There are 2 topics mixed here.

1. Existence of the contrarians.
2. Side effects of their existence.

My own opinion on 1 is that they are necessary in moderation. They are doing the "exploration" part in the "exploration-exploitation dilemma". By the very fact of their existence they allow the society in general to check alternatives and find more optimal solutions to the problems comparing to already known "best practices". It's important to remember that almost everything that we know now started from some contrarian - once it was a well established truth that Monarchy is the best way to rule the people and democrats were dangerous radicals.

On the 2 - it is indeed a problem that contrarian opinions are more interesting on average, but the solution lies not in somehow making them less attractive - but by making more interesting and attractive conformist materials. That's why it is paramount to have highly professional science educators and communicators, not just academics. My own favorites are vlogbrothers (John and Hank Green) in particular and their team in Complexly in general.

Penicillin. Gemini tells me that the antibiotic effects of mold had been noted 30 years earlier, but nobody investigated it as a medicine in all that time.

Gemini is telling you a popular urban legend-level understanding of what happened. The creation of Penicillin as a random event, "by mistake", has at most tangential touch with reality. But it is a great story, so it spread like wildfire. 

In most cases when we read "nobody investigated" it actually means "nobody succeeded yet, so they weren't in a hurry to make it known", which isn't very informative point of data. No one ever succeeds, until they do. And in this case it's not even that - antibiotic properties of some molds were known and applied for centuries before that (well, obviously, before the theory of germs they weren't known as "antibiotic", just that they helped...), the great work of Fleming and later scientists was about finding the particularly effective type of mold and extracting the exact effective chemical as well as finding a way to produce that at scale.

I wonder at which point we'll start seeing LLM-on-a-chip.

One big reason for the current ML/AI systems inefficiencies is just abstraction layering overhead, our pay for the flexibility. We currently run hardware that runs binary calculations that run software that run other software that runs other software (many many layers here, OS/drivers/programming language stacks/NN frameworks etc) that finally runs the part we're actually interested in - bunch of matrix calculations representing the neural network. If we collapse all the unnecessary layers between, burning the calculations directly to hardware, running particular model should be extremely fast and cheap.

Thank you for this summary! It is nice to see someone covering these topics here, I personally rarely have enough nerves left after 2+ years of this hell. Victory to Ukraine and peaceful skies to us all!

This is what happens when the min wage is too high

... These automated kiosks existed for years and were used in Mac for years. And in places they were set Mac had better employment, not worse - there was exactly the same number of staff members on the same-ish salary but with decreased load on each member, while, as stated, leading to slightly bigger orders and less awkwardness. 

So far I have been highly underwhelmed by what has been done with newly public domain properties

Some can argue it's quite an argument in favor of lowering the length of protected period. We can observe first hand that things going public doesn't cause any problem for previous owners at all and my opinion is that we are cutting it too far. If we want proper balance between ownership and creativity we need to put the threshold somewhere where it is at least a mild inconvenience for the owners, maybe more.

Oh, there are absolutely correct places to use the phrase and correct places to benefit from reliable simplicity! My main argument is against mindless usage that I unfortunately witness nowadays a lot. Understanding why and when we need to solve for the equilibrium in evaluation replaced by the simple belief in a rule that we should - always and for everything.

Both Gemini and GPT-4 also provide quite interesting answers on the very same prompt.

Adam Grant suggests: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations for you, and I’m confident you can reach them. I’m trying to coach you. I’m trying to help you.” Then you give them the feedback. Love it.

These are great, but unfortunately only work if the person is ready to accept your authority as a coach. If they don't - they work in an opposite direction.