Where I'm from (Norway), the majority of computer science and software engineering studies do not have the same math requirements as, say, engineering or math/physics/etc. - nor do they have the same amount of math as the latter ones.

When I did my CS classes as an engineering student, I did meet a bunch of students that viewed math as some niche subject only relevant to those that wanted to work with computer graphics, computational stuff, or similar.

There are many countries, especially in Europe, where entrance/admission tests are not a thing.

It's a case of having the right people at the right place, at the right time. Turkey have some of the leading doctors and clinics in this field, and have had for years. They were also located in a place which was close to both customers from Europe and the Middle-East, and could offer FUE (Follicular Unit Extraction) procedures at a very nice price.

Even the very top doctors there were charging a relatively modest price, compared to their (more) western colleagues. And I guess with the sheer volume they'd go through, they discovering new best practices, techniques, etc. along the way.

Back when I did research on this, now 15 years ago, the industry was starting to really take off. This was reflected in the prices that the best clinics charged. Some of them jumped up 50% in a short time, when photo-driven social media like Instagram started blowing up.

And then a whole industry sprung out of it. Many excellent clinics, tons more mediocre (to horrendous) ones that are only trying to compete on price.

Guess this also goes for the dental industry there.

But that idea was shot down real fast by the unions, who informed the employer that it with great likelihood also would clash with data protection laws, and GDPR (this was not in the US). So it was quickly abandoned. Among workers that was one of the most dystopian ideas we had heard of.

But now you have people like Gowers and Tao, pure mathematicians, hyping up what the SOTA models can do - and I figure they both are getting access and tokens us mortals can't afford.

So I guess the question is - will everything be as expensive as applied fields?

They learn how to read papers and literature rigorously. They get low-hanging fruits to practice on, which can take months. Their funding doesn't come from thin air either.

So what happens when the group leaders would rather spend money on compute, and get models to solve the low-hanging fruit? Which the models could very well do in mere hours, compared to months.

Nor does it help that publishing is the number 1 measure in academia. Furthermore, the access to compute and capital could end up be the defining factor between researchers and research groups.

It is basically the "junior problem", but even more severe.

Those services were usually just based on NLP + simple decision trees, and people actually won their cases.

Of course, doing huge corporate contract disputes, IP disputes, M&A, and whatever will probably be out of question for a good while. Same with more serious criminal cases where the stakes are very high.

But I think there's potential for automating away less serious cases, especially where there's good structure.

And of course, it all depends on what kind of legal system one is situated in. Immediately I'd think that Civil Law would be easier for AI lawyers, as its inherent structure is a better fit for machine reasoning. So I'd expect to see more AI products start in Civil Law countries.

But, it makes me wonder, will clients be able to use these AI-attorney systems in the future, in the court. Where they basically either just parrot what the model is instructing them to do, or - I dunno - give the model permission to speak for them (while waiving liabilities).

I have no doubt that some complex AI system can perform better than a bottom-tier, overworked lawyer.

- You can't blindly trust the US, or US businesses. Even less when it comes to critical infrastructure.

- You can't rely on underwater cables to be safe.

Starlink is a proven technology. They were the first major mover. But they will not be the last.

It'll be sort of like Tesla cars. For a long time they completely dominated the EV market, but now others are catching up. Yet Tesla is valued more than all other EV manufacturers combined. Some of this is of course from their vertical integration, but most of it is just hopium.

Same will happen with both Starlink, SpaceX, and other products under the Musk umbrella.

Let me rephrase that to you: The vast, vast majority of people, even in the western world, even the white-collar part of the population, are not whales or power users of AI models.

I use ChatGPT daily. And I never spend more than $25/month. If I lost it, it would suck, but it would not affect my life significantly. I then see people spending $100 / day on Claude Code tokens, programmers in startups / tech companies rack up thousands a month in bills. These people are literally spending 100x more than me, a casual user.

Yeah, I suspect they follow some sort of whale economics - where a relatively small userbase (in the big picture) and providing them with a huge chunk of their revenue.

But still these companies are being valued as if they're some omnipresent companies which humanity simply can't live without.

Right now the message is more or less: If you want to "AI-proof" yourself, pick up a trade or manual job.

If we create a society where all the peons will work in healthcare / trades / manual labor, while the trillionaires control all their other aspects of (digital) life, that could very well usher in reactionary leaders.

