llbbdd

That's fine but you still have to get to/from the train station, which is a problem cars solve very well. All the better if the car drives itself. They complement each other which is why I find it so strange that discussion of trains shows up in these threads so often as though though they're some kind of panaceanic alternative that is being overlooked.

> because it's not some private ownership tech hype bullshit

I don't want to own a car, but I do want privacy, and I do want to go directly from point A to point B without being on a train. I have absolutely no reason to want to board a train as an alternative unless I want to go very fast from A to a very far away B. That is a real problem that is being solved for, not just hype. Aspiring to be cattle isn't noble.

EDIT: Also - rail doesn't get built because they're expensive projects, they take up a lot of space that people can't walk on, that cars can't drive on, that isn't useful to park housing or commerce near. Autonomous vehicles slot nicely into infrastructure that exists already, that already has the advantage of being point-to-point.

If the goal is "improve transit", autonomous vehicles achieve that without directly competing with trains. If the goal is, for some reason, "less cars", they also arguably achieve that because you'd end up with less private ownership of cars. If the goal is "no cars", I have no idea what the point of that would be.

That's the bit. For some reason trains come up on these threads all the time like it's some kind of gotcha alternative solution to driverless cars, forgetting that cars can go to your front door.

I think intelligence is an orthogonal, mostly philosophical question aside from whether these tools can produce novel, useful output vs purely recombinant output.

I come back to something like this idea when I consider the distinction being made that LLMs can only combine and interpolate between points in their training material. I could write a brute-force program that just used an English dictionary to produce every possible one-billion-gazillion word permutation of the words within, with no respect for rules of language, and chances are there would be some provable, testable, novel insight somewhere in the results if you had the time to sift through and validate all of it. LLMs seem like a tool that can search that space more effectively than any we've had before.

"the most personal computer"

Most degrees are just advancing levels of verifying you can walk and chew bubble gum simultaneously, follow instructions, show up on time. Being able to attain a Master's is a side-effect of having that skillset but doesn't necessarily instill it, and employers generally don't care as long as you've demonstrated that capacity outside of school.

I wish you many happy returns of the day.

It is. You understood what he said perfectly and chose to complain about a lack of formality for some reason; just like how you misspelled Scotsman lowercased and with two t's and I still understood what you said. It's also just how younger people have been communicating online for some time now, if that helps you inspect your belief that it's contrived or why you find it annoying.

My favorite version of this but is like "An engineer has one problem he decides to solve with multi-threading. Now problems. has two he"

More appeal I agree because it's easier to see useful results and iterate quicker. Lower barrier of entry I disagree with strongly; if the barrier to entry were so low I don't know why I've worked with so many otherwise-talented backend devs that can't wrap their heads around the frontend to save their lives. Frontend forces you to deal with real-world customer problems sooner rather than later; performance is more important, it has to work on more than one environment, you have a frame budget. It's like saying game development has a low barrier to entry; you might be able to get started quickly but you will run into constraints unless you learn fast. On the backend you can just pay another dollar for a VPS twice the size.

They feel the need to compete given that jokes about "backend" devs write themselves

It's formal vs. informal register; both of you are doing a version of the classic "Can I go to the bathroom?" / "I don't know, can you?" bit

Lol, nice to meet you. Left freshman year, got paid, got out. Questions welcome. College for tech jobs became useless after like 2008. Books are cheap. I'd challenge anyone in response to prove they got a degree in the 21st century.

Yeah, robots.txt is a great herald example of the type of solution invented by people who don't understand incentives whatsoever.

Lol yeah, still pissed at my family for having me walk for high school grad, didn't walk for college because I got a real job instead of wasting my time graduating. What a stupid tradition; mandatory accredited higher education deserves the death waiting for it. Paid for a dumb "class ring", too.

Abbreviated:

- Surrounded by other kids who have access to the same internet you do

- Access to the school's career networks (LinkedIn)

All time.

It's going to be interesting to see where universities are in ten years. Higher education has for a long time been a bad proxy for internships and apprenticeships, because if you aren't teaching what the market is paying for then you don't get funding or students. Watching universities start to defend against this obvious and accelerating association is fascinating. There's an obvious decoupling between "learning how to do a job" and "higher education for fun because I'm rich" that we're only going to see getting crazier.

Same here, walking across the stage in a dress is for the school, not for you. Got my paper, bye

This is not money that would otherwise be going to agriculture or energy; one of the few salient points that Ed makes is that a lot of these deals are circular and based on invented money. I think the comparison to the dot com bubble is sound purely because basically every DC investment that exploded would have been legacy-defining investments if they'd been able to stay solvent until like 2010. Some companies and some people are going to lose, but they're not going to have been wrong, just badly timed.

