Meanwhile heads of state:

I have to attend an event at a club, and the organizers have sent out multiple warnings about the dress code. It's clearly a constant problem holding back the sea.

"Don't let Dad let you go to bed late." — Jessica's instructions to 11 yo on going to London

Maybe what AI eliminates is not programming jobs but middle management jobs, because companies can be so much smaller that they don't need so many layers of management.

Maybe 10x isn't in fact the norm now. It sounded on the high side to me. But if it isn't, just wait a year.

If that kind of increase in productivity were the norm, it would make starting a startup qualitatively different, because you could do with 8 programmers what would have taken 80, and a company with 8 programmers is much easier to fund and run than one with 80.

Talked to a programmer today who said AI coding tools made him about 10x more productive. Though 10 seems like a round number, this was an attempt at a precise estimate.

Progress in mind-reading: "Using just data from the MRI, the ANN could produce a rough summary of a story that the test subject was listening to, a description of a film they were watching, or the gist of a sentence they were imagining."

11 yo tries to explain to me why it wouldn't be a problem if you went back in time. Basically there are infinite timelines, so if you go back in time and change something, you're not changing the one you're in.

Sometimes the real world looks more AI-generated than images generated by AI.

"How can something be both very silly and very evil at the same time? The answer is that what’s going on is very silly, but the silliness is distracting us from very important things."

Ted Kaczynski was a user of an early proto-Twitter.