If AI makes people so much more productive, why aren't there much more apps on the Apple store? Mobile apps involve a lot of dirty, boring scaffolding work which AI automated first thing, 2 years ago easily. It should've been the very first place where productivity boost should've been evident, a year ago at least. But it's just not there. Why not?
App Store releases are increasing due to a new gold rush on subscription apps. Review times have gotten longer as the review team at Apple is being spammed.
Most of these apps are rudimentary habit trackers, time management apps etc. so not much creativity, much more recycled ideas. More code != better ideas though.
Also a lot more clone ideas these days. AI has definitely empowered people to write things from scratch, either as a product to sell or as internal projects inside companies.
+160k apps a year, that's only 84% above pre-AI era (safe to say that apps were not routinely built with AI in 2023 yet). Noticeable increase but doesn't feel dramatic, especially since yes, majority of those new apps are low-effort trash like those described in this thread.
It was my belief since many years that nuclear run out of runway a long time ago. It seems to be true even for 20-year old projects such as this, but is even more so for every single nuclear project if it starts today, in any country.
Hinkley Point C may be an outlier because large public projects in UK are famously corrupt and dysfunctional, but even in countries with no red tape and no "society" as we know it, where all-powerful government can just cut through things at will, nuclear takes 15-20 years to work. In 2040s, there will be no place for it left. And unlike many future projections, this one involves a lot of things that are already baked in such as existing solar and storage costs and already committed investments into supply chain: even if the technology and economics of wind and especially of solar do not improve a bit from where they are, they will still dwarf every other generation and make nuclear unneeded in every country capable of building it (and even more so in countries that aren't).
I just recently hired a guy who did excellent job on the interview, easily answering every question. Interview was over video so there was no way he could cheat.
Then he ended up utterly incapable when working and had to be fired, frustrating everyone. I still have no idea what happened there. Maybe it's cheating is now on a higher level (someone else passing the interview using an elaborate face/voice replacement AI crap?)
Ask the interviewer to call you on mobile phone and ensure they are not on speaker phone. I’ve had several candidates simply hang up and never call back - pretty funny (and sad too)
get on Teams for an interview, start with introductions, things are going well. Ask first technical question the candidate is obviously looking slightly up reading answers from a monitor which is above the main laptop/monitor connected to Teams. I’ve the same where candidate is looking slightly to left or right, wherever the 2nd computer / monitor is from where answers are being read.
Ask them to call me on my cell, basically to eliminate anything hearing and questions and feeding answers. Had one candidate call and put me on a speaker. Had 6 never calling back :)
I'd contend that 2020-2023 is a continuation of the slope from... 2017 with a an outlier for 2020. That is especially evident in the software publisher part of the increase.
And then there's the significant change in computer infrastructure, data processing (AI hype?), web hosting, & related.
If sustainable growth is at the +125k/year (picking a number out of the hat), there is a lot above that line.
Also, this is the plot of the derivative... if there's a line with a slope greater than 1 there, then the corresponding "how many people are in the field" is accelerating.
... And also compare the increase in hiring rate for 2020 to 2023 to 1990 to 2000. The peak for the dot com boom (which was associated with irrational exuberance and hiring for things with no feasible way to make money) was lower than the post covid boom.
Looking at the data, I wonder if the 2023 correction was enough of a dip... and if not, then the other side of it is that the length of the period of job contraction will be longer.
It's easy, why investing into production if oil price spike is caused by a single, temporary event, not something structural? That money will be lost if invested in production because it means producing crude with high marginal cost (or it will be already produced today), which will by definition become unprofitable when prices fall back. There is no moral dimension here.
All events are temporary, but if oil prices skyrocket, the rest of the economy will suffer long-term damage and increase the chance of higher interest rates for everyone
Why?! If oil price skyrockets, US just becomes richer. It's not what it was in 2008. US is the world's largest oil producers by far and one of the largest net exporters. So economy wins one way or the other, or petrostates won't be rich. Higher oil prices means money flowing in, not out.
Psychological/political consequencies of higher nominal sticker price of gas can be negative, but this is Trump's problem, not anyone else's.
I wonder could we do something like this with USA. Really get them going against each other. Split up all states from each other. And maybe even split the states themselves to be smaller. Then we could exploit the resources there and ship them to rest of the world.
Well... the world doesn't need Iran to be anything or do anything. We need it to not be a lot of things though. I don't think we lose anything even if it goes completely to hell as long as it will no longer be a problem for others.
I think it's mostly the denormalisation of this. Indeed someone just randomly striking a conversation with a stranger will come across as a psycho or a creep. No one wants to be perceived that way.
What's wrong about it? This is the goal - like in Syria: neuter the country by bringing in a pro-American government that will ensure country will stay weak and irrelevant, in exchange for letting it terrorise locals as they please.
Syria was an interesting one for me... Not in the typical american modus-operandi of destroying countries that are not american banana republics, but in actually supporting Al-Qaeda there...
US is full of people who've lost family members, friends, their own limbs, have PTSD and worse from when they fought Al-Qaeda... and now their own politicians are shaking hands and taking photos with them.
Then another shooting spree will happen and the media will be asking "what radicalized him?"..
Well, in any case, it is a guarantee that Iran will be less of a danger for other nations if the regime falls, and that people inside of the country will suffer - because either pro-Western or any other government is bound to be a lot weaker, and there will be a lot more violence and economic disruption, eventually economic degradation. It should avenge the emigrants, and provide sufficient punishment for those in Iran for enabling this regime in the first place.
Let's not have illusions about it. There is no way to build a sustainable democracy in a country that never had such leanings and is not culturally/religiously predisposed to it, and can't be physically coerced into it with boots on the ground. Achievable goals are punishment, and neutering.
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