It's an acceptable solution only if you used it as an excuse to buy a 3D scanner.

Welll, if you were good at drywall already, drywall patches would be faster and better. But if you are good at printing and scanning, and you enjoy that process, then it’s fine.

The challenge with the example is that “success” is personal preference. With plenty of examples, the success criteria are external.

It works so :shrug: I did the same to replace a part of a door frame I had to remove to make space for a washing machine 4 mm too wide. Nobody sell 400 mm of door frame so i just copied the frame shape, printed in 3 parts, and that was it. Filament color matched the frame one so I didn't have to paint.

I commend you for your imagination. Can I ask how you crafted the object to match the dimensions? I’m brand new to 3D printing and currently climbing the learning curve of printing itself but will want to start learning about doing my own modeling soon.

The only criticism I’d make is that patching drywall is dead simple and cheap and so your solution seems possibly a bit overengineered (and, while I’m at it, that Andreesen’s observation is both facile and meaningless and is probably a reflection more of the bids Marc Andreesen’s house manager gets than anything insightful about labor costs in America).

Cosmetically it's probably fine. The downsides all have to do with predictability and the ability to reason about what the wall is made of in the future.

A person who goes to eg hang a picture frame or shelf there will encounter a different material with different load bearing properties than expected. Pushing into the center of that area with EG a drill bit will not have the same physical response or give, and depending on how it was braced/integrated with the surrounding wall, the patch itself may be pushed or pulled out of place. Similar for anyone that leans on that area if it's at such a height.

It's fine.

The biggest actual problem would be in a fire, the PLA will burn and let the fire into the wall cavity, where drywall would maintain a barrier for much longer - that is why we have drywall in the first place, it is a decent fire barrier.

I would simply do the normal thing of covering the hole with drywall patch screen, covering that over with drywall joint compound, letting it dry, sanding, and painting. This is an under $50 trip to Lowes, and certainly cheaper than a flatscreen TV.

The solution I was taught as a child is to saw the hole square, put a section of 2×4 behind it spanning the hole, held in place with a drywall screw through the drywall on each side of the hole, cut a square chunk of drywall small enough to fit in the hole, put a drywall screw through the middle of it into the 2×4, and tape, mud, sand, and paint.

I suspect that this procedure is faster and easier than taking a 3-D scan of the hole, 3-D printing a PLA patch, and gluing it in, but it does require most of an hour and the appropriate materials on hand.

It's a solution. There are better solutions, and far worse solutions (anyone who has worked to get a deposit back on a college rental has probably developed a few of their own), and most of them are all still fine because drywall isn't (shouldn't be) structural.

Crucially, even if you are completely unwilling to take a stab at a fix yourself, hiring a local handyman to patch a hole via some good enough technique should still be far cheaper in most places than buying a nice new TV.

But nothing is gonna ever beat buying a 2nd-hand framed picture or plaque or movie poster or grabbing a flyer from the junkmail on your porch and tacking it over the hole... And if you're determined to fix holes with a TV, you can probably find one used for about as cheap / free as any of the other choices. Which is what makes this such a stupid example - the cost of TVs, like framed images or furniture, spans from $0 to "as much as you're willing to pay". Hiring someone can also be arbitrarily expensive, but can by definition never be 0. So the comparison is rhetorical trickery and demonstrates nothing.

...other than, apparently, Andreessen's dissatisfaction with paying tradespeople.

Also as noted in the prior dupe, the article also misunderstands it's own topic, as explained in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox):

In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient *to use*; however, as the cost of *using the resource drops*, if demand is highly price elastic [PED], this results in overall demand [for the resource] increasing.

The cost to use tokens is already zero or deeply negative, depending on your accounting. And the author is mistaking the cost of 'creating/extracting the resource' (token generation economics) with cost of 'using the resource' (calling an API). I don't think we'll understand the true cost of, and demand for AI services for quite some time.

That's part of a quotation, as clearly stated in the article.

That might be true but that doesn't mean the effect is false in the aggregate. The classic example given in Baumol's paper was a violinist[1]. Sure, playing a violin might be more enjoyable than working in HVAC or churning out enterprise CRUD apps, and some people might even accept a paycut[2] to be a violinist, but that doesn't mean the effect isn't real. Despite zero productivity growth in being a concert violinist, wages for it has still risen, thanks to productivity growth elsewhere. People might be willing to take a pay cut to be a violinist, but not a arbitrarily large paycut.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential

Drilling a few holes to mount a TV is so straightforward that nearly everyone can do it, in contrast to patching drywall, so excluding the cost of hiring a professional for that case is reasonable. Granted, you might be able to learn how to do it with some youtube videos, trips to home depot, and trial/error, but the cost of that will quickly exceed the cost of a handyman if you value your time at all.

The likelihood is that models will "box" questionable stuff for radiologist review, and the boxing threshold will probably be set low enough that radiologists stay sharp (though we probably won't do this at first and skills may atrophy for a bit).

This is also a free source training data over time so market incentives are there.

I have the same question about minor legislative amendments a certain agency keeps requesting in relation to its own statutory instrument. Obviously they are going to be passed without much scrutiny, they all seem small and the agency is pretty trustworthy.

(this is an unsolved problem that exists in many domains from long before AI)

This is a software problem! You can make the job be more engaging by sneaking in secret lies to see if the human is paying attention.

The modern day example that really made Baumol click for me is child care, particularly day care. It’s a highly labor intensive with basically minimal opportunities for productivity enhancements (due both to regulation and parental preferences, as well as just baseline sheer human decency). As the rest of the economy becomes more productive, the relative cost of child care goes up and up and up - which is why we now see situations where two-earner households can an entire after-tax income consumed by child care costs once they need to put 2-3 kids into daycare.

Another way to think of this intuitively is simple economies of scale. Or volume discounts if you work in sales.

When you buy 10,000 handbags you pay the wholesale price whereas buying a single handbag can be quite expensive.

If there is way lower hose demand (volume of sales), the horse producers will have to charge a higher price per horse.

Thus, society in aggregate spends way less on horses while the price of a horse goes up.

Going back to econ 101 & supply/demand curves:

Jevons describes the supply curve moving out, resulting in increased quantity

Baumol describes the supply curve moving back, resulting in higher prices

No, they're not.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

There's a spike and subsequent drop after the pandemic, but that was from service workers being forced out of the labor force by lockdowns. If you exclude that, it follows a steady trend up. And yes, the chart has already been adjusted for inflation.