seen from China
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gotta have a sense of wonder about 3d printers sometimes. Two decades the idea of having a cheap machine in your house that can make any small object you want was literally science fiction. And now they're just here. My local microcenter has like thirty of them for purchase. You can make a completely custom design that will survive an autoclave or nasty acid or a surprising amount of mechanical load for like six bucks of material. while you sleep. shit is WILD
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I'm increasingly thinking of AI companies kind of like I think of airlines. Airlines are notorious for not making money due to structural reasons (see: this post shared by argumate) in part because (at least in my reading) the size of a functional airline is large compared to the revenue of each seat and there's very few good ways to keep people from switching carrier given a price difference. So in aggregate the industry may have tremendous value, but each firm needs to get a large fraction of it to get any profit - and maintaining that hold is almost impossible, because the moment you do, you create an incentive for someone else to undercut you.
Training an AI is quite expensive, as is building out the infrastructure to run it at scale, but the revenue per token is tiny and switching is not that hard. The potential profits are absurd, assuming you can capture a big fraction of it, but if you charge too much, any joe schmuck can rent out datacenter space and undercut you. Not sure I'm seeing the case for sustainable profit here!
Re the fabric and automation point going around:
I think one thing to highlight is that machines and labor are fundamentally different types of cost. Machines are a capital investment. Labor is (generally) not. Three large implications:
1) employing labor is generally more flexible than using machines, so you only automate tasks where the labor is expensive, the demand is consistent, and the machine is cheaper and/or produces a more marketable product.
2) once the case for automation has been reached for in general for a task, the straightforward next move is to deploy capital and automate to the level of demand. Failing to do this will over reasonable time horizons likely result in destruction (because someone else will and undercut you)
3) because labor is flexible and can be moved around, automation frees up people to other things. This means that more stuff is made on a per-capita basis, making automation desirable at a social level; a society with a high degree of automation is better off than one with a low.
All of this means that if a task has not yet been automated but is instead outsourced to a very cheap workforce, it’s likely because you can hire a very cheap workforce to do it relatively reliably somewhere. Almost by definition there is no task that cannot be automated. Just tasks that cannot be automated at the price it costs for people to do it.
Cleaning up my soldering station is revealing an embarrassing quantity of absurdly large flathead screwdrivers
people you'd like to know better: tagged by @iamthepulta! (Apologies for the delay)
last song: I've basically always got some giant spotify playlist running, but the last song I've listened to on repeat for a bit was the Kaitlin Butts cover of Red Wine Supernova
favorite colors: This was always a nice mid blue, like royal blue. but a good hunter green is starting to sneak its way in.
watching: MAWS! it's real good. and CR C4
currently reading: WOT at the moment. last book series that completely consumed me before that was otherside picnic
current obsession: Either a) a work thing that I cannot really talk about but is a fun combo of a couple technologies or b) the intersection between resilience/performance and changing selection pressures
currently working on: aforementioned work thing, one of four other work things, and a drainage pond I've dug to stop my basement from flooding
last google search: at the time of writing: most underrated smithsonian
current desktop/phone wallpaper: default for both. too many windows open to ever have any hope of seeing it, so why change it
this is my first one of these, so I've been informed I should be tagging a few mutuals who I think may enjoy this/want to know better (and ofc anyone else who wants to fill it as well please do!) @selfmaderibcageman @squidong @robustcornhusk @lappelduvivalavida @nonevahed @southern-continent-skies
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So given this (which I agree with) I am curious what the reforms in the US bargain are going to be. Between AI and China, pretty sure the calculations are changing.
it is very funny to me how when I travel to the NL for work with coworkers* we go to dinner at actual restaurants. and then when it's just me it's me and albert heijn all the way
*i have one coworker who is on the same page as me and sometimes we will run into each other walking to/from the grocery store
Things I am pretty sure are true about the Netherlands but will probably start a fight to actually say:
1) the Netherlands is the most American country in Europe
2) Utrecht is way better than Amsterdam and the Dutch just aren’t telling anyone
