11–20 of 77 posts
Technology has always been deflationary. But you don't put off buying a computer because it will be cheaper next year. Nobody seems to be putting off buying GPUs despite scary depreciation and a blistering pace of new product introductions that are ever cheaper faster and better.
> when prices go down instead of up. It is generally considered harmful: both because it is usually brought on by something really bad (like a severe economic contraction) Or, you know, technological improvements that increase efficiency of production, or bountiful harvests, or generally anything else that suddenly expands the supply at the current price level across the economy. Thankfully, we have mechanisms in pla…
Deflation is about all prices going down. Just a few decreasing is normal. Anyway, WTF, economics communication has a huge problem. I've seen the article's explanation repeated in plenty of places, it's completely wrong and borderline nonsense. The reason deflation is bad is not because it makes people postpone buying things. It's because some prices, like salaries or rent just refuse to go down. That causes rationin…
Technology has always been deflationary. But you don't put off buying a computer because it will be cheaper next year. Nobody seems to be putting off buying GPUs despite scary depreciation and a blistering pace of new product introductions that are ever cheaper faster and better.
RTX doesn't count to me either, because that's some bullcrap pushed by gpu manufacturers that requires the aformentioned upscaling and frame generation techniques to fake actually being anywhere close to what gpu manufacturers want gamers to believe.
> when prices go down instead of up. It is generally considered harmful: both because it is usually brought on by something really bad (like a severe economic contraction) Or, you know, technological improvements that increase efficiency of production, or bountiful harvests, or generally anything else that suddenly expands the supply at the current price level across the economy. Thankfully, we have mechanisms in pla…
Deflation is about all prices going down. Just a few decreasing is normal. Anyway, WTF, economics communication has a huge problem. I've seen the article's explanation repeated in plenty of places, it's completely wrong and borderline nonsense. The reason deflation is bad is not because it makes people postpone buying things. It's because some prices, like salaries or rent just refuse to go down. That causes rationin…
The reverse of this is that high inflation tends to cause a lot of strikes, because salaries refuse to go up and very high levels of inflation need salary repricing every month or even week.
Technology has always been deflationary. But you don't put off buying a computer because it will be cheaper next year. Nobody seems to be putting off buying GPUs despite scary depreciation and a blistering pace of new product introductions that are ever cheaper faster and better.
Why not? Sounds like a pretty reasonable strategy.
> Nobody seems to be putting off buying GPUs
Many people doing exactly that.
I have the legal structure, i know my collegues, i have potentially employees and more capacity.
The problem is not that a startup is starting after you but you do not give yourself time to keep an eye on AI and not leveraging it when its helpful.
We leverage AI and ML progress constantly and keep an eye on advances. Segment Anything? Yepp we use it. Claude? Yes Sir!
That is why we are all waiting to buy our first personal computers and our first cell phones.
Economists have managed to be ludicrous for a very long time and yet we still trust them.
Let’s say you have the a fusion rocket and can hit 5% the speed of light. You want to migrate to the stars for some reason.
So do you build a generational ship now, which is possible, or… do you wait?
Because if you build it now someone with a much better drive may just fly right past you at 20% the speed of light.
In this one the answer is to plot it out under the assumption there is no totally undiscovered major physics that would allow, say, FTL, and plot the curves for advancement against that.
So can we do this with software? We have the progress of hardware, which is somewhat deterministic, and we know something about the progress of software from stats we can make via GitHub.
The software equivalent of someone discovering some “fantasy” physics and building a warp drive would be runaway self-improving AGI/ASI. I’d argue this is impossible for information theoretical reasons, but what if I’m wrong?
Does anyone else agree with this the premise of this article? Is it sensible to put off building things now because it will get even cheaper and faster later? Maybe the time value of time is only increasing as we go.
Yeah, and will be done by somebody else. I think this is the main problem, and if you get rid of it, you'll have a completely sensible strategy. I mean there are many government contractors who, through corrupt connections, can guarantee that work will be awarded to them, and very often doing just that.