More recently, I'm using Claude Code to handle my inventory management by having it act as an analyst while coding itself tools to access my Amazon Seller accounts to retrieve the necessary info: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/trading-my-vibe-...
That's not consumption as it applies to sales tax rules. In almost every jurisdiction, raw materials and inventory purchased for resale or industrial processing are exempt from sales tax.
Which is why Value added tax is superior system. Though gold is in some jurisdictions treated different when it is considered investment. But for rest it is like any other metal.
Wouldn’t that be for the same kinds of reasons things like purple dyes were valuable: rare to find, hard to harvest, hard to transmogrify (insect/sea life guts into clothing dye, gold into chains or other wearables), hard to break, which all culminates into a quick visual indication of wealth.
Now? Gold is a great conductor of electricity (of course silver is better) and some people still like wearing lots of flashy jewelry.
I have no earthly clue why people find it valuable to invest in other than it’s like bitcoin: it’s valuable because everyone else also thinks it’s valuable.
Never once have I read a quarterly progress report from the CEO of the element “gold” outlining profit strategies for the next year.
> I have no earthly clue why people find it valuable to invest in other than it’s like bitcoin: it’s valuable because everyone else also thinks it’s valuable.
Unlike bitcoin there is a price “floor” because of its use in jewelry and industry. Even if no one hoarded it, it would still have some value.
Just because it doesn’t generate a yield doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Fresh drinking water is incredibly valuable and will be more so as its supply dwindles.
I am a birder who checks eBird for sightings of rare birds in my area. Let's see if Kairos can do some googling and summarization for me by text message. All it needs to do is find its way to this page:
This is the first google result for "rare birds pg county" and many similar queries.
I prompted Kairos by text message: "What rare birds have been reported on eBird in Maryland's Prince George's County today?"
On the page above, I can see that a Vesper Sparrow was sighted (and confirmed) and a Common Yellowthroat was reported (but remains unconfirmed). I expect the Vesper Sparrow to be reported, as you ca
I'll anthropomorphize for brevity's sake.
Kairos fired up a chrome session. I can watch as it generates notes like:
- "Accessed eBird.org to search for Prince George's County, Maryland sightings",
- "Need to navigate to county-specific recent observations for today's date",
- "Will identify rare, unusual, or out-of-season species reported today"
This plan doesn't seem super promising, as there will be hundreds or thousands of bird reports in the county, and the rarities may or may not be on the most recent list. It seems to run into difficulty and generates a new prompt:
"Go to eBird.org and access the recent sightings for Prince George's County, Maryland for January 28, 2026.\n\nTry this approach:\n1. Navigate to https://ebird.org/explore\n2. Use the search or navigation to find \"Prince George's County, Maryland\" or \"Prince George's, US-MD-033\"\n3. Look for a \"Recent Visits\" or \"Recent Observations\" section\n4. Make sure the date filter is set to today (January 28, 2026)\n5. Extract ALL species reported today with their locations\n\nReturn the complete list of species observed today in Prince George's County with:\n- Species name\n- Location/hotspot name\n- Number of individuals (if available)\n- Observer name (if available)\n\nI need the full list to identify which ones are rare or unusual.""
Despite the training data almost certainly including discussions of the eBird rare bird alert feature, which is very popular, it seems to be reinventing the wheel.
Eight minutes in and it is now searching for today's lists from one specific birding hotspots in the county.
It's final text back to me had no rare birds reported today. It correctly reports that a LeConte's Sparrow was seen in Maryland, but it doesn't specify where. Ten seconds of googling shows it was reported on the other side of the state. More than a week ago.
It doesn't mention the Vesper Sparrow or Common Yellowthroat.
thank you for sharing this. we're still improving the way we architect this. any suggestions for improvement off the top of how it went about executing your task?
Productivity is by definition real output (usually inflation adjusted dollars) per unit of input. That could be per hour worked, or per representative unit of capital + labor mix.
I would accept an increase in the slope of either of these lines as evidence of a net productivity increase due to artificial intelligence (unless there were some other plausible cause of productivity growth speed up, which at present there is not).
First, I'd expect the trajectory of any new technology that purports to be the next big revolution in computing to follow a distribution pattern of that similar to the expansive use of desktop computing and productivity increases, such as the 1995-2005 period[0]. There has not been any indication of such an increase since 2022[1] or 2023[2]. Even the most generous estimation, which Anthropic itself estimated in 2025 the following
>Extrapolating these estimates out suggests current-generation AI models could increase US labor productivity growth by 1.8% annually over the next decade[3]
Which not only assumes the best case scenarios, but would fail to eclipse the height of the computer adoption in productivity gains over a similar period, 1995-2005 with around 2-2.5% annual gain.
Second is cost. The actual cost of these tools is multiples more expensive than it was to adopt computing en masse, especially since 1995. So any increase in productivity they are having is not driving overall costs down relative to the gains, in large part because you aren't seeing any substantial YoY productivity growth after adopting these AI tools. Computing had a different trend, as not only did it get cheaper over time, the relative cost was outweighed by the YoY increase of productivity.
[1]: First year where mass market LLM tools started to show up, particularly in the software field (in fact, GitHub Copilot launched in 2021, for instance)
[2]: First year where ChatGPT 4 showed up and really blew up the awareness of LLMs
To genuinely "talk to stakeholders" requires being part of their social world. To be part of their social world you have to have had a social past - to have been a vulnerable child, to have experienced frustration and joy. Efforts to decouple human development from human cognition betray a fundamental misunderstanding.
A Fenix 5S+. A lucky garage sale find. I can't btw vouch for "fully debugged" on some of its fancier features. I mean map display? On such a tiny device? I'll just use my phone. But the basic sports stuff is rock solid.
Map display is incredibly useful for us outdoor people - having a map of a hiking track at hand is much nicer than having to pull out a phone constantly.
This holds true also for other sports - e.g. ski layer is nice to orient yourself on ski slopes.
(Also Garmin maps actually have sports tracks with better detail than software made for cars like GMaps.)
Right. If this level of indirection is allowed, the most efficient way to "grow corn" by the light of the original post would simply be to buy and hold Farmland Partners Inc (NYSE: FPI).
I'd like to see Fred follow right along and allocate the same amount of funds for deployment starting at the same time as each of Seth's expenditures or solid commitments.
The timing might need to be different but it would be good to see what the same amounts invested would yield from corn on the commodity market as well as from securities in farming partnerships.
Would it be fair if AI was used to play these markets too, or in parallel?
It would be interesting to see how different "varieties" of corn perform under the same calendar season.
Corn, nothing but corn as the actual standard of value :)
You don't get much any way you look at it for your $12.99 but it's a start.
Making a batch of popcorn now, I can already smell the demand on the rise :)
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