Case in point: Regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase "due to inflation," despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by — get this — corporations raising prices. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their own reporting as a means of providing "balanced" coverage, insisting again and again that the economy is good, contorting to prove that prices aren't higher even as companies boasted about literally raising their prices. In fact, the media spent years debating with itself whether price gouging was happening, despite years of proof that it was.

There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of opportunities, which in turn leads to the horrible truth that those who often have the most opportunities are some of the most boring and privileged people alive.

The way this equation is written, it leads to two sources of confusion, which I’ll call the “two myths”:

1. Many people wrongly assume that imports reduce GDP, because they appear in the equation with a minus sign.

2. Many people wrongly assume that if consumers become pessimistic and decide to spend less while saving more, this will cause GDP to fall. That’s because consumer spending appears in the equation with a positive sign.

Why in Turing's name would I want to have AIs attend a meeting for me that I don’t want to go to myself? What’d the AI do to deserve this? Let me give you a litmus test: if you think you would rather send an AI to attend a meeting for you rather than waste your time, your life, on that meeting, consider just taking it to email, or not having that meeting at all. Don’t punish the poor AI, wasting all those kilowatt hours of GPU time on that nonsense. Think of the planet!

It's hard to overstate the significance of a collapse of growth in the SaaS market, as is it hard to overstate how dangerous generative AI is to its fortunes. While these companies had costs before, generative AI is multitudes higher than regular cloud compute costs, meaning that any new revenue growth from this software will be burdened by leveraging an increasingly-expensive solution to a problem that most of them have trouble describing.

And if the revenue never arrives, they'll be faced with the same problem as the rest of the tech industry — that they've run out of ideas to generate growth.

At that point, they'll have to reckon with the fact that there are too many software companies incapable of solving any problem other than "how do we find a new way to charge customers for something?"

The strategy that delivers the best returns, it turns out, is to divide the funding equally among all researchers. And the second- and third-best strategies involve distributing it at random to 10 or 20 percent of scientists.

To do it, we need to (paradoxically) ignore house prices and instead, focus on income. The root driver of the housing crisis is that poor people can’t afford to buy houses or pay rent. And yet the rich have their cake and get to eat it too. Maybe … just maybe … if we took some of this money and gave it to the poor, then these folks could afford a place to live.

What makes monopoly a monopoly:

If you are a monopoly and then you do something to maintain that monopoly or to extend your monopoly, that's what makes it illegal. Like, if I just create a new product category, some widget that no one's ever heard of before, and I start making it and it's popular, I'm by definition going to have a hundred percent of the market. That’s not illegal.

What would be illegal is if I had a hundred percent of the market and then I said to my distributors: “Hey, if you want my thing that everybody wants, you can't distribute my rival's thing.” That's what turns it into an illegal conspiracy.

About connection between authoritarianism and monopolies:

John Sherman, of the Sherman Antitrust Act, said that if we will not be ruled by a monarch, we should not be ruled by an autocrat of trade. He was very explicit about the link between monarchy and authoritarianism and monopoly. And they were using the term monarchy because fascism hadn't happened yet, but monarchy did exist. In the 19th century, Americans were looking across the ocean and they were seeing a bunch of kingdoms. There was a little bit of democracy, but that's what they were really looking at. And they were like, we don't want that.

Last week, HR platform Lattice announced that it would be, to quote CEO Sarah Franklin, "the first company to lead in the responsible employment of AI ‘digital workers’ by creating a digital employee record to govern them with transparency and accountability." This buzzword-laden nonsense, further elaborated on in a blog post while adding absolutely nothing in the process, suggested that Lattice would be treating digital workers as if they were employees, giving them "official employee records in Lattice," and "securely onboarding, training and assigning them goals," as well as performance metrics, "appropriate systems access, and even a manager, just as any person would be."

The training data crisis is one that doesn’t get enough attention, but it’s sufficiently dire that it has the potential to halt (or dramatically slow) any AI development in the near future. As one paper, published in the journal Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, found, in order to achieve a linear improvement in model performance, you need an exponentially large amount of data.

Weird interaction with a student this week. They keep coming up with weird “facts” (“Greek is actually a combination of four other languages”) that left me baffled. I said let’s look this stuff up together, and they said OK, I’ll open a search bar, and they opened … Ch*tGPT. And I was like “this is not a search bar” and they were like “yes it is, you can search for anything in here”.

Medical research is largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry, papers ghostwritten by the pharmaceutical industry and influencers paid by the pharmaceutical industry. Regulators are not independent either and so it is that most doctors have become pawns in a system, used to deliver the drugs which provide the fundholders with the maximum profit. So far, the system has failed to eliminate corruption and bias, for one reason only, that is there is no such thing as a free lunch.

These findings have wide-ranging implications. First, universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust curricula and academic standards. Second, employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees. Third, students need to realize that acceptance into university is no longer an invitation to join an elite group. Fourth, the myth of brilliant undergraduate students in scientific and popular literature needs to be dispelled.