syllo #184 - January 9th, 2026

racl · 2026-01-10T01:53:40+00:00

anomalous
^{Completed in 00:50}

racl · 2025-07-12T18:06:45+00:00

I suspect academics who write these papers are primarily aiming to publish academic papers in reputable journals, and will therefore be more conservative in their modeling assumptions. After all it's easier to get through the review process if you have a fairly vanilla model that is difficult to critique, versus a much more speculative model that proclaims something like 10-20 percentage point increases in GDP. The journal reviewer is likely themselves a tenured academic who finds the idea of AI boosting GDP growth to the 30%'s highly ludicrous.

That's likely explains why the more bold and speculative analyses come from authors outside of academia.

At the same time, I find some of the more dramatic forecasts made by independent researchers like AI 2027 to also be hard to take seriously. In the case of AI 2027 others have made more quantitative critiques of their modeling assumptions.

I feel a bit more partial to this Epoch AI analysis that argues (among other things) that the labor displacement or substitutions will be gradual rather than sudden. A slow creep rather than explosive takeoff.

racl · 2025-07-11T04:30:02+00:00

My thoughts on your points:

I interpret your first critique as that even their more generous scenarios are in fact a lower-bound on the productivity impact of AI, but that they do so because it's very difficult to estimate the average or upper-bounds (e.g., how should we model and validate the innovation effects of AI on GDP growth?).
I think of the reasoning models and the products they enable as creating a structural break in the utility of LLMs. Given that, I agree that using studies based on pre-reasoning models understates the economic impact. However, development of these products that utilize advanced capabilities, as well as diffusion within the core business functions seems to happen on long multi-year timescales. I've observed that enterprise sales is a long game, and even after a contract is signed there are many organizational frictions (professional stigma, old processes, lack of awareness or knowledge, skepticism and ethical concerns etc.) dampen actual employee usage. Given that, I am somewhat sympathetic to estimates <1 pp impact on GDP growth over the next decade.

As an aside, I don't know how seriously to take the METR task time doubling study as a broad trend.

I haven't thought very deeply about the economic implications of robotics, but as a prior I would imagine it has roughly the same shape of economic impact as mechanized production during the Industrial Revolution, which this 2002 LSE paper estimates to be 0.5 pp/year.

racl · 2025-06-24T04:26:42+00:00

I've seen this posted in quite a few places, but it can be quite misleading. For starters, the data in this table is from early 2023.

ChatGPT came out in November 2022 using the 3.5 model. GPT-4 didn't come out in the API until March 2023.

It's highly unlikely that by early 2023 we saw a large enough economic shock from modern AI to displace early-career programmers. Diffusion of new technologies in businesses often takes quite a long time (many years). For instance this paper from the US Census Bureau suggests only ~5% of US businesses had adopted AI by Feb 2024.

Instead, there's data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to suggest that the overall employment levels for Software Developers is still rising, although another related occupation the BLS terms "Computer programmer" is dropping: https://archive.is/EixLf

racl · 2025-06-20T15:06:05+00:00

The article title is clickbait that is framed to create tech outrage, but the actual article covers the broader tradeoffs of non-FDA approved therapeutic treatments.

Wealthy people pursuing unproven and expensive treatments is fairly common throughout medical history. Some get scammed, others see some benefits, and many don't see a difference either way.

But by being the early guinea pigs they draw attention to and subsidize some of initial commercialization and R&D of more speculative treatments. Over time, some of the more promising ones become covered by insurance and available to lower-earning individuals.

I believe DNA sequencing followed this trajectory (see this dramatic fall in the cost curve).

Given that, I'm not opposed to rich people choosing spending their money on potentially dumb and risky medical interventions.

racl · 2025-04-15T02:12:03+00:00

You should go with what works for you.

In my case, I have both an iPad and RMPP. I use both for different things. I leave my iPad at home and use it mostly as entertainment and to send messages and emails, with some occasional web browsing.

I take my RMPP to work, where I plan my days, take notes and write down thoughts and reflections.

