Jevon's Paradox and AI

 In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal.  

As something gets more efficient more not less of it is used. This is going to happen to software. If a developer can produce more features and products witht he help of AI that will increase the demand for developers not reduce it.

Someone can reasonably ask but what if an AI is more efficient at all the aspects of making software. Designing specifications, testing the UX with customers, Unit testing, creating the backend code, the UI code, the security testing etc. Then the economics law of comparative advantage comes into play. Even if someone is better than me at everything we still produce more if I concentrate on the area they are less better than me at.

This does get into tricky areas as Moores law and software improvements means that as soon as software gets better than us at a a task it gets vastly better than us pretty soon afterward. The most recent stockfish 18 is about elo 4000. In 100 games the worlds best players would not even get one draw against it. Competitions between people and computers used to happen until fairly recently.

Henry Ford II: Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?

Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?

St Brigid and Fair Division

 In Cogitosus’s Life of St Brigid the Virgin translation Liam de Paor St Brigid does a fair division into 3 equal parts. The algorithm used is not explained.

"[She divides a silver dish exactly into three]

Her miracles are great, but this one is especially admired.
Three lepers came, asking for alms of any kind, and she gave them a
silver dish. So that this would not cause discord and contention among
them when they came to share it out, she spoke to a certain person expert in

the weighing of gold and silver, and asked him to divide it among them in
three parts of equal weight. When he began to excuse himself, pointing
out that there was no way he could divide it up so that the three parts would
weigh exactly the same, the most blessed Brigid herself took the silver dish
and struck it against a stone, breaking it into three parts as she had wished.
Marvellous to tell, when the three parts were tested on the scales, not one
part was found to be heavier or lighter by a breath than any other. So the three
poor people left with their gift and there was no cause for envy or grudging
between them."

Gantt Chart Visualisations

I remember hearing years ago that real cheeseburgers could only happen after industrialisation, greenhouses and freezing as the ingredients. On the impracticality of a cheeseburger. This is also a tale of Malthusian constraints for example you would have killed cattle after they fattened over the summer. You could kill them anytime but hunger was so common the best time was nearly always picked. And because of that rennet to make cheese was only practically available then also.

I made a graph for cheeseburgers and put it on reddit where people shouted at me. We do not realise the time constraints (and malthusian ones) on food until very recently. And I think a Gantt chart is a good way to show them. That and just making a visualisation out of a Gantt chart I thought was an interesting idea.

If you know of someone else who made a visualisation out of a Gantt chart let me know as I doubt it is a new idea.

I also made one of Club Sandwiches and I think thats also an interesting story about nature and our food. The code and data are here
 

We Didn't Start the Fire Graph

I made a graph of when people in "We didn't start the fire" were born, did the act referenced in the song and died. Because Bridget Bardot died people found it interesting that only three people. Chubby checker, Bob Dylan and Bernie Goetz remain alive of those mentioned in the song.

The reddit post of the graph got popular and it was picked up by a few online newspapers.

People Magazine, The Poke, the Express, fox news and extra.ie  and the Irish star

Bonus points for a tabloid including my argument about Popperian epistemology in their quotes.

There were a few weird things I found out in this process. 
None of the journalists messaged me. My handle was in the image and you can message the creator of a post on reddit but none did. The poke messaged me when I was one of their 25 funny tweets of the week 4 years ago, so not doing that now about an entire article is a change.

I found a few of the authors of articles email addresses. This is hard now as how to contact a journalist now seems to be hidden. I messaged them a new version of the graph with some fixes in case they want to use that one instead, but none replied.

A fair few of the Articles using my picture I can't see as they are geo-blocked. It is a bit odd that they can take something I made and not talk to me and not let me see they thing they made from it.

and

and

My silly picture is not important. But on a bigger scale huge numbers of silly pictures and jokes have made the internet fun for the last several decades. And in my experience when one of these was yours in the past some amount of credit came back to you. It didn't pay any bills or anything. But it did feel in some way that you putting in an effort was recognised and at least part of a very large group of people making silly stuff to entertain people. If the incentives are now one way, where a news organisation can use something and you can't even see it that seems like the general internet bargain has become skewed. 

