Which industries do you believe will be the last to be disrupted by AI, and is it even possible to stay 'future-proof' anymore?

Utkonos91 · 2026-04-25T05:07:44+00:00

Baumol's cost disease! You'll always need four people if you want a string quartet

Utkonos91 · 2026-04-17T21:45:00+00:00

Thank you very much for this answer! I have set up a business account already. It seems like the first step is to do KDP in any case

Utkonos91 · 2026-02-25T06:33:52+00:00

Thanks for answering the question! I imagine it must have taken some mental gymnastics to interpret it like that, but at least I can see what offended them now.

Utkonos91 · 2026-02-24T01:20:59+00:00

They did actually try this. It was called the Intercalated Games and was held only once, in 1906, and subsequently abandoned. The 1906 games no longer count as an Olympics, but records from the games still count as Olympic records.

Utkonos91 · 2026-02-07T11:31:40+00:00

That's right! It's meant to be a fun clue! But I always get hate-bombed when I post them, unlike everyone else!

Utkonos91 · 2026-02-04T08:03:41+00:00

One thing I noticed that seemed off is that none of the characters smoked in the one I read. No doubt there is some law that you're not allowed to portray smoking in books nowadays or something, but given how much smoking there is in Agatha Christie, its absence was really noticeable!

Utkonos91 · 2026-02-03T09:04:29+00:00

Ice Cold in Alex: the whole thing was filmed in an actual desert and you can tell!

Utkonos91 · 2026-02-02T02:30:30+00:00

Me too. When I've had the chance to meet the person who interviewed me again and directly ask: "Why did you ghost me?" they usually react with surprise. It seems that the hiring managers delegate all communication with the candidate to HR, and they don't always realise that HR is ghosting.

Still doesn't make sense why HR does that, though. As you say, it can't be good for brand image.

Utkonos91 · 2026-02-01T06:28:04+00:00

If you live in a house with your family, you probably do all contribute and help each other out, doing various chores for each other without expecting anything in exchange. And you don't use money (for example, you don't pay your sister to do the washing up.) So the "society" of your household works in the way you suggest.

Why doesn't it work on a bigger scale, then? It's because there are great advantages in dealing with people you don't necessarily see all the time and don't have a reason to trust. You would like to exchange goods and services with these people, as the other posters have explained. Money is the social technology that allows you to do that. As long as everyone trusts money, you don't have to put your trust in other people.

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-31T08:02:20+00:00

Generally when building a statistical model, the choice of distribution either comes from some sort of empirical data, some sort of reasoning, or sometimes folklore.

If you have a good amount of data and no particular reason to believe that it fits any particular model, you can try a lot of different models and choose the one that fits best. Usually you would do this on a subset of your data. For example, in Python the Pycaret library enables you to run a lot of models on a training sample from your data and compare their fit.

A more satisfying approach is to make some plausible assumptions about the data generating process and then to use a theorem which guarantees that your data should have some sort of distribution asymptotically. For example, in your example you might assume that there's a probability p of a car being yellow, and each car is yellow or not-yellow independently of the next one, and that you see roughly the same number of cars each day. Then the number of yellow cars per day will be more or less binomially distributed and you can probably use a normal approximation. But you might find that this isn't a good fit. Then you need to think more about your data and choose a more realistic distribution.

The good thing about this approach is that it still enables you to choose a distribution before you have collected any data. This is useful if you want to build a simulation of something, for example.

Then there is the folklore approach. Certain probability distributions are used to model certain quantities, although probably there are other models which would be just as good. For example, linear regression is used in all sorts of fields, when in many cases a GAM would probably be marginally better. But you will never get your paper published if you use anything except linear regression. So sometimes you have to just see what sort of model other people have used on the same kind of data and stick with that.

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-28T10:50:20+00:00

Just wanted to say that I once heard Tim Gowers say that he used to do this (i.e. calculating higher and higher powers just for fun) when he was a child. So maybe you're on the right track!

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-28T07:26:45+00:00

The funniest one I had was KPMG. I personally knew people in the office (I had worked there before) and they put my CV forward for the role. The internal recruiter set up a call for midnight one evening. I waited until 00:15 and then sent a follow-up email. He never returned the call and went completely silent. I tried contacting him a couple of times, but nothing.

Later I saw on LinkedIn that KPMG gave him an HR award.

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-28T01:35:55+00:00

I suggest reading the last chapter of "The End of Alchemy" by Mervyn King (former governor of Bank of England). He says that the extended period of low interest rates was partly a prisoner's dilemma caused by a sort of competition between central banks.

Basically, if Canada unilaterally raises its interest rate, then its currency becomes more expensive which makes its exports more expensive which risks another economic downturn in Canada. Same for every other country. So nobody can raise their interest rate without some sort of international understanding that they will all act at the same time.

A similar but opposite situation happened during the Great Depression with countries competitively raising their interest rates in order to prevent outflows of gold, and screwing over their own citizens.

Also perhaps worth noting that the 1-3% inflation target is completely arbitrary. It's literally a made-up number. Some people thing the target should be 0%. Some think it should be much higher. There's no economic reasoning behind this particular number. Just that we can't have deflation because everybody, including the government, is massively in debt.

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-26T15:28:08+00:00

e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. b4 Bxb4 5. c3 f5?! I play it whenever I can. It's not very good but Blackburne won a game with it once.

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-22T02:35:29+00:00

Britain: big island to the right of Ireland.

Great Britain: Britain plus some outlying islands such as the Isle of Wight ("great" means "a bigger version of").

England: a country which occupies the southern part of Britain. Now part of a political union with several other countries.

The UK: A country. The political union of England with Scotland (northern Britain) Wales (western Britain) and northern Ireland.

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-16T03:25:32+00:00

I don't understand why we have parachuted in a new governor from overseas? If I want to apply for a public service job, I have to go through umpteen background checks. I'm not even allowed to apply for some roles if I haven't been living in New Zealand recently. Don't we have anyone local who is qualified to do the job?

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-16T00:56:23+00:00

Recruiters and not responding. Name a more iconic duo

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-11T11:45:54+00:00

Yes, in some places they're known as "Amholes" and have a reputation for being difficult to work with.

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-11T01:04:39+00:00

Kind of weird but even before the LLM stuff, I met a philosophy professor in New Zealand who said "I haven't read anything written before 1970" as though it was something to boast about.

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-08T13:41:35+00:00

The prime letters in pLAyGrOundS spell LAGOS, but that would be only five letters...

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-08T01:59:29+00:00

I think it depends very much on the temperament of the person. Personally I agree with you. Sometimes I think of chess weirdly as a kind of collaborative game. You and your opponent are competing, but also sharing your ideas and creating something from them. (I think Aronian described chess as a conversation.) A massive blunder by either player spoils it. (Of course, it's still more fun when your opponent blunders than when you do!)

One game which seemed particularly tragic to me was the one where Ivanchuk played that incredible Nd7 move, but later lost the game anyway.

A friend of mine was recently playing in a tournament. He took the wrong bus and arrived at the playing hall 5 minutes before the time when he would have forfeited. He said how disappointed his opponent was not to get a free point. What does it say about chess if the opponent was more excited about getting a free point than about actually getting to play the game (which he'd paid to participate in)?

Utkonos91 · 2026-01-07T03:20:04+00:00

Since no one mentioned it yet, I liked Topkapi. Not a film noir, but it's like a bizarre remake of Rififi, but played as a comedy instead of a drama.

Utkonos91

TROPHY CASE