Yeah, everyone in the world should change for your preferences…
Glad you agree
Pretty much agree with this from an FT discussion (from a Mathematician/Cosmologist).
I agree with the notion, though I’d be surprised if alpha evolve didn’t in fact reach sota on sphere packing.
Looks like China still has quality control issues in their own domestic chip market. Still behind the US when it comes to higher end chips as well.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last two days fighting with copilot trying to get some coding issues resolved. I think what you described is what I’ve been seeing. I was trying to get a KNN classification model fitted and it kept on giving me binary model options when I was trying to fit a multi class model. I think that’s because many of the examples are based around binary examples. I think it’s maybe a little bit like how Google’s photo classification software was identifying black people as gorillas as their photo set of humans was all/mostly white people. The AI gets biased by what it trains on.
I will note that I think the help from copilot was probably better than I could get by googling Stack overflow: more immediate and specific to my problem. If I was willing to post my problem there, I might have gotten better, but slower help. It also reaffirms my belief that not as many jobs are at risk to AI as some people claim because you need someone who knows what the AI should be doing to guide it.
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I can see AI helping fewer humans do the same work, which would still have a lot of knock ons.
AI to me is like a dirt cheap intern. Gotta review what it does, but can save time for some types of work.
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Interesting read on AI and the difference in electrical grids between China and the US. Also some maybe interesting impacts on carbon emissions.
China apparently has surplus electricity and is adding the equivalent of Germany to their grid each year. Does this give them the ability to start moving off coal?
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We’ve got the intern from hell at the moment. Complete PITA.
They have been moving off coal, percentage-wise at least, iirc. Let me see what i can find, figure-wise.
Decreasing as a share, but still growing. Rate of decrease slowing a bit. Numbers not fully updated.
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I can see AI helping the same number of humans do more work. Excel didn’t put actuaries out of business, it just raised expectations.
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It will make productive people more productive.
Problem is, the rungs below that.
Mass office low skill admin Labour is going to be a thing of the past for the most part. AI will take most of those jobs.
Yep. I’m so old that I started work when we had desktop calculators and batch-processed COBOL programs. I was the first person at that company to use interactive computing, first dial-up and then with an IBM 5120. I could turn stuff around much more quickly with the better tools.
But, did that mean that we got rid of actuarial staff, or did we simply answer more management questions with a greater degree of detail? And, if our competitors were doing the same thing, was there a net benefit to society?
I was talking to a marketer who said that with AI she can produce more sophisticated “pitch decks” in less time. Does that mean fewer marketers or just more sophisticated slides?
I’m confident it is some of both. I don’t know the ratio.
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This.
The punched cards we used for programming put me off programming so badly that I took a path to avoid doing any after my first year or so of actuarial work.
I started on punched cards too. When the company phased them out, they sold the army green file cabinets that held the cards. 12 drawers, two trays of cards in each drawer. I have one in my garage, it’s great for small stuff. It’s ugly, but it’s built like it will last forever.
About a year after I started, one of our actuaries went to an actuarial meeting where someone was pitching APL. Since I was the most recent hire, I got nominated as the guinea pig. It was like the sea parted and I could see the promised land.
My dad was one of the first engineers who got to run his own programs/stack his own card decks at his work in the mid/late 1960’s. He could only get time at night. It was ITs domain otherwise.
Punch cards were out by the time I started in 1991. We did have a cabinet with cards from production jobs for old times sake in the hallway. It could serve as a fallout shelter. We still used APL for reserve factor generation, but were phasing out in the mid 00’s.
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I caught the very end of punch cards. But while in grad school, the university announced the readers were going away, so our research group spent a couple days just emptying out the cabinets, carrying boxes of cards to the building where there were still readers, and running them through the reader to save the contents.
Tell us about the days when you could use your computer without IT blocking you!
Listening to the Ric Edelman show interviewing personal finance people, they were super excited about writing more personalized spam emails and financial updates for their clients. Edelman seemed to think this was revolutionary, I thought it sounded like a minor update from using templates.
It has the potential to be disastrous as they want to mine personal call transcripts for personal details they’ll store in a database and then use to fill in future communications with a personal touch (e.g. you remembered I had cats). They don’t seem to have plans for DB management and I can totally see a financial planner saying they hope their client’s cat is doing well for the next 5 years after the cat was run over by a car while the owner was watching.