My favorite example of this was a mechanical engineering graduate student with a focus on thermodynamics I lived with in college. He bought a large box of FlaVorIce and put it in the freezer expecting them to freeze overnight. I told him they wouldn't freeze quickly if you don't spread them out (like my farmer father taught me as a kid), and he sarcastically stated that a f*ing thermodynamics engineer could figure out how to freeze water. Fast forward to the morning, and the 10 freeze pops I separated from the box were the only ones frozen. The rest of the box was barely even cold.

I don't know the history of IoT devices and don't know a good inflection point such as the release of ChatGPT to compare the speed of adoption, but I agree that is a good candidate. My gut says IoT took a lot longer to gain adoption than gen-AI technologies did after December 2022, but I'm not sure how to really compare the two. IoT is certainly more ubiquitous today than ChatGPT is, but that doesn't say anything about how rapid the adoption was. IoT predates Gen-AI by about 25-30 years. It would be like comparing the number of ChatGPT users with the number of Internet users.

I don't agree the level of hype is unprecedented. I'd point to flying cars, nuclear-powered household appliances, virtual reality in the 90s, and cold fusion as a few technologies off the top of my head that had a similar level of ridiculous hype. I'd agree the hype is more widespread this time, but I think that's just because we are further into the information age so most public discourse is more widespread.

Although as for the impact on my life and job, this feels pretty similar to the advent of the PC, Internet, and smartphones. Not quite yet today but AI keeps getting more useful for me every few months. The PC was mostly a toy for a couple decades, the Internet took over a decade to really become essential, and smartphones took about 5-10 years to become ubiquitous. Each time another radically impactful digital technology is introduced its adoption is quicker than the one which preceded it, so it's not surprising the same is true for the current class of AI technologies.

Which of those technologies do you think had the same rapid adoption as recent Gen-AI technologies like ChatGPT? Many of them were released at a time when less than 5% of the world's population had a personal computer, so how could they possibly have the same level of adoption as a technology released when over two-thirds of the world's population has access to the Internet?

A big reason AI is being adopted so quickly is because decades of advances and infrastructure that makes its adoption possible, but that doesn't change its adoption rate. It just explains it.

The article seems to imply that SAG doesn't have these agreements in place. Their complaint is that the company didn't negotiate with SAG for appropriate terms, which means to me that no existing terms are in place to restrict what the company did. So why would they negotiate with SAG at all? I'm hoping to read something soon written by an actual lawyer explaining why SAG feels like they have a case here, because it isn't obvious even after reading their very brief legal filing.

I agree with your sentiment that this "great hesitation" explanation is horribly wrong, but not for the same reason. US tech sector employment is dropping because it was in a bubble. US Software developer and QA jobs tracked by the BLS grew by 35% from 2019 to 2023. This 7.8% annual increase was over 60% higher than the 10 years preceding this bubble, which was arguably caused by excessive Covid-related hiring.

AI is just being used as an excuse instead of admitting these companies over-hired for the last few years. This disruption will be messy and people's careers will be seriously hurt because of this mismanagement, but everything will get back to normal in a few years.

I'm not some quack job that thinks tariffs are paid by China, and in almost all cases tariff taxes are passed on to consumers, but this is one rare area where I'm not so sure. I think most of these costs will be passed on to scalpers, and those scalpers will have a hard time raising their prices any more than they already have. There are some companies finding ways to get Nvidia cards to consumers at or near MSRP, and the tariffs will directly make these cards more expensive, but I don't think that is what the majority of US consumers are paying.

It's just an opinion. I may be wrong. We shall see.

I used to read 5-6 non-fiction books per month, but that has dropped in half since I starting using LLMs for a significant amount of my continuous learning. I haven't stopped reading books, but I can usually get 80% of the insight in 20% of the time using AI. Now I focus my reading on filling that 20% gap.

I don't think AI is going to remove the rest of the EdTech industry, but it is bound to reduce the market size of non-AI education methods by quite a bit.

The retail price of these cards appear to have little to do with their MSRP, so this is one area where the tariff taxes might not be felt by the consumer. I assume scalpers have already found the top of the market that people are willing to pay for the small amount of supply available.

"We are investing $150 billion in the US, paid for with $160 billion of staff reductions in the US." -- IBM

And I hope the next Pope is even better than Pope Francis. Each generation should hopefully be becoming more progressive than the last, leading to a more moral and inclusive Pope each time they are replaced.

I also prefer very light regulation while new industries are being formed. No one knows what direction they will take or how much value they will create. I've seen studies estimating the Internet is responsible for 20% of the economic growth over the past 30 years, and AI has much more potential than the Internet had.

The problem comes from not regulating it and distributing its gains throughout society after the markets begin to mature. If AI became good enough to replace 50% of today's labor, the US could become a utopia. The government could step in and mandate a 20-hour work week and create wealth taxes to replace income taxes, all without lowering our standard of living.

But everyone is freaked out because no one thinks that will happen. We expect the trend that led the top 1% to go from owning 10% of the nation's wealth 75 years ago to 26% of the nation's wealth today to accelerate. We expect the nation's GDP to double while real median household income drops. No one is really fears AI taking our jobs, we are fearful that the new jobs which are created will be worse than the ones we have today. That shouldn't be what happens, but almost no one is optimistic about our chances.

To an observant liberal like me Trump's first presidency was abhorrent. His judicial appointments, the insurrection, mishandling of Covid, obstruction of justice, usage of the pardon power, Ukraine extortion and cover-up, and loyalty oaths all made him the worst President in our country's history. But would I expect the average person to even remember all of this, or comprehend how bad each of these examples are? The average person I remember from school had trouble remembering order of operations in pre-algebra class.

"Idiot" is a pretty subjective term, and I use it to describe someone of significantly below average intelligence. But if you use a definition that is closer to the word's Greek roots, someone who is slightly above average would absolutely still be considered an idiot. So I can't in good conscience claim you are wrong and I am right. All I can do is point out why I don't use the word "idiot" to describe someone who can't combat propaganda and tribal allegiance to form more rational and informed opinions.

For most people it was as simple as experiencing a 10% real household income increase during Trump's first 3 years, and a 1% increase during Biden's first 3 years. There are so many reasons why this is an insanely bad method of evaluating a President, but almost none that 80% percent of the human population is capable of evaluating properly.

Correct. They are not the same.

When the Republicans are in power they put in new policies to redistribute more wealth to the richest among us, and when the Democrats are in power they keep all those policies in place. That is quite a large difference.

The US economy has not been crumbling for 3 decades. The US economy has been growing by 4.75% over the past 30 years, which is the same as the world GDP growth over the same period. Our economy is doing just fine.

Our middle class has been crumbling for 45 years, when the wealthy started redistributing wealth to themselves after the election of Reagan. The median US household would have $200k-$300k more wealth today, a little over double, if we went back to the wealth distribution of 1980.

Our federal government has been crumbling for 25 years, when we took a balanced budget and decided to drastically reduce federal taxes. The federal government collected 20% of GDP in revenue in 2000, but only 17% in 2024. If we had gradually moved that ratio up to 22% to account for our aging population, we would have no federal deficit today. To put it into perspective, that tax increase would still represent 25% less total tax revenue than the OECD average.