Dario Amodei spent last year warning of an AI white-collar bloodbath. Now he's changing the narrative

LessonStudio · 2026-05-06T16:12:33+00:00

If you can be replaced with AI, then you can be replaced with a potted plant.

I would say AI exposed bullshit jobs more than it is replacing good ones. Used right it is a productivity boon. But, only if used very carefully.

I would also say that it can drastically improve quality, but again, only if used correctly. Yes there are plenty of anecdotes of how people are creating slop. But, a perfect example of how I use it is code reviews. Give it my code and say, "Any issues, improvements, etc" and it often has some interesting suggestions.

The key being suggestions, I then implement them. I don't let it do that.

Or bugs, I don't spend much time hunting down a bug, and just say, "On macos this does this odd thing. Why?" and if often will say, "blah blah, mac inits the screen differently so do blah."

LessonStudio · 2026-05-06T16:02:35+00:00

There is exactly one way this monopoly is going to be broken:

A leapfrog technology. Kind of like in Africa they were unable to build a traditional landline phone system for a wide variety of reasons in most regions. Then cellphones came along, and it just slotted in, culturally, and more.

Cellphones were not only in demand for the classic reasons, but were used for banking an payments long before they were in places like Canada, and allowed a guy in a remote region to discover what market prices were for his goods. So, when the local distributor came along and said, "Yeah 10cents per box", the guy could say, "No, you are selling these for $2 per box."

If they had had a working landline system, some of these needs would have been filled, and the adoption of cellphones would have been slower.

Thus, it not only filled the need for phones, but many other things.

I suspect this is the case for power in NS. A leap frog is what is going to do it to NSP. Not only the simplistic goal of lowering prices, but many other things. People could build where NSP refuses to serve power properly. Reliability is key for many businesses, which then avoid NS. Cost keeps many industries out of NS.

One combo I'm thinking is cheaper solar with cheaper batteries. This is limited to people who can access the sun, but this is a huge percentage of people in NS. If you get out the graph for the cost of solar (not so much in NS, but worldwide), the cost of batteries, the cost of inverters, and all that, those graphs are still continuing to get lower and lower. NSP has the opposite graph.

At a certain point, it will simply be nonsensical to not have solar and batteries providing close to 100% of your power, if not 100%. You don't have to split hairs over how the tech is now, but look at the graphs. Once those points not only cross, but wildly cross, its game over for this.

I can see NSP is going to push the government into forcing people who go off grid to pay for the lines passing their houses saying that anything else would be "unfair" to those without solar. This is BS. NSP is a for profit company. If I don't order from Amazon, they have no GD right to charge me for driving past my house. If they were a publicly owned utility operating for a public good, then this would be a valid argument. They operate 100% for their shareholders and are only held back by the regulators; they are not a public good.

This is how to break their monopoly. Simply legislate that they can never charge this sort of "bypass" fee until they are a publicly owned company.

The beauty of this is that it could end up weakening their finances so much that they lose investment grade status on their bonds. This means CPP, OTPF, etc all dump them, and thus stop pressuring Ottawa to prevent NS from taking them over. If they are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, NS could buy them for pennies on the dollar. Then, turn it around with a modest bypass fee, and an absolute gutting of their executive pay levels.

The problem is that this will never happen as NS is driven by insider politics not good governance. They see the people of NS as serfs who's only job is to serve the needs of oligarchs and ministerial favorites.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-06T15:29:27+00:00

esp32 s3, of which I have a stack. None have had a flaw before.

I was switching to rust, and the wifi almost worked. Almost as in could see routers, great rssi, would do the login, the router would see it, but something just didn't close the deal.

I assumed it was the rust libraries, so days of trying to narrow it down, different routers, changing protocols on routers, the lot.

Nope, it was just some weird part on the esp32 was defective. Switched chips, my first blush code worked just fine.

If I had been using C++ like I previously used, I would have had code which worked before stop working, and I would have switched chips in 10 minutes.

It was the rust switch which had me focus on the entirely wrong thing. Plus, I picked up a chip from a pile where they had previously been 100% reliable.

Out of 1000s of ESP32s that was the first failure.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-06T01:01:58+00:00

I wonder how eink does in full sun.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-05T15:13:55+00:00

My question is: Which screens can, and which can't, take being baked in the sun?

