throwaway5752

Blackmailers and protection rackets aren't known for being satisfied after a single payment, after they've established someone is willing to pay.

That is why public corruption is such as plague and one of the reasons the US dollar was seen as a safe store of value once.

eGPU cradles, presumably, for people with intense local model execution requirements until it can be made to work in the device? This is exactly like the POS dongles Square had until tap to pay was more widespread?

I picked up a klein bottle at your house and it was a bucket list moment and one of my best memories. I'm glad AI was wrong, and I am also glad it nudged me to tell you this.

Crazy suggestion - maybe there is some space for a more efficient compute software / device combination ecosystem and companies. I don't really need or even want the AI features being pushed on my devices. I don't want to pay for ever more absurd camera specs on phones. I don't need 8k or even 4k displays on small devices. I don't need or want browser security container features to safely run and render obnoxious adds - I just want them suppressed. I don't need 4k streams or want to pay for the bandwidth.

We actually don't need all the ram. Everyone was fine in 2010. The devices were fine, the internet was productive.

We have all just seriously fucked up in the software and hardware space. We are super-sizing devices and software just as surely as the car industry has done in massive pickups and SUVs and the food industry has done with portion sizing.

The synergy is "corruption"

As a matter of fact, ESL had bought Kmart and used it as a vehicle to acquire Sears. It was the same person.

The sad thing is it could succeed. This is exactly how Putin put the apparatuses of Russia into the hands of his allies. I'm sure GME will get administration support, any white knights will get Netflix treatment from the FTC. Cohen, as a loyal MAGA supporter, would then use Ebay cash to support Trump aligned groups.

Yes, this reduces the TAM of companies like Roblox in the near term. Countries should collectively regulate how much big tech can exploit minors. Minors cannot go to casinos, and the underlying gamification techniques for creating addiction are the same. Children are not some demographic to maximize for profits. If they aren't educated and raised correctly, a society collapses in less than 40 years.

If one is a psychopath and needs an analogy rather than "harming childrens' mental development for profit is morally and ethically evil": this is essential the same as setting catch quotas on fisheries, to maximize long term value at the expense of short term profit.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"

Decades in, this is the worst of all of them. Misused by laziness or malice, and nowhere near specific enough.

The graveyard of companies boxed in by past poor decisions is sprawling. And the people that made those early poor decisions bounce around field talking about their "successful track record" of globally poor and locally good architectural decisions that others have had to clean up.

It touches on a real problem, though, but it should be stricken form the record and replaced with a much better principle. "Design to the problem you have today and the problems you have in 6 months if you succeed. Don't design to the problems you'll have have next year if it means you won't succeed in 6 months" doesn't roll off the tongue.

> those capabilities are available to you as well

Give him $100 to obtain that capability.

Give each open source project maintainer $100.

Or internalize the cost if they all decide the hassle of maintaining an open source project is not worth it any more.

I'm not aiming this reply at you specific, but it's the general dynamic of this crisis. The real answer is for the foundational model providers to give this money. But instead, at least one seems to care more about acquiring critical open source companies.

We should openly talk about this - the existing open source model is being killed by LLMs, and there is no clear replacement.

50 years from now when those panels produce less than 75% of nameplate capacity they'll really regret not depending on a market where the swing producer is a cartel of theocratic dictatorships.

Actually, you can just look in Iraq, and CNOOC, PetroChina, and Zhongman. Companies will benefit, just not American ones.

And the US will clearly have failed to protect allies and project force in the Gulf. If the bulk of OPEC moves to a basket currency trade to ally more with PRC, India, and Russia that will be an astonishing failure.

I wouldn't have thought even Trump and this Republican administration was incompetent enough to break the petrodollar, but here we are, just one year in.

Also, don't look at fracking production curves. Bakken and Eagle Ford are foreshadowing the Permian.

There used to be a social contract, but now there are so many people that it's a problem that there is no work for the displaced. The leverage between the very small number of people with vast amounts of capital and a large number of people with very little capital or leverage - this is a societal dynamic that has existed before in the world. There is historical precedent for this, and it's probably worth paying very close attention to what comes next if you are a very wealthy person pushing against all forms of wealth redistribution.

Everybody is, not just the pilots. The US ATC system has been in a state of induced crisis since Reagan broke the union's back in the 1980s. Then Trump took office, laid off a bunch of people, cancelled a bunch of hires, and immediately that led to the conditions for the Potomac / DCA collision.

The US is just in an active state of collapse in many areas, including air travel.

x

x

This sounds exactly like how IBM sounded 50 years ago, before Microsoft disrupted them.

All the various APM companies are implementing "Assign to agent" flows. The various foundation model providers will be satisfied getting a subscription for 10% of total comp of a developer, instead of pocketing 60% of the total comp completely replacing them?

The only thing that could prevent this is lack of ability to execute, like how Uber wanted to replace drivers with FSD vehicles.

No they don't have incentive to cultivate developer goodwill. They are monetizing replacing developers everywhere. That is the trillion-dollar valuation. They have the opposite incentive.

Sometimes criminals are unethical and lie, sometimes they are not smart or empathetic enough to accept they are causing harm to people. This is not some challenge to help them bridge that gap to understand, it is just why police are allowed to use force to imprison people that break the law and harm others.

And massive oil resources. As a result of this, one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet, which they manage well and for the good of the country.

Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.

It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.

It's going to kill the software industry as we know it!

We're literally killing our field by making the devices and internet so repulsive that people are actively unplugging. You can't hear about this online because the bot generated content is filling the gap and the people doing it aren't online to tell you about it.

Children are getting addicted to everything because the internet has killed any sense of self-stimulation and they are growing up into gamblers with cards, sports, and prediction markets or rage-addicted media consumers.

