> I have yet to see an end user product that in itself isnt a wrapper around LLMs that is impressive created by LLM assistance.

I don’t disagree that AI is overhyped. But I think you are probably looking in the wrong place.

I think most software that is written isn’t really a product, at least not a public product. It’s an in-house tool or a one-off project needed to complete some larger task. People everywhere are always writing small programs that make their life or job just a bit easier (and explains why so many corporate projects are little more than an excel spreadsheet).

And there are a lot of people who have made custom software just for themselves with AI. Not a product, just a tool or project that finally made sense to build.

But where's the revenue from those? It has to add up to a couple trillion dollars to break even on the capital spending.

Would you say the same about any other tool, like where is the revenue caused by Susan in accounting having a computer, shouldn't we take away her computer if she can't prove a benefit?

The benefit of a computer would be trivial to demonstrate.

Trivial now. It was not always the case: http://digamo.free.fr/david90.pdf

> It has to add up to a couple trillion dollars to break even

It doesn't have to and I'm pretty sure it won't.

not sure one would expect huge revenue increases from these internal tools, but maybe dramatic cost savings? Surely a lot of corporate processes could be automated?

That's been the dream for the 40 years I've been paying attention. And in that time, I've seen plenty of incremental changes but never the kind of sudden sea change that the hype machine anticipates.

The perennial reality is that automation is inherently inflexible, so there's only so much of it that you can do before you've committed a huge strategic blunder by making your business resistant to change and severely curtailing its ability to cope with situations that don't cleanly fit the mold. So then we need to hack in ways to deal with the exceptions, but, since they're hacked in, they're often painful and time consuming. Sometimes so much so that after the new process stabilizes it turns out to be even more cumbersome and require more manual effort than the system it replaced.

When anyone other than a technologist suggests doing that kind of thing, we call it "bureaucracy", and we hate it. I think maybe what we have trouble seeing is that there's actually a pretty fundamental difference between automating purely technical processes like server deployment, and automating processes that are fundamentally about mediating human interactions.

Now they need to work on a fanless option. It would be nice to have at least one SKU be a silent machine with no moving parts.

That, in the x86 universe, has some heavy penalties in performance terms. I got myself a fanless “student” laptop (another name for “rugged”, but sells for less) and, while performance is acceptable, it ain’t fast - like a 10 year old i3.

I don’t think performance matters much to a lot of people. Look at how well the Neo is selling and it’s running what is essentially a phone SOC.

Forget about raw FLOPs and focus on performance per watt. Computers have been fast enough for most people for a decade now.

> the only way up is seniority

That’s not true at all. Look at professional athletes. The starting pitchers in a baseball game are the best pitchers. Or consider WGA screenwriters in Hollywood. Their ability to make money doesn’t depend in seniority.

My kids were able to take some SAT test prep course through their school (partially funded by the PTA) and it helped a lot. They wrote a bunch of practice exams and each time their scores went up. Also, test taking itself is a skill and the more you practice it the better you get at it. If you’ve written the SAT 15 times over the past 2 years, then the 16th time won’t be as stressful and you will know strategies that work and the questions will be familiar.

If you are in a school that doesn’t have a well funded PTA, you are at a disadvantage.

You can, as of about a year ago, take official SAT practice exams for free in Google Gemini.

The person to whom I responded seemed to imply that it consists chiefly or entirely of taking practice exams. I merely wish to point out that if you want your kid to take SAT practice exams every month you can do it for free at home.

Such a "SAT test prep course" is going to involve more than just self-guided practice exams. It'll include feedback and coaching to address deficits revealed by those practice exams.

This is exactly right. Writing each practice exam only takes a few hours and this course last months. The reset of the time is filled with all the things you talked about.

Plus, for some kids writing a practice exam at home isn’t the same thing as a simulated seating with kids all around and a proctor in the room.

You seem to be arguing with someone else.

No; I'm saying "just take practice exams" isn't what we're really talking about. They are merely a part of high-end test prep offerings.

