago
Rope is a solid choice too. I hear AI will even help you with the knot.
Holy fuck lmao
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
26m ago
How likely is that really though? Very often, it's the capital investments that are the primary cost drivers of utility prices, and the larger customers usually pay a larger share of the capital investments that are needed to support their usage, which would normally lead to lower marginal prices for everyone else. I've seen this play out multiple times in municipalities when it comes to water: large industrial customers support large municipal capital investments, which through economy of scale drive down the unit cost of water to residential customers. The large customers go away, the capacity now far exceeds the demand, and the per-unit cost of water goes way up to pay for the infrastructure despite the huge reduction of demand.
HereAndGone
30m ago
Guy drives me up the wall about 90% of the time with his posts about how he used to write for John Oliver, but every so often reality bonks him over the head hard enough that there is common ground between us on "this is freakin' stupid".
And he was where I heard about Katie Porter's performance, and that one was genuinely funny (though with the material he had to work with, it would have taken real genius not to be funny there).
HereAndGone
34m ago
Nobody is suggesting that these guys are members of the NSDAP, an organization which was disbanded long before they were born.
...Imagine you are a 25yo white nationalist in today's America. Now you could get a swastika tattoo and join the Aryan Brotherhood or something, but then you will never make a difference. Or you could join one of the two major parties, and the one closer aligned to your views are the Republicans.
....Jokes in small groups are a great way to reach a common understanding that Nazis are not icky. Obviously not everyone who plays along is a Nazi, perhaps some only like the jokes because the SJ people are whining about the Nazis all the time, but it is very much a step in the right direction, moving the overton window where you want it to go.
So... they're not Nazis but they totally are Nazis. Just because we (the side calling them Nazis) are not saying they are formally members of a defunct political party but in fact we do mean that they are indeed members of a defunct political party in everything but formal name of the party.
My head hurts. Clearly I am too stupid to get the fine nuances of "I'm not saying they're Nazi Nazis but I am saying they are Nazi Republicans" or "Republican Nazis" or "Nazi fascist nazi Fascist".
Dotcom bubble was a bubble because there were no users. The reasoning was along the lines of 20% of all shoe sales in 2010 will be online.
That really isn’t true. Plenty of dotcom companies like Yahoo had huge numbers of users; Yahoo had 400 million registered users at the peak in 2000 with 60 million monthly users (double the previous year’s figure). Many other dotcom companies had large user numbers too.
And if you look at the non-dotcom companies that still saw huge stock price crashes after the bust, many were businesses with big revenue, like Microsoft ($23bn in revenue in 2000, down 70%+ during the crash, didn’t recover until 2016) and Intel ($34bn in revenue in 2000, down 80%+ during the crash, didn’t recover until 2020). Both Intel and Microsoft were also extremely profitable during this period, contrary to boosters who say all tech stocks at this time lost money or whatever.
The bizarre myth that dotcom was all money into worthless internet businesses with 10 users and inflated traffic figures on zero revenue is peddled by exactly the same people trying to claim that “this time is different”.
quiet_NaN
38m ago
Chatgpt has millions of daily users.
The analogy would be an online shoe seller who spends investor capital to sell shoes at half to themselves, in the hope of cornering the market. Presumably, they would have an impressive revenue (if only because every shoe store starts buying from them).
Per WP, OpenAI has a revenue of 3.7G$ per year, and net losses of 5G$ per year, but their plan is to start burning through money much faster than that, for 2029 their goal is 115G$.
In my mind, this level of investment can only be worth it if they reach a game-changer threshold which far dwarfs anything AI has done so far. If their 2029 investment only yields net profits of 10G$/a, that will be their doom, because then it takes them them a decade just to recoup costs. And they will not have a decade before other models inevitably catch up to them (unless they burn through even more money).
Either they built an LLM which can do anything which an IQ 160 human can do, or they go bust.
HereAndGone
42m ago
Not everyone who tells rape jokes is into rape culture, obviously, some people just like dark humor, but they can certainly be used to transport the message "rape is not a big deal".
While I think those jokes are tasteless and crude, I am now reminded back when me and my peers were twelve to fourteen year old girls telling dead baby jokes. Good grief, où sont les neiges d'antan! Did dead baby jokes back in 1978 lead to the liberalisation of abortion in the Ireland of 2018? After all, they must have been used to transport the message "dead babies are not a big deal".
