johnvanommen

Ah I see we have worked at the same company

\S

Possibly the most interesting lesson from your graph is that the trillions in stimulus during Covid caused productivity to CRATER.

I noticed this anecdotally; in 2021 it was especially noticeable that people were just phoning it in at work, and “quiet quitting” was a meme.

A16Z stands for the first and last letters of their names, 16 is the number of characters in between.

> WSJ just needs to sound alarm bells so people keep paying for their crappy journalism, and thus everything they write becomes alarmist slop.

The WSJ is a ghost of what it used to be.

TLDR: the article describes stagflation in a novel way.

Yes, it’s happening, just as it did in the seventies. Invest appropriately.

> The US is cooked. China is the new economic and industrial super power.

The US economy has outperformed every economy on earth for the last fifteen years.

China is at a permanent disadvantage because the United States and Russia are the largest producers of petroleum and natural gas on earth.

Anyone who thinks China is going to be passing the US anytime soon is uninformed.

> Kind of interesting, when compared to the hubris from American frontier labs.

One Man’s “hubris” is another man’s “marketing campaign.”

Drama sells.

Even funnier:

The biggest of the "sharpening with AI" models, if you let 'em go, they'll turn you into a celebrity on accident.

If you go to the Topaz AI forums on Facebook, you'll see examples of where the AI sharpening tool went off the rails and turned a blurry photo of someone (typically the user who bought the software, who is trying to clean up their own photos) into whichever celebrity that is in the AI model who resembles them.

IE, it might turn a photo of YOU into a photo of Robert Downey Jr.

> Letting the kernel use SSD based swap space for something this big would be a good way to destroy its cumulative write endurance over a period of just a couple months.

Optanes are a good option here, right?

I bought mine for $100 for each 128GB DDR4 stick. I believe write performance is off-the-charts on these, besides the fact they're c-h-e-a-p.

> Jacobin is more like social democrat

”The goal of socialism is Communism.” - Lenin

It’s always sold as “a little bit of socialism.”

Every country, every time in history.

The author of this transparent propaganda is a student in a college. When I was his age, I was a socialist too. It’s just youth and inexperience.

> Given that you cannot force someone to hire anyone at a given wage what is the solution?

The author writes for Jacobin, which promotes a failed ideology where you CAN force people to “hire anyone at a given wage.”

It’s an advertisement for a failed ideology.

The author writes for Jacobin.

Of course it’s promoting Communism.

> “The pattern invites us to read welfare as macroprudential policy, part of the toolkit that keeps financial openness politically survivable. Where redistribution runs vertically and broadly, the welfare state itself absorbs the shocks of global finance. Where it runs horizontally, protecting established insiders while the rest carry the risk, governments buy stability at the financial border instead. Capital controls work as a cheap, imperfect substitute for redistribution. They calm an exposed society without asking anyone at the top to pay.”

Their analysis will yield false conclusions because they’re completely ignoring a number of variables.

For instance, the USSR had capital controls for financial and political reasons. The article assumes that politics plays no role, only finance.

Wall Street influences US financial policy, but so does politics.

The laziness of this research is shocking, so I looked up the author. He’s an author for the Communist blog “Jacobin.”

Why is this on Hacker News?

This paper is flimsy propaganda.

https://jacobin.com/author/martino-comelli

The one thing I miss about driving to work.

> the moment I realized it's a kind of cloud OS

The foundation of this is thirty years old:

Mark Andreesen founded a company to do what Amazon did: Loudcloud. This was cloud computing, BEFORE AWS was public. Loudcloud was founded in the nineties; AWS opened its APIs in 2006.

Loudcloud failed and became Opsware. Opsware was server automation.

Its competitor was Bladelogic.

Luke Kanies, from BladeLogic, founded Puppet. Puppet was open source, and steamrollered over nearly every installation of BladeLogic and Opsware in existence, because you can’t beat free.

Folks from BladeLogic migrated to jobs at DCOS.

DCOS was steamrollered by Kubernetes, the same way Puppet steamrollered BladeLogic.

The author of the piece predicts that open weight models will steamroller everything next.

I fear he’s right.

I worked for Opsware and BladeLogic.

I watched it happen in real time.

Financially, Andreesen’s wealth stems from Opsware. He is known for Mosaic, but Opsware put him on the map, financially. HP bought them.

If one wants to follow in Andreesen’s footsteps, study how he did it at Opsware.

Conveniently, there is a book.

“The Hard Thing about Hard Things.”

I worry that AI will be so fundamental to how we do things in the future, companies can mold human behavior via access to the AI tools.

For instance, I worked at FICO. When I mention this, people wonder what they do. The average person only knows FICO as a “score.”

FICO was founded in Silicon Valley.

The average person doesn’t think about how credit scores work, fundamentally.

It’s just software, at its core. FICO incentivizes certain behaviors.

Ever been banned from an online forum?

Now imagine if a corporation could shut you off from a technology that’s literally indispensable.

Same idea.

I took the same attitude. The hardware isn’t getting cheaper, it’s getting more expensive.

As I see it, an investment in AI hardware is an investment in my own future.

IE, I drive my car a couple of days a week, and it’s perfectly normal to spend $500 a month on an asset like that. When you factor in the SPACE it takes up, that’s the REAL cost of owning a car: the real estate you have to buy for your car to occupy.

Once that’s factored in, the “true” cost of having a car can easily be $2000 a month, even for a crummy car. The space that the car occupies is expensive.

Yet people balk at spending even $2000 on a GPU.

Makes no sense to me. I choose to invest in the future.

> The biggest benefit for me is that it's all done locally, and I know the harness is not uploading anything or sending telemetry to someone else.

