So, TFA says "Today, CAISO engineers scan outage reports for keywords about maintenance that's planned or in the works, read through the notes, and then load each item into the grid software system to run calculations on how a downed line or transformer might affect power supply."

Sounds like there is already an actual piece of simulation software in place; but the people feeding it scenarios need to manually assemble them from outage reports and maintenance notes; because apparently you can perform, even schedule, maintenance without generating a record of which asset you'll be working on. And so someone proposes that the obvious answer is to bandaid that with a summarizer, and their notorious penchant for accuracy?

Does that strike anyone else as slightly insane? We're already recording outages and maintenance events and those records refer to various pieces of infrastructure; but not in a format that can be programmatically extracted from the report to load into the analysis system; so rather than doing the boring thing and slapping serial numbers on transformers or adding a "things we turned off for maintenance and when" field to the maintenance report; we'll just continue doing that as a big free text blob and hope that an LLM will save us?

Seems sort of like deciding that postal addresses and mailing labels would be a huge pain; so let's find a chatbot that can, hopefully, follow a rambling account of how mail for the Johnson place is 3rd right past the old rail bridge; but if you see the silo you've gone too far.

Even if we assume, for sake of argument, that trends are favorable and someone can actually figure out how to cover their costs; why do you say that "the train is leaving the station on this"?

So far the LLM guys have appeared to be relatively low moat; with significantly cheaper and only modestly worse competition not far behind the big names and ongoing contention between the ones you've heard of.

If Google, whose main obstacle to dominance of the search market is its own self destructive tendencies; with microsoft a distant second, is paying Apple 20 billion a year to stay default and everyone who isn't them is basically begging you to switch to them, why would we expect that the LLM guys would be in a position to squeeze Apple on terms?

Where is the point where Apple can no longer board the metaphorical train for some reason? There may come a point where they can no longer simply ignore the matter; if Siri's ongoing mediocrity becomes an actual issue or the like; but I'm not seeing why they'd be in a notably worse position tomorrow than they would be today to either get satisfactory terms from one or more of the largely interchangeable and margin-challenged competitors; or just snap up one of the more competent fast-followers(or an open weights model and some appropriate hires) and deal with that when it comes up.

Where's the urgency? What marks the end of the station platform in this increasingly tenuous metaphor?

Even if we, for sake of argument, accept the theory that Apple products are suffering for want of 'AI'; what's the case for Apple to pay a fairly stiff premium to acquire vs. just taking advantage of the current state of the market; where there are multiple people who will fight for the opportunity to lose money on every sale and attempt to make it up in volume?

Absent a fairly specific argument why Apple needs to own one; rather than just snapping up some of the useful people or commanding the influence that being a customer with actual money tends to provide over suppliers that are in the process of bleeding out, the idea that Apple needs to buy into 'AI' seems sort of like the idea that Apple needs to buy into DRAM, except that it's vastly more evident that Apple's products actually need DRAM; and Apple still doesn't go there because why bother with a capital intensive business whose margins are constantly buffeted by spot prices and on the thin side when you are buying enough that you don't need to worry about your place in line?

It's not clear that that's an either-or. A financial sector metastasizing into the real economy is going to have many of the same symptoms.

This seems more like a "Zuckerberg threatens hundreds of billions for AI datacenters" situation.

In all seriousness; even if you are an 'AI' optimist(perhaps especially so, since you presumably think that this isn't just Zuck pissing away more money after his metaverse successes); would you want Facebook to have a commanding position in the area? It's not literally the worst possible company to potentially have to deal with; but it tries.

Given the level of commitment it implies; basically the most lightweight of expendable pilot programs even if you are saying that you 'plan to' in a legally binding context; is seems at best exceptionally dubious to treat the answers to "do you plan to adopt generative AI?" as straightforwardly meaningful.

The differences mean something; it's just not obvious to what degree they reflect actual company strategy, vs. personal fascination with the new shiny thing, vs. people saying what they think the audience wishes to hear.

It's sort of an interesting mix of goofy hype and actual(but relatively boring) worth-looking-into.

Not so much because of 'quantum' necessarily; it's entirely possible that someone will get an at least somewhat worrisome classical efficiency improvement worked out before the quantum computing types reach anything of useful size; and it's probably worth betting money that particular cryptographic implementations will turn out to be flawed; but because it takes a fair amount of awareness to even have a complete idea of what you are running; and more than that to know the implications of needing to swap it out in some or all locations.

The people selling 'quantum' and 'post-quantum security' are mostly in the business of "forget your boring arduous problems by focusing on our exciting ones!"(good business; bad way to do security); but it's a pretty solid idea to be aware of the boring arduous problem of exactly what ciphers you use, and what implementations, and whether there are any places where you've inadvertently left a compatibility toggle that allows something to be downgraded to some 90s 'export grade' cipher; and have an idea of how hard it would be to change ciphers or update implementations if you needed to for one reason or another.

