Even if the prediction of comparatively controlled impact is accurate; I think it's worth considering just how grim it is likely to be; not in purely economic terms; but in the character of the work.

Maybe this is a personal peculiarity; but I that there's something exquisitely dispiriting about beating your head against people who are stubborn or clueless enough that every conversation is just a baffling sequence of different confusions, some of the repeated from previously. It's a totally different thing from dealing with someone who is merely ignorant; but learning, especially if they are enthusiastic about it.

Even if everything is fine in terms of job pace and security and all; that seems like it is shaping up to be a really hellish aspect of dealing with bots. The experience is sort of a somewhat weirder simulation of dealing with a chirpy, people-pleasing, very-junior type; except they are far more likely to lie than to admit ignorance; and they never learn(possibly the SaaS guys hoovering up your interactions in the background will make the next iteration better, possibly not, progress seems to have slowed considerably after only a brief period of improvement; but a given release is more or less full groundhog day).

That seems like a nightmare. Everything that sucks about teaching or mentoring; but precisely none of the rewarding aspects.

I can't see them selling email accounts for $9 per month. That's just too small of a service for that much money. $1.50 per month maybe (paid annually to lessen CC processing fees), but not $9 per month.

It's adorable how they pretend that the 'well being' gap between the people who matter and the ones who don't is some sort of surprise that calls for urgent action; rather than a deliberate outcome carefully achieved.

It's the pandemic-period numbers that are the anomaly, from a period when at times downright existential issues forced people's hands(at least for white collar workers; if you are 'essential' good luck and back to dealing with the public in person); and a lot of work has been put into rectifying that period.

What's next; a comparative analysis of the labor markets of the 1950s and the 1980s that studiously pretends that it's not exactly as Milton Friedman and Neutron Jack intended?

In a sense his puzzlement is justified; when the tech demo works an LLM is probably the most obvious candidate for 'just this side of sci-fi'; and, while may of the capabilities offered are actually somewhat hollow (realistically, most of the 'take these 3 bullet points and create a document that looks like I cared/take that document that looks like my colleague cared and give me 3 bullet points' are really just enticements to even more dysfunctional communication) some of them are fairly hard to see duplicating by conventional means.

However, I suspect that his perspective is fundamentally unhelpful in understanding the skepticism: when you are building stuff it's easy to get caught up in the cool novelty and lose sight of both the pain points(especially when you are deep C-Level; rather than the actual engineer fighting chatGPT's tendency to em-dash despite all attempts to control it); and overestimate how well your new-hotness stacks up against both existing alternatives and how forgiving people will or won't be about its deficiencies.

Something like Windows trying to 'conversational'/'agentic' OS settings, for instance, probably looks pretty cool if you are an optimism focused ML dude: "hey, it's not perfect but it's a natural language interface to adjusting settings that confuse users!"; but it looks like absolute garbage from an outside perspective both because it's badly unreliable; and humans tend not to respond well to clearly unreliable 'people'(if it can't even find dark mode; why waste my time with it?); and because it looks a lot like abdication of a technically simpler, less exciting, job in favor of chasing the new hotness.

"Settings are impenetrable to a nontechnical user" is a UI/UX problem(along with a certain amount of lower level 'maybe if bluetooth was less fucked people wouldn't care where the settings were because it would just work); so throwing an LLM at the problem is basically throwing up your hands and calling it unsolvable by your UI/UX people; which is the an abject concession of failure; not a mark of progress.

I think it may be that that he really isn't understanding: MS has spent years squandering the perception that they would at least try to provide an OS that allowed you to do your stuff; in favor of faffing with various attempts to be your cool app buddy and relentless upsell pal; so every further move in that direction is basically confirmation that no fucks are given about just trying to keep the fundamentals in good order rather than getting distracted by shiny things.

All it does is make it so that the ability to get a ticket shifts from having more money to he who gets there first, which isn't really a huge tradeoff.

The reality is that if the tickets are selling out that fast and they're being resold for significantly more than the original price, then they were underpriced to begin with.

I suspect that a more fundamental problem is what you would need to preserve.

Embryos are clearly the easier case, being small and impressively good at using some sort of contextual cue system to elaborate an entire body plan from a little cell glob(including more or less graceful handling of cases like identical twins, where physical separation of the cell blob changes requirements dramatically and abruptly); but they are also the case that faces looser constraints. If an embryo manages to grow a brain that falls within expectations for humans it's mission successful. People may have preferences; but a fairly wide range of outcomes counts as normal. If you discard or damage too much the embryo simply won't work anymore; or you'll get ghastly malformations; but there are uncounted billions of hypothetical babies that would count as 'correct' results if you perturb the embryo just slightly.

If you are freezing an adult; you presumably want more. You want the rebuilt result to fall within the realm of being them. That appears to not require an exact copy(people have at least limited ability to handle cell death and replacement or knock a few synapses around without radical personality change most of the time; and a certain amount of forgetting is considered normal); but it is going to require some amount of fidelity that quite possibly wont' be available(depending on what killed them and how, and how quickly and successfully you froze them); and which cannot, in principle, be reconstructed if lost.

Essentially the (much harder because it's all fiddly biotech) equivalent of getting someone to go out and paint a landscape for you vs. getting someone to paint the picture that was damaged when your house burned down. The first task isn't trivial; but it's without theoretical issues and getting someone who can do it to do it is easy enough. The second isn't possible, full stop, in principle, even if you are building the thing atom by atom the information regarding what you want has been partially lost; though it is, potentially, something you could more or less convincingly/inoffensively fake; the way people do photoshop 'restoration' of damaged photos where the result is a lie; but a plausible one that looks better than the damage does.