HereAndGone
50m ago
From the accusations and counter-accusations flying around, it seems to be real but also seems to be an internal power struggle, where A leaked to Politico in order to get B (and possibly C and D and E) in trouble, trigger a purge, then A gets the good-boy pat on the head and slides another rung or two up the greasy pole in the party structure.
Gotta love internal back-stabbing for the sake of advancing a mediocre career 🙄
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1hr ago
how do you justify this morally?
Clearly
I'll be voting for my own team
is a moral position.
It may not be one you agree with, but it's no less a (n a) moral position than the "post-liberal racial spoils hellscape."
You seem to be begging the question that there is an objectively correct morality and deviating from the progressive racism violates that, without actually filling in the gaps of why that is objectively correct and the losers should enjoy being in the hands of an angry god sacrificing their children for the wellbeing of the ungrateful.
functor
1hr ago
Dotcom bubble was a bubble because there were no users. The reasoning was along the lines of 20% of all shoe sales in 2010 will be online. Company x has started to sell shoes online so in 10 years they will make billions. They had no sales and no where close to amazon's supply chain.
Chatgpt has millions of daily users. This is more akin to the boom of companies created when the world got smart phones. Those companies made money.
functor
1hr ago
We are going to win a trade war with China! We are going to bring the factories home!
A few companies add a few GW of base load demand and people start freaking out. The failure to build electricity has got to be one of the largest self owns ever.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
bucketloads
$60M over two decades, according to this journalist. Care to guess how much Elon contributed last year?
I will also note that none of those donors were awarded an entire government department and a broad mandate to purge the others.
Look, I’m not impressed by the article either, but pearl-clutching and correctness aren’t mutually exclusive.
functor
1hr ago
Unemployment is low and humans have been replaced by machines for 250 years. If anything we would stagnate if we were unable to boost productivity.
There are other productivity improvements from AI, such customer service outside of office hours speeding up bureaucratic processes, rapid prototyping and making it easier to start companies and more. This should improve the overall economy.
BahRamYou
1hr ago
But like... is that actually a good thing? Obviously from the point of view of a corporation, being able to reduce the number of employees they need is great. Huge cost savings, even if it's just 1%. And a lot of them could potentially cut a lot more, like the ones who rely on big call centers.
But for the global economy, what happens? I know the traditional answer is that those workers then go find something other job and our overall productivity increases. But it's far from clear to me what a million laid-off call center employees are supposed to do instead. Work in the factories? Those were closed/offshored decades ago. Learn to code? Silicon valley isn't exactly yearning to hire one million junior programmers with no experience these days. In fact, they're also hoping to lay off programmers and make it up with AI instead.
It seems like a lot of areas will jsut end up with significantly higher unemployment from this.
Corvos
1hr ago
Why do my actors constantly and rapidly accelerate in unpredictable directions?
This is usually because they were spawned partly in an object / terrain, right? The physics engine prevents clipping and collisions by producing a force to push the offending objects apart, but if the objects start off intersecting this force can be huge and sends it off into space. Most obvious when you spawn an object intersecting terrain, b/c terrain doesn't move and objects go flying.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Fairly well, actually. Stole some minutes here and there and managed to discover that one of my greatest sources of consternation - my actors spawning in at (0,0,0) instead of wherever I nominally put them - was because immediately after spawning them, I programmatically assigned a new rootcomponents to them. Now, I expected the rootcomponents to assume the position of the actor, given the methods and parameters with which I attached them...but it's the other way around. So it goes.
Now my remaining issues revolve around the physics.
- Why do some of my actors collide with the terrain, while others fall through?
- Why do my actors constantly and rapidly accelerate in unpredictable directions?
And when I get a handle on that, I'm on to the somewhat more freeform
- What's the best way to attach to physically simulated actors together, given my use cases?
BahRamYou
2hr ago
But not if we launch them into orbit ! (I can no longer tell if this is crazy bubble talk or the next logical step after starlink)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
This is a good point. Valuation voodoo can actually lead to meaningful damage when a bubble pops because it isn't an actual representation of cash flow.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
Despite the data center build out in Virginia, electricity prices there increased at half the national average, as this hilariously written axios piece reports.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
(and I've worked marketing roles, the sort of insane digital marketing KPI hacking that goes on would make an Engineer vomit).
Ahaha dude thank you for saying this. I'm in my first digital marketing role now and WOW, it's so bad. People just acting as if churning out quantity of words is useful in any way whatsoever. With AI it has become even worse.
I can see why marketing has such a bad reputation.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
There's also FDR, for that matter
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