Shockingly enough, the people with the biggest marketing blitzes and best 'executive whitepapers' with stock photos of shadowed hoodie hackers and chinese quantum AI owning your cyber are not the ones mostly advising that you should do some really boring systems administration and SBoM stuff while waiting for mature industry-standard implementations to become available; so the people selling immature proprietary implementations and dubious silver bullets tend to out-shout the more sensible ones.

Hopefully the NTSB's tier 2 people are ready; since they did in fact try turning it off and turning it on again and there's still more to the situation.

So all we have to do to vindicate our investment in glorious AI is keeping firing the expensive labor until we get the team down to people so ignorant of the code that their guess is worse than the bot's guess; and they'll have no reason to doubt the bot's output?

Sounds like a win-win to me!

It would be amusing if it weren't so annoying; but you often see people who embrace both positions without a hint of awareness of the contradiction: when condemning the non-breeders they are 'selfish' and 'hedonistic' and so on; but, in the same breath, children are their greatest pleasure and most fulfilling experience and so on and so forth. What's it going to be? Are children the cutting edge of indulgence and everyone who is missing out will die bitter and miserable; or are the people failing to pay the flesh tithe to our civilization repulsively self-centered for avoiding a massive hassle that one undertakes only as a grim duty?

I'd be curious what, if any, role the increasingly obviously hollow promise of progress may have.

In absolute terms residents of low-income countries are usually more fucked than those of high income ones; but in terms of trajectory they often have a somewhat rosier picture: if GDP per capita is really low you don't really have an option but to be really poor, there's just not enough productivity to support being otherwise; but there's a fairly straightforward alignment of incentives: unless there's a local supply of mineral wealth to skim, even the local elites generally want everyone to be more prosperous because there's just not that much money to be gouged out of subsistence mud farmers; and there are a variety of plausible avenues toward greater productivity in the form of people looking for new manufacturing areas and the like.

Similar things hold for various quality-of-life stuff. Low income countries tend to see a lot of morbidity and mortality from lack of relatively cheap and simple medical interventions; but have a corresponding selection of relatively cheap and simple improvements that will improve population welfare if realized.

Wealthy countries are, obviously, absolutely wealthier; but are often harder to write an optimistic trajectory for: if most of the obvious productivity improvements have already been made and you still feel squeezed it's a lot less plausible to believe that you will grow out of that problem(both because there are fewer evident paths to notable growth; and because feeling poor in a wealthy society is often a good sign that someone who isn't you is good at capturing value; and will probably remain good at that even if more value is unlocked); and if most of the relatively simple, relatively cheap, improvements in things like medical interventions and occupational health and safety standards have already been made it becomes much less evident how your children will do better than you did.

My impression is that, among people who actually reason their way toward parenthood, there's a general desire to see good outcomes for their children. This often involves heavy doses of irrational optimism regardless of location; but there are definitely some contexts where at least expecting your children to have it better than you is within the realm of the plausible; and others where you need to be hitting the copium pretty hard to imagine that they'll beat the odds dramatically enough to do so.

I assume I'm not supposed to ask what 'our own civilization' has done to deserve our care; and just swallow the implication that suffering as an end in itself is totally sensible?

If you think that AI is good enough to replace education; do I want to know what jobs that pay for family-size houses you expect people to be working?

Most of the time economists respond to data about individual choice with a "meh, revealed preference, obviously"; then "It becomes possible to do sex without 9 months of creepy endoparasitism and a couple of decades of very high cost parenting; turns out people are up for that" hits and suddenly it's a crazy mystery what is driving such a change...

There's one confounding factor with a lot of enterprise tech announcements: the people who make the purchasing decisions or act as executive sponsors for splashy projects don't actually have to use whatever they are purchasing, and are often at fairly modest risk of real consequences(especially if the failure is readily contained: if the COO announces a bold plan that ends up destroying the ERP system he's probably going to use that golden parachute whether he wants to or not; but if a little NFT faff can be described as an experiment in unconventional marketing and then quietly dropped in 6 months when it's time to announce a 'digital twin' AI-centric approach to airframe maintenance, that's entirely survivable); but the those people are the ones looking to build 'personal brands' get treated like 'thought leaders' and industry conferences, and so on. So there's a temptation to do trendy nonsense with only the slimmest business case because it effectively means that you can spend the company's money on burnishing your own resume. The most overt cases are where the speaking gig is directly related to the thing you are buying: get real hyped about Salesforce Agents, sign the contract, get your own little keynote at Dreamforce for being such an innovator.

That's what is a trifle puzzling here: 'crypto' is basically a generation old as a "things the degenerates of linkedin think will make them thought leaders" item. Even the guys who are still just talking 'generative' rather than 'agentic and context aware' are starting to look out of touch and behind the curve; so it's a weird time to see an announcement.

When you can use other people's money as the stupid money there are sometimes reasons to remain in the market longer than if you are working entirely on your own account; but the most obvious of those reasons requires that the stupid money still be pouring in because it's trendy; which NFTs definitely no longer are. 'Crypto' has settled into a fairly lucrative but somewhat less glamorous role as the deeply, deeply, shady side of 'fintech'; but nobody cares about NFTs and 'web3'.