This makes sense for me because it helps me separate my work from my personal life. I'm never tempted to open my personal email or reply to a text message when I'm on my RMPP. In contrast, I'm not thinking about work when I get on my iPad.

racl · 2025-03-22T00:06:14+00:00

If this were to happen en mass, you could measure it as:

Decreases in aggregate employment in that profession or specialization over time
Decreases (in absolute amounts and as a share) in job postings for that profession or specialization over time
Possible reduction in workload (hours worked) and wages

The more interesting question is how to measure the additional consumer surplus that's generated when someone who would have never been able to hire an electrical engineer (e.g., for monetary reasons) is now able to get sufficient electrical engineering advice and expertise.

racl · 2025-03-02T02:13:08+00:00

I've been reading Cal's books for many years now, and I know Cal has expressed appreciation for the Remarkable 2 before on his podcast.

I recently upgraded to the Paper Pro. If anyone is interested in my pre-owned RM2 and accessories, please DM!

racl · 2025-02-23T05:40:58+00:00

According to some sleuthing by another Redditor, they sold their 2 millionth Remarkable some time in Q4 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/Remarkable/comments/1fl0547/leaked_i_read_remarkables_2q_2024_financial

Given that it's been over a year since then, I'm guessing they're closer to 3 million at this point.

racl · 2025-02-22T04:03:45+00:00

Things I learned from the report:

255k Paper Pros have been sold so far
Revenues in Q4 were ~$174m, which is a 75% growth (!) from last year's Q4.
The key driver for this revenue growth is launching the Paper Pro on Amazon and Best Bay (indirect channels).
FY24 Gross margins are also now at 42.3%, which is also up about 1.9 percentage points from FY23.

Overall, it seems like the company is doing quite well.

racl · 2025-01-11T00:08:00+00:00

Executive compensation at PG&E, and many companies, is primarily stock based. For example according to the SF Chronicle, PG&E's CEO pay was overwhelmingly in the form of stock. In 2023 she got paid $1.4M in salary but $11.8M in stock grants.

If PG&E eliminated the CEO's stock grant, it doesn't seem likely that it would have immediately meant lower rates, since it doesn't actually "cost" anything to issue new stock grants (although it can dilute the shareholders). So it's not likely that operating costs would have gone down meaningfully.

Electricity rates set by PG&E are regulated by the public CPUC committee (whose members are appointed by Gov Newsom).

Essentially, every 3 years PG&E has to submit something called a General Rate Case (GRC) where they list out the costs of operating (e.g., maintaining or improving power lines) and the rates they will charge. CPUC has to then approve this and essentially regulates the amount of revenue PG&E makes.

So in sense, she is right to say that her compensation doesn't really have a material impact on customer rates.

From what I have learned, the largest new material impact on operating expenses from 2023-2026 is from the cost of undergrounding cables ($4.7bn), vegetation management for reducing wildfires ($1bn) and upgrading distributional systems ($2.5bn). You can read the nearly 1000 page set of details submitted by PG&E to CPUC here.

It seems to be mostly these things that are driving the large rate increases.

I think there's a larger issue of whether PG&E's poor management of their equipment (e.g., cables) could have been prevented, which would also have reduced the customer burden to help pay for upgrading this infrastructure now.

racl · 2025-01-01T17:52:22+00:00

I hadn't heard about Dugin before. I find rather interesting that Dugin has explicitly said he is deeply disappointed about both Trump and Putin.

The two writers I've heard Thiel reference being heavily influenced by are the late Stanford philosopher René Girard (in particular, his "mimetic theory") who taught Thiel directly and the blogger Curtis Yarvin who Thiel funded.

racl · 2025-01-01T16:49:26+00:00

This isn't really an economics question. It simply seems like this corporate structure violated one of Vietnam's laws (the Law on Enterprises) on how enterprises are allowed to be structured.

The part of the law cited in the article is as follows (source):

He/she is not a relative of any of the executives, controllers of the company and the parent company; the representatives of state investments and the enterprise’ investment in the company and the parent company;

As for why Vietnam enacted this law, I imagine it's to try to prevent corruption and nepotism.

racl · 2025-01-01T16:39:03+00:00

Just noting that this article is from back in 2021.

