You have no idea how much better they can be if you haven't tried.

I, and many friends and coworkers, switched to Arc browser a couple years ago because tab management is such a gigantic pain and problem in most browsers. Arc fixed that for us (with spaces + vertical tabs). Vertical tabs are far easier to navigate and organize than previous approaches (tab groups, colors, multiple windows).

With Arc being deprecated in favor of AI browsing garbage, I am so thrilled and relieved Firefox and Chrome have decided to try to improve the worst UX of the browser.

You're still here after all these years?

Notably though if we actually run out of work to do we have a post-scarcity utopia, and that happens when people are so rich that there's basically not a single person who, given even more money, would even be able to think of something to spend it on. That's not going to happen any time soon, so we're basically dealing with a distribution problem, which requires distribution (e.g. minimum wage, set it to 1/3 national hourly GDP, the reason for this takes a while to explain) and redistribution (negative income tax, do it as a universal dividend) policies along with monetary policy to properly increase the money supply to not fall behind productivity growth.

Just hack into everything he makes, that's going to be the MO here. "Oh this guy's LinkedIn says he worked at [insurance company]" boom, an army of 14 year olds now is millionaires from stealing millions of credit cards and selling them on the dark web.

It's funny how these comparisons all depend on how you measure things. Yes, China has lower emissions per capita, but if you factor in economic output, the scales tip again. China has higher kg per PPP $ of GDP. On that measure, China's CO2 emissions are less efficient now than the US's in 1990. And the US's total emissions peaked around 2005

And even if you look at emissions per capita you can see a clear trend of the US getting vastly more efficient over the last few decades. while China's emissions per capita are increasing rapidly. Given China's extreme demographics, I wouldn't be surprised if their emissions per capita exceeded the US's.

I'm not defending whatever GP was on about. We're all totally fucked if we don't get emissions down (and probably even if we do...). But I think there are some useful ways to compare economies and measure progress on these issues.

The American right has absolutely blown a circuit in its reasoning about this. They can't talk about out-competing China in this area because they'd have to admit the left had a few good points about clean energy. The argument appears to be:

1. 1. Why bother building things more efficiently if China's not going to
2. 2. We need to be competitive with China on trade!
3. 3. EVs suck!
4. 4. clean energy sucks, don't install it!
5. 5. Drill baby, drill
6. 6. Why are China's solar panels so cheap? We need tariffs!

If only being able to prove it in court were a sufficient defense. You may be bankrupt from legal fees before it gets that far...

Maybe. I have heard that many gas stations break even on gas sales, and make their profits from their convenience stores. If so, they might just find other ways to draw in customers: EV chargers / battery swaps, Vision Pro headset cleanings, slot machines, or even more addictive snacks.

FWIW, most of the gamers I know are like me: we do most of our serious work from a Mac, and we have a separate PC for gaming. We don't trust the Windows systems with anything sensitive.

I would absolutely love to replace my four-way KVM switch setup (work mac, personal mac, personal PC) with a two-way.

I don't have much hope for ever being able to play all the games I want to play on Apple hardware, but it would be nice.

...Most of those productivity benefits are going straight to executive compensation and bonuses, with a piece going to the shareholders (but only through speculative increases in stock price -- not dividends)...

This definitely is not my area of expertise, but I wonder whether increased interest rates will put pressure on companies to pay out more in dividends. A lot of dividend stocks (esp. utilities) have been getting crushed since their yields are < the 5-6% bond yields.

And since this is a story about AI, I asked its opinion:

Yes, as a hypothetical senior stock market analyst with a background in economics and finance, I would say that an increase in the federal funds rate can indeed put pressure on companies in various ways, affecting their capital allocation decisions such as share buybacks and dividend payments. Here's a brief explanation:

1. Cost of Debt: As the federal funds rate increases, the general cost of borrowing also tends to rise. Companies that rely heavily on debt for financing will find it more expensive to borrow. If a firm has a significant portion of its capital structure in variable-rate debt, the interest payments on that debt will increase, potentially reducing available profits.
2. Opportunity Cost: Higher interest rates mean that the risk-free rate (like the rate on a government bond) is more attractive relative to stocks. For income-seeking investors, if bonds start offering better yields, they might shift some of their allocations from dividend-paying stocks to bonds. This can put pressure on dividend-paying companies to either maintain or increase their dividends to retain these investors.
3. Capital Allocation Decisions: Companies often choose between reinvesting in the business, buying back shares, or paying dividends. If the cost of borrowing increases, share buybacks funded by debt might become less attractive. Similarly, if companies perceive that their stock is undervalued and they have sufficient cash reserves, they might prioritize buybacks over dividends. On the other hand, if they want to keep or attract income-seeking investors, they might prioritize dividends.
4. Economic Slowdown Concerns: If the Federal Reserve is increasing the federal funds rate to combat inflation or preemptively cool down an overheated economy, it might be seen as a signal of potential economic slowdown or tougher times ahead. In such scenarios, companies might become more conservative with their capital allocation, potentially prioritizing dividends to reward shareholders or holding onto cash for future uncertainties.
5. Market Perception and Shareholder Expectations: The reaction of the broader stock market and individual shareholders can influence a company's decision. If the market values dividends more in a higher interest rate environment, companies might adjust their policies to meet these expectations.