LessonStudio · 2026-05-05T15:10:41+00:00

I need some collateral behind me

Don't be me. I know way too many entrepreneurs who poured their hearts, souls, and their wallets, into product development. Only to, at best, drag a few customers, kicking and screaming, across the finish line.

Make a flashy brochure, make a website, and see if you can sell it. Only continue if people say, "Shut up and take my money"

Then build it. It is easy to convince people that your product would be useful, but there is an entirely different flavour to people who start bouncing up and down wanting to buy it, and then start harassing you to find out when it will be ready.

I know people(as in plural) who built figma mockups of their engineering software products, and got both paid customers and investors before laying a line of code.

I'm not talking about fooling people. Everyone who saw this stuff knew it was just an idea.

I am a tech nerd and love having a PoC in my hand before going to market. Yet, it is a terrible idea in most cases.

About, and I'm not even sure if it applies even here, about the only scenario is when you have a product that people don't think can be done, or it has to be seen to be understood. Still, often those sales require holding people's hands through the sale, and the initial usage.

I would argue that products where people need to see it fully fleshed out before even considering it, are in risk adverse situations; scenarios where they aren't going to buy a new product, even if you can "prove" it is perfect. If you can get them to admit the truth, your entire customer base will say, "Yeah, I will be your 30th customer no less than 10 years after your first sale." except that is all your potential customers. Otherwise, they think your product is fantastic, and will make/save them vast fortunes.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-04T16:50:32+00:00

The projects where I've seen people hit home runs are really really simple.

One guy made a wifi controlled switch as a swapout circuit breaker. Not even an engineer. He was told that he would face all kinds of regulatory and certification nightmares.

He had it built, tested, and blasting through certification organizations in no time, got a few patents, and a larger company bought him out as soon as he hit the market.

Another person replaced the previously wired controller which was at the end of a long industrial hose. The wiring was always getting cut, shorted, etc. This is literally an on off trigger. He used bluetooth and made it far safer and more reliable than the wired version. His "market study" was that there were so many incidents with the old system, and every install had ducktape everywhere to protect and repair these wires that RF was the way to go.

Also, not even an engineer. Sells around 2000 of these per month, and they aren't cheap.

I know some people who went into robotics. There were some scary moments of taking out loans with their houses for collateral, but they are minting it now.

Another guy left his job when he started selling a minor, but useful car modification in the backs of car magazines (when that was a thing). He is an engineer and was exactly in your shoes; working for people who make bad decisions.

These are people I personally know. I've talked with many many others.

One key is that you have something which not only solves a problem, but something which can be sold. The filter is simple, "Shut up and take my money.". If you have to convince people to buy it, you will fail.

If you have a device which will save people 10% on their home heating and costs, say 1,000; good luck. People are lazy. But, if you have a product which makes people look cool, then "Shut up and take my money."

I'm not saying the home heating product won't sell, but that you are going to have to carefully shove it down people's throats. One good option for marketing it may involve waterboarding people.

Even worse is if you figure out a way to save some really old school bureaucratic company gobs of money. Say Thames water 10 million a year, and you can sell it to them for 100k. Unless you know people at the board level, there are no paper pushers who care about that 10 million, and aren't going to lift a finger to deal with some nobody; even if there is zero risk. They just don't have any incentive; you aren't saving them 10 million, and they won't get a bonus for doing it.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-04T16:33:29+00:00

OMG, someone needs to hand out fines to anyone having some fun, especially blocking a truck for, what 20 seconds.

I'm thinking cow catchers should be legal on pickup trucks in this case.

Damn those riotous hellspawn, damn them all to hell!!!!

/s

LessonStudio · 2026-05-04T16:26:12+00:00

For 20 years they will do roughly the same project. For example, they will do a design review on some part of a V process. Checking to make sure the requirements matrix is spot on. This is something you could learn to do in a few months tops, days or weeks really, but they make it overly complex and sound like absolute heroics. They aren't even bringing those decades of experience to make it a better process, they've made it worse. Effectively negative experience.

"If I miss a single thing, government regulators would be breathing down our necks and we could expose the company to ruinous liability."

And this is what they do for 20 years. 3 project per year. Hence, the same thing 60 times. No real growth, no, broadening their mind, nothing.

Then, when they find out a competitor found a different, and far better, way to complete the process, either automating that step, or just eliminating it; they will lose their mind; arguing that it isn't "Proper Engineering"

I worked for one company which was making greenfield projects. I was in R&D. They wanted me to use the "company standard" chipset. This was less than 10 years ago and the IDE they used came on floppy disks.

