ignirtoq

The kind of memory the current manufacturers are focusing on is specialized for data-center-grade GPUs. These GPUs are insanely power-hungry and require data-center-grade cooling. When the bubble pops and data centers go under, you’re not going to see consumer-grade RAM flood the market. So if TSMC wants to enter the market conservatively with the assumption the AI surge will not last, going into the consumer RAM side would be a better bet.

Good. Legitimate safety features should be opt-out rather than opt-in wherever possible.

prompted questions about who bears responsibility for an AI agent that goes rogue.

That’s not a trivial question, but courts have had the concept of distributed weighted responsibility for decades. Does your company provide users with access to an AI agent you know aggressively finds illegal/unethical ways of completing prompts? Mostly the provider’s fault with small fault of the user submitting the prompt. Safer AI with a user who has crafted the prompt specifically to attempt to get the AI to break into a system? Higher weight on the fault of the user, smaller weight on the provider.

We assume that the AI boom is the result of market demand. In reality, it is the result of investment decisions made by concentrated capital, which is reshaping the economy on its own terms.

But that’s always been true under capitalism. It’s just that in the past generally large capital expenditures have gone towards things the wealthy think will get them more wealth. There have always been capitalists who spend their money directing the economy to do what they want, rather than what the “market” wants. They just haven’t had the majority of the capital being spent.

The last 50 years has seen an unprecedented concentration of wealth. The wealthy are literally a thousand times proportionately wealthier than poor people than they’ve been at any other point in human history. There’s not much wealth to squeeze out of everyone else, so the economy is even more at the vain whims of those with all the capital as they look for things to spend it on.

Tech news has been reporting for literal decades that Apple, Amazon, Google, and similar have been sitting on giant war chests of profit with nothing to spend it on. Well, they’ve found something they want to spend it on, so they’re emptying 20 years of profits in 5. They’ve now completely blown through those stores, and don’t want to slow down, so now they’re taking on unprecedented levels of debt. Something is going to give out and things are going to get bad within the next 5 years.

It’s worth stating that this is showing just the private company contributions (private as in not owned by national governments). State-owned oil companies of various nations contribute massively as well, so beyond the bribes lobbying problem there’s a direct conflict of interest for many nations that get a substantial amount of revenue from those state-owned oil companies.

I think it’s technically not crop rotation because they’re supposed to be planted in the same field at the same time, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)

After briefly pushing SpaceX’s market value close to $3 trillion, investors have begun reassessing whether the stock’s rapid advance can be justified by fundamentals.

Nothing in the stock market has been about fundamentals for a very long time. Especially regarding Musk companies.

Ok so when a dozen people all go to say the same thing, when do the other people get to speak? 36 minutes later. They get 3 minutes each. These elected officials can spend a half fucking hour listening to their citizens.

No, sales are going down because prices are going up. If you have a fixed inventory and sales go down, you lower prices to increase demand and move the product and keep your revenue stream. But in this case, they’re moving supply away from this market (consumer hardware) to a different market (AI data centers). So the supply is going down with (previously) fixed demand, driving prices up. The “motherboard sales are collapsing” headline comes from looking at the consumer hardware slice of the computing hardware market. If you look at total sales from each manufacturer, so include the AI data center sales in the analysis, they’re not having any trouble moving inventory nor keeping up their revenue stream overall.

Wholeheartedly agree. The point I’m more trying to make is that they can survive much longer without popular support than other kinds of movements. So Palantir can be very successful for a long time aligning with the regime, even if it will ultimately fall. They can (and probably plan to) jump ship before that fall, like German companies that aided the Nazis did after WWII.

Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.

I keep seeing this logic that:

1. If a movement is unpopular it will fail in short order
2. In the US, the current fascist movement is unpopular
3. Therefore it will fail soon

That may be true of a lot of movements, but fascism doesn’t work like that. They don’t need popularity, they just need control over the levers of power. The Heritage Foundation and many, many other conservative groups have been working for decades, some since the 1950s, to seize control of those levers of power.

Palantir aligning with this fascism is not nearly the clearly failing strategy the author believes it to be. There’s a very real chance they are successful for years or even decades aligning with the current fascist regime. It has a lot of momentum, and I haven’t seen good evidence that that momentum is reliably ebbing. It’s seeing speed bumps, but I haven’t seen any kind of turning point. I really hope the midterm elections are that turning point. Either conservatives lose Congress or the public realizes they can’t stop it by working within the system anymore.

For enthusiasts, AI promises to usher in something that socialists have long dreamed of: a world without scarcity in which human beings can move finally from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Like many problems techbros try to solve, this is a problem of politics and social organization, not technology. We have had the technology to free the entire human population from several fundamental scarcities for decades (food and housing most prominently, but also many diseases), but the groups with the resources to do so actively choose not to solve those problems. Mostly because they are antisocial psychopathic billionaires.

We’re about to face a crisis nobody’s talking about. In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on. The leaders who’ve abdicated to algorithms won’t have the wisdom to share.

Except we are talking about that, and the tech bro response is “in 10 years we’ll have AGI and it will do all these things all the time permanently.” In their roadmap, there won’t be a next generation of software developers, product managers, or mid-level leaders, because AGI will do all those things faster and better than humans. There will just be CEOs, the capital they control, and AI.

What’s most absurd is that, if that were all true, that would lead to a crisis much larger than just a generational knowledge problem in a specific industry. It would cut regular workers entirely out of the economy, and regular workers form the foundation of the economy, so the entire economy would collapse.

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”