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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • it goes deeper than just “investors are greedy” though. Most people making these investment decisions are doing it at the behest of other people who have handed them their saving in exchange for returns. Those people aren’t privy to the nature of how money is getting invested and why, they hire someone else for that, the investors.

    The investors may be making short sighted, stupid decisions, but they’re doing it because they’re pursuing their own personal incentives, get a raise, a promotion, or just not get fired. The managers are doing the same. If they don’t do it, someone else will.

    It’s not the fault or moral failing of any one individual, but a fault in the system of incentives. A failure in the fundamental structure of how we decide how investments are made, in how we accumulate capital for investment.










  • The problem is that the AI branded software doesn’t run easily on old devices, unless you just stream it from one of their server farms. But they’re losing money every time they run one of these services for you, and the vast majority of people aren’t going to pay them a subscription for that.

    They’re trying to justify selling new devices with software now, not giving out software that can run on old devices. You gotta replace your 2017 laptop to run windows 11. Gotta get a new computer with an NPU to run AI models locally. But it’s happening again, users are not embracing these new AI features, let alone buying new devices just so they can use them.

    Much like wearables and VR headsets, the interest for these things is largely limited to enthusiasts spaces and isn’t translating to mass adoption. The average person doesn’t care about having their computer writing their email in to a limerick, they just want their email client to not freeze up and crash because they got an email with a weirdly formatted picture.




  • Perhaps there is a better term and I should be more clear, but people know, roughly speaking, what “new” does, even “active” is fairly straight forward. They are literally algorithms but not what people are talking about when they complain about “algorithms”.

    When people complain about the “algorithm”, in the colloquial sense, they’re talking about some nebulous unknowable method of sorting that only the people at meta and alphabet are privy to the details of, not the literal definition of the word.

    I should have chosen my words more carefully but I think the point stands, there is a marked difference between a system where it is clear to the user how things get sorted, and the home, discovery or “for you” systems of major social media sites.



  • There is this interesting push and pull with algorithms, they need to show content users will engage with, but, their main value to the companies is that it allows them to easily manipulate what is seen.

    They push people to hard they stop using the algorithm, but if they just let the algorithm act purely one what people engage with, then they can’t monetize it.

    There is a third access of preventing people from going down self destructive rabbit holes, but they don’t care about that until people start talking about regulating them or start moving away.





  • Previously there was an obvious cap on the value proposition to scaling data centers, mainly, that they needed population centers nearby who would need storage or processing for thin film devices. Latency is important for these kinds of things, so they need to be near to the demands

    Now they think they can make value regardless of demand from local population, through training weights for models, or running models and sending the output to population centers. So suddenly the cost of power to run the systems is what matters, and the most profitable (not the cheapest or most efficient) is fossil fuel.

    They see dollar signs with the opportunity to turn power directly in to value without the need for people nearby.

    It’ll be really embarrassing for them as the consumer market continues to fail to show interest in the outputs they’re making.


  • There definitely has been some scalping, but also, just, not a huge amount of inventory available (like sub 100 units available across cities with populations in the millions). A bit of a paper launch TBH.

    TSMC only has so much throughput available and NVIDIA has other products they’re selling that they can make better margins on than consumer GPUs. I’m a little surprised they launched at all given how few they’re shipping.

    I wonder how much of launching now was to generate buzz to get studios to adopt methods of rendering that work best with with software, make it harder for competitors to compete on hardware.