Short-term AI/GPT/LLM consulting services to help you strategize, discuss, and navigate the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence. Discover how these powerful tools can transform your business.
There's no need to hire a full-time consultant when you only need guidance for a few hours or days. I can quickly help you develop a solid plan that your existing engineers can build upon.
Offering simple and flexible contracts, I am available for clients in the EU, UK, US, and AUS/NZ time zones (with advance notice for synchronous meetings).
I found that telling Claude I was going to bed meant it continued on making assumptions for longer rather than asking lots of questions or stopping part way.
They aren’t allowed to do whatever they want with your data, there’s strict restrictions on requiring consent for things you want to do with user data.
If you're measuring it as "how many people own superyachts" that's probably different from how most people want to measure "how well is the planet being run".
> And she's probably more efficient in spending it than the practical alternatives.
Why? This seems like an odd statement. Why is a singer more efficient at doing this than a team of analysts?
> Yes to all of the above. I assume.
I have to point out that you are likely looking at the world in a drastically different way to most.
You think that
1. We should be pushing for more superyachts, as an immediate measure of efficient allocation of resources
2. Taylor Swift is being rewarded for efficient allocation of capital and not her songwriting, singing, etc.
3. Taylor Swift, who has been singing for many years at lower amounts of wealth, would stop if her fortune dropped and she had to release songs in order to gain more wealth
4. Taylor Swift is making music because there is something she wishes to purchase that she is saving up for. She does not wish to make music, and is putting up with it to finally afford something.
I think most people believe that musicians who are extremely popular for their music would continue to make music if they could live an extremely lavish lifestyle without a care in the world for money but their net worth didn't increase. I think that most people would prefer some measure of how well things are going that look at their own life, or how many people have food.
> Also, if that was the goal, wouldn't it be better to tax (or break up) the corporations rather than the shareholders? It comes out of their pocket either way,
If you do it via the corporations you're saying it should be linear (so everyone taxed flat). Doing it via the shareholders allows it to be non-linear.
> Isn't that fairly close to what we have now? I don't see any theoretical issues.
Massive concentration of wealth has a few outcomes you may find disagreeable or sub-optimal
* Huge concentration of power in smaller numbers of people, chosen for unrelated skills, heavily tied to luck
* People with huge amounts of power being able to make extremely sub-optimal decisions and still be entirely fine. Elon can buy and run a business into the ground on a whim and be entirely fine.
* Concentration of direction of human labour - it is more worthwhile to spend many lifetimes of humans to very slightly increase the comfort of one multi-billionaire.
For the last example, Americans earn more typically than anyone else in the world and data is easy to find. Assume lifetime earnings of $3M. Bezos' yacht cost more than enough for 100 full lifetimes of US median worker labour, and requires ten lifetimes every year to maintain.
For one ship, for one person.
You can look at that and say "this is optimal" but I am very unsure as to what you're then measuring.
> Obviously if we literally mean one person I don't think the market would pick that as an optimum outcome
Well it being a daft choice is rather the point, taking the absolute extremes is rarely a sensible approach. Total abolition of private wealth is not the point anyone is making. The argument people are making is to take money from those that have so much that the impact to their lives would be negligible, and use it to improve the lives of many others. It may even make them wealthier!
You said optimum there, but optimal for what? Even if it's just efficient allocation of capital, doesn't that rely on pressure to invest well? The reward for doing so is more wealth, but what if you don't need more, or don't need to constantly try and get more?
The wealthiest could sit with vast sums as cash and be fine, which is sensible for them but surely a terrible use of capital.
> the alternative is to have a relative small committee that, in practice, decides when to give and when to take away.
That's a government.
> Worst case is she gets angry and a bunch of people go hungry and uneducated,
Why would anyone go hungry and uneducated if Taylor Swift is angry? What is the process by which you see that happening?
> She's more effective with that donation than getting outcomes like educating 500 kids.
How do you figure that? And you can simply swap over fully educating those kids for something else if you want, unless the argument is that Taylor Swift specifically is better at allocating resources for whatever outcomes the population wants.
Let's take TS as an example. What is it she is being rewarded for, is it efficient allocation of capital? Is that why people buy her songs? Is that what's made her so incredibly wealthy?
Do you think that if she was rewarded somewhat less, that she'd stop making music? Stop touring?
In fact, imagine she never got more money. Do you think she's making music because she's saving up for something she cannot currently afford? Does she have a lifestyle that's unsustainable without earning even more money?
edit -
To be clear, I think the market is an incredible way of constructing a ludicrously large graph of how to use the worlds resources and human labour, tied to what people want as an outcome, allowing fractional voting through the network in a way that's extremely simple for end users (I buy things for prices I'm happy with, the "market" of millions of other people optimise the back end of that) and is self-optimising.
The problem comes when some people have enormously more votes than others, distorting it all, or are able to manipulate the graph, or where hill climbing optimisation cannot reach the more optimal states (infrastructure classically, legal systems are another good example).
> We've got a highly reliable and effective system for working that out (aka the free market economy) and no alternative in 2nd place that doesn't typically lead to mass starvation because someone underestimated how much food was needed.
This is an absolutely wild comparison. The choice is not "everything is purely market forces" vs "everything is centrally planned". We have all kinds of implementations across the world that have different systems.
