7 Comments

Ioannidou et al: "Inflation" or deviations, positive or negative, from target inflation?

I don't know which annoys me more a) assuming control of inflation means only overshooting targets is bad or b) control of deficits means only reducing expenditures.

Expand full comment

Very sorry to learn about your sciatica. My wife has the same issue: an hour or more a day of exercises "merely handicapping and pain-inducing (rather than disabling and agonizing)". She gets physiotherapy too!

Expand full comment

Welcome to the exciting world of open source software. Getting something to work is generally a crap shoot. There is an open source tide prediction program that I like. Now and then, I try building it. Most of the time it fails with a series of inscrutable errors. I usually try two or three methods to rebuild it, but it seems to go through its own tidal cycle. When a build actually works, I carefully archive to precious compiled code and hope that it continues to work until the net alignment of the sun, moon and stars.

(I gather that this is why they developed Docker and other such encapsulation systems. Open source software is so sensitive to the existing system environment that making it reliable requires a complete encapsulation of the code, the libraries, the configuration and whatever else. Unfortuantely, Docker is open source software, so using it has all the same problems as using any piece of open source software.)

Expand full comment

What if we called Artificial Intelligence simply Predictive Analytics using Large Language Models?

Would the hype decline? After all, who likes a statistics course and who knows what LLM's are.

That said, I agree that if one didn't have to learn R or Python, and simply state to a computer: Regress this column of data against these three variables, yada ,yada ,yada...the world would be better off.

I am looking forward to an Excel spreadsheet with AI.

Maybe it will do my taxes for me too!

ChatbotGPT: Compute Bill's taxes with the data in my checking, savings, brokerage and credit card accounts with information from the attached W-2s.

Expand full comment

Golly, sciatica! The Lord knows that so many of us have it and yet doesn't do anything.

Expand full comment

Can something be less inhuman and stupid when it is not based on intelligence, and given access to a button, could certainly start a nuclear war by mistake.

How about "shows its lack of its superficial mimicry of an artifact of intelligence less often"?

Every blogger who sorta wants to say there's some possibility of sentient like intelligence sets sensible discourse back. They make me want to take time away from other matters and comment. I resist most after framing a response in my head. You're too demonstrably knowledgeable and thoughtful not to counsel on the apparent lack of reasoning behind bullet #1.

Frivolous compliments? NO. I pay for your words. I want the best

Best regards.

Expand full comment