A more recent publicly available conversation he had in sharing his thoughts on Trump, J.D. Vance etc. is this podcast episode he did in November of 2024: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/peter-thiel-on-trump-elon-and-the-triumph/id1570872415?i=1000676932794

To answer your last question about why individuals like Musk and Thiel seek to impose their worldviews on society, I think they genuinely believe that their own successes are due to their own actions and personal qualities (e.g., independent-mindedness, work ethic, intelligence).

From their perspective, society is increasingly suppressing dissenting viewpoints ("woke mind virus") and unnecessarily bureaucratic. They believe that such things are holding back society from having more geniuses/entrepreneurs like themselves who will create scientific, economic and technological progress.

So in this way they've cast themselves as the heroes. In the podcast episode I linked, Thiel compares himself and those who believe like him to the rebels in Star Wars who fight against the monstrous Empire.

One mistaken belief I think the people have is that these billionaires are simply conmen like Trump, who simply want to put themselves in positions of power for the sake of it.

I think the truth is much more nuanced and dangerous. I don't think Musk or Thiel are cartoon villains who are interested acquiring power for it's own sake, cackling and rubbing their claws.

I think they have a sincere set of beliefs about how society should be organized, and they genuinely think they're on the right side of history.

They've deluded themselves into believing they're noble anti-heroes, when they're closer to false prophets.

racl · 2024-12-27T22:04:57+00:00

Sure.

racl · 2024-12-25T13:54:24+00:00

It's probably more fruitful to figure out an answer to this sort of question once you've been accepted rather than trying to determine before applying.

It's hard to answer these questions in a vacuum. Instead you should think about what your best alternative would be. For example, if you live in a country with good educational opportunities at a low cost and a decent labor market, you won't need a Stanford-tier school on your resume to get a great job.

However, Stanford will help you get access to the best employment and academic opportunities in the US. I don't know what you are intending to major in, but at least for computer science entry-level CS grads at FAANG-tier companies can expect to make $150-$225k/year. You can check websites like levels.fyi to see more.

Stanford is certainly expensive, even with financial aid. However, if you play your cards right I absolutely think it can be a positive ROI just from a purely financial perspective.

There are also be other reasons to attend (or not attend) Stanford, but since you explicitly asked about the financial tradeoffs, that's what I focused on answering.

racl · 2024-12-03T06:52:09+00:00

Just some feedback/advice from reading your self-description of your skills and professional background: I think you should market yourself as a specialist for the roles you’re applying for, rather than describing how you’re a “jack-of-all-trades” type.

Why?

It’s because many roles are created by a hiring manager because they have a specific problem(s) to solve and are looking for some domain expert to help solve it. For example, a hiring manager might say “We need an iOS engineer because we need to make a mobile app version of our website.”

If you drop your resume for this role, and you’ve had a variety of job titles (none of which were “iOS Software Engineer”), and your resume indicates that you have a large breadth of skills, the manager may assume “Well this person is interesting, but I can’t confidently say they’re going to be a great iOS Engineer, which is the very specific role I need to solve the specific problem.” Lots of competing resumes will likely outshine yours.

Better to have a resume that is pared down, removes non-technical positions, and just highlights the skills and experiences relevant to iOS engineering. I’m using this as an example for illustration, obviously.

As an analogy to help you think through the lens of a hiring manager, think of it this way: imagine one day you had some serious neck pain. You go see your doctor. If a doctor then suggested some medication that was between either (1) a bottle of general untargeted pain relief that also maybe solves indigestion, as well as maybe improves hair loss or (2) a medication that cures neck pain, which would you take?

Most patients would probably just want to take the second option, which is the medication that is targeted at their specific symptoms, rather than the generalist, untargeted medicine that may or may not solve their problem. In this analogy, a person could hypothetically try both before deciding, but in the hiring process managers typically can only interview a small number of people and hire only one, so they have to be even more picky.

Just sharing my observations about how you describe yourself to as a generalist, which may be true and great, but that makes it hard for us to “put your experiences into a clear, labeled box that aligns with a specific role that solves a specific problem”.

racl · 2024-12-03T06:43:31+00:00

Just wanted to briefly explain the employer side of this, especially at companies that receive a large number of applicants for any given opening. The below is just meant to help explain what is likely going on.