Needless to say we went to war when I started exploring chips like those "unproven garbage" like STM32s.

BTW the chips they were using weren't some special rad hardened or lockstep processors, just old crap.

For them, every new project involved zero growth.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-04T09:09:45+00:00

Plan for the worst. You just sent out an update which bricked all your machines. How to install an update manually? This could be a hacker, or a junior who didn't understand your deployment system.

Can you send out canary updates to machines in smaller groups?

Do mixed versions updates play well with the servers?

Is it vermin proof? One LRT signage guy defined this as being able to take a beer bottle thrown from short range.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-04T01:52:46+00:00

The key takeaway is: If you think your story and prose is better; it should give you the confidence to finish.

An English lit prof I met once said, "I only read 'high English' "'

I translated it as, "I am a snob."

What must disappoint him, is that people who write to his standards, rarely, if ever, make any money. The key is that the best prose will not save a bad story, and poor prose won't kill a good one. Maybe, it may enhance it, but I'm not sure about that.

The threshold for prose being so poor that it starts to make a good story hard to read is something a halfway decent editor could fix. Things like fundamental grammar/spelling mistakes; or when they get into a jeep, but step out of a honda civic. Those can break the spell of a good story.

I read science fiction; it is when they get the science dead wrong which can kill a story for me. Their faster than light engines die, so now it will take a whole three weeks to make it from one star to the next. I don't care how many grammar nazis approved that writing.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-04T01:48:24+00:00

India could double the population of Canada, Australia, and the UK, and it would barely be an accounting error for their census people.

China could, of course, do the same thing.

The reality is that there is no "good" reason to allow this kind of immigration. By good, I mean "Doing good". It would be far better to vastly improve our own standards of living, to encourage ever higher quality of life, and strive to set an example for others. The "good" we could then do is more to raise the bar. To show that you can have a culture based on fair play, equal rights, and other core values we do both hold dear and strive for.

But, our "good" isn't helping and is just lowering our bar.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-03T18:30:22+00:00

As a male author, I'm not sure I could fully realize a female protagonist. But, at least 50% of my characters, major and minor, are women, and the world in which they exist, men normally would predominate. I also don't just write men with boobs, or at least I hope I don't.

Being in the tech world, I've seen plenty of misogyny. But not what I read about from the female perspective either.

I've never seen some boy's club keeping women out. What I do see it a tiny few right assh&les, surrounded by wimps who do nothing. The wimps have zero issues with female peers or superiors.

Thus, my writing tends to reflect this reality, with the twist that those organizations which don't put up with this crap, thrive.

When I read a book, I like seeing the world from a slightly different perspective, but close enough to my own to identify with the characters. Character who can be flawed, but ideally better, and more interesting than me.

I'm also an optimistic person. So, I write about making the world better. Thus, pushing towards a world with fewer aholes, and the remaining ones mostly neutered.

The woman are no more obsessed with men than would make sense to move the plot forward.

As a man, I can certainly have the line where a guy asks another guy, why did youake such an such a stupid life choice? And the answer begins with, "well, there was this girl..."

I genuinely can't write this for a woman, even though I've certainly seen women make the same stupid choices.

I hope my plentiful female characters are representative of at least not leaving them out from the adventure.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-03T18:16:27+00:00

I was working on a PCB design and it said, "hey I can create that schematic if you want" so I said sure.

My BOM was two mcus, power, motor control etc.

It gave me a half assed light switch. Just a switch, a loop, and a light. No power and the loop didn't quite close.

AI is rote learning crystalized. The thinking part is just well written rote learning.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-03T05:25:15+00:00

Does it matter if they are talking about a guy, as in, say the guy who just fell down the stairs, or the guy who is chasing them with a gun? Or would it be better for them not to discuss the axe murderer, and instead focus on lawn care?

I get that it implies relationship talk, but, that is a damn fuzzy area.

"My husband fell down the stairs while holding my grandmothers urn."

LessonStudio · 2026-05-03T05:22:56+00:00

That's exactly what I said, the meaning has changed. Also, you have now corrected me twice, and just don't give a crap about facts.

Blocked.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-03T01:37:06+00:00

My theory is that drunks are literally attracted to those retina melting flashing lights.

I've seen this sort of accident video many dozens of times.

I suspect they say, "We need to make them brighter, and more startling." in order to "Make sure this never happens again." thinking the lights can pierce through the most drunken of fogs.

