Rohr Wiseraker

This is not the first time Japanese media have declared an overtourism crisis. In the 1960s and early 1970s, with the economy booming, high-speed trains connecting big cities and disposable income in everyone’s pockets, young families began taking domestic trips en masse.

In contrast to the modern perception of Japan as an exceptionally neat, clean... See more

Worrying signs

There are growing, worrying signs that the optimism about AI won’t pan out.

An MIT report found 95% of organizations surveyed are getting no return on their AI product investments. A University of Chicago economics paper found AI chatbots had “no significant impact on workers’ earnings, recorded hours, or wages” at 7,000 Danish... See more

David Cahn, a partner at venture-capital firm Sequoia, estimates that the money invested in AI infrastructure in 2023 and 2024 alone requires consumers and companies to buy roughly $800 billion in AI products over the life of these chips and data centers to produce a good investment return. Analysts believe most AI processors have a useful life of... See more

What they're really good for is starting from nothing and building stuff that doesn't have to support a lot of weight. So you'll see these guys who post things like, I coded a thing for my fucking TV in two days. And you're like, yeah, it's not that hard to go from zero to a thing for your TV. Now try to modify Facebook so that it works in a... See more

almost everything I write or think about is either too particular for convergence machines like LLMs to have anything to say about it, or I want to know what I think or what the people I work with think or what the market I work with thinks, which again, is particular. So, you know, it can give me some kind of general point of view on social media.... See more

I think back to these technologies that get hyped a lot like crypto. For several years, everywhere you went, people were telling you about how crypto was going to change everything. It was going to end the reign of fiat currency and lead to new political structures. And one of the things I used to say back then is, if any of that's true, you won't... See more