Brooks Bergreen

Appreciator of innovation, uncomfortable truths, good design and a well made paella 🥘.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

Much as I dislike tow trucks… I think I prefer them to this. This is way too easy. 😂

[NEW【テクノロジーニュース】 @sutoroveli_news]

【速報】駐車場のロボットが車の下に潜り込み自動で持ち上げて空きスペースへ運ぶシステムが登場した。ヒュンダイが開発した自走式ロボットパレットで2トン超の車を360度回転させながら移動でき駐車場の収容台数を2倍以上にできる。​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Remarkable that realized ERCOT wholesale prices (2025 in orange) are near inflation-adjusted lows since 2012, even as Texas has seen the fastest load growth in the country. It highlights the upside of a policy and business climate that broadly supports growth.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

@ExnerPirot @BradWall306 Everything you show here is less than 10% of fossil energy use. 90% of fossil products we just burn for energy. We’ll look back not long from now and think of ourselves as Neanderthals for just lighting on fire these amazing molecules.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

@DannyCrichton @steipete I think a lot of it is go woke and go broke. The verge and ars have been insufferable since trump won and spend a lot of their time whining and not as much on tech. Most don’t want constant stream of politics with their nerd reading.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

@andrew_leach Thanks, will check it out.

[Jesse Peltan @JessePeltan]

The history of electricity is basically:
- use water to spin generator
- use hot water to spin generator
- use not water to spin generator
- not water not spin solid state generator

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

@sama @thorstenball More speed please! 🙏

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Politicians openly admit that taxing cigarettes, gas, or alcohol is meant to reduce consumption. They understand perfectly well that higher costs discourage behavior.

But when it comes to taxing income, that basic logic suddenly disappears. They pretend people will keep working, investing, and taking risks at the same rate while receiving less of the reward.

You can’t have it both ways.
If taxes discourage behavior, income taxes discourage earning.
If incentives matter for consumption, they matter for production.

This isn’t ignorance. It’s convenience.
They understand incentives when it supports control, and deny them when it exposes the cost of punishing work and success.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

Impressive.

[Tesla @Tesla]

Tesla Lithium Refinery

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

Great post. My sense is All so called white collar jobs today will become AI verification jobs esp for people with good experience in their sector. Quasi data science/info processing/programming jobs will be a huge chunk in the middle as people build experience here they will move into verification. All blue collar jobs will continue to see significant wage increases as there is a limited pool of people willing to do these jobs. Robotics will eat away at the corners of the blue collar jobs but will not be able to replace many of them for at least a couple of decades. As it does replace them those jobs will also become verification jobs (semi drivers that sit and watch rather than directly drive etc). Ultimately human agency and will is still required to do anything fundamental in the world, but it will be helped and quickened massively by additional intelligence.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Sharing an interesting recent conversation on AI's impact on the economy.

AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing.

If you were to forecast the impact of computing on the job market in ~1980s, the most predictive feature of a task/job you'd look at is to what extent the algorithm of it is fixed, i.e. are you just mechanically transforming information according to rote, easy to specify rules (e.g. typing, bookkeeping, human calculators, etc.)? Back then, this was the class of programs that the computing capability of that era allowed us to write (by hand, manually).

With AI now, we are able to write new programs that we could never hope to write by hand before. We do it by specifying objectives (e.g. classification accuracy, reward functions), and we search the program space via gradient descent to find neural networks that work well against that objective. This is my Software 2.0 blog post from a while ago. In this new programming paradigm then, the new most predictive feature to look at is verifiability. If a task/job is verifiable, then it is optimizable directly or via reinforcement learning, and a neural net can be trained to work extremely well. It's about to what extent an AI can "practice" something. The environment has to be resettable (you can start a new attempt), efficient (a lot attempts can be made), and rewardable (there is some automated process to reward any specific attempt that was made).

The more a task/job is verifiable, the more amenable it is to automation in the new programming paradigm. If it is not verifiable, it has to fall out from neural net magic of generalization fingers crossed, or via weaker means like imitation. This is what's driving the "jagged" frontier of progress in LLMs. Tasks that are verifiable progress rapidly, including possibly beyond the ability of top experts (e.g. math, code, amount of time spent watching videos, anything that looks like puzzles with correct answers), while many others lag by comparison (creative, strategic, tasks that combine real-world knowledge, state, context and common sense).

Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify.
Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

This lodged ball thing will stay with me for a long time. Blue jays were robbed! That was a live ball and it was a horrible call. I’m an expert because I’ve seen 7 baseball games ever.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

There is a complete phase change happening over the last 7 years and into the future in solar energy. Everything else will eventually pale in comparison. It continues to drop in price while everything else goes up. Nobody sees it yet but it’s blackberry/fossil and iPhone/solar.

[Megatron @Megatron_ron]

JUST IN:

🇺🇲🇨🇳 Elon Musk: China Could Produce Solar Panels to Power ALL of US in 18 Months

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

@Zephyr_hg NEWS

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

@Rogers World Series stream is down or mostly down for the last 20 minutes. Their name all over it and they own the team. Matches my experience with their wireless and internet service.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

@JessePeltan Lomberg is a shill. He’s found his audience and he’s monetizing it.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

@clawrence China engineers and builds things. We barely even “permit” them. Very different phsychology.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

@JessePeltan 100%… also cotton is much more relaxing to wear. Try it back to back wear only cotton one day and then only nylon or synthetics the next and note how you feel. Makes a difference.

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

Beautiful video and incredible process.

[Just a Dude Who Invests @DudeWhoInvests]

TAIWAN SEMICONDUCTOR $TSM DROPPED A VIDEO FROM ITS ARIZONA FAB SHOWING THE ASML $ASML EUV MACHINES PRINTING NEXT-GEN CHIPS…

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY STUNNING TO WATCH. 🤯

[Brooks Bergreen @brooksbergreen]

@teqtant @sdw This has been my experience. I went to the air and now toting my cameras around more and enjoying it. I don’t often miss the other lenses, as I’m programmed with some limitation already in my use of primes on other cameras, so I just take different pictures.