swe, speculative investor
O O
Karma: 695
I wonder if giving it an example of the intended translated writing style helps.
Not just central banks but the U.S. going off the gold standard too then fiddling with bond yields to cover up ensuing inflation maybe?
It’s quite strange that owning all the world’s (public) productive assets have only beaten gold, a largely useless shiny metal, by 1% per year over the last 56 years.
Even if you focus on rolling metrics to(this is 5 year rolling returns).:
there are lots of long stretches of gold beating world equities, especially in recent times. There are people with the suspicion (myself included) that there hasn’t been much material growth in the world over the last 40 or so years compared to before. And that since growth is slowing down, this issue is worse if you select more recent points in time, with gold handily beating equities if you start 25 years ago.
Has GDP essentially been goodharted by central banks in recent times? Wonder if there’s more research into this.
I just think they’ll be easy to fool. For example, historically many companies would get political favors (tariff exemptions) by making flashy fake headlines such as promising to spend trillions on factories.
China has no specific animal welfare laws. There are also some Chinese that regard animal welfare as a Western import. Maybe the claim that they have no concept at all is too strong, but it’s certainly minimized by previous regimes.
ieMao regarded the love for pets and the sympathy for the downtrodden as bourgeoise
And China’s average meat consumption being lower could just be a reflection of their gdp per capita being lower. I don’t know where you got the 14% vegetarian number. I can find 5% online. About the same as US numbers.
I don’t think the Trump admin has the capacity to meaningful take over an AGI project. Whatever happens, I think the lab leadership will be calling the shots.
Looked up a poll from 2023. Though, maybe that poll is biased by people not voicing their true opinions?
Chinese culture is just less sympathetic in general. China practically has no concept of philanthropy, animal welfare. They are also pretty explicitly ethnonationalist. You don’t hear about these things because the Chinese government has banned dissent and walled off its inhabitants.
However, I think the Hong Kong reunification is going better than I’d expect given the 2019 protests. You’d expect mass social upheaval, but people are just either satisfied or moderately dissatisfied.
quantum computing, nuclear fusion
I recently interviewed with them, and one of them said they’re hiring a lot of SWEs as they shift to product. Also many of my friends are currently interviewing with them.
I mean some hard evidence is them currently hiring a lot of software engineers for random product-y things. If AGI was close, wouldn’t they go all in on research and training?
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/sam-altman-ai-will-make-coders-10x-more-productive-not-replace-them
It sounds like they’re getting pretty bearish on capabilities tho
Yes, the likely outcome of a long tariff regime is China replaces the U.S. as the hegemon + AI race leader and they can’t read Lesswrong or EA blogs there so all this work is useless.
These tariffs may get rid of the compute disadvantage China faces (ie Taiwan starts to ignore export controls). We might see China being comfortably ahead in a year or two assuming we don’t see Congress take drastic action to eliminate the president’s tariffing powers.
The costs of capex go way up. It costs a lot more to build datacenters. It will cost a lot more to buy GPUs. It might cost less to buy energy? Lenders will be in poorer shape. AI companies will lose funding. I think it’s already quite tenuous, given how little moat AI companies have. Costs are exploding and pretraining scaling seems too diminishing to be worth it. It’s also not clear how AI labs will solve the reliability issue (at least to investors).
I also expect Taiwan to start ignoring export controls if our obscenely high tariffs on them remain.
The U.S. tariffs, if kept in place, will very likely cede the AI race to China. Has there been any writing on what a China leading race looks like?
The point is the money or food just won’t get to them. How do you send food to a region in a civil war between 2 dictators?
A lot of them are trapped in corrupt systems that are very costly and have ethics concerns blocking change. We have the money to feed them, but it would take far more money to turn a bunch of African countries into stable democracies. Overthrowing dictatorships might also raise ethics concerns about colonialism.
The easiest solution would just be lots of immigration, but host population reject that because of our evolutionary pecularities.
Isn’t it a distribution problem? World hunger has almost disappeared however. (The issue is hungrier nations have more kids, so progress is a bit hidden).
I’d argue OpenAI weaning off Microsoft is a sign of strength. They no longer need give up immense future profits to a big tech company to back them, they have shown the ability to raise again and again. They just had the largest funding round in history. They are also probably the fastest growing company revenue wise in human history. Doom and gloom seems a bit premature.