Mike Konczal

confirming my priors: "ai exposure" is mostly nonsense the higher the average exposure score, the more disagreement there is on the degree of exposure the exceptions are: astronomers, statisticians, insurance underwriters and . . . economists (lol).

have had some...uh, spirited debates about this. but look idk how much of this drop in Professional & Business Services is attributable to "AI" or not. all i know is a lot of execs & management teams are telling me on background they just don't need XYZ as many new grads anymore:

AI progress since late 2024 looks like a goldilocks case to me along economic, alignment, meaning-crisis dimensions: -superhuman at routine, in-distribution tasks -is still of the function approximator type, not the RL alien type -bad at art with no real signs of improvement

hypothesis: the writing styles of language models are basically fine, they weren’t better in some halcyon before times. we just use them so much that we get annoyed by their mannerisms. they need to have a superhumanly diverse idiolect to not become grating

Fuck a breakup you ever been addicted to a restaurant that closed down ?😭😭

the konczal-bruenig effect: people on the left tend to be more skeptical of and hostile to AI, unless their job involves data analysis, then they are more positive about it

One week into SB 79 being law, permits for at least 220 new homes have been filed—and this is just the beginning. Laws change, housing gets built.