WSJ reviews The Cure for Burnout: “In addition to exhaustion and stress, burnout, we are told, entails a sense of “misalignment” with the “direction your life is heading in,” even—or particularly—when all signs seem to point to success. Ms. Ballesteros avoids the common pitfall of enshrining burnout as endemic to the modern workplace, and encourages us to see it, instead, as an impetus to change our lives. She points out that burnout can arise from the high volume of our responsibilities, the burden of social demands or the feeling of “chronic disengagement and disinterest.” Mitigating burnout calls for changes to our mindset, personal care, time management, boundaries and stress management. Many of the techniques she recommends—time blocking, establishing accountability mechanisms, using the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize tasks, doing a morning check-in with yourself—will be familiar to regular readers of the self-help genre.”
Scott Alexander: “AI is like one of these detached blobs of brain tissue. This is why I was arguing as early as 2019 that the GPTs were a big step towards general intelligence. We call them “language models”, but as we’ve seen, with slight tweaks they can learn to generate images / video / music, play games, and possibly (I’m not really up to date on this research) handle movement for embodied robots. The exact structure of LLMs is optimized for language but the same general class of things is going to be able to do whatever human brain tissue does, because it’s overall a similar type of thing. You just need to find a way to plug the right input in and reinforce success (I say “just”, but obviously this will take billions of dollars, and work by thousands of people who are much smarter than I am). This is why I expect AI to become human-level or beyond pretty fast. Making a cerebral cortex at all is the hard part. After that, you just need to scale up, and hack together equivalents for other useful brain structures.” More: “The closest thing I’ve seen to agentic AI so far is AutoGPT, which is just GPT plus a wrapper that prompts it with things like “Make a list of ways to create a successful business”, “Okay, how would you do Step 1 on your list”, “Okay, now try doing that thing”, and so on. Connect this to some sort of output channel (like a GMail client that sends an email whenever GPT says the word [SEND]) and you can sort of imagine a hacked-together super-dumb agent.”
Dr. Rainer Zitelmann (Sep 2023): “At the end of the ’80s and into the ’90s, capitalism was on the rise around the world. Prominent examples include China, under Deng Xiaoping, Vietnam because of the Doi Moi reforms, Poland under Balcerowicz, and Reagan in the USA and Thatcher in the UK. Today, capitalism is on the defensive everywhere. Almost all the countries of South America have socialist governments. The EU is increasingly coming to resemble a planned economy. China is reversing course and tightening the state’s grip on more and more areas of life and the economy. And the United States just received its worst ever rating in the Index of Economic Freedom since the Heritage Foundation published the first index way back in 1995…The real problem is massive over-regulation. Under capitalism, companies decide what to produce and it is ultimately consumers who vote with their wallets. In a planned economy, politicians and civil servants make the decisions.”
Ajay Shah: “Every evening, solar users turn back to the grid. This is hard for managers of the grid. The bulk of the Indian energy system is coal thermal, so what is filling in the breach each evening is coal thermal. But in the day when the sun is shining, there aren’t enough buyers for this electricity. It takes hours for coal plants to increase or lower their generation: They cannot respond to surges and declines that play out over short periods of time. The global financial system will no longer fund new carbon-intensive generation plants. Indian energy firms have therefore pivoted in favour of renewables, and the addition of capacity in electricity generation based on fossil fuel has stalled…At present, too much is being asked of grid engineers. The electricity system of the future is a combination of solar, wind, and storage, orchestrated by the price. Decentralised adjustments by private persons will solve the bulk of the problem. This gives grid engineers a modest problem to fight each evening.”
WSJ: “Companies are juggling more software vendors than ever. It isn’t easy…CIOs are yielding control of some vendor management to business unit partners because there’s simply too much to keep track of—but the transition isn’t always smooth…Typically organizations have a handful of major key vendors, followed by a long tail that are used for smaller services. There have been cycles of trying to rationalize, consolidate and reduce the number of vendors used, but there’s also an acceptance that having more vendors makes companies less dependent on bigger ones, White said. He added that today’s AI hype is also fueling the fire as organizations look for new vendors to take advantage of cutting edge technology. Adding to the deluge, software companies have also wised up to the idea of business counterparts’ involvement and have shifted their sales strategies to target end users, Agusti said. She said she asks existing vendors not to target business people when they have a new solution they’re trying to sell and instead go through IT. “