I'm in Scandinavia, and at least here, Messenger is by far the most dominant messaging app.

Meta in general has a really tight grip here.

ZIRP caused a massive overhiring in certain fields, especially in tech. The post-COVID hiring started to cool down around 2.5 years ago, and hit rock bottom 1 year ago. There were almost 4 times as many listings at the peak, 4 year ago, than there were 1 year ago.

A quick data point: US Software job listings

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

US interest rates

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate

So companies are flush with cash, and ride a bubble where there's a huge demand for digital tools. People that enrolled college during the height of the bubble were promised jobs left and right, and good salaries. People need to remember that these sort of things rarely change overnight - there can be a latency that takes months to years.

At least to me, it seems like a classic example of a boom and bust. When I did my EE degree, everyone that specialized in control / automation were guaranteed a oil & gas job, many had a job offer 1 year before the graduated. The petro companies would wine and dine us, and we could send out competing offers to negotiate.

Then came a huge crash, and almost no one had a job. The offers were rescinded, multi year hiring freeze. All in all very bad times.

I'm not at all buying the argument that WFH has any serious effect on junior hiring.

In the past year we've seen these non-technical analysts become more productive when it comes to developing internal tools, by leveraging AI models for the dev part.

Prior to this, pretty much everything was developed in Tableau. It was the most accessible way for non-devs to build working tools.

Just the other day one analyst in our group presented a tool he had been working on, which was basically a port of a tableau report, made into a more flexible app.

Yes, franchisor hold a lot of power, and in the big picture the franchisees are small owners and a move like this ($200k of merch they haven't paid a dime for) can affect the PnL quite a lot on the local level. It seems like the average Bricks and Minifigs franchise store has annual revenue of just $600k. At that's revenue. Another search shows that their margins are around 10%-20%

If these franchise owners managed to pull of this, and sell the collection for $200k on top of the expected annual revenue, that would put their store margin for that year around 45%-55%!

I'm guessing Bricks and Minifigs, the corporation, just assumed this would fly quietly under the radar, and let their franchisees.

I think it just comes down to greed. A couple of franchisees figured they could make a killing, and become one of the most profitable franchise stores with no effort.

Back in college I used to make money flipping stuff on Ebay, and did that extensively. I did consignment for others, as well as sending stuff to others to sell.

This sounds illegal, and like a case of the store / new franchise owners trying to bully the consignors into submission.

If there's no connection between you and the trade you're copying, there's nothing you can be charged with. Normally there's a natural latency between the "signal" trade (i.e. the trade to copy), and the copy trade, which obviously can alter the profitability. This latency can range from sub-seconds if there's some public ledger, to days/weeks/months if the info is due to disclosure. Obviously when it comes to crypto and public ledgers, we're on the former.

But as soon as you place such trades based on insider trading, that's insider trading.

I decided to look through old IRC chats, and I honestly couldn't for sure say who maybe 30% of the people are just based on their nicknames. Nicknames I hadn't seen in 20 years. So I decided to feed all the raw chats into a LLM, and see if the model could string together names and nicknames. It managed to do surprisingly well! Many of the chats were not personal chats, but from the channels. My most active channels were local groups from my small town, so the names would naturally be named there, but I couldn't be bothered with sifting through the vast amounts of chats/text.

I then noticed that in the mid 2000s, MSN Messenger really took off, so most my chats were done there. Or ICQ if I were chatting with people from the US.

Then, around 2009/2010 Facebook became the standard (though it seems like my account was created in 2007), and most chats are via messenger.

The next year, most of the guys that would frequent these parties were completely engrossed in World of Warcraft. They just weren't interested in playing any LAN games, or any of the socialization. Many of them were in WoW guilds with people that lived in completely different time zones, so they weren't even there when the few of us others tried to play something.

At least to me, that was a watershed moment. To me the magic was gone, and I more or less lost interest in multiplayer gaming for years.

To me LAN wasn't just about gaming, but also shooting the breeze, talk abut techy or gaming stuff. When two thirds of the people were glued to their screens 24/7 grinding WoW, a lot of that died.

EDIT: Not saying that WoW single handedly killed LAN, but I feel like it was final nail in the coffin.

IME, there's been a rise of those for the past 1-2 years. They not only embrace AI/slop coding, it is a core part of their business model.