Good movies have both.

Hard disagree. There's absolutely nothing preventing a fun movie from having decent writing (i.e., "treat your audience with some basic respect") aside from cheap studios and hack producers. Michael Bay and JJ Abrams should have been warnings, not instruction manuals.

Sometimes critics focus on silly or tangential things in movies that average people don't care as much about, but critics are also much less willing to let incoherent plots and repeated non-sequiturs pass just because CGI and EXPLOSION.

Ironically, Altman agrees that AI is a bubble:

Not just once the crash comes, but this sort of thing will help cause the crash.

Cory Doctorow talked about some of it in a recent post that really helped me grok what I've been feeling about the inevitable AI bubble collapse.

AMD giving 10% of itself to OpenAI is almost entirely symbolic as OpenAI will turn around and "spend" that money on something like GPU hardware, probably AMD products. AMD is just paying itself via OpenAI and both companies will book it as revenue to try and obscure the colossal losses on AI spending.

It's all monopoly money laundering, and it's going to crash hard.

Let's consider history and debt. The economies of the world have passed through several stages. Prior to the gold standard things could only scale so far before it failed. The gold standard reintroduced stability and fostered even more international trade. The principle of the gold standard was to maintain the peg of a currency to gold. This worked really well up till world war one. Its weaknesses had started to become carat before that where the need for currency expansion could not be satisfied till the next unpredictable gold rush discovery. As a result under capitalized banks became at risk and eventually their were crises that led into world war 1 and utterly failed after it leading to the great depression

We got out of the Great Depression largely in part ti temporary suspension of the gold standard.
A new way of pegging currency emerged with the Brettin woods agreement. All countries would peg to the us dollars and use treasuries as the medium of international money transfer not gold. The us would remain on the gold standard because it could afford to buy gold with all those treasury purchases.

But eventually this too saturated and limited growth. Under Nixon the us left the good standard.

The goal of the fed central bank was not to maintain the dollar per se since the dollar stood alone as the international benchmark. But instead the goal of the Fed was to curb inflation and curb unemployment. The weakness is the Fed only can use monetary policy not fiscal policy. As a result those two goals are in conflict since they cannot be decoupled with a single point of control ( monetary policy without fiscal policy)

But somehow we've done a great job using that system.

But now the international system has again scaled to a new problem which is deficit spending is reaching a point where debt service is a burden.

The next evolution of this is well known. It was beta tested in The depression when the us both went off the gold standard briefly but also excersized both monetary policy abs fiscal policy in concert.

The approach is called modern monetary theory. It has its critics but critics fixate on sound bite summaries of mmt and really fail to grasp that actually it not only can work but has worked in all the instances it has been tried ( us, Italy, Venezuela all recovered from crises under mmt approaches)

The fact that Europe is having problems is in fact due to the euro not allowing fiscal policy since states can't control their own money supply any longer.

The Fed not true problem with mmt is tgat one cannot actually trust politicians to conduct proper discipline in fiscal policy. That has to be solved before it can be implemented. What allowed its implementation in the past was the automatic and not political and transient spending needed to meet crises like the Great Depression. But to do it outside of unemployment periods is dangerous unless it can be done by an apolitical entity -- something similar to the Fed but with different powers and madates.

In any case the bottom line is this, under mmt a debt equal to your gdp is not a bad thing! No need to panic.

The economies of the world have passed through several stages. Prior to the gold standard things could only scale so far before it failed. The gold standard reintroduced stability and fostered even more international trade. The principle of the gold standard was to maintain the peg of a currency to gold. This worked really well up till world war one. Its weaknesses had started to become carat before that where the need for currency expansion could not be satisfied till the next unpredictable gold rush discovery. As a result under capitalized banks became at risk and eventually their were crises that led into world war 1 and utterly failed after it leading to the great depression

We got out of the Great Depression largely in part ti temporary suspension of the gold standard.
A new way of pegging currency emerged with the Brettin woods agreement. All countries would peg to the us dollars and use treasuries as the medium of international money transfer not gold. The us would remain on the gold standard because it could afford to buy gold with all those treasury purchases.

But eventually this too saturated and limited growth. Under Nixon the us left the good standard.