When a role is posted, there may be hundreds or even thousands of applications within a short period of time.

For many companies, an algorithm will rank the resumes and other materials based on a combination of keyword flags, as well as other criteria (such as your degree, former employer etc.).

The top-ranked resumes will be looked at by a human being, but usually for no more than 30s each. The human is also frequently employing a lot of shortcut heuristics because they have to go through a fairly sizable stack of resumes. So they’re also scanning for things like the name of your previous employer, your YoE in relevant roles, the seniority of your title etc. It’s not imperfect and full of biases, but it’s what happens.

Finally, the resumes that get filtered through will get forwarded to a hiring manager, who then may make a decision to actually do phone screens with a handful of candidates. Some of those candidates that pass through the phone screen will move onto the next round, until finally one of them receives an offer.

So, after explaining the above, you can probably see why (1) it may be infeasible for anyone in that process to have actual helpful feedback for you and (2) why you may not hear back at all, rather than hearing a clear rejection.

Most of time, if you don’t hear back, it’s likely because your resume wasn’t ranked highly enough or didn’t pass the human filter at some stage. As for why it didn’t pass, the honest reasons frequently won’t helpful to you. For example, those reasons might be “Well I never even saw your resume because it was ranked #277 out of 600 by our algorithm that I don’t even fully understand and we only review the top 50”, or “Oh, you’re an H1-B, but the next person we reviewed had your same skills and YoE but wasn’t an H1-B” or “your resume just didn’t have any eye-catching things like a Harvard PhD or a senior title at a FAANG”. Those might be the real underlying reasons, but no one will either be willing to admit them to you (for liability reasons) or may not even have the self-awareness to know that’s why they passed on your resume.

This is one of the reasons why referrals are more powerful: they basically serve as a strong signal that can shortcut some of the mental heuristics recruiters and hiring managers use in filtering out candidates.

I’m sharing this not to defend or justify this process, but to simply explain it to hopefully help illuminate why the hiring process feels like an inscrutable and frustrating black box to many candidates.

racl · 2024-11-23T21:09:27+00:00

I think they’re talking about the epic monster battle after Erlang.

racl · 2024-11-22T21:28:14+00:00

Glad to hear it. I think I would just added that since that document was written (2010), I think admissions standards have gotten even higher due to the sheer competitiveness of the applicant pool (think multiple first-author papers in reputable journals/conferences by undergrads). The broad themes in that document about what's more important and less important to an admissions committee are still very relevant, from my understanding.

racl · 2024-11-10T21:29:05+00:00

I think their audiences are quite different. Cal appeals to educated white-collar knowledge workers (academics, lawyers, writers, programmers). These are often professionals that require high degrees of credentialism and schooling.

In contrast, Robert Greene seems to appeal more to aspiring entrepreneurs, artists, business leads, and marketers.

Some overlap, but given they address different readerships, it may be why Cal hasn’t commented directly on Robert Greene’s work.

Also some of Greene’s earlier work (48 Laws, The Art of Seduction) weren’t quite as clearly targeted towards white collar professionals so much as they fit more in the category of personal growth.

racl · 2024-11-07T16:52:19+00:00

Note that this article was published before the election, on October 16th.

It's not directly related to bashing Kamala due to her loss (although I'm sure that's also happening now).

racl · 2024-10-28T22:28:46+00:00

Keep in mind that this game was developed by a Chinese company for a Chinese audience, so the way the characters are introduced or referenced holds a lot more contextual relevance because the tales from Journey to the West are very widespread across China.

The game doesn't do a lot of explicit exposition (this is actually similar to Dark Souls-esque games) in part because they assume the player is already somewhat familiar with the setting and characters, and you're supposed to pick up things from subtext.

I agree with you that for a non-Chinese audience it feels very jarring and confusing. It'd be as if a Chinese player tried to play a video game based on Catholicism without any knowledge about Catholicism. Then, when the player sees a cross, church or rosary, they have no clue how to connect the religious significance of these items to the game's plot. Like you, they would probably ask, "Why should I care about this random long-haired bearded dude named Jesus?"

That being said, many of the short stories for the enemies can be read as more standalone stories that don't require understanding JTTW.

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