Viewing profile — marsten

A lot of people believe in Musk and will invest in anything he wants to do. Is this rational? It depends on how it plays out. I think we may be seeing a new type of capitalism that…

Second-highest P/E is Tesla, currently at 97. Apart from Palantir and Tesla, the other big companies are trading at what would historically be considered reasonable P/Es given thei…

Japan is a classic example. You can drop your wallet there and someone will send it to you with all the cash intact. It makes you realize how much overhead it causes when you need …

I was an undergrad at Caltech in the late 80s and likewise it never even occurred to us to cheat on take-home exams. Maybe things have changed. People did plenty of collaboration o…

Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly. I have a friend who in college had another student take h…

This is exactly right. Gone are the days when you could get a C+ average at Harvard and still land a good job or a spot in a prestigious law program – purely by virtue of having go…

If you posit that Altman suffers from main character syndrome (as many CEOs do), then he likely believes that he alone can lead OpenAI to success. In this case, doing whatever it t…

CEOs are hired to run companies and make themselves, and their investors, wealthy. That is their prime directive and CEOs are the ultimate partisans. If a CEO feels that bending th…

> You cannot be sure that anyone other than yourself is conscious. It is only basic human empathy that allows people to believe that. In Bayesian terms what makes it reasonable to …

Bitcoin attempted to replace cash, but failed because the transaction costs are orders of magnitude too high. The high cost of zero-trust makes it a desirable medium of exchange on…

I can see Apple's position: The Mac has been through four major ISAs and the value to most users of maintaining that entire stack indefinitely in the current macOS is nil. A number…

More likely they would buy the assets of AI companies for pennies on the dollar. There could be a lot of H100s floating around at fire sale prices. Or they would acquire these comp…

Unless they change their tack, Apple is unlikely to go head to head against Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace because they only target their own ecosystem (macOS/iOS). For MS and G…

In fairness to all concerned, the MacOS to MacOS X transition was brilliantly executed. These days we take VMs for granted, but back then it was a novel idea to run MacOS 8 as a pr…

In the grand scheme it's good to invent things that replace human labor. It frees up people to do more interesting things. The goal should be to put everyone out of a job.

Agents playing the iterated prisoner's dilemma learn to cooperate. It's usually not a dominant strategy to be entirely sociopathic when other players are involved.

What hit me when I read Rama in the 1980s is how alien it all was. This is not Star Trek where the aliens speak English and look human-ish. There's a lesson there for AI I think. W…

IMHO the EU is the best place to live if you're a rank-and-file worker, and the US is the best place to live if you're ambitious. EU integration brings some advantages but it also …

Well said. Another factor that nobody in the EU likes to talk about is regulations like worker protections that make it hard to do layoffs. Such regulations are popular but they st…

Yes, and housing is priced by competitive auction so if you drop out of the rat race and other people don't, you'll just get out-bid.

As we approach this pole running off to infinity, what bit of reality will intervene? An infinity in a model indicates you're missing some aspect of saturation or friction that wil…

Yes but the thing is, most people don't actually want realistic movement. They want to be Neo in The Matrix, not some average schlub that gets easily winded and jumps six inches hi…

> Intel is strategically important. Fab capability on US soil is strategically important. Intel is one of many possible routes to that.

Intel should have spun out their fab in 2009-2010 when the signs were clear: Mobile was taking off, AMD spun out their fab, Intel had missed the boat on mobile CPUs, and Apple had …

Biological weapons are probably the more worrisome case for AI. The equipment is less exotic than for nuclear weapon development, and more obtainable by everyday people.