There is plenty of human connection to be had out there, it is free, and all you have to do is put down the phone or computer. It is getting extremely compelling as an alternative for increasing large groups of people.

The tech industry is energetically strangling its golden goose.

That vision is a lie, and it's a distraction. It is taking advantage of the emptiness that they themselves created, and now they are making you angry to distract you while they rob you. I sincerely wish you well in life, don't pick the wrong heroes.

The US is doing much, much worse. This is no compliment to China. The US

* murdered a political leader the were negotiating with in Iran after using the military to kidnap the leader of Venezuela.

* is credibly threatening military allies in Greenland, countries with which it has mutual protection treaties and is credibly threatening, without casus belli, to militarily invade another weaker neighbor, Cuba.

* spent months threatening to invade Canada. This wasn't trolling, it is forgotten with their strategy of constant chaos, but they really tried and Canada has made alliances with other countries as a result

* is actively murdering thousands of people in Haiti via a Republican allied private military contractor

* is actively subverting domestic elections

* is building and filling concentration camps with people who have committed no other crime than illegal residency, without due process, and giving them substandard care, leading to many deaths in custody.

* has masked secret police detaining people without due process and deporting them to foreign prison camps, frequently in violation of judicial orders

* has masked secret police arresting citizen because of their nationality and because they are not carrying "their papers"

* is using the power of government to force mergers and ownership changes of corporations to political allies

* is using the power of the government to hide an embarrassing a criminal conspiracy involving leadership in the country, in violation of the US Constitution, since it was ordered by Congress.

* has completely disregarded conflict of interest laws which the leader of the country is using to enrich himself and his family at completely unprecedented levels in US history.

I could go on, but China is a more ethical superpower by a lot of measures and that is a very painful conclusion to state.

This is not even touching on the subject of competency.

The internationally accepted US hegemony and the privileged role of the US dollar was the result of almost a century of goodwill. It is now gone, and then some. The next two decades will not be pleasant for regular Americans who have grown accustomed to, and frankly taken for granted, the level of privilege they had.

edit: and speak of the devil, and competency: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/what-happens-w... just made it to the top of the front page. Even with everything I wrote above, I had neglected to include that the US lies about embarrassing economic data now due to political intererence.

edit 2: this didn't even make the front page and would have been the biggest scandal in modern American history: https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-deal-fee-trump-administratio... "Trump Administration Set to Receive $10 Billion Fee for Brokering TikTok Deal"

Conspiracy theories aren't very productive. But the one thing that continues to bother me is how there is no great explanation for why TSLA is still worth much. It's a shrinking car company that is failing to execute at FSD and says it's going to make humanoid robots instead of cars.

There is no good reason TSLA should be valued any more than 10% of its current valuation, and even that would be rich. There is a fine argument it should be worth 3-4% of what it currently is.

It is almost like there's a connection between PayPal, Elon Musks fortunes, and crypto.

I still wonder who Satoshi really was. I wonder how Microstrategy remains solvent.

I agree. For whatever reason, whether it is a change in community sentiment or something else, I get downvotes talking about this. I can't think of a more useless thing to care about. Even if I cared, I couldn't think of a better way to spend accrued social capital.

The hold that scumbags - influencers, political operatives, narcissists with Messiah complexes - have taken over young men, particularly those inclined to go into the software field, is alarming.

Various former founding members of PayPal, leaders of the companies they've founded subsequently, member of A16Z and some opportunists and hangers on to these wealthier individuals who are beneath the dignity of mentioning separately - they have lost their moral and ethical moorings in the course of accumulating massive wealth and they are corrupting others in doing it.

Even modest startup incubators are be obsequious to the wealth and power of these people in the field and decided that money is more important than morality. Or at the very least there is no pretense of it now.

Of course it is Erik Prince's company.

to clarify: Erik Prince founded Blackwater, of the Nisour Square Massacre infamy in the GW Bush administration. He is deeply tied to Republican politics, mercenary work, and particularly the Trump administration. He is IPOing an autonomous lethal drone company, Swarmer, and his other company, Vectrus, is behind the events of this article.

They aren't specious, though. There's ample public record evidence. You can't rebut them because they are part of the historical record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joV-9FFoA3Q is the "Sigg Heil" video. Anyone can see with their own eyes.

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/27/nx-s1-5276084/elon-musk-germa... is where Musk says, "Frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their parents, their great-grandparents." - referring the Holocaust, just 80 years ago, in which 13 million people were systematically rounded up, placed in concentration campls, and mass murdered by the government, including 6 million Jewish people.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/16/elon-musk... "You have said the actual truth"

Regarding Twitter / X, after he took over:

According to data provided by the research company Memetica to The New York Times, in the past month, Elon Musk's platform featured 46,000 posts with the hashtag #HitlerWasRight, compared to an average of less than 5,000 posts per month in previous months (an increase of 820%). Posts with the hashtags #DeathtotheJews or #DeathtoJews appeared 51,000 times in the last month, marking a surge of 2,450%.

This is the guy claiming to try to make a trustworthy foundational model. There are deeper reasons for Grok's market share problems than the founding team or coding capability. You can't talk about this event and ignore it. He's trying to take Space X public and it's only going to get worse. His personal brand is dragging down his companies, as far as I can tell Tesla has lost 25-50% of their EV market share in Europe in the past 2 years? The problem is not just BYD.

This ignores his publicly acknowledged drug use that has led to tension with his boards of directors https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-illegal-drugs-e826a9e...

I don't know. Elon Musk personally founded xAI and these were his hand selected cofounders.

The grandparent comment is from someone that has been on this site almost since the beginning. Far longer than you. They might have insights about the community that you do not.