The Insomniac Coder

  For most of industrial history, "intelligence" was the scarcest and most expensive resource. To get a legal contract reviewed, a codebase audited, or a marketing strategy drafted, you had to hire a skilled human. This created a linear relationship between growth and headcount: to do twice as much "thinking," you needed twice as many "thinkers." We are now entering the era of the AI-Human Cost Inversion . Recent data shows that while a human expert costs between $15 and $60 per hour, an advanced AI agent performs equivalent information-processing tasks for as little as $0.10 to $0.50 per hour. When the cost of running an AI agent falls below the cost of a human worker, we don't just get "faster humans." We get a different kind of economy entirely. 1. From "Service" to "Utility" Historically, professional services (law, accounting, consulting) were rival goods . If a consultant was working on your project, they couldn'...

This is really cool: you can tell in the middle picture that the plane was on fire before the debris cloud even touched it: This is because of the pulse of heat generated by the explosion. Related articles by Zemanta Kablam! (blogs.discovermagazine.com)

OK, this is both useless and desperate. Why are we still putting up with this cabling nonsense? Why not develop a secure means of replacing USB with a wireless technology , even if it is even shorter range than Bluetooth ? We don't need a new cable that goes 3GB/s because even if we had a device that could use such a connection, or computers can't sustain such a channel for long periods of time.  Instead we should be able to take a hard disk , pair it with our PC wirelessly , and then it would work at whatever speed, but only as long as the drive was within 3 feet from the PC. If we do this right, our PC will have one wire coming out of it, the power cord. Control devices should use a slower channel like Bluetooth or 802.11b/g/n, and all data channels should go over this high speed wireless channel. Even the Internet connection! We have had routers with push-button device pairings for a while, I don't see why we can't have it also work over this theoretical ch...

X-37B unmanned space shuttle   This is really cool. Instead of trying to build a new shuttle, somebody actually figured out how to take the parts of the process that work (reusable vehicle that is blasted off like a rocket , then glides down like a plane) and made it smaller (read: cheaper) and unmanned. They also added some interesting capabilities, like the way it scoots in and out of the atmosphere to switch directions, which totally screws with anyone that is relying on basic orbital tracking calculations to figure out where it should be. Related articles by Zemanta Amateur Astronomers Spot Super Secret X-37B Space Shuttle Replacement [X-37b] (gizmodo.com) Secret X-37B space plane lost by sat-spotters for 2 weeks (go.theregister.com) Secret X-37B Space Plane Has Changed Orbit (space.com)