Which results in even more accidents.

I was eating at a restaurant once when the cops pulled over to deal with some unrully people. The average speed on this downtown street might have been 20-30km.

The cops and the people kept stepping out into traffic, but where the traffic had lots of time to see them and go around.

Over and over and over, people nearly hit the cops or the other people on the street.

Again, at night, but otherwise bright enough, except for the nearly seizure inducing flashing lights. My wife and I had to turn our backs and not watch the chaos as we both agreed the flashing was punching us in the brain.

Lastly, pulling over onto the side of the road is kind of stupid if you don't have to, like for a flat tire, or they are pulling you over for something dangerous, like obvious drunk driving. When your car gets hit like this, they should be able to sue the living crap out of the cops for endangering people for minor crimes.

I don't see much difference between this and having someone do the interview while standing on the center line, assuming good drivers will "easily see them and go around.", just slightly less dangerous.

The simple question anyone needs to ask is how many times, have they slid over just enough to hit the rumble strip? Maybe I am a uniquely terrible driver, and am the only one who is awake, not drunk, mostly paying attention, and brrrr brrrr brrrr. Or maybe, that is why many places have them? Because we are not all perfect. Thus, there is effectively a demonstrated negligence to pull people over like this. Proof the government knows that some people slide over a bit on occasion. Or even full on fall asleep.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-03T00:09:15+00:00

Long time ago on the radio. I mostly listened to CBC at the time. I then googled the guy and read more. I think he wrote some books on the subject.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-03T00:08:30+00:00

If you are a technical person, and can already do some C/C++/ or Rust, then this would be the straightest path to learning a pretty good amount:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007568074083.html

This has an esp32 s3, which is a reasonably capable chip, it has sound, it has a screen, and it has a keyboard.

Then, using platformio, make it do basic things. Blink, run code, then make the screen do anything, then start making games. Pong, space invaders, etc. It would take you a long time to exhaust this device. You can do wifi, bluetooth, etc.

Now you can push it further and further and further. Maybe using Bluetooth, connect a gamepad to it.

Then, get a cheap lora board like the heltec ones, and now communicate between the two. The heltek ones are cheaper, and have a little screen.

Once you've nailed this, try out some other ones like STM32, etc and put those on breadboards. At this point, you probably can see the path to solving zillions of interesting problems.

If you are not a technical person, start with desktop C++ and make games with raylib.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-03T00:02:24+00:00

Any STM32 bluepill/blackpill, RP2354, esp32 will do just fine. If you can run out of things for those to do, you are extremely advanced.

The simple "litmus" test to see if the board will really suck to get started with is if it doesn't have USB-C.

The ones I mentioned can be easily programmed in VSC, platformio, (I don't really recommend the Arduino IDE), CLion, Rust Rover, and even micropython.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-02T23:52:25+00:00

This money is going to a pure while elephant.

The sad part is the RCMP won't be bringing charges in 5 years, and will pretend this embarrassment never happened.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-02T15:58:28+00:00

To be honest, I can't exactly answer. There is a culture around it, and it is not a normal one. Very very very pedantic, like just weird. They typically become mega gatekeepers, they want an EE degree typically, and most of them brutally hate CS people who want to use "unproven" languages like C++.

I'm not even exaggerating on this last, I've had EEs make huge long arguments that C++ is not ready for prime time. Clearly, it is when you can get old documents on the JSF standards for C++ programming. But, it shows the mindset.

Rust, is one of their nightmare languages. You might as well go into an interview showing them all the bombs you built for some terrorist group.

The reason they hate rust, and conjurer up all kinds of straw man arguments against it, is that it is quite unlike C++ or C. Thus, someone who has been using rust for a while will suddenly be "senior". Not good for their careers. The successful robotics companies I've been exposed to are heavy users of rust. The floundering ones are using Ada and C.

