And they’re turning around to give the money to their customers in the form of investments or loans, so that they can buy more products from them. That’s simply not sustainable.
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Machine learning is not why companies are dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into building data centers so they can earn tens of billions of dollars; it’s specifically large language models. Machine learning existed before the LLM boom and had real benefits, but has barely seen a fraction of the investment into it that LLMs have, because it didn’t have a bunch of tech bros speculating that artificial superintelligence would make them trillionaires.
Anyone remember when WeWork filed their S-1 and interest in their IPO crashed in the ensuing reality check? This seems like it will be so much worse, at least in terms of numbers. I just hope we don’t have to wait that long to pop this bubble.
Because teacher Christa McAuliffe was onboard. I believe they previously broadcast earlier shuttle launches, but by 1986 they were no longer novel; putting a teacher onboard who was planning to teach some lessons in space made educators more interested and so many schools pulled out the TVs to show the launch live. Turned out to be a different kind of education than they expected.
I love that this is like that evolution of man painting, but showing how script evolved over the years.
Just a reminder that Musk’s original timeline to Mars was to launch in 2024 and land this year. Meanwhile, the Starship rocket(s) meant to accomplish this, as well as the lunar landings have only just had 6 successful launches out of 11 attempts.
Furthermore, none of those launches even attempted low earth orbit (LEO) which is roughly 120+ miles up. The delta-v to go to the moon is much lower, but the fuel for that has to get into LEO first, along with fuel for descent, ascent, and the trip back to Earth. The Apollo missions accomplished this by using a truly colossal rocket, the Saturn V. Incidentally, the Soviet’s approach was the N1, which blew up on all four attempts to launch it. While Starship is planned to be as big or bigger than the Saturn V, which much greater payload capacity, the actual lunar module (LEM) was a much smaller craft and was left at the moon to avoid return fuel, while the Starship lander is the rocket itself (or the top stage) and meant to be returnable.
In order to achieve this, it will need much more fuel and therefore can’t fly a single rocket to accomplish this. SpaceX plans to accomplish this via refueling in space, a novel technology that has yet to be demonstrated and therefore adds more uncertainty into their time budget to work out the kinks. All of this brings into question the timelines for Artemis as extremely optimistic.
Of course, the original goal (for Musk) was to go to Mars, which is like the jump from LEO to lunar landing, as the distance jumps from 120+ miles to 250,000 miles and then to 140,000,000 miles. Additionally, you can reach the moon in 3 days, while a trip to Mars takes 9 months. The difficulty curve is exponential and they’re nowhere close to this goal. Naturally, Musk is “50/50 confident” that they can launch a mission in 2026 in remarks made this year.
All of this to say - while SpaceX has some incredibly smart engineers who are passionate about what they do, Elon Musk is a liar and a fraud who has an abysmal track record of ridiculously optimistic timeline predictions and should never be trusted.
It’s so upsetting to me that everyone (including the title) have focused on Steve Jobs while completely ignoring a much more worthy person: Dr Norman Borlaug. At least the linked page has him first.
Do we want the informed consumers making rational decisions kind of capitalism, or the kind where corporations exploit people who are helpless to whatever a lie they want to tell about the true cost of our decisions? Guess we have the answer.
True, but I always hoped death would be the one guaranteed release from work.
It’s literally the title of the linked article?
Plus with almost everyone being related, men don't have to play that “imagine it was your sister or daughter” game to generate empathy for women. /s
Most proprietary software has a catchy name and branding, a single website to visit, and a push to “sign up” or “download now”. In contrast, most FOSS have goofy or even unpronounceable names with little or bad branding, no clear authoritative website (especially with federated services), and there’s too much friction to sign up or download the software.
Additionally, you and I see a clear benefit to open source software, but most people either don’t know what it is or don’t really understand or care why it’s beneficial. It seems so clear and obvious to us, so much so that we’re willing to put up with all kinds of rough edges and hurdles to use.
This is even worse with federated social media because of the network effect. If there’s no friends or celebrities already there, it’s not clear why I’d want to be there, and there’s very few organizations that have accounts with useful information that I want or need. Even worse, what good stuff does exist is spread across a bunch of different instances and interfaces so if something gets shared on other networks, it’s not clear where it came from or where I’d go to get more of that.
I’m sure if you look around there are other examples in your life where you haven’t put much thought into things beyond your obvious needs. Do you care enough about ethically sourced diamonds or coffee or other products to make the extra effort to only purchase those? Do you scour labels at the grocery store to ensure they’re sourcing ingredients from reputable places and avoiding using certain chemicals or drugs that you don’t want? Do you care if you’re using services built on clean energy or if they pay fair wages to their employees? Maybe you do all that, but most people find worrying about all that stuff exhausting and just want something to eat, a product that is useful to their life at a fair price, a helpful service that is affordable, etc.
Happy birthday! I got you a government shutdown.
Still not as weird or gross as cat shit coffee.
If only there was a clue… like this being posted in programmer_humor.
You just sparked in my head something that I couldn’t quite summarize previously: GenAI is like someone who knows a lot of trivia or can do a cool party trick - it’s really impressive, but not really useful.
I’m genuinely amazed at many of the things generative AI can do. The fact that a computer can spit out text on a subject that sounds coherent is kind of amazing, and the fact that it can synthesize images based on a prompt is honestly mind-blowing to me. The quality of that generated content isn’t that impressive compared to human authored works, but the fact that a computer can do it at all is bonkers to me.
That said, it doesn’t really make my life better in any way. It’s barely helpful to me in the tasks that it actually does well on, and it wastes my time on prevarications that I spend more time double checking than if I’d just done it myself in the first place. Even worse, it takes an enormous amount of energy and other resources, it’s being used to diminish human labor, and we’ve blown through massive amounts of financial capital that could have been used to actually improve people’s lives in a substantial way.
The only use case that I can