Are there any articles you’d recommend for this?

I have Qwen running on an HP Z8. Very nice platform.

I have mine in a sandbox, due to privacy fears.

Your solution sounds more elegant.

This sounds like networking.

Did OP invent an “intelligence router?”

Amazon Prime Video is exhausting in that respect. I purchased a paid account, just to make the ads go away, then discovered that even paid accounts get ads.

> AI is destroying the economics which allowed for a sizable middle class of artists.

I was an art major and switched to CompSci purely for the money.

AI "art" is often slop, but the ability to create something in seconds that used to take months shouldn't be taken lightly. There will undoubtedly be truly creative people who will use AI art as a force multiplier instead of a shortcut, and that is when things will get interesting.

We're already seeing this in software; plenty of people can attest to the fact that LLMs give them the opportunity to write software that they couldn't have written without AI, because their ability to write code wasn't up to snuff.

Some use that opportunity to get their existing work done faster.

But some use that opportunity to create things which were beyond their capabilities, just a few years ago. And when that same mindset eventually becomes prevalent among artists, we will undoubtedly see AI "art" that is truly art.

That was Morrissey's stance when he was in the Smiths.

I really wish he hadn't been such a luddite, it would have been great if we had some Smiths music videos that were actually made in the 80s. (OK, we did get one, "Stop Me if You Think That You've Heard This One Before.")

> It may have little to do with winning a board game, and a lot to do with seeing what people will tolerate and what the thresholds are for being called out; it’s a test of one’s intimidation factor.

It’s one of the most famous scenes in The Wire: when Marlo steals a lollipop.

> My impression is that a lot, if not most, anime was always cheap. Lots of stills, few frames, and CGI as soon as it got remotely good enough (and often before). Like Hanna-Barbera cheap. That was my impression when I used to be moderately "into" it 25-ish years ago, but judging from youtube channels like Mother's Basement, it hasn't gotten better.

Individual frames of anime, they generally had a lot more 'packed into' the frame. This is part of the reason the motion wasn't great; they were spending most of their time budget of big flashy frames.

Disney, when they made animation, was more focused on hyper stylized characters that moved in a very specific way. There's an entire book on how to make animation 'The Disney Way." Some friends of mine ended up working in animation, and that's how I learned about this.

> But they do it by squeezing businesses upstream, who end up with even lower margins.

I've done tech projects for supermarkets and I've done tech projects for movie studios.

The thing I noticed about Disney is that they have an entire 'suite' of products. Basically, they can afford to lose money on a movie release if it drives toy sales, or drives attendance at Disneyland or Disneyworld.

> The expensiveness in running them will eventually be solved by cheaper faster hardware.

How?

* Moores Law is almost over. The 5090 improves over the 4090 mostly because of quant improvements.

* even if the hardware improves, there’s a huge incentive to slow roll the next generation. Nobody wants to end up like Sun Microsystems. Sun’s used hardware was faster than its new hardware, once you considered price. Sun ended up competing with its own used equipment.

The most obvious place for improvement is RAM, network and storage.

If someone can bring more RAM onto the market, that will unstick things.

> If that happens the AI companies will first try to negotiate with their creditors and after that likely declare bankruptcy with the creditors taking over what’s left of the assets.

Due to the fact that we’ve already done this before (Enron, Global Crossing) -

I’m willing to bet that there are contracts in place ALREADY, that define what happens in the event of a default.

In particular, I’ll bet that the buildings, the GPUs, the patents, etc…

All of these have probably been accounted for.

I worked at a data center that closed during the WorldCom era, and when they put the padlocks on the door, there were still websites “hosted” from the building.

I don’t know if they killed the power or what. I’d cleared out my desk long before they locked it all up. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these websites couldn’t get their own servers, since ownership was tied up in the courts.

In the Bay Area during that time, there were row upon row of empty office buildings.

> The big thing is, the western world has moved so much of the manufacturing to China

I built my career on Solaris and it got rugpulled by Linux.

That wasn’t because of software, it was because of hardware. Linux’s cost advantage existed because Sun hardware had huge margins, because their software was basically free.

AI will probably be a repeat of this. Whoever can come up with the hardware solution that minimizes the cost per token will win.

I believe the 5090 still holds this crown, but someone certainly knows better than I do.

> GM just did this in the last 30 days [1], and their sales are likely going to be just fine. In fact the auto industry has repeatedly automated jobs over the last 100 years, and they still make decent sales numbers.

I worked at Verizon during their layoffs last year. Biggest layoffs in the USA.

As someone who’s been laid off before, I knew that it generally boosts the stock price.

I bought VZ because of that. It’s up 15% since the layoffs.

Microsoft, an AI stock, is down 30% in the same timeframe.

> Cherrypicked dates? But I'd like to hear analysis comparing the Nixon shock to the covid shock since one was monetary and one was supply and demand.

Of course!

* In 1971 and 2019, the M2 money supply was flooded. In 1971 by the Nixon Shock, in 2019 by Covid: The amount of US dollars that existed between 1961 and 1971 increased by 100%, the amount of US dollars that existed between 1971 and 1981 increased by 253%. Assets are denominated in dollars and the flood of money that the Nixon Shock caused led to the inflation of the late 70s and 80s. The flood of money that Covid caused led to the inflation of the last six years, 2022 in particular.

* The other factor that contributed was the lack of oil supply. In the 1970s, it was caused by a war in the Middle east. Will we see history repeat again? My bet is yes.

Data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

Note that the Fed data is difficult to read in the 70s, you'll want to play around with the length of the time window. It's difficult to read because the supply of money has grown so much.