A coder getting AI is like a farmer getting a tractor and saying "oh wow, look how fast it tills my small plot! Now what used to take all day takes 30 minutes. I can relax for the rest of the day".
What a tractor actually does is help the farmer till LARGER plots. It still takes all day - but you achieve more.
Any farmer still tilling small plots will be out of business.
Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.
The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.
So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.
Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.
Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.
The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.
Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.
@kemboi__amos We have normalized shenanigans to the point we find this amusing. A whole lifetime wasted thinking God and life is against you when simple political and social corruption keeps our mental and physical capabilities constrained. Then the church takes over. There's no other heaven!
I'm joining OpenAI next week!🥹 The job search turned out to be really challenging but also super rewarding, so I wrote a small blog to share what I learned along the way and hopefully make the process a little less mysterious for the next person. https://t.co/6FigSBdenD
So I gave Fable 5 the watchmaker benchmark: a full Swiss lever movement in Three.js. Real gear ratios (18,000 bph), working escapement, breathing hairspring — and the hands tell actual time. It verified its own work with vision, in a loop, until done. ⌚
The simulation will pause tomorrow for 3 years for renovation but you will not notice this lapse in time
You will however notice one of the most profound changes we have seen this millennia