> I think Bregman skirts close to the "Effective Altruism" movement and his work has similar problems of choosing flashy, exciting, elitist projects over boring, uncomfortable, policy changes.
I'm sorry, but what? The most prominent EA projects focus on cost effective interventions that save and improve lives.
Give Well's current top recommendations are medicines and nets to prevent malaria, vitamin A supplements and promoting regular childhood vaccinations. None of them are flashy or elitist.
> you may run some models locally if only from a cost perspective
I have a hard time believing running a model on a laptop will be cheaper than running it in a datacenter. Why wouldn't economies of scale apply here as with every other computation?
> The computers were very old IBM PC compatible machines, mostly with monochrome cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors. They had no hard disks at all. They had a few hundred kilobytes of RAM. Every time, we performed the same ritual. Insert a 5¼-inch floppy disk to load MS-DOS into memory. Then insert another disk to load LOGO.COM. Then write small Logo programs and watch the turtle move.
I'm a few years younger than OP and grew up in a large Indian city, but this matches my earliest experience exactly, right down to having to take our shoes off before entering the computer lab.
The quote absolutely reads like AI slop.