I think the article is right in that if you don't have a clear business idea ("we're building a platform"), the odds are even worse. Except when they aren't, because in some niches, you actually have customers who want a platform. Cloud computing is an obvious example. It's just not the general case for consumer stuff.

I don't think that's the point you're making, but it's good to be careful with that. You can do good after hours, but it doesn't absolve you from what you're doing 9-to-5.

As to your first point: yes, but it's all relative. Most tech workers are "trying to get by" in their minds. Just look at the SFBA rents and the PG&E bills! And wait until you hear about their college loans... most people in the top 1% don't think about themselves as the top 1%.

In the end, making good decisions often requires sacrifice, pretty much no matter how much you make. And we often find ways to rationalize why it's not the right time for that.

So, the original thinking was "if you need wifi, we can't price a standalone chip competitively, just buy a SoC". But the genius of ESP32 was that they approached it the other way round: they built a wifi chip, and then figured they can carve out some room for user code. No need to pay for a separate MCU. This worked for a lot of customers, and the economies of scale took care of the rest.

Modern OLED displays are superior in every way and CRT aesthetics can be replicated in software, so a more practical route would be probably to build some "pass-through" device that adds shadow mask, color bleed, and what-have-you. A lot cheaper than restarting the production of cathode-ray tubes.

Still, I think that the original paper and this take on it are just exercises in excessive anthropomorphizing. There's no special reason to believe that the processes within an LLM are analogous to human thought. This is not a "stochastic parrot" argument. I think LLMs can be intelligent without being like us. It's just that we're jumping the gun in assuming that LLMs have a single, coherent set of values, or that they "knowingly" employ deception, when the only thing we reward them for is completing text in a way that pleases the judges.

Part of the problem is that they're fighting against financial incentives that they themselves created. There's plenty of upside and little downside to abusing it, so it's just endless whack-a-mole.

Another issue is just how bureaucratic the process has become. They want it to look good to the regulators and the courts, so they put up with a pattern of abuse for five years, then announce some well-reasoned but narrow policy change (e.g. "product reviews now need to be actual hands-on reviews"), and... a month later, spammers are just adding an extra lie on all the fake review websites.

How many of us are canceling their Spotify subscriptions over this? It wouldn't be some huge sacrifice, it's about the least we could do. Most of us won't. The "caring" is just lip service.

Free market means you can vote with your wallet. If you don't, then it says less about markets and more about our stated vs revealed preferences. Maybe we just don't care if real artists go away.

The first stage is right after you spend an insane amount of money to buy the property. At that point, you want to validate the investment, so you spend more on making it look nice, but you're probably oblivious to many realities of homeownership. So yeah, this is when people splurge on matched kitchenware, beautiful cutting boards, "smart" kitchen appliances, sleek-looking but impractical veneer / plastic / glass furniture, etc.

The second stage is when you get kids or pets, and you start losing the battle. You eventually throw in the towel, accepting that there are going to be dings on the walls and on stainless steel appliances, holes in window screens, and veneer peeling off after the fifth juice spill accident.

The third stage is when the kids move out and you can actually make the space look nice. Except now, you know that there's some wisdom to old-fashioned solid wood furniture, that cutting boards are for cutting, and so on. So your home acquires more of an "old people" vibe.

If we're focusing on energy consumption, using an LLM to generate a newspaper article probably uses less energy than a living journalist would use. The morning commute alone is probably "worth" a dozen articles.

The problem is different. First, that journalist is still alive and consuming resources, just out of a job. Second, because you now have a very cheap way to generate an infinite number of articles, and there are commercial incentives to do so, the "dead internet theory" has a good chance of coming true.

It will work the same for porn. It's just that mainstream models are sanitized not to generate it, so the cost to enter is higher.

As for the second part, I meant "by the time you looked at the dates and hours and clicked on a specific flight".

In fact, obfuscation like that probably allows the airline to charge you more, because you don't get to see all the fees until you commit.

But it's also true that with age, you lose the drive to get praise from strangers - so at best, you get a text website viewed by hundreds, not a series of TikTok or YouTube videos viewed by millions. And sometimes, not even that website.

When that person dies and leaves behind a man-sized vacuum tube computer, or a collection of vintage calculators, or something of that sort... the heirs usually don't have the willpower to carry on, and because the stuff is impossible to sell, it's often destined for the dump. Maybe a couple of years in a storage unit before that.

It's even worse with digital assets. Who's gonna renew that hobby domain or pay that hosting bill? I've seen some really valuable online resources disappear after the author died.

The theory behind it is that some mammals are somewhat less likely to be carriers, but it's not a comforting thought, right? You have a somewhat lower chance of certain death than if you were bitten by a bat, so we will deny you a pretty safe vaccine.