Double Burrito Day

If you know me, then you know that Las Vegas is my home away from home. Or at least it used to be. Since I last spent time in Vegas, a bar at the Venetian and Planet Hollywood has opened, called Tipsy Robot. You punch in your order, pay, and a pair of mechanical robot arms go to work to prepare a refreshing cocktail for you to enjoy.

The good news is that I’ll never have to send back a gin and tonic because they put a lemon instead of a lime in my drink. The bad news is that the bill comes with an automatic 10 percent gratuity. So yes, you still need to tip your server / bartender even if they are a robot.

It’s like living in the future.

Random Thoughts: Has it occurred to anyone that today’s frontier AI models might all be trained by reading code that I wrote in the 00’s and 10’s?

“The only way to fix spaghetti code is…MORE spaghetti code!” -Me

Laugh all you want. All those years I only ever missed one project deadline. Fortunately, no one noticed. Everyone was too busy running around screaming into their Cisco 7900 IP phones “WHAT THE f*#! AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH SIXTY THOUSAND SHARES OF ENRON!?” True story.

Those were crazy times. Lunch was a Marlboro Red and a Mt Dew, dinner was a filet mignon at Morton’s, and Mary J Blige was blasting Family Affair through my multi-disk Blaupunkt setup.

Life was beautiful and the sun shone everyday.

Random Thoughts: Jevons paradox is an economic theory stating that as technology makes the use of a resource more efficient, total consumption of that resource increases rather than decreases. This happens because higher efficiency lowers the effective cost, which drives up overall demand. 19th century economist William Jevons (I bet his friends called him Billy) observed that James Watt’s (perhaps aka Jimmy Watt) improved steam engine made coal usage far more efficient, which actually caused British industries to buy and burn more coal overalI. I told you that story to tell you this one.

As AI makes workers more efficient in their everyday work, there will be a net increase in demand for human employees. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I have never in my 300.0 years of working ever sat in a quarterly planning meeting and thought to myself, “man I wish we had more stuff that we could be working on.” And to anyone who disagrees with me, I’m rubber and you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.

Filed under: I did not see this coming.

Real-world data from Waymo shows that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries. The evidence has not been independently verified, but it is unusually transparent, large‑scale evidence.

So who would be against autonomous vehicles (AVs) besides gear heads like me?

Trial lawyers. 😂

Lobbies representing troll, I mean trial lawyers are lobbying for the right to sue automakers et al. It turns out trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents. Go figure.

Tell me if you’ve heard this story before:

“AI is going to disrupt/replace…”

I was just reading about the D’Ieteren Group. Never heard of them? I bet you’ve written on one of their notebooks. They own Moleskine – among other things. I told you that story to tell you this one.

In 1805, 14 year old orphan Jean-Joseph D’Ieteren took over a small workshop in Brussels making wheels for horse carriages. The company he would found would become one of the most celebrated horse carriage makers throughout Europe. But this carriage didn’t get wiped out by the automobile, two World Wars, or the Great Depression. In fact, it walked away from its core business four times. 221 years later, the D’Ieteren Group operates in more than 40 countries, employs over 32,000 people, and generates annual revenues exceeding $8.2 billion.

Whenever a stranger asks me “what do you do?” I’m never quite sure how to respond…unless I’ve been drinking and then the answer is usually “I own a urinal cake company” or “I sell tank insurance to the military”. 😂

What was I saying? Oh yeah, there’s a lesson in the story of the D’Ieteren Group, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. 🤷🏻‍♂️ IBM used to make calculators, Nokia started as a paper mill, American Express was an express mail order company, and Netflix used to rent physical DVDs via mail order. Water’s wet, the sky is blue, and…OH I remember what I was going to say.

“Never confuse where you live with where you work. And never confuse who you are with what you do.” -Me

Random thoughts of the day:

1. FFS why would you put the delete button two microns away from the archive button!!!
2. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – Arthur C Clarke

In this context, the current set of AI tools are, relatively speaking, crude and rudimentary. Technologists talk about prompting and context windows, and tokens as if it were as exciting as the first season of LOST. CEOs are all in on AI because they see an opportunity to either increase 💰 or save 💰💰💰. Though I am of the belief that most CEOs couldn’t tell you how to connect to the company WiFi much less craft an AI strategy. But I reckon most people don’t see a ton of value in AI. Perhaps a good analogy is the BlackBerry or Palm Pilot. The only reason anyone carried one of these is because it was required for work or because it was a status symbol for pretentious aholes. See above, me 20 years ago. But the iPhone! There were lines straight up and down and around the corner and down the street at the Town Center when iPhones came out. It was magic.

Until Tim Cook or someone gets off their ass and builds a device or software that makes AI appear as though it were magic, no one is really going to be compelled to use it.

Someone once wrote, “art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on the wings of misery”

Art provides self-expression and healing. An outlet to process emotions and confront thoughts. It allows individuals to explore different perspectives and connect with experiences beyond their own. It provides nourishment to the human spirit and inspires us by transforming personal experiences into universal experiences.

Honest Question: What happens to the human spirit when the primary source of art is produced by Artificially Intelligent Nano Anthropic Generative Pre-Trained Transforners?

Great art, great writing, great code, and great accomplishments require [human] suffering.

To that end, if you’ve ever worked with me then you’ve probably heard me yell the following:

“I know two sprints is not a lot of time, but you’ll figure it out. If it was easy, then [with all due respect 😁] they would have hired Accenture to do it.”