Why is it cheaper for individuals to install some amount of cheap solar power for themselves than for the grid to install it and then deliver it to them, with economies of scale in the construction and maintenance? Transmission cost?

2 data points: I have 15-20 years of experience at a variety of companies but no college and no FANG, currently semi-retired. Recruiters still spam me with many offers and my professional network wants to hire me at their small companies.

A friend of mine has ~2 years of experience as a web dev and some experience as a mechanical engineer + random personal projects, no college, and he worked hard to look for a software job and found absolutely nothing, with most companies never contacting him after an application.

One and a half years later it seems like AI tools are able to sort of help humans with very rote programming work (e.g. changing or writing code to accomplish a simple goal, implementing versions of things that are well-known to the AI like a textbook algorithm or a browser form to enter data, answering documentation-like questions about a system) but aren't much help yet on the more skilled labor parts of software engineering.

It seems like Musk in 2018 dramatically underestimated the ability of OpenAI to compete with Google in the medium term.

Thanks for not only doing this but noting the accuracy of the unchecked transcript, it's always hard work to build a mental model of how good LLM tools are at what stuff.

I don't know whether this resembles your experience at all, but for me, skills translate pretty directly to moment-to-moment life satisfaction, because the most satisfying kind of experience is doing something that exercises my existing skills. I would say that only very recently (in my 30s) do I feel "capped out" on life satisfaction from skills (because I am already quite skilled at almost everything I spend all my time doing) and I have thereby begun spending more time trying to do more specific things in the world.

I worked at Manifold but not on Love. My impression from watching and talking to my coworkers was that it was a fun side idea that they felt like launching and seeing if it happened to take off, and when it didn't they got bored and moved on. Manifold also had a very quirky take on it due to the ideology of trying to use prediction markets as much as possible and making everything very public. I would advise against taking it seriously as evidence that an OKC-like product is a bad idea or a bad business.

If you installed it in a preschool and it successfully killed all the pathogens there wouldn't be essentially no effect.

Superficially, human minds look like they are way too diverse for that to cause human extinction by accident. If new ideas toast some specific human subgroup, other subgroups will not be equally affected.

Why do you feel so strongly about using so much eye contact in normal conversations? I sometimes make eye contact and sometimes don't and that seems fine.

I agree with your sentiment that being very uncomfortable with eye contact is probably an indication of some other psychological thing you could work on, but it sounds like you maybe feel more strongly about it than that.