Let me prefix by saying that I'm solidly in some kind of AI middle ground. I think people who are fully outsourcing everything they do to AI are insane, and I think people who have planted their feet and are pretending AI is useless are also insane.

The way I think about it is that a lot of what we considered knowledge work isn't anymore. In "the before times", I would have considered it knowledge work to know how to dig into an unfamiliar code repo or long document and produce a useful summary of the information within, or identify which parts of a codebase are applicable to a given problem I'm trying to solve. AI turns semantic search up to 11; you can point it at an unfamiliar repo and say "what do I have to touch to make this work" and get a 90% accurate result. That's insane magic. I think if the bar is to consider it not a replacement for knowledge work as long as there is a human in the loop, then we're not there yet, but it keeps eating away at more and more of the basic pieces.

I don't know if these were related but I had a Pixel C tablet and I'm still upset they killed that off too. It was a nicer tablet than any Samsung I tried and felt like a genuine competitor to the iPad equivalent really excellent build quality, and then they abandoned it. I still have it but whatever they did to the software before giving up on it made it crash and blackscreen all the time while completely idle and I haven't had the energy to install something else on it, if something else even exists.

This entire article spends a lot of time hiding the ball and conflating what I'd distinguish as "data centers" vs. "data center capacity". Existing data center capacity is being allocated to AI because that's where the demand is, this is in addition to future data center capacity still in the process of being built. Microsoft and others are playing word games and combining both numbers for PR purposes, which I think Ed knows and is being obtuse about.

It's also annoying how he keeps using the term "bubble" as a sleight-of-hand synonym for, I don't know, "useless and fake". Tulip valuations vastly outgrew their actual value and never made it back up. The Dot Com bubble was just early and investment outpaced real-world adoption. Nobody looks back on dot com and thinks claims like "nearly all commerce and social interaction will move online" are silly because that's exactly what happened. AI investment might be at outsized levels right in this moment, it remains to be seen, but even if it doesn't get any better from here it's already insanely useful. That won't "pop" in any meaningful way that he predicts.

EDIT: To say nothing of the overwrought 2023-era comparisons to cryptocurrency. It was obvious at the start that crypto was a solution in search of a problem, shaded by the fact that most advocates benefited strongly from convincing everyone else how valuable of an idea it was. Anybody has been able to spend 20 minutes with free ChatGPT for years now and immediately start to grasp the real-world applications of tech that genuinely replaces a substrate of knowledge work.

In the UK of course it would be "personal injury barrister"

Lol. Call her and put on a heavy lisp

All documents eventually become applications if they're useful enough. For anything that doesn't match that description, we have PDF.

It might be hard to rank the players exactly but nobody is writing significant amounts of code with a Grok subscription.

Most firms would consider experimenting with efficiency gains "R&D", which is investment. The AI companies under scrutiny here are gathering up as much compute as they can because people and companies are paying for it, and anybody pretending they're doing that for no reason is covering their eyes and ears.

> Laying people off offsets some of those expenses.

Layoffs are independent of AI. The impact of AI is that firms can do more with less, they are doing more with less, and when the economy supports them having more, they'll do more, not less.

> The firm exists to maximize wealth of its stockholders.

Deeply tired of hearing this type of argument. Your grandma is a stockholder. Your 401k is a stockholder. The Stockholders aren't some alien leech race. We've structured the economy so that the average person doesn't have to grow their own food; the result is stockholders, and it's not a scary word.

Ed is posturing to his explicitly anti-AI audience. Read any of his recent work on this topic and it's normal to feel embarrassed for agreeing with any of it.

That's investing, which is not the same pitch Ed is making repeatedly, that there is absolutely no value to this tech and everyone is lying about it. Saying it won't pay off to the level of investment is one thing, and may be true, but that is not his line.

> SpaceX and Anthropic’s Compute Deal Shows That There’s Little Demand Outside of Anthropic and OpenAI For GPUs

I almost stopped reading here. I get that he's captured a paying audience that had their brains largely turned off as long as the AI hate keeps spewing, but he's not this dumb. The world is drowning in demand for GPUs and memory for all purposes. There are dozens of reasons that Musk would lease this capacity to Anthropic; it's not like they can just spin up a hyperscale public cloud service offering overnight with this capacity. Musk shot himself in the foot trying to compete with better players in the agent space and needs a way to justify the hardware, this is like the only way to do it.

> Where is the demand coming from if it’s not OpenAI and Anthropic?

It is OpenAI and Anthropic, and their competitors, and they can't use it yet because it's not built yet, and they are serving customer demand right now.