The choice to compare data centers to canals rather than to railroads seems rather arbitrary.

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There’s certainly an adjustment period - I’m still learning how to use AI effectively and so is the industry as a whole. The technology is so new and the state of the art is evolving so quickly that there are no established best practices yet.

However, I think that in the long term, assuming human programmers remain relevant at all, we’ll adapt like we did to the development of high-level programming languages. That paradigm shift happened before I was born so I can’t speak from experience, but my impression is that the meaning of being a programmer changed.

Modern programmers are less skilled in some ways, in the sense that most can’t write assembly code, but they also have new skills for working with high level languages that make them significantly more productive overall.

I hope I have 30 years until I retire, but given how rapid progress has been, I’m worried about whether or not I’ll still have a job in just a tenth of that time. The technology is just a few years old and already so powerful that my bet is that current limitations will be overcome. (And the goal isn’t 100% accuracy, because humans don’t have 100% accuracy.)

It has already revolutionized software development. As my friend put it:

On the subject of claude code, I went to a high-level founder talk about code ai and the general consensus was that CEOs were telling their staff 100% of code must be written by an agent within 6 months or they have to leave the company. And all the focus was switching on to how you verify, for example, a 15000 line PR written entirely by AI.

100% of my own code is now written by AI. I’ve been programming for 20 years - I can write code myself, but the AI is so much faster than I could possibly be that managing it is far more productive.

Very occasionally I run into something that used to be doable without a smartphone but requires a smartphone now, but that’s quite rare. Not having a smartphone now would be very inconvenient, but generally not more inconvenient than living without a smartphone was before they existed. I expect the same with this technology, if it ever arrives.

I’m not sure why the tone is so negative in this article given that the plan being discussed is to make the technology so useful that most people want it despite the disadvantages. That’s not coercion.

It would be foolish not to invest even if inflation were always 0. Present-day consumption is worth more than future consumption, but hoarding (as opposed to investing) in the absence of inflation trades present-day consumption for future consumption 1 to 1.

You can make very low-risk investments (effectively no more risky than just holding dollars) and still beat inflation (not by much) to end up with more real purchasing power than you had before. No one is being forced to spend money now or lose its value.

Students fail to make the is/ought distinction.

So? Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t have the moral intuition that an employer generally ought to keep employing people if it can afford to.

USB C maxes out at 240 Watts. Is that enough? A modern laptop GPU can use up to 175 Watts on its own…

Edit: I looked it up and apparently laptops are allowed to have other charging ports and to rely on those for operating at full capacity. As long as they can charge at all from USB C, they’re compliant, even if they run in a reduced-capability low-power mode unless you plug them in via their other charging port.

I find AI to be a better conversation partner than humans in most circumstances. It’s not perfect but it’s knowledgeable about pretty much every topic and it’s always fully engaged and attentive. Most people, by contrast, aren’t very interesting and most interesting people are busy. Of course I would prefer to talk to someone who was also subjectively experiencing and enjoying the conversation, but I can get a lot out of a conversation even without that.

The cargo tracking firm Vortexa has reported that at least 34 tankers linked to Iran have circumvented the US blockade since it began, with 19 exiting the Gulf and 15 entering from the Arabian Sea.

I don’t understand why this is happening. Is the US Navy somehow trying and failing to intercept these ships? (That would surprise me.) Or are they being allowed to pass deliberately?

I just bought a very lightly used BRZ (20k miles) for $27k and I thought I was splurging because I could have paid significantly less for a completely adequate car, but I wanted something fun. It cost me more than an SUV would have, so even people who want practical cars aren’t being forced to spend over $30k.

Are we? I’m looking to buy a car and I think gas cars make the most sense even now, because the change in the price of gas seems like a relatively small part of the cost of car ownership. A one dollar increase in the cost of a gallon of gas works out to about $300 a year in extra costs for me. That’s not enough to tip the balance towards an electric car.

For reference, I’m comparing a Hyundai Elantra N to a Tesla Model 3 - the Hyundai costs as much as the base Tesla at about $36.5k, but to get similar performance you’d need the $42.5k premium Tesla, and that price difference pays for enough gas to go 40,000 miles.

So the preexisting difference in price between CA and the rest of the USA was bigger than three wars with Iran… CA voters are a mystery to me.

Never mind about that, he changed his mind again.

After comments that seemed to suggest President Trump was looking towards an exit from his war with Iran, Trump said in a speech to Republican lawmakers in Florida that “we have won in many ways, but not enough. We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long-running danger once and for all.”

The enemy cannot anticipate your actions if you have no plan! No doubt Sun Tzu would have said something like that if he were American.

We’re going to end up in a situation where whatever is necessary to train AI is permitted, and the main question is whether that will be through (re)interpretation of existing law or the passage of a new law.

Due to the disconnect between price, supply, and demand in the Soviet Union, many things officially cost little but there wasn’t enough for everyone who wanted to buy some. This gave retail workers (and everyone else in the distribution chain) informal power: they could make sure those who did them favors got special access.

When my family came to the USA from the Soviet Union, one of the weird things about the experience for us was how friendly American retail staff were. Brighton Beach in NYC is a neighborhood with a lot of Soviet immigrants, and you can still go there and experience retail staff glaring at you because you’re creating more work for them by coming into the store.