Where Britain invaded in an Anamaniacs Song Dance

An Irish woman named Emma invented an the Animaniacs song listing the Countries of the World and jumped whenever a country that hasn't been invaded by Britain is mentioned.

Her video is here 

Below is the lyrics with the countries she jumps for marked in RED.

United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama
Haiti, Jamaica, Peru,
Republic Dominican, Cuba, Carribean
Greenland, El Salvador too.
Puerto Rico, Columbia, Venezuela
Honduras, Guyana, and still,
Guatemala, Bolivia, then Argentina
And Ecuador, Chile, Brazil.
Costa Rica, Belize, Nicaragua, Bermuda
Bahamas, Tobago, San Juan,
Paraguay, Uruguay, Surinam
And French Guiana, Barbados, and Guam.

Norway, and Sweden, and Iceland, and Finland
And Germany now one piece,
Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia
Italy, Turkey, and Greece.
Poland, Romania, Scotland, Albania
Ireland, Russia, Oman,
Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia
Hungary, Cyprus, Iraq, and Iran.
There's Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan
Both Yemens, Kuwait, and Bahrain,
The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Portugal
France, England, Denmark, and Spain.

India, Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan
Thailand, Nepal, and Bhutan,
Kampuchea, Malaysia, then Bangladesh (Asia)
And China, Korea, Japan.
Mongolia, Laos, and Tibet, Indonesia
The Philippine Islands, Taiwan,
Sri Lanka, New Guinea, Sumatra, New Zealand
Then Borneo, and Vietnam.
Tunisia, Morocco, Uganda, Angola
Zimbabwe, Djibouti, Botswana,
Mozambique, Zambia, Swaziland, Gambia
Guinea, Algeria, Ghana.

Burundi, Lesotho, and Malawi, Togo
The Spanish Sahara is gone,
Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Liberia
Egypt, Benin, and Gabon.
Tanzania, Somalia, Kenya, and Mali
Sierra Leone, and Algiers,
Dahomey, Namibia, Senegal, Libya
Cameroon, Congo, Zaire.
Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar
Rwanda, Mahore, and Cayman,
Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Yugoslavia...
Crete, Mauritania
Then Transylviania,
Monaco, Liechtenstein
Malta, and Palestine,
Fiji, Australia, Sudan.

list of not invaded places. All these sorts of things are arguable as the borders of countries and such change over time.Not in the song but not invaded are Andora, Belarus, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Marshall Islands, Sao Tome and Principe,  Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Vatican City

The 40-tool limit in Tools of AI

Theres a rule of thumb in AI agents where they should only be able to call 40 apis. After that confusion between different systems becomes a problem. Cursor has a hard limit of 40 in its MCP setup for example.

This i think could be a cognitive limit (like Dunbars number). The documentary The Price of Everything describes how Stefan Edlis an art collector only collects 40 artists (and 200 works of art). And how a hedge fund manager says that 40 is the limit on the number of stocks an analyst can follow.

It could be that there is a 40 limit on the number of complex things you can track and possible 200 individual abilities is the limit.

By having parameters,

my life is a lot easier.

- Which parameters?

- Well, 200 works, 40 artists.

-I mentioned that to a very important hedge fund guy about

five, six years ago, he smiled.

He says, "That's interesting.

My analysts can only follow

about 40 stocks."

Climate Bets on Coal

 I have made two bets on climate recently. 

I believe coal usage for electricity by China will be lower in 2025 than it was in 2024. Using Ember Energy as a data source. And I will take a $10 bet on that at 50:50 odds.

and one on world coal usage. I think this year 2025 will have lower coal usage for electricity in the entire world than 2024. But if any of the years coming up do I will win this bet. 

I am not sure on these bets. I just calculated now 
The percentage change in coal generation from 2024 to 2025 is: -0.72% but a lot can change in the remaining months.