In summary, an increase in the federal funds rate can indeed influence companies' decisions about share buybacks and dividends. However, it's essential to remember that numerous other factors, both internal (like a company's specific financial situation and strategy) and external (like overall market conditions and industry trends), also play a critical role in these decisions.

and I asked ChatGPT (Sept 24) if it agreed with my response to you:

Your observation about the potential impact of rising interest rates on dividend-paying stocks is astute. As interest rates rise, especially if they rise rapidly, the yields on safer assets such as government and corporate bonds become more attractive. Consequently, income-seeking investors might shift some of their capital from dividend-paying stocks to bonds, especially if the yield on these bonds surpasses the dividends from stocks.

I absolutely get over $100/mo of value from ChatGPT. At least my employer does. Just in the past 12 hours it saved me at least an hour of time.

I was dealing with a [poorly written] script someone had written a few years ago. It was causing issues in something I was working on, so I needed to debug it and add+update some documentation along the way. After fixing some of the obvious issues, I realized I was wasting my own time. I had ChatGPT generate documentation for each function and the whole script, explicitly outline areas where the script would fail in odd ways, and write up a list of potential bugs/problems. Then I vetted those, made a few more changes, etc. That took about 10 minutes end to end. And it did a much better job than the average software engineer would do if I had given them such half-assed input.

That said, the hype is overblown and promoters aren't worth listening to.

You misspelled "web 3".

Seriously, though, I am one of millions of paying customers for several [narrow] AI products. They have dramatically increased my productivity. If you haven't already, I'd like to encourage you to consider that it's being hyped and invested in because millions of people are finding it to be a really useful, innovative tool.

To counteract my own point, here's a completely useless (but highly amusing to me) use case for ChatGPT. I asked it to write a sonnet about its usefulness, citing some of the things I use it for:

100% the same experience here. ChatGPT is also an extremely useful rubber ducky. It can't do my job for me, but it's definitely made me much more efficient. It's more useful to me right now than a mediocre junior engineer/intern.

LLMs remind me of the early days of configuration management. Some sysadmins were slow to adapt, especially since early tools like Cfengine 2 were clunky at best. But the productivity of admins who learned the new tools skyrocketed. Configuration management tools didn't replace systems administrators--Ops people are still in high demand. But due to the productivity gap, admins who won't or can't use configuration management tools are far less employable.

I agree on principle, if only so we can explicitly shift all spending from "tax cut" to "spending" and have slightly less stupid debates about fiscal policy. Especially on things like the home/property owner and child-raising tax incentives.

But I do want to raise the issue of localized cost of living. $14,580/yr goes a lot further in Mobile, AL (~$25k/yr median income) than San Francisco (~$55k/yr), Berkeley, New York, etc.

I've always found it a little bothersome that $100k/yr is solidly middle class in some areas, fairly well off in others, yet the two have the same federal tax rates.

But then the stock price would go down!

Funny, though, Intel did announce a 5.2% dividend yield for March right after this story broke. And their share price has been up since.

I was going to ask how you knew that, and if you knew what her exercise price was... then I realized I could just find the disclosure online: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/e...

It looks like she just (last week?) exercised options for 187,607 shares at $2/share when the stock price was ~$28.30/share. That's $4,934,064.10 net, right? But hey, this crap's complicated. A lot of those shares were from a 2015 grant when the company was probably worth a bit less.

Do we know what kind of stock she got (and tied to what strings) in 2022 and 2021? The most recent I found (in a quick search) was $7.43/share for her 2018 options. Salary.com shows her getting stock award of ~$12m in 2022 and $5.6m in 2021, compared to options in 2020 (and presumably earlier). If she got straight RSUs, those are still worth something. A whole lot of something.

You're not really wrong--this is total comp, not salary. But it's fair to call RSUs at a publicly traded company a hell of a lot closer to salary than ISOs at a private one.