It definitely increases some types of productivity (Opus one-shot a visualization that would have likely taken me at least a day to write before, for work) - although I would have never written this visualization before LLMs (because the effort was not worth it). So I guess it's Jevons Paradox in action somewhat.

In order to observe the productivity increases you need a good scale where the productivity would really matter (the same way that when a benchmark is saturated, like the AIME, it stops telling us anything useful about model improvement)

If you had more like 200GB ram you might be able to run something like MiniMax M2.1 to get last-gen performance at something resembling usable speed - but it's still a far cry from codex on high.

The author uses MIT Living Wage numbers to argue that should be the new "poverty" benchmark - an absurd proposition. Those might be reasonable middle class numbers. He also implies that the benchmark historically represented what is now covered under that $140K calculation - also false; it took ~$9000 in 1966 to cover a "basic standard of living" for a family of 4 with 1 earner; inflation adjusted, that's around $90,000 today. If you add in SS/Medicare taxes (3% then, 15% today), that puts you at ~$100K-105K.

Using the same MIT Living Wage numbers and taking Essex-Princeton NJ as the area (roughly what the author used), you end up with $99,922 as the living wage for a single earner, 4 person household - almost exactly the same as the household back in 1966.

Were there more jobs in 1966 that paid $9000/year versus jobs that pay $100K today? That's the real story you're looking for.

The author uses MIT Living Wage numbers to argue that should be the new "poverty" benchmark - an absurd proposition. Those might be reasonable middle class numbers. He also implies that the benchmark historically represented what is now covered under that $140K calculation - also false; it took ~$9000 in 1966 to cover a "basic standard of living" for a family of 4 with 1 earner; inflation adjusted, that's around $90,000 today. If you add in SS/Medicare taxes (3% then, 15% today), that puts you at ~$100K-105K.

Using the same MIT Living Wage numbers and taking Essex-Princeton NJ as the area (roughly what the author used), you end up with $99,922 as the living wage for a single earner, 4 person household - almost exactly the same as the household back in 1966.

Were there more jobs in 1966 that paid $9000/year versus jobs that pay $100K today? That's the real story you're looking for.

Therefore the adjustment should probably be based on a different number reflecting the actual consumption of households near the poverty line (food would probably be higher than it is in the CPI currently, as one example)

This is more akin to manager-level view of the code (who need developers to go and look at the "deterministic" instructions); the abstraction is a lot lot more leaky than high->low level languages.

Subcultures? Some are at least trying to (i.e. rationalists), though imperfectly and with side-effects.

And I find that even the auto-generated stuff tends to go up at least a bit in terms of level of abstraction than staring at the code itself, and helps you more like a "sparknotes" version of the code, so that when you dig in yourself you have an outline/roadmap.

I would expect that this will cause certain programs to see more demand than the creators anticipated for (extrapolating previous trends), which might require changes in the programs (i.e. more people apply for benefits than expected, benefits / application might have to be cut, etc).

And in some ways there's a Cantillon effect (though traditionally associated with proximity to the "money printer", but here the proximity is to the LLM-enablement; in that those who use the LLMs first can get the benefit before the rules are changed).

From my understanding the AlphaZero based engines (i.e. neural nets) do not really benefit from having a human in the loop.

A Slav that was born and grew up in China would be Caucasian but culturally Japanese.

Accusations of racism should stay limited to disparate treatment based on skin color or race exclusively and not extend into the cultural domain. Cultural preferences are not racist, full stop.

In Poker, luck plays an integral role in the outcome of any specific game or match, but skill does show up when collected over a large enough sample (that's why they say you can't prove something is due to skill over chance until you've collected a sample of 10,000 - 100,000 played hands of poker - at least if you're playing online).

You could also be a very good poker player and have bad luck on one important occasion (say in the finals of the WSOP), where the outcome hinges purely on luck. Similarly, you could be a subpar player and "luck out" and strike it big purely because of the right sequence of cards at a big event. But generally, most people who succeed at Poker are not there purely based on luck; you can be lucky once or twice, but you're unlikely to make it through a whole Poker career just by being lucky.

I think similarly in life - you have a certain hand you're dealt, and if you play it to the best of your ability (and make opportunities for yourself), you increase your odds of winning the hand / the tournament / life; but ultimately even with your best efforts the outcome could still be decided by luck.

It's not that they make you superhuman - I don't think I'm any "smarter" on them. It's just that without them, my "productive" bursts would be at really random times (11PM or 2AM), and make it very hard to fit into a "normal" schedule with the rest of society (I would frequently fall asleep in classes or meetings).

So it's more that it allows you to "rearrange" the same (or slightly larger) amount of work but into a more reasonable, traditional schedule. And for certain things, helps more than that. But it's not a miracle drug by any means.

Existence of a correlation is enough reason to break down any analyses by demographic data to have a clearer picture of what's going on. That's just basic data science.

Same with the constant drumbeat of "Americans are getting shorter".