Most AI use cases involve the Internet. So let's pretend that OpenAI agreed w/your logic and did this. They'd have tons of businesses on the Internet, whose lifeblood is Internet traffic... and on the other side of this, controlling the spigot of all this Internet traffic, is Google.

All Google would have to do is to wake up one day and say "we've decided to depriortize low-quality AI businesses to protect the consumer" and they'd be dead.

Example, the UI for his two vibe coded example apps. Why not let AI do a single pass on that? 30s for a huge improvement. Other than the personal pride of saying you did it all, I don't see why not.

For what it's worth, the "first patients were lab workers" part isn't established. What is documented is that the earliest cases cluster around the Huanan market. The lab workers attribution shouldn't be carrying the argument.

Before COVID, people were just unable to be roused out of their sleep about the dangers of cross-species virus transmission. "Wake me up when something important happens." By a certain standard nothing important had ever happened: so people slept on.

Then COVID hit. "Time to wake up." Suddenly people went from basically unconscious to hypervigilant overnight. Something which was a clear and present danger - the wet markets - looked uninteresting compared to the lab. Environmental samples taken there tested positive. In other words: don't sleep on the wet markets again - they are dangerous, then and now.

While paying attention was arguably an improvement over complete indifference, I don't think we landed in the right place.

I send a ton of requests and even reaching $10 for the month would take more calls than I have capacity to review and use. And as I said, that's for a ton of requests.

We think: Germans are like this, the French are like this, the Dutch are like this... without thinking that, when one moves out of sync w/the others, its likely, statistically, to move back into line w/the others.

This has nothing to do with left or right specifically. It means that, whatever the mean is, if a country is not there, it's likely to move in that direction over time. It's more likely to move closer to that than away from that, measured over years.

The Dutch were very liberal and still are in many ways, but in such a situation, they are more likely to move in the "less" than "more" direction. And this is probably such a case.

In the literary world, I would call using AI sentences in your novel a felony, but I'm not sure using it in a cover would even qualify as a misdemeanor.

He's saying that a full body MRI is so valuable, that if you got one and then smoked for a year, you'd be in the same place as you were before you started, health wise. No loss.

Obviously you'll come out way ahead if you don't do the smoking part: it's very valuable, in other words.

I'm not sure the process can even be stopped, if the company is successful and the new changes appear to be, and probably are, profitable.

For this they do need ideological coherency and the ability to order their arguments logically, ideally as part of a larger program. Since it is such a popular destination late in life, you'd think it would be a good choice for a major too.

We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.

Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: it's not that you're expected to know the whole word, but they're looking for you to recognize components of it and infer the meaning from that. I knew sesquippedalian (sometimes jokingly used in "long word" contexts) so that was easy: but phobia is also easily identifiable, and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome). So you could, even knowing only "phobia" and being able to guess "hippo", have a good basis for your choice.

Complacent and gauche: have heard both these uses, I think that's straightforwardly correct. If this was a dictionary that would, at worst, be the 2nd or 3rd definition. No complaints.

Source: I used to place in spelling bees and could've been a contender but I didn't have the discipline to study the dictionary for hours on the weekends, which is the next level.

Use YouTube for this. You can find experts, fans, all kinds there who will guide you through genres and act as non-algorithmic, human-sense-making curators. Use Spotify only to find the specific tracks and albums you already know the name of, to listen.

He has identified a real problem, and the good news is there is a solution.

I can name two:

1) Chemical Engineering 2) Classics

In both cases the physical book may be the only place to find certain kinds of valuable info.

In the case of Chem E, I was told this by my father, also a Chem E, who said that some of these old books contained values and tests that were found nowhere else. And while a lot of that is available in modern form, not all of it is.

In the case of classics, I'm cribbing from David Butterfield here, who has a great book tour on YouTube where expands on this at length (4+ hours).

In the 18th and 19th century the level of education was higher and there were simply more people around who were working at the highest level in the field. Their speculations were written down in physical books and nowhere else. Many of these were valuable and showed new insights you won't find elsewhere else, especially for professionals in the field.

Here's an example. The copies that we have of, say, Homer, are copies of copies. Pretend for a moment that Homer actually wrote in English. We can imagine a line in the "original" (a copy of a copy), that says:

He of the stout quarrel chest said:

It kinda works - stout men quarrel, I guess. But you know what would work even better? He of the stout barrel chest. You can make a case that this was an instance of bad copying and should be corrected in editions going forward, especially if you can cite additional evidence.

Multiple this by the Greek & Roman corpus and all the possible permutations and you have a good reason to turn to those books that earlier writers thought very deeply about.