rogermunibond

https://www.ft.com/content/a0e54dd5-b270-42cc-8c4c-18a0b8b3e6cc AI agents working across various apps would make life easier for consumers, but destroy walled gardens created by app developers.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03990-2 Running out of data

Waluigi jokes are trending online

CP still trading at a premium to NA rail but for how long? Use the sell off as a buying point. https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/the-railroad-on-the-wrong-side-of-trumps-tariffs-51d1a1bc?mod=hp_lead_pos10

yeah I take that back. The UNODC 2024 report has a lot of data (not all of it good or even up to date but it’s the best available). Heroin addiction is a big problem in Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe. Opioids is a much bigger issue in US, UK, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Egypt, Nigeria, India, Pakistan. 60 million opioid/opiate addicts globally.

Criminalization of possession and usage doesn’t work, decriminalizing and treatment doesn’t work, stopping supply doesn’t work. Maybe legalization works but I doubt it. What countries have very low or no illicit drug usage? Seems to me that the problem is a WEIRD one - western, educated, industrialized, rich democracies. Would the US population tolerate the death penalty for dealing and trafficking?

What about fentanyl entering from Canada? Anyone have data on that? Why can't we control our drug problem on the demand side? Have we given up on that?

Mike Judge's Idiocracy was prescient.

Test time compute - Nadella just referenced OpenAI's o1 model in his talk yesterday. Additional compute at the time of answering. Pretty cool. https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/20/ai-scaling-laws-are-showing-diminishing-returns-forcing-ai-labs-to-change-course/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1858929066264379629.html?utm_campaign=topunroll Fascinating Twitter thread on the IT industry slackers. Deedy @deedydas Everyone thinks this is an exaggeration but there are so many software engineers, not just at FAANG, who I know personally who literally make ~2 code changes a month, few emails, few meetings, remote work, < 5 hours/ week, for ~$200-300k. Here are some of those companies: Oracle Salesforce Cisco Workday SAP IBM VMware Intuit Autodesk Veeva Box Citrix Adobe The “quiet quitting” playbook is well known: - “in a meeting” on slack - scheduled slack, email, code at late hours - private calendar with blocks - mouse jiggler for always online - “this will take 2 weeks” (1 day) - “oh, the spec wasn’t clear” - many small refactors - “build is having issues” - blocked by another team - will take time bcuz <obscure tech reason> like “race condition” - “can you create a jira for that?” And no, AI is not writing their code. Most of these people are chilling so hard they have no idea what AI can do. Most people in tech were never surprised that Elon could lay off 80% of Twitter, you can lay off 80% of most of these companies

CP and CSX Mexico to Southeast intermodal is ready to go December 1 https://theloadstar.com/us-and-mexico-intermodal-traffic-surge-too-much-for-railways-to-swallow/ CP is losing some of its premium to US Class I rails due to fears of Mexico/China tariffs. Long term say 4 years out even with tariffs I wouldn't be overly worried.

I’m totally pro exercise. But I’m anti linking mouse model papers to talk up the effects of exercise. here are two good ones in HUMANS - increase in life expectancy and improved cancer survival rates. there’s a typo in the tweet. Adds 6.3 years in life expectancy

Sorry but there's a lot of junk science and unreplicated studies which purport to show benefits for x y and z. The exercise hipposcampus study is in mice.

Latest LLM models are not advancing as fast as predicted by scaling laws/theory. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-google-anthropic-struggling-build-100020816.html

What's the benefit of longer nerve growth in muscle?

Are you referring to Google Translate integration in Android?

So ever since Bill Perry's last supper in 1993, the defense industry has been in consolidation mode. Now there's five main defense prime contractors. How long before the current wave of technology (AI/LLM, autonomy, air/land/sea drones, robotics, hypersonic missiles) start eating into the defense prime contractors main business? Does the US need aircraft carrier groups when autonomous hypersonic missiles can hunt down carriers easily? Do we need trillions of dollars spent on the F-35 when autonomous drone swarms can operate the same missions? Do we need M-1 Abrams tanks on the battlefield since they are so easily targeted by drones? Interesting Tyler Cowen podcast on defense innovation https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/christopher-kirchhoff/ Bill Perry's last supper https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-a-1993-pentagon-dinner-reshaped-the-defense-industry

AI Meta announced Seamless in 2023 You can test it on huggingface. It's pretty good and even maintains expressiveness/mood of the speech. https://huggingface.co/collections/facebook/seamless-communication-6568d486ef451c6ba62c7724

LLM powered translation in real time either through speakers (over air) or through Bluetooth earbuds?

I don't think China wants to be a reserve currency. They can't run trade surpluses if they are a reserve currency.

Yeah trade - tariffs and cutting off Chinese goods moving through Mexico. UNP is up.

More Chinese factories in the US a la Japan in the 90s

Treasury bills

Isn't the real issue with most NA rail the lack of volume growth? They've had to deal with huge decline in PRB and thermal coal. Container, commodity, not growing.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/federal-trade-commission-announces-final-click-cancel-rule-making-it-easier-consumers-end-recurring Golf clap. Finally a ruling from Lina Khan that I can get behind. I wonder if subscription companies of all sorts are going to start going down.