I recently took a trip from Chicago to LA and saw some folks doing just this! They had a restored Pullman sleeping car and a kitchen/bar car behind it with crystal chandeliers. Maybe the single most luxurious way to travel. Every stop people would get out and gawk at their cars.
I'm not sure why, other than for the nostalgia, I'd do this other than a trans-Atlantic ocean liner. I have take fairly comfortable sleepers in Europe but nothing like a luxurious ship.
Rail is my favorite way to travel. Going to sleep at night with the country going by is one of the finest feelings imaginable in life, little towns with lights on in empty public squares, just one of my absolute favorite things. And you wake up in endless fields or breathtaking views of canyons and mountains. The people are friendly and you meet new ones at every meal. The sleeper accommodations aren't exactly the Ritz, but they're cozy and comfortable and good for reading or writing or just sitting and looking out the window for hours. Coffee is plentiful and decent, meals are probably microwaved but served on white tablecloths. Cruises give me a feeling of disconnectedness. You're on endless waves, endless sea, in the middle of nowhere. On the train, even going through a desert you feel like you're in the moving center of the world and every stop you could get off and be in a town you'd never heard of that means something to someone. You feel like you're a part of the grand and forgotten history that built the country.
It definitely depends on what you're looking for. I'm very happy with extremely low-key, cozy, and quiet. There are trains that have lectures and good meals (the trans Canadian railway!) but not Amtrak as far as I'm aware.
My take is the reckoning will come for the billion businesses that offer B2B AI solutions that don't offer any meaningful value. "Analyze customer intent and improve conversion with XYZ AI!" The tools of the AI revolution will continue to exist though development (read money) will presumably slow as businesses recalibrate and stop paying for the silver bullet solutions that they discovered don't work. Then the snake oil business people who built businesses around LLMs will move onto whatever BlockChain 2 Electric Boogaloo looks like.
Presumably a reference to the river in Lord of the Rings or the WoW character, though the relation to either is somewhat lost on me. It is a cool name though.
Edit: or I'm dumb and the author's name is Anduin.
Having engineers specialized in a specific stack learn on the job for the sake of/while working on a project is a great way to end up with really funky code and poor user experiences. I speak as a developer tasked with doing exactly that several times at a previous job, and the long-term is never pretty. The first code you write is immediately legacy code, but if you're learning as you write for a project that is already in motion, you're usually stuck with that legacy code until someone goes out of business or the rapture comes and they have to do a reorg because half the team was hauled to the kingdom of heaven, and now there's an MBA running the department who doesn't like you and wants to leverage AI to do the block chain.
There's stories that bridge the gaps between the two models of explosions and fires and legally actionable fast moving breakages that bring new people into start-ups who put these processes into place and generally shift the culture towards cautiousness. Other industries need to start at point B, or otherwise learn the lessons that get you there _quickly_.
Oh man. Early in my career I was working a job I didn't like and doing work that was by necessity incredibly hacky and tedious—not an interesting challenge, just a grinding one. It involved overwriting template files that weren't supposed to be overwritten and essentially writing multiple versions of the same code in multiple places because the system was so kludgey.
This project stretched on and on with brutally painstaking iteration, long hours, fires happening with other clients, etc, etc, long story short, I sort of lost my mind and left an Easter egg comment in the code in a state of minor madness.
Years after I had left the job, I got a message from a former coworker that said "Do you know anything about MOOL?"
I said I didn't know anything about something called MOOL, and he said, the client had found a long diatribe about a bovine god named MOOL in an obscure template file deep in the codebase, and I said, "ah, yeah, that was probably me."
The head of IT for the former client had found the code and gotten in touch with my coworker and said, "I assume this isn't a security breach, but I also don't know what the hell it is." He thankfully had a sense of humor about it, and it ended up being a nice opportunity to catch up. Pretty much the best possible outcome.
Now adays I would never do that, after experiencing real security breaches and dealing with that nightmare. But it was fun knowing A. My ancient horrible code was still in production and B. The comment I had left, which I'd forgotten about, and probably assumed no one would ever read, had been found like a flag in the moon or at least a time capsule.
Something is nagging me about the AI-human replacement conversation that I would love insight from people who know more about startup money than me. It seems like the AI revolution hit as interest rates went insane, and at the same time the AI that could write code was becoming available, the free VC money dried up, or at least changed. I feel like that's not usually a part of the conversation and I'm wondering if we would be having the same conversation if money for startups was thrown around (and more jobs were being created for SWEs) the way it was when interest rates were zero. I know next to nothing about this and would love to hear informed opinions.
> It seems like the AI revolution hit as interest rates went insane...
> ...I'm wondering if we would be having the same conversation if money for startups was thrown around (and more jobs were being created for SWEs) the way it was when interest rates were zero.
The end of free money probably has to do with why C-level types are salivating at AI tools as a cheaper potential replacement for some employees, but describing the interest rates returning to nonzero percentages as going insane is really kind of a... wild take?
The period of interest rates at or near zero was a historical anomaly [1]. And that policy clearly resulted in massive, systemic misallocation of investment at global scale.
its not part of the conversation because the influence here is tangential at best (1) and your sense of how much vc money is on the table at any given time is not good (2).
1a. most seed/A stage investing is acyclical because it is not really about timing for exits, people just always need dry powder
1b. tech advancement is definitely acyclical - alexnet, transformers, and gpt were all just done by very small teams without a lot of funding. gpt2->3 was funded by microsoft, not vc
2a. (i have advance knowledge of this bc i've previewed the keynote slides for ai.engineer) free vc money slowed in 2022-2023 but has not at all dried up and in fact reaccelerated in a very dramatic way. up 70% this yr
2b. "vc" is a tenous term when all biglabs are >>10b valuation and raising from softbank or sovereign wealth. its no longer vc, its about reallocating capital from publics to privates because the only good ai co's are private
I'm not seeing how you're replying to this comment. I'm not sure you've understood their point.
The point is that there's a correlation between macroeconomic dynamics (ie., the price of credit increasing) and the "rise of AI". In ordinary times, absent AI, the macroeconomic dynamics would fully explain the economic shifts we're seeing.
So the question is why do we event need to mention AI in our explanation of recent economic shifts?
What phenomena, exactly, require positing AI disruption?
Social media. Especially in SV, the embarrassment of failing publicly having been given so much money is far too painful psychologically.
Spinning that to say you're a "visionary" for replacing expensive employees with AI (even when it's clear we're not there yet) is risky, but a good enough smoke screen to distract the average bear from poking holes in your financials.
It's an analysis of cognitive decline from "active coping and grit". The study is being done exclusively on a black cohort, it appears from their Background, because these studies have already been done on white cohorts and they have the data available already to do the comparisons. I'm not a scientist, feel free to correct me, someone, if I'm misreading this.
Is the use of the data appropriate/applicable to what the linked article is suggesting? Probably not.
I did skim it, but it didn't help me much, because I didn't see any comparison to the supposed other cohorts, and even if they had done those, an online convenience sample is almost certainly going to differ a lot in many ways from whatever other white cohort you used from a different study, whereas you could've simply recruited white participants from the same service and gotten an obviously much more valid comparison group.
RAM brought back that funky sound which had been completely absent from contemporary dance music. It was a revival of old elements, mixed with modern electronic sound. A masterful mingling of elements of the past and the future coming together to form something not quite as good as either, but listenable and danceable, and most importantly impactful, because after that album there was a wave of artists emulating that sound. We wouldn't have gotten Uptown Special if we hadn't gotten Random Access Memories. That's my feeling on it anyway.