> The people behind wealth taxes generally handwave explaining how their system will be better at allocating than the people who make a living of allocating wealth effectively
They have different targets though surely? The effective part here is that for one group it's getting more into the hands of the less well off, or funding (say) schools, healthcare, etc. The effective part for someone else is making a single person or family richer.
> So far no compelling cases where they've turned out to be right. If they could do a better job, why even allow private wealth at all?
Because utility is not linear. It is entirely reasonable to assume that the very extreme ends of a scale are not likely the most beneficial under almost any measure. If wealth getting concentrated is so good, why not only allow one person to have everything? See how odd that seems?
It is not surprising to me that it's a good idea overall to let people benefit from figuring out how to do things that people want.
It is also not surprising to me that it can be a good idea to take some of that benefit, and use it to do some of the following
* Alleviate suffering
* Long term planning/research to benefit all and speed up progress
* Core infrastructure that everybody benefits from but is hard to structure with pure market forces
For example, companies benefit from an educated workforce - are they individually going to fund schooling for young kids?
The goal is to try and hit some of those other things while not discouraging people too much from doing the things we want.
> taxes always make someone better off. So does wealth. A decision has to be made.
Sure. So we could ask, say, can we compare educating 500 children for 12 years vs Taylor Swifts net worth going from $2.1B to $2B? How much would she be hurt and how much would other benefit? What would be the impact if she was slightly less wealthy?
They’re the same type of problem as sql injection but there’s not the same ease of solution. There’s also a lot more subtle problems that can come in, but it’s still a decent comparison to help explain things.
Selecting from a menu is one way, but you can be much more broad about what acts can be taken. Give it an email tool and it can spam customers, give it an email tool locked to only being able to reply and you restrict what can go wrong. Limit exfiltration with restrictions similar to xss kinds of vulnerabilities (rendering images can leak data, etc).
Self promotion is fine here typically, I’d say the main thing here is it sounds like a tv ad. Try X! And not in response to a question or stated problem.
Here’s a tip, imagine how you’d comment if this wasn’t your library but just one that you knew and used. Would you have commented at all? Would you explain why you’d use it, how, the direct and clear relevance to the article?
Take that and add in that it’s your library.
If you wouldn’t comment otherwise, you’re just advertising a thing where people are. If you would, you’re contributing to a conversation with something you built.
Oh and there’s lots of open source products that have most useful features paid saas or licensed, or it’s an oss library that only talks to a paid saas thing.
Edit - the other thing you can do is just call out the comment at the start as self promotion or a plug, I think your work is more directly relevant here and doesn’t need that but it’s another approach when it’s a bit more tangential. That’s better here than other communities.
That’s wildly different, and if you want to invent things and then get mad at them you can, but the rules on ac are because the outside part has an impact on your neighbours.
I think so, or even more permanent ones. since it’s London I assume flats where you need permission for any number of outdoor units but it’s then one for semi detached and two for detached houses - one of the examples in the article is someone with three outdoor units afaict.
Those people seem to have installed multiple outdoor units, there are limited numbers you are allowed to do without getting planning permission (two for detached housing, one for semi, nothing by default for flats) because these things have impacts on those nearby.
The telegraph is an awful rag, and should be read assuming the facts are probably true as written but interpreted in an incredibly biased way.
Also speed and connectivity. My car needs a screen and some low power chips. It’s ten years old and the maps and everything are snappy (low quality touch screen aside, but that’s not too bad) because it’s all running on my nice fast device I already own that’s much newer than the car.
I think this is in the same vein as continuity and user centric and what you were describing but it’s a different part - more than one person drives my car. I want my things and my wife wants hers. Having accounts or something extra on a new shared device is annoying.
If a dev costs $1k/day that’s $30 to spend 15 minutes looking at a pr. How much review does that in tokens get you? I’d wager you’d easily find lots of low level issues that are beyond basic linting with that reliably, and I feel like latest gen models can do really good work.
Outside of the benefit of some extra documentation around changes and having more than one person see what’s happened there are a few main safety parts here:
* It can be easier to see a problem in something that another person wrote, you’re not clouded by what you intended to write
* different skill sets mean two sets of eyes broadens the kind of problems that can be found (benefits from selecting good reviewers, maybe I’m tagged because I know the llm APIs and performances better by someone who has done refactoring to improve, say, internal caching that’s more their thing)
* just chance. There’s some chance you spot an issue, some chance someone else does. Combined it’s better.
* I disagree they can’t find architectural or design issues. You see repeated changes of the same kind, or tying together things that shouldn’t be, etc.
But yes, many things could be caught before opening. Lots I catch as I’m explaining the change, like rubber ducking. I quite like AI code reviews things for this, there’s a whole back and forth that can be avoided once you get past basic linting/test level things. Save the human time for understanding the higher level issues.
There's no need to hire a full-time consultant when you only need guidance for a few hours or days. I can quickly help you develop a solid plan that your existing engineers can build upon.
Offering simple and flexible contracts, I am available for clients in the EU, UK, US, and AUS/NZ time zones (with advance notice for synchronous meetings).
Pricing:
£1200 for a half-day £2000 for a full day
For inquiries, please contact Ian at [email protected]