News   Jun 14, 2024
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PM Justin Trudeau's Canada

There’s always the unicorns as well. My lawyer’s daughter got a MA in Art History in London, UK and now has a super career at Sotheby’s auctions.

That's like when kids talk about making the NBA or NHL. Sure, it could happen. But not something they would bank on. Also, I'm going to guess that MA is not from some ordinary university (Oxbridge? SOAS?). And probably, being the daughter of a lawyer possibly helped with the networking.
 
There’s always the unicorns as well. My lawyer’s daughter got a MA in Art History in London, UK and now has a super career at Sotheby’s auctions.
That's probably more a function of your daughter and her drive. Running degree mills won't make more people like this.
 
Here's an exact example of the mismanagement in our system. Algonquin College cutting a hairstyling and esthetics program because it's not a moneymaker that caters to foreign students. And it's a program that has a waitlist. I'd rather fund this than more BAs.

 
Here's an exact example of the mismanagement in our system. Algonquin College cutting a hairstyling and esthetics program because it's not a moneymaker that caters to foreign students. And it's a program that has a waitlist. I'd rather fund this than more BAs.

Your post reminded me of my mid 20s. After my BA I went to George Brown for international business. And that’s where I noticed the difference in the women. In those pre-Lulu days, at university women’s fashion on campus was all sweat pants and ponytails. But then at GB with its fashion, hairdressing and cosmetics programs I was in awe.
 
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Here's an exact example of the mismanagement in our system. Algonquin College cutting a hairstyling and esthetics program because it's not a moneymaker that caters to foreign students. And it's a program that has a waitlist. I'd rather fund this than more BAs.

This is one field that is probably pretty resistant to automation and offshoring!
 
Your post reminded me of my mid 20s. After my BA I went to George Brown for international business. And that’s where I noticed the difference in the women. In those pre-Lulu days, at university women’s fashion on campus was all sweat pants and ponytails. But then at GB with its fashion, hairdressing and cosmetics programs I was a transformed.
Haha, I'm not opposed to the sweatpants and ponytail aesthetic. Anyone can be made fairly attractive with enough fashion, styling and makeup.
 
A lot of 'BS' jobs/degrees will be blown away by waves of AI replacing white collar work. I honestly worry about entry-level technical work. It is easy to imagine AI advancing to the point that most of that low-level technical work can be automated and reviewed by more experienced/senior staff. I just wonder how we will possibly train the next generation of experience/senior staff. It takes years of accumulated experience to develop that judgement, and I already find the 'apprenticeship' period pretty long for entry level workers to develop to the point where they are strong contributors.

99% of the current AI boom is nonsense, since the LLM path is pretty much done, and it will revert to normalcy after the hype dies down. It will implode around the time that investors find another shiny thing to look at. Proper use of AI actually increases the amount of human hours worked, so companies will run away from it screaming.
 
99% of the current AI boom is nonsense, since the LLM path is pretty much done, and it will revert to normalcy after the hype dies down. It will implode around the time that investors find another shiny thing to look at. Proper use of AI actually increases the amount of human hours worked, so companies will run away from it screaming.
 
99% of the current AI boom is nonsense, since the LLM path is pretty much done, and it will revert to normalcy after the hype dies down. It will implode around the time that investors find another shiny thing to look at. Proper use of AI actually increases the amount of human hours worked, so companies will run away from it screaming.

The current AI hype is overdone. That doesn't mean the idea has no legs or won't have an impact. It may not reduce jobs right away. But the increasing productivity could drive down employment growth initially. If every lawyer in a firm is 10% more productive, you could use 10% fewer lawyers for the same workload.
 
The current AI hype is overdone. That doesn't mean the idea has no legs or won't have an impact. It may not reduce jobs right away. But the increasing productivity could drive down employment growth initially. If every lawyer in a firm is 10% more productive, you could use 10% fewer lawyers for the same workload.
The only reason you need a lawyer is because I have a lawyer. It’s a virus.
 
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AI is definitely at a peak of the hype cycle. That doesn't discount the fact that advancements are continuing to be fairly rapid. I don't think the claim that we have reached a plateau or diminishing returns in the latest breakthrough with transformers/LLMs is supported by the evidence. The fact that the cost of inference has declined by 12x in a matter of months and has much further to fall yet through purpose-built hardware is in some ways more meaningful that advances in model size. Additional inference resources can extract more value out of existing models. It continues to be a target rich environment. Of course, most of the startups are BS and will be crushed by base models becoming more capable. It's a bit like how pets.com etc. all got eaten by Amazon.

Also not sure if people are aware of the huge advancements in things like protein folding, drug discovery (AI helped identify a novel antibiotic) , materials science, etc. enabled by AI. Big things are coming on that front.

Content generation is an example of BS jobs that are being automated away. Think copywriting... lots of Amazon listings found with ChatGPT errors...
 

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