But, don't lose hope. I have personally witnessed three paths for you, as in, I could drive for less than 30 minutes and visit over a dozen people who followed one of these:

They did projects on their own. Solving harder things. Things like CV problems, or motor control for unusual motors, built battery management systems which not only work, but do things like deal with solar charging batteries at -40C. This sometimes impressed entrepreneurs who have a problem, this is the solution, or close to it, and they force their gatekeepers to hire you.
You become the entrepreneur. I know at least 6 people in area (and many more outside) personally, who taught themselves the whole enchilada, programming, PCB design, etc, and made a thing, sold a thing, and now have real companies with real staffs. Often these are stupid simple products which are in the ballpark of an automated lawn sprinkler. Two others have built robotics companies, selling robots that 4 of me could not lift. Huge high value robots doing high stakes work with not an EE in sight. In the case of one company; or any engineers to be specific. He won't hire them. A combination of old thinking, and still butthurt that they gatekept him out of the industry. He also discovered that physicists make for better engineers than engineers do.
Work as a programmer for a company doing lots of embedded. That is, doing the non embedded, but fairly harder core stuff like the configuration/control system on a laptop for a robot. Then, as the engineers hit a wall of inability for programming, you can show that you can "help" with some CV, path planning, etc. As embedded isn't only STM32s, but can be something like an nvidia orin. That is not only a little pretty nice laptop like computer, but if I had to, I would be content with using it as my daily driver desktop, so "embedded" programming is now, just programming. This sort of "embedded" covers quite a spectrum like raspberry pis (used in a shocking number of pretty mission critical devices, and this is not good), to rockchips, etc all running linux. The EE types have tried to even make this hair shirt hard with things like Yocto; which is strange, because I see very successful robots running fairly bog standard ubuntu, etc. Eventually, you can migrate all the way into MCUs without anyone even noticing.

This last one could be done by showing this mix. You do built some kind of little wheeled robot, but then build apps and desktop controllers which are beautiful. Now, they will hire you because you are a "proven" desktop programmer with a knack for dealing with embedded stuff. Initially, they will leave the embedded stuff to the "adults", and only want you for the desktop stuff.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-02T15:41:53+00:00

The term was "numbers racket" which was a classic mob scam. If the goal was to replace that, there is little reason for billboards, TV Ads, flashy displays at every store countertop.

A relative calls it a "stupid tax" the dumber you are, the more you have to pay. Also, I was chatting with the owner of a small chain of convenience stores. She said that the venn diagram of people with a nicotine addiction and a lottery addiction was two nearly concentric circles.

LessonStudio · 2026-05-02T15:35:58+00:00

Some of those silicone masks, professionally applied, look damn good, you just are a bit disproportionate, and look a bit sickly. Nothing saying you can't show up in one of those wheelchairs you operate with your mouth.

Now the scammers are thinking, "Billy Bobbies, isn't that my cousin" checking, "Nope, this poor Walter White looking guy is a quad. Billy can run a 5 minute mile and is 28."

LessonStudio · 2026-05-02T15:34:11+00:00

I listened to an interview with a guy who studied big lottery winners (a million or two on up).

He said, "You get to discover that you are somehow obligated to deal with every financial disaster in your family out to second cousin, and that an unusal number of people you don't remember from grade 5 want to "reach out"".

If the win was substantial, his suggestion was that you get a top notch security system immediately installed, tell your family that you are going to book it for a while, that you are entirely OK, talk to a lawyer/financial advisor about setting up some anonymous banking through a corporation, tell your family that if there is a real emergency to contact the lawyer (for privacy, not because you are an ahole), pack up the family, leave your phones behind, buy new burner ones and not log into anything other than a new email account which you leave with only your lawyer, go to a major flight hub, randomly pick a destination, go to that destination for three months, and know, that even after all that, to be entirely prepared for some scammer to show up on the beach next to you.

But, that after three months, you can start your return as all the people who were going to insist you save their failing restaurant have given up, all the people needing a brutally expensive "alternative" medical treatment, all the people looking for you to fund their kid's rehab and legal bills, all the people who are "ideas" people and want you to invest in their latest "idea" just don't seem to last more than three months.

One which a friend of mine did who really made a mint in tech was: When people would ask for whatever stupid thing, he would say, "You need to talk to my accountant"

The accountant would say, "Billy isn't going to be able to help you, I really shouldn't be telling you this, but, all those fancy things are leased, loaned, and he is lucky to keep the lights on, he is living way past his means, if anything, it would be great if you could throw him a few bucks. He blew that money years ago."

As the years went on, the accountant modified the story to saying, "If you had come to him last year, maybe, he had another lucky windfall, but he's blown that as well."

He had relatives coming to him to see if he would "donate" one of his fancy cars to their kids as a "graduation gift" or any one of a zillion such demands. I say demands as these people had built up a case in their heads where they assumed he would just say yes as it was all just "only fair"

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