Right, but that all comes from upstream, with Conservative media (and politicians) focusing all their attention on “wedge issues” to distract their base from their ruinous fiscal policies, gutting the government services their base would benefit from to steal more wealth for the ultra wealthy.

OpenAI has a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving. LLMs cost a lot of compute. They’re burning through cash. Operating costs are more than double revenue. Their net operational losses are about $1 million USD every 40 minutes.

And somehow they’re trying to put half a trillion USD into building more datacentres to make even more advanced models, which will be even more compute intensive.

Meanwhile, as venture capital has been committed to a whole series of AI companies and data centres, venture capital is dying up. Nobody has gotten a payout yet, since there’s no path to profitability for any of these companies.

And it’s coming to a head this fall, when OpenAI needs to pay their suppliers for the expansion they’re building, and there’s no reason to believe they’ll be able to raise enough more investment to cover their costs.

It doesn’t even take OpenAI failing, either. There’s so much debt (“leverage”) and circular cashflow going on in this space, between the AI companies, data centres, computer hardware manufacturers, and construction companies, that any one of them failing could cause cascading failures, like dominoes. Worse than the '08 financial crash, most likely.

So no. It’s not going to be like YouTube. YouTube is cheap to run, compared to LLMs.

And the worst part of it all: LLMs aren’t even very good! It creates an illusion of productivity, but it’s all bullshit, either doing a shitty job, or taking more time to prompt fondle than it would have taken to do the job by hand, or building up tech debt that’s going to make massive projects unmaintainable.

It has some use cases, sure. I use it almost daily, tbh. But only because someone else is footing the bill. It doesn’t produce nearly enough value to justify its costs.

A company borrowing money to buy it’s own stock makes sense though, doesn’t it? A share buyback reduces the number of shares, so remaining shareholders are holding more equity (as a percentage) than prior to the buyback. It’s just the reverse of issuing new shares. If the company has no productive use of the capital, then a share buyback is a way to make the company more “lean”, shedding unneeded cash to increase (relative) value.

Borrowing money to do so just means that they are deemed credit worthy by enough bond investors that they can borrow at low enough rates that the debt repayment costs are less than the value shareholders would expect from a dividend payment and/or that they don’t want to issue dividend payments for some other reason (like the idea that dividends should be consistent and only ever increase or they’re valuation gets slaughtered.)

The whole stock market is a bubble now, anyway, so this is the heart of our problems. About 2 decades ago, financial reporting allowed companies to shift their PE ratio away from Price-to-Earnings ratio and instead report on Price-to-Forward-Earnings ratio. This is the company’s projection of their future earnings potential, but investors just seen to accept that a “PE” ratio means the same thing it did for the preceding, like, century. A PtFE ratio of 25 is insane, on historical contexts, yet that’s completely normal now.

Insanity. And yet the market keeps going up. Even the '08 crash was just a small blip, compared to what it should have been.

I’ll just put my tinfoil hat back on over here.

You mean the person who posted 3 hours after me?

But, clearly, a Google Home or Amazon Alexa needs cloud connectivity to function. And short of Stop Killing Games regulations forcing companies to release software to keep purchases functional after server shutdowns, there’s going to be no alternative when they shut down the servers.

But where do we draw the line?

A smart fridge should obviously keep working without cloud connectivity, since cloud features aren’t relevant to its core functionality.

A spyware house-scanning vacuum robot, on the other hand, that stores video of your entire house on web servers “to map your home” may not have the processing power to model the home based on its surveillance video recordings. So, is it reasonable, then, that these break when servers go offline?

Without any regulations, the answer is just “consumers can go fuck themselves”, which clearly isn’t a good answer.

lol, high school.

Maybe, for “rec league” or whatever, but school teams are usually meant to be competitive, and non-gendered sports would mean girls wouldn’t have equitable access to athletics.

But even for non-competitive teams, girls are unlikely to be able to access shared sports to the same level as boys. At a party high school I worked at, there was a major challenge with girls being willing to access open gym time, feeling uncomfortable advocating for access to basketball nets for practice—even girls who were on the competitive team felt they couldn’t use open gym time.

TL;DR: Sexism runs deep. We need policies that recognize that and build equity, not just offer “equality” that perpetuates, or even magnifies, the problem.

The challenge, as always, is to never underestimate a bubble’s capacity to outlast your solvency. I personally know people who have been heading against the housing “bubble” in Canada bursting since 1999. They’ve spent a lot of money with nothing to show for it, yet, and missed out on housing prices, like, quadrupling? Quintupling?

So, good luck. Buying out-of-market puts might be a safer bet, since you’re most likely to “just” lose all your money, with a small chance of a massive payout of it “properly” crashes.

Exactly right. Parent poster is conflating the investment in “AI” since 2022 (almost exclusively meant to mean LLMs, like ChatGPT) and specialized “AI” systems (almost exclusively “machine learning” systems).

A LLM is just about useless for any sort of surveillance or data analysis tasks. The bigger fear with LLM proliferation is as a propaganda machine, astrotufing the whole Internet with mass LLM-generated bullshit.

I’ve been on the flip side of this. You’re so panicked about getting your wallet back, and wondering if it was carelessness or thieves, that you don’t even think of giving a reward if you get it back.

I think the worry about thieves also primes us to not want to give money, too, but that’s just speculation.

I’ve also been the one delivering a lost wallet full of cash and got no reward, lol.

Not parent poster, and you’re totally correct… But paper-format books don’t work at all for me, or many others with accessibility needs. I read almost exclusively with TTS while driving/doing chores/walking or to fall asleep. It’s… very hard to TTS a paper book.

So, an old (<= 5th gen) Kindle works great. They’re incompatible with the newest Kindle DRM, so they still allow old methods to transfer books. For KU books, it also has built-in TTS, so you can leave the book “reading” for you after you’ve transferred the file to your “real” device. That way authors get paid for your page reads, but you can still read/store/transfer/preserve the book.

But Amazon still tracks your reading data, and you’re still supporting Amazon’s/Kindle’s self publishing monopoly… But it’s literally the only place where books from my genre of choice are available, so not really any good options until their unethical monopoly is regulated away from them.

Sure, but even so: that hardware isn’t going to be obsolete or wear out for a long time.

Compared with going to a concert that can be $10K for 2 people to attend a single show.