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Feral Joe: he sounds pretty rational and in-control these days. Imagine that.

If the NYT., et al., really believed in good faith that the accelerating cognitive decline of the actually serving president were an existential threat, it would still be a threat even if he only has six months (now three-and-a-half) left in his term. So, where’s the wall-to-wall apocalyptic coverage of his continuing and accelerating decline? It makes a person wonder (not really!).

I guess it’s OK to leave his finger on the button for another six months, as long as he’s not running for reëlection.

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Justin Wolfers: An Econ Educator's Guide to our AI-Powered Future

Note that we had the "conversation mode" of learning before there was printing. How did that go - poorly because knowledge will keep changing like the Chinese telephone experiment. If one naively assumes that current LLM technology would be accurate like the "Young Lady's {rimer", then fine. But LLM technology using transformers is not like that. It "hallucinates" - ie can talk BS. How can the receiver know what is true and what is not? For this model to work as a "conversation with a book", the responses must be accurate. The other issue is that reading the exact words of the author may be important. Where is the text ambiguous and weasel words and ambiguous phrasing used? Because a chatbot will hide this information to provide what sounds on the surface like an authoritative answer.

IMO, we could be better off with books that are written differently. Each chapter and section should have an abstract and the detailed material presented more in-depth, perhaps hyperlinked with local content and not in the cloud. Dynamic content with videos and charts that demonstrate changes rather than static images. Perhaps the content includes a video or audio reading of the material.

Dead tree books do have one great advantage today. They last a long time, Bit rot does not break the content (although holographic approaches would mitigate bit rot) and they survive technology changes that cause a "dark ages" of unrecoverable content.

Books with DVD (current storage technology) inserts are a compromise, but ideally restructuring a book to be more like a compilation of journal papers to aid reading would be preferable to SCI-FI fantasy AI talking books that try to answer questions you have about the book - questions you may not know how to ask to extract the true value of the contained knowledge.

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Insult Inflation—the Anti-Core

The big peaks and troughs are due to energy price changes. Food may be dragged along, but energy is teh driver. If correct, then a more stable, decarbinized, energy supply from renewables (and nuclear) that avoids oligopolistic fossil fuel producers controlling supply should tame these inflation/deflation shocks. An [unexpected] benefit of green energy supply in a decarbonized energy infrastructure.

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Well, food is a secondary driver. But distinctly secondary... Brad

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