I actually took fairly involved test prep way back when (and didn't end up actually writing the SAT) and there really wasn't anything to it beyond the practice exams that I couldn't have figured out myself.

You can make an email rule to filter those messages to trash.

I have my phone set to only ring for people in my address book. It’s probably time to do something similar for email. Not in my address book? Straight to trash.

Adding a filter is still extra work for me. Saying “no” stops the need for the rule and is less work than giving the info in the first place.

My phone is setup similarly. I did it manually back in the day, then sent some feedback to Apple, which they added in the next update about a year later. I’ve submitted a lot of feature requests, this was the only one they actually did, which is a great one. It made things much easier. Though they seemed to have changed the settings of how this works with the call screening feature. I used to have a shortcut to toggle this off and on, when I was expecting a call from an unknown number. I need to revisit my setup here, as the shortcut doesn’t actually do anything anymore.

Doing this to email is an interesting idea. If sitting in one ecosystem, maybe it would work. I’m fractured, so it’s a non-starter. Even beyond that, I think it would be an issue as there are real emails I do want to get which I’d never add to my address book, as I’d never send an email to the address. I think I’d want a whitelist for these addresses, that imported the emails from my address book as a base.

At work I had a rule like this for many year. Anything internal would pass, plus a few external domains I named. Everything else would go to a spam folder for vendor emails. Keeping up on this was hard. I ended up throwing in the towel a couple years ago after running the rule for 5-10 years. This blog post is what made me move away from this rule[0].

[0] https://herman.bearblog.dev/digital-hygiene-emails/

I'm sorry to burst your bubble but I don't think your feature request had anything to do with when apple implemented call allow listing. It's been a thing forever and they were surly aware of it since the iPhone first came out

Tax per megawatt, decibel, and gallon of water. That would provide incentives to reduce power consumption, noise, and water use.

> But buying an event contract that pays if someone dies or someone's house burns down is fine?

You can sell your life insurance policy to somebody else. It's a way of getting money to sick people to use while thy are still alive.

> Just as the teamsters tried to ban cars to protect horse carriage drivers

Is that true?

So a random poster makes an assertion and rather than Google it and verify it yourself you throw out a request for another random poster to concur? And that concurrence you will take at face value and then believe the original assertion?

I did google it and couldn’t find anything backing up the claim.

I think it's reasonable to request the person making the assertion to back it up. It's not on the audience to either only debunk or accept the assertion. It can just be rejected.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Why is an anodyne factual claim an “extraordinary claim”? What makes that particular claim extraordinary? They didn’t claim to have discovered perpetual motion or something you can’t prove or disprove yourself, just shared a historical fact you can easily just check up on if you choose not to believe them.

>Why is an anodyne factual claim an “extraordinary claim”? What makes that particular claim extraordinary?

FWIW I tried to get AI to substantiate it and came up empty. Maybe it's not as "extraordinary" as "Obama was a reptilian alien" or whatever, but for everything else what counts as "extraordinary" depends on your prejudices, I suppose. Regardless of whether it's "extraordinary" or not, it's definitely not common knowledge and needs to be substantiated rather than asserted without evidence.

The hard part for me is stepping away when I'm grinding on some problem. It always feels like I'm sooo close and this next idea could be the one that lets me walk away victorious.

Usually I'm wrong though and taking a break would be a much better use of my time. Walking, biking, noodling on my guitar, or even going for a drive all seem to work for me.

Same. When you're grooving/flowing it's different than when you're "just on the cusp".

My only reliable "hack" is to have a workout/exercise partner and/or trainer so it becomes a mutual shared commitment.

Did you try one? Egg sandwiches really aren't my thing but I've always wondered if the US version comes close to the quality of the Japanese version even if some of the details (like presence of bread crust) differ.

An egg sandwich is not the sort of thing I'd trust from 7-11. I'd be thinking of that Futurama episode with the worms the whole time I was eating it.