>> 'Oh, there's not actually any real original thought here.'

ChatGPT is like a "wisdom of crowds" version of things. It can rearrange concepts into unique systems based on how the different concepts relate, but it's not going to come up with a completely new concept. It is probably going to do a better job of providing filler than something like a studio executive, but that's mostly because it has no sense of avoidance of risk.

By far my biggest problem in retirement is that I tie myself up working on kinda useless projects at home as an excuse to not get out and see real people. I _do_ get out, but it's this big involved ritual and I seriously worry I'm losing the battle over time.

I worked remote for all sorts of tech companies in the 90's, and it was awesome. In 1999 I decided to get a "real job" primarily because I wanted to have lunch with people without having to work so damned hard at it. It totally worked out for me. I got to have lunch with people, and my career development accelerated exponentially because I no longer could hide out doing only really safe work.

I'm not going to argue that in-office work is the bee's knees, because it isn't, there are lots of things that suck about it. But there are lots of things which suck about remote work, too.

At any time he could have taken someone else's work and published it on Amazon under his byline. In most worthwhile endeavors, faking your way in is not accomplishing the endeavor.

Speaking of which, you can go order yourself an award plaque or trophy with whatever you want printed on it. You want to have an award as the top salesperson for SpaceX? Go for it! You can order whatever you want. You can tell people at cocktail parties whatever you want.

When the company gives you stock-based compensation, the dollar value of the compensation is based on the dollar value of the stock. Like, if they gave you compensation in Bitcoin, the dollar value of the compensation would be based on the dollar value of the Bitcoin. I'm sure the number of shares they vest per month/quarter remains the same, and the dollars they receive on each pay cycle remain the same.

I'm sure the next article will be about some people who kept their RSUs as they vested, and now they're sad that they've lost 40% of their value.

Your business is so important to us that we will do anything within our power to avoid talking to you. Because of the business, and the importance of that business.

What next? Will they read out a speech written by a human-level intelligence? Do they even have access to such technology?

Any eighth grader with some free time in history class can draw you a wicked cool ITX case. The real trick is designing one that has all the necessary stuff inside and is easy to work on without gashing your hands and shorting your motherboard. Or having useful failure modes like melting or cracking or overheating your CPU and RAM and SSDs.

The algorithm told them to!

I mean that as only half snarky. The reason things like ChatGPT are so concerning is that it slots in so well with the existing systems of algorithmically-generated content. Just because humans are running the existing algorithms doesn't mean that they are engaging in inherently worthwhile creative endeavors.

The question isn't whether we should investigate the tax returns of the wealthy because they are good or bad or make good contributions or bad contributions to society. The question is why the wealthy for the most part are not held to account, while the less wealthy are held to account, REGARDLESS of their respective contributions to society.

The answer is because the wealthy can afford to pay specialists to either arrange their affairs to be opaque to the tax authorities, or they can afford to pay other specialists to distract the authorities indefinitely. Meanwhile the less wealthy have to just suck it up because a potential $600 tax savings isn't enough to justify paying an expert to realize it.

It's not really a rabbit hole. It's not like we tried hard to figure it out and it was just an impossible task, in fact our general approach has been to starve the system of the resources necessary to track down tax evasion. As a result about all they can manage is to catch small clear-cut evasions or mistakes.

We live in a time where the regular person in the developed world has EASY access to ingredients and information about how to combine those ingredients, and yet take-out is more popular than ever, we have dozens of meal-kit delivery services, and dozens or hundreds of cooking shows. Even though the process of preparing a meal has been made as cheap and easy as it has ever been in history ... fewer people are preparing their own meals than ever before. In fact, many people spend hours and hours watching cooking shows, and then can't prepare their own meals because they "don't have time". The advances have worked to expand the footprint of the industry tremendously, so instead of employing fewer food-service workers we employ MORE.

AI programmers will mostly displace humans who are doing things like wiring up form pages to databases or mom-and-pop storefronts. Think in terms of automating Squarespace setup. They will generate a demand for people to debug where things are going wrong, which won't precisely be "programming" in the traditional sense, but that won't be all that much different than what a lot of "programmers" are doing today. More like curating, maybe? But the people at places like Google and Apple will have more demand than ever to provide the backends these AI "programmers" will plug into.

These things won't replace search engines - but they may destroy them.

A search engine is nominally a way to find actual knowledge. A huge problem is that the Internet has been overrun by people creating websites which bear the same attributes as websites with knowledge, but don't actually contain anything useful. These chat bots are just an automated form of that. Clickbait sites will use them to generate plausible-looking faux content which will overwhelm the search engines.

But as far as replacing search engines ... how? When I want to learn some information, I don't want to read an article which looks like information. For instance, these tools can do things like describe the components of a chair - but they have no knowledge of what the actual function of a chair is, so if you dig into their description things will get odd. You definitely wouldn't want to build a chair based on chatbot results.

I think the real challenge for a place like Google is that the trashy part of the Internet is what pays the bills. They could invert the problem and attempt to derank things which fit the patterns too well, but those are exactly the things which pay them money. When a free-use user finds a decent paper on a scientist's weblog, Google doesn't make any money. Google makes money off the trash sites flooding the zone with heavily-padded derivative articles about the scientist's paper.

I discovered Bear in high school, maybe middle school. Blood Music was like . The Eon series was neat. I always hoped for a sequel to Hegira, it was just a super interesting concept, though I can see how it would be challenging for a sequel to maintain the style (kind of like Ringworld, you can only introduce the amazing concept once, then it's just background for further adventures). There were clunkers in there, but he maintained a baseline readability even when things weren't firing on all cylinders.

In the timeframe when it came out, I was still mostly optimistic that technology would carry us forward, so you really needed super-advanced aliens dropping black holes on your planet to destroy things. It makes me sad that instead going out with a glorious bang, we're just going to kind of gradually suffocate in our own waste products, like some sort of bacterial colony.

You evolved to love Earth. This is a very literal thing - your basic unconscious desires and assumptions are all aligned with things on earth, not things in space. You can mentally conceive of expansion into space, but your assumptions about the very meaning of "expansion" are based on something more like landing on the coast of the Americas and shooting a deer and collecting some fruit for dinner. Your body tells you that you can find something to eat and something to drink if you try hard enough to find it, but in space that is quite thoroughly untrue. You look out a window into space and none of the scene fits the scenes your brain is designed to work with.

Expanding into space will be hard. Living inside of a manufactured creation for years is HARD on a person, we don't know how hard it will be, but it's reasonable to assume a certain number of people will have breakdowns. Maybe VR will help, or maybe we can find other options to scratch the itch.

That's not even getting into how deep the support network is on Earth, and how hard that will be to replicate on, say, Ganymede.

Right now, it's a lot of work to enforce this kind of friction on the system. Which is why we need to replace the system with a new system allowing fine-grained control, so that companies can benefit from improved access to our wallets.