The goal of the fed central bank was not to maintain the dollar per se since the dollar stood alone as the international benchmark. But instead the goal of the Fed was to curb inflation and curb unemployment. The weakness is the Fed only can use monetary policy not fiscal policy. As a result those two goals are in conflict since they cannot be decoupled with a single point of control ( monetary policy without fiscal policy)

But somehow we've done a great job using that system.

But now the international system has again scaled to a new problem which is deficit spending is reaching a point where debt service is a burden.

The next evolution of this is well known. It was beta tested in The depression when the us both went off the gold standard briefly but also excersized both monetary policy abs fiscal policy in concert.

The approach is called modern monetary theory. It has its critics but critics fixate on sound bite summaries of mmt and really fail to grasp that actually it not only can work but has worked in all the instances it has been tried ( us, Italy, Venezuela all recovered from crises under mmt approaches)

The fact that Europe is having problems is in fact due to the euro not allowing fiscal policy since states can't control their own money supply any longer.

The Fed not true problem with mmt is tgat one cannot actually trust politicians to conduct proper discipline in fiscal policy. That has to be solved before it can be implemented. What allowed its implementation in the past was the automatic and not political and transient spending needed to meet crises like the Great Depression. But to do it outside of unemployment periods is dangerous unless it can be done by an apolitical entity -- something similar to the Fed but with different powers and madates.

In any case the bottom line is this, under mmt a debt equal to your gdp is not a bad thing! No need to panic.

Some would argue that rewriting the entire browser - the company's crown jewel - from scratch was a suicidal move. At least in hindsight.

I used Netscape and was a total fanboy when version 6 came out. It was terrible and like many users, I stuck with version 4.x hoping they'd improve version 6, but eventually gave up and moved to IE 6, which itself was a vast improvement over IE 5.

Netscape's fate should be a warning to any dev teams arguing to throw it all out and redo everything from scratch (see also: Winamp 3). It can be done but the odds are not good.

What a horrific, and probably intentional, mischaracterization. Calling AI a "little angel" presupposes that it has the best interests of the affected humans guiding it, while the truth is that these systems are absolutely going to be designed to benefit their corporate overlords first, foremost, and always.

How long until Microsoft inks a deal with Delta so that its agents prioritize Delta when someone asks it for help booking a flight? Or directs inquiries about food nutrition and health towards companies that the packaged foods corporate lobbyists group promotes? Sends requests to watch a show to Hulu instead of Netflix?

Perhaps each request will trigger a real-time auction the same way Google does for ads, with the winner taking control over your agent. Every task you might request of an AI agent is going to be susceptible to subtle (or overt) manipulation, sponsored by undisclosed parties.

AI is not immune to enshittification. I'd argue it's going to take that path almost immediately because (1) it's a completely opaque system that nobody can peer into, (2) it's unbelievably expensive to operate and there will soon be a massive push to start recouping those costs, and (3) the tech bros are comfortably in with the Trump administration, which already tried to make it illegal to pass laws regulating AI.

This is comparing apples and applejacks. If you only care about cost per calorie, people may as just drink canola oil and take a daily vitamin pill. What we really need to do is look at the total cost of living when eating real foods vs packaged trash "food". If we were honest about adding up the related external costs of illness, healthcare, discontent, disability, etc and look at it more holistically, I believe the "cheaper" shit food starts to lose out fast. But nobody wants to do that. Hell, we can't even get people to agree that being a fatass is unhealthy.

And the idea that it costs a lot to eat healthy is a myth that needs to die. Some things are more expensive, sure, but you can make a healthy meal with cheaper options as well. The truth is that people are lazy and addicted to the results of 50 years engineering to create the mouth porn that line most store shelves.

Easy to say when you live in or near London (which as I recall, you do).

There's nothing wrong with local time, and there are good reasons humans have used it literally for as long as we've had clocks. You are trading one mental adjustment -- "what time is it where Bob lives?" -- with a different one -- "what time is it where I am when the sun is directly overhead?" Guess which one you need to worry about more often?

And if you think adjusting to time zones is annoying now when traveling, imagine needing readjust your entire mental model of the solar day - where sunrise, noon, and sunset are on the clock. But hey, I guess you didn't need to adjust your watch. Hurray?