The fraught ethics of neurally engineering someone until your client says that their personality, memories, and behavior 'seem right' is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader; along with the requisite neuropsychology.

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?

That's only very partially true. The uptick in unpaid mortgages gave the house of cards a little tap; but it was the giant pile of increasingly exotic leverage constructed on top of the relatively boring retail debt that actually gave the situation enough punch to be systemically dangerous; along with the elaborate securitizing, slicing, and trading making it comparatively cumbersome for people to just renegotiate a mortgage headed toward delinquency and take a relatively controlled writedown; rather than just triggering a repossession that left them with a bunch of real estate they weren't well equipped to sell.

I don't think that's it. Gaming PC's generally cost more than a console, and the "general purpose PC that can also dabble in some gaming" is becoming less common. It seems that people are buying less PC's but those who are still buying them are often buying them for a purpose.

I think it's that "gaming" (and by that I need AAA high dollar value gaming as opposed to casual cell phone/mobile device gaming) is becoming a little more niche of a hobby. Niche hobbies often have high costs associated with them because the small group of people who are willing to participate are willing to unload large sums of money into it.

PC gaming has always been where the best performance and visuals have been available - and it could just be that the remaining customer base are the ones who want that whilst more casual people are fine using their mobile devices for playing a different type of game.

I will say personally I've always bought consoles strictly for exclusives, while always also maintaining a gaming PC as well. As exclusives become less of a thing and everything seems to be available on PC anyways, I have little incentive to actually buy a console anymore.

General purpose PC's are becoming more rare, but it seems like gaming PC's are starting to account for a larger chunk of the PC population. In general it seems like people who just want to do mundane tasks are largely moving away from full PC to tablets and smartphones, but people who actually want to game are still very much getting PC's to do it on.

I'm an old fart who still games, but every one of my 3 teenage nieces have asked me to build them a gaming PC because it's a "cool kid" thing to have one.

I'm not sure DRM is hugely necessary. So many games do online play now that just getting a pirated copy of something generally isn't as functional. And honestly the LAST thing I'd do in modern times is run executable code from some random torrent site. Media files for audio and/or video sure, but anything executable is a no-go for me.

I don't know - maybe its because I'm not the broke teenager I once was, but I haven't pirated a game in probably 20 years. If you wait most of them will be $5 or less eventually on steam anyways.

I don't mean "modern print" as opposed to "old print" - I mean print with modern writing instruments as opposed to the instruments of the time when cursive was invented. They didn't exactly have ball point pens back in the days of yore.

Cursive is not generally less movement in the 2d plane of the paper - it is just less movement up and down in the 3d space so that you are removing the pen from the paper less. The thing is, we can move in 2 directions at once. The tip of a pen can come off the paper as its moving to the next location with very little impact in overall speed.

The goal of cursive is to keep the tip on the page more which worked better for quills as coming off the page and back onto it would often cause an ink blot and could break the tip of a quill. Those issues are gone with ink pens. Plus have you ever looked at cursive from when they really focused on it? Like census reports from the 1800's? A lot of that stuff is basically illegible. Even the archives that have translated it will just have ????? in some spots because no one could make out what was written. While print isn't immune to

Trust me - I know how to write it. I'm old. I was forced to learn it in elementary school and had to do all assignments in cursive up through high school. Its still a dumb idea.

Hand-writing is fine. Cursive itself is pointless. Print is just as fast in modern times and is FAR more legible.

If you look at cursive writing from like an 1800's census or something, half of it is virtually impossible to read. Cursive was invented for use with QUILLS. Even if you're writing by hand now you're using a pencil or an ink pen, not a quill.

It's certainly possible that some people do, sincerely, 'fear' that the onrushing machine god will speak chinese and that it would be just the worst if all humans were rendered obsolete by the wrong side's robot when that's supposed to be our job; but, especially with how tepid the results are for the money poured in, it seems much more the case that we are seeing a lot of nakedly cynical playing of the 'give us what we want, lest the chinese win' by people who are otherwise on deeply shaky ground in terms of things like massive copyright infringement, voracious data mining, and an endless hunger for capital without any signs of returns.

It's like a vastly hypertrophied case of the 'race to 5G' stuff; where, if we didn't give Verizon whatever they asked for, China would have a faster rollout of 5G and we would lose the 4th industrial revolution or something? It was never entirely clearly what losing the race was going to involve.

The existential tone of the claims seem especially curious given how meagre the leads people are pouring billions into seem to be; and how readily 'AI' models can be poked at via distillation attacks or good, old-fashioned, electronic intrusion. If The Singularity kicks off that presumably changes everything beyond the powers of meaningful prediction(though that holds for whoever develops it as well as everyone else; given the odds that it will slip the leash); but as long as you are in the realm of incrementally more or less flakey chatbots it seems a bit weird to even talk like there is some sort of victory condition that will trigger and cause one side to lose.

It seems exceptionally weird that people have started writing as though "AI"'s needs are just axiomatic; and that the size of other things, like revenue or suckers with available capital, must be the problem.

The fact that you want something that costs more than you have isn't normally described as a 'funding gap'; it's just you having expensive tastes that you can't afford. Why are talking about there being X trillion in 'demand' when, in fact, there's only X trillion in unfunded hype because nobody has slapped a shock collar on Altman yet?