421–430 of 607 posts
Archived docs:
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/4700/
Article on the history of ATMs:
https://computer.rip/2026-02-27-ibm-atm.html
(ChatGPT was of no use figuring this out)
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Because AI agents are tool users. Why does AI need to research 2026 tax code changes and then try to one-shot your taxes when it can just use Turbotax to do it for you? Turbotax has the latest 2026 tax changes coded into the app. I'd feel much more confident if AI uses Turbotax to do my taxes than to try to one-shot it.
> Turbotax has the latest 2026 tax changes coded into the app. How does TurboTax implement the latest tax changes? My guess is that before the decade is over, the answer is "an LLM does it."
Anyways, formulas are a lot better than one shot.
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Almost tautologically it's not "inefficient" to do so, because free market economics has decided that all the attempts are mathematically worth it, for a high-margin low-marginal-cost product like software.
I'm a little lost as to why seven teams duplicating effort is more "efficient" in any sense of the word than one or two teams working iteratively toward the same goal. If this were seven government funded teams solving the same problem, people would lose their minds over the 'waste' But when private companies do it, we call it efficient market competition. The duplication is the same - we just frame it differently. E…
It is not. Seven teams all working under one leadership is quite different to seven leaderships each working with one team.
When different governments (e.g. USA and USSR), and thus different leaderships, are both trying to solve the same problem (e.g. travel to the moon), that too is considered efficient competition.
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Yes and also keep in mind that low-income in US is high income in most of the world!
I hate this point, so what? It's not like the lower class in "pick you region of interest" can take advantage of this localized price disparity. The poor person is poor based on their spending power with respect to the local economy and its pricing.
That's not true of many "objectively" poor people in the world, who even if they could buy the computer, they might not have had access to electricity to run it.
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"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable." You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative. "If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high…
If I described my symptoms to an AI and it suggested a diagnosis, I would defintely get a second opinion.
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No country has ever raised up poor people by eviscerating the wealthy.
Isn't that exactly how the USSR became a global superpower?
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And the executives do this in a golden shower of trickle-on economics. ...which didn't work so well during the Reagan administration, but I guess we're on course to try it again.
No country has ever raised up poor people by eviscerating the wealthy.
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> I feel like you didn't understand my comment. I am predicting that there is no code to review. You simply ask the AI to do stuff and it does it. I didn’t, and thanks for clarifying for me. This doesn’t pass the sniff test for me though - someone needs to train the models, which requires code. If AI can do everything for you, then what’s the differentiator as a business? Everything can be in chatGPT but that’s not t…
> I don’t think a paying customer would accept that - they want a direct line to a person. What the customer wants only matters insofar as they are willing to pay for it. Sure, I'd rather talk to a person... But I'm not willing to pay 100x as much for a service that's only marginally better. Same reason I don't fly first class, as miserable as coach is. Someone may want to pay for a boutique human lawyer/banker/coder…
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I'm in the US and things are definitely less check-centric than they used to be but I still probably write or receive a couple a month.
I guess there's also a difference between "can use checks" vs "have to use checks" because, aside from rent, I can't recall having to write checks. Everything else allowed either credit card or direct debit on top of allowing checks.
Landlords, IME, insist on a physical check for the first payment. I think they're performing some sort of blood ritual with it in the back of the office. After the sacrifice is complete, though, they'll switch to ACH.
The only other place I've ever had to use checks is for large purchases, where the amount exceeds that which cards are capable of. Even these would be pretty rare for most people, since there's a likelihood you would finance a large purchase with a loan instead.