Local time is a "human sized" solution to the problem of timekeeping while UTC is a planet-sized solution to it.

Nonsense. Every single business has a list of their operating hours posted. Some open at 6am, some at 10am. Some are open on Sunday, others closed. Some close for certain holidays, others for others (or none). Some receive deliveries earlier than customers, others don't.

Most people in the US may not be accustomed to the idea of summer hours, but it's not a complicated idea and people would catch on pretty quickly.

You can't really use a wok on any home cooking appliances, regadless of heat source. The only exception are the specialized wok-specific ones some others mentioned, and even those kind of suck because they limit how much you can move the pan around.

I had a gas stovetop for years and a wok (both round and flat-bottom) was pitiful. There's a reason that restaurants basically use a 100K BTU jet engine to cook with a wok. Can you cook food in a wok on a standard stove? Sure. Will it ever be on par with asian restaurants? No. You're better off just using a griddle or flat frying pan on home stoves.

Todd Howard loved that.

I think even the idea of dropping $250 for a video game is absolutely bonkers, and calling Skyrim "ground-breaking" is being vastly too generous. The only reason Skyrim has had the staying power it has is (1) modders and (2) Bethesda's inability to release more than 1 game every 5-6 years, leading to 10-12 years between each franchise game.

I think it's a symptom of streaming services. They want to offer a massively wide variety of shows to try and capture as much of the market as possible, which means a large number of titles. But money and human resources (writers, actors, directors, etc) are still finite, so now they spread those resources across twice or three times as many shows as they used to back in the 24/26 episode seasons. Then multiply this across a dozen different "platforms". So now we get 8 or 10 episodes per "season".

Add to that their desire to keep people hooked and subscribed. If they drip-feed seasons, people will be more likely to stick around because several shows they have started are still unfinished (some kind of combination of inertia and FOMO). So now we wait 2-4 years between seasons (which, to be honest, bothers me a *lot* more than the shorter seasons).

It really sucks in a bunch of ways. Aside from just making everyone spend 10 years to watch a 4 season show, huge breaks make for problems with the availability and visual appearance of aging actors. Writers and showrunners come and go more frequently, making seasons inconsistent and lacking a coherent plan, and the small number of episodes means every episode must be SUPER EXCITING AND IMPORTANT or people feel like it's a waste of precious screentime (which it kind of is). This means there should be fewer "filler" episodes (even though there are still a lot of them) and a lot less episodes that focus more on character development vs plot movement.

Oh, and episodic storytelling has completely died as an art, so every season has to be part of one HUGE IMPORTANT series arc which is almost always disappointing because none of these shows are planned more than one season ahead. Companies want to be able to cut any show at any time, so nobody is willing to commit to 3 or 4 seasons with a planned story. And it turns out JIT storytelling mostly sucks.

Streaming kinda ruined dramatic TV.

I agree with your larger point, but it's not entirely fair to lump covid response in with the tax breaks. From a quick look, it appears that something like $5-6T of that $17T can be attributed to tax breaks and spending related to the first couple years of the pandemic.

But $11-12 trillion in 8 years is still absolutely bonkers.

I concur. The unemployment rate is about 4% and even the more padded U6 unemployment rate is below 5%
Those are normal.
Under condition when unemployment rates are normal the primary job of the federal reserve is to bring down inflation. It's not simply a good idea. It's their mandate

The fact that there are more jobseekers than jobs is also close to normal. There's always a mismatch between jobs and jobseekers.

It may well be that those jobs are demotions or involve moving etc..

So the Fed has done everthing correctly.

But now they are on toes because we have the immigrant labor leaving and hightarrufs.

While those might increase the number of jobs available it might not fund takers. And both will cause supply side inflation. Simultaneously extending the tax cuts and the debt ceiling means the high rate of pumping debt into the economy will continue.

So the Fed is in an uncharted territory . It could mean high inflation is coming. Most likely. But it could mean a recession. You love the rate in opposite directions there! Most likely is both: stagflation. Which is awful. We did the stagflation experiment in the early 70s and tried both spending into it and later raising interest rates sky high. Only the latter worked.

Fed is exactly doing the right Thing by being watchful