And I don't mean The Resistance to Terminators. Al automation promises to revolutionize white-collar or office work. Some think there’s plenty of resistance against quick AI adoption and so there won’t be major negative societal disruptions. I’ve come to believe that resistance will crumble. Legal and copyright issues could slow AI down, but not for long. AI generated code may be hard to accept into proprietary code bases due to legal uncertainty, e.g., copyright issues.  For example, the Google v Oracle Java lawsuit started in 2010 and reached conclusion in the Supreme Court in 2021 ..read more

Automation in oil and gas reduced labour needed to extract and produce oil. Oil as a product is not a platform-platform. Oil usage cannot induce demand for ever more oil by being a medium for platforms that can recursively host more platforms of products. Because oil does not induce exponential demand, then automation has a good chance of reducing labour down. The flip side is that platform-platforms can recursively host more platforms of products. So platform-platforms has a chance to induce exponential demand, and so while automation reduces labour per unit produced, on the whole the expone ..read more

AI is not like the internet or computer operating system software in terms of its economic impact. The latter two are platform-platforms while AI is not. A platform is a kind of medium.  e.g. YouTube is a platform for videos. Some platforms are special in that they are recursively platforms for platforms. Computer hardware are platform-platforms.  They're a medium for various single purpose built software, of course, but more importantly they are also a medium for different operating systems (OSs). OSs like macOS or Windows are platform-platforms.  The most easiest and redu ..read more

Jevons Paradox says that as technology becomes more efficient, overall resource consumption can increase. This was seen during the Industrial Revolution when more efficient coal engines led to higher coal usage. However, this paradox is not universal, and efficiency can also lead to reduced resource consumption. In the context of AI coding tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot), there's a belief that increased efficiency will lead to more coding jobs by lowering development costs. While this may happen, history shows that technological advancements can also displace workers. Counter Examples The inven ..read more

You'll find descriptions of how to do this, like on StackOverflow: How to use Homebrew on a Multi-user MacOS Sierra Setup. It's said that using `sudo` is wrong. It's said that using a per-user local version of brew is right, but... 1. it doesn't play well with `nvm` (see) 2. it is completely and entirely unsupported (see) 3. many packages don't support it (see) 4. many packages will install from source instead of a binary (see) So the practical, quick and dirty solution is to just use `sudo` (see). In my experience, if I recall correctly, homebrew on macOS 14 by default uses the group "admi ..read more

This is exciting! I’ve been looking for a disk format that works seamlessly across Mac, Windows, and Linux.  Something like a USB or disk image that mounts on all three desktop platforms. The obvious choice is exFAT, but what if I want a modern disk format with journaling for data safety? Ext4 is one option, although it used to be read-only on Macs (see Mounting Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 USB Flash Drives on Mac: Read Only Success). Maybe things have gotten better in the last 10 years? And what if I want disk encryption? VeraCrypt with an exFAT disk works: see Sharing TrueCrypt USB volume on 3 pl ..read more

I’m trying to make sense of “The AI summer” [1]. OpenAI’s ChatGPT had a meteoric rise in popularity not because the technology works (it does, for some reasonable definition of “works”) but rather the foundation is there for viral spread because: > a lot of this is ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ - OpenAI didn’t have to wait for people to buy devices or for telcos to build DSL or 3G > ChatGPT is just a website or an app, and … it could ride on all of the infrastructure we’ve built over the last 25 years. So a huge number of people went off to try it last year. But current AI’s ..read more

They say there is a $500B "gap between the revenue expectations implied by the AI infrastructure build-out, and actual revenue growth in the AI ecosystem" [1]. Part 1 Given the business that Sequoia Cap is in, it should not be surprising that they’d say things like: > Investment incineration… a lot of people lose a lot of money during speculative technology waves. It’s hard to pick winners, but much easier to pick losers > Winners vs. losers… there are always winners during periods of excess infrastructure building. AI is likely to be the next transformative technology wave… lt will ..read more

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(We'll use JavaScript for today, running in the Firefox developer console.) No doubt when you learned recursion, you learned that each recursive function call uses stack space to do its work.  There's only so much stack space.  So unless your programming language has a special feature (called tail call elimination), a recursive function can eventually exhaust all stack space, leading to the famous stack overflow error (not the web site). For example, let's write a loop to sum up numbers from 0 up to some N like this: let sum = 0;for (let i = 0; i < 10000; ++i) sum += i;console.lo ..read more