SW can use a ton of AI. Lots of other applications can't, and they don't need the super smart frontier versions either. We just don't need all that much compute to serve AI for these applications, and people won't need to pay the margins necessary to get access to that AI. SW alone is not going to be enough to pay for all the investment.

I don't buy brand loyalty either. If I can pay 1$/m for the same thing from someone as I pay OpenAI or Anthropic 10$/m for, I'll do that, which almost zero barrier to entry.

The buildout is paying stratospheric prices on the assumption they can charge that much on the other end, but if demand tapers off (or model efficiency doubles again), prices will start falling. Everyone talks about Jevon's, but I don't really see why I'd spend more on AI than I need to do the things I want. I already run out of stuff to ask it to do on a basic subscription, I hardly need more.

The crux is this: I can spend x for y results. If I spend more, I probably don't get 10x for 10y results - I probably get, say, 2y results. So on that equilibrium I just don't spend all that much more because the reward for all that extra spend is not worth it. And if models get better this tradeoff starts to look worse, since I get more of the super-effective benefits for cheaper. Now I'm spending 0.1x for y results, and spending even x for 2y might not make sense, let alone 10x for 3y.

If these were AGI we wouldn't be talking about them helping engineers, engineer jobs would just not exist. The AI would be superior in every way that mattered. That's not the case yet, so IMO we don't have AGI.

My understanding is that models will often still forget games rules etc unless you design a harness specifically to assist them and prevent them going off the rails. I was going to use chess as an example but it sounds like they are good enough to do that now, albeit I'm not sure if they have a special harness for it.

It's not about how "smart" they are, or how good they are at recall. It's about whether I can teach a model to understand and execute an arbitrary, general task regardless of whether they have been trained on that task before.

Disregarding the above, the fact models still require a human prompter/decision-maker is defacto proof they aren't AGI in my view. If they were humans would be obsolete in decision-making.

At some point someone moved the goalposts for this to include LLMs that emphatically are not that. I think it was Altman when they came out with Astra?

But I have no reference for the cost of setting up such a storage and how it compares to battery or hydro.

Go look at the goods people got in countries that didn't practice capitalism. They were worse in almost every way, more expensive if you could get them and often the things people wanted were completely unavailable because there was no market incentive informing production.

In my experience, this sort of comment is usually followed up by some personal preference of the commenter. Great. I don't want the same thing, so I guess something has to mediate the resource allocation and effort of society towards providing that want/need at a certain quality/price.. and guess how we do that?

Even if you can write a lot of code with LLMs, what is that code actually doing?

I don't understand why some people feel the need to turn a few hundred words if concise description into thousands via LLM.

They try to get around this by charging you more after you've invested in your tools, but even then you can only go so far (though it's astonishing how far the big guys have managed to get regardless)

If anything, the core job of most software is to reliably and repeatedly do the thing a user wants. Bugs outside eof that are OK, but a software that doesn't Do The Thing is useless.

LLMs increasing bug density in exchange for more features is likely a terrible tradeoff for most software people use IMO.

Even really good DDR5 could be had for cheap; I remember paying like 300$ for 96GB of high-quality M-die hynix DDR5.

Maybe they find a buyer in a doctor, maybe they don't, but PE provides them an exit that keeps the practice operating in the community.

Many people don't really run businesses efficiently. There was an interesting video I saw recently where a sole doctor practice made a few changes to their workflow that allowed them to hire more doctors and handle 2x as many people - I would expect a PE firm would pursue similar changes that help increase the number of people they can service, increasing competitiveness and lowering prices in the long run.

I don't know how these tradeoffs interact with patient care, but I wouldn't inherently expect PE to be worse at this than any other operating model.

"More traffic" is not sufficient. I can actually sort of believe shade from an apartment building could count, but the impression I get is that is rarely a good-faith argument (and in any case it should only severely affect a few people in any new development, so you could easily justify just compensating them in some way rather than outright blocking a development.

Are you proving for some arbitrary definition of == that isn't what we commonly consider the definition? How is it logically coherent? You mean only in the sense that you say it is and you haven't provided any rules to disprove it?

It's like giving people excessive discretion. Then if you're someone they don't like (eg. a black person if you're racist), then you deal out a maximalist punishment. If they're someone you do like, you let them off and tell them not to do it again.

Policy like this is just corruption. It allows some people to exercise more rights than others, at the expense of the commons.

You're cheering for the prevention of building new housing in the most valuable, most useful part of the town. I bet it would have kept all the same retail and restaurants in the bottom too, so there would have been zero downside for anyone who actually uses the street.

Instead a bunch of people with no stake except an aesthetic preference blocked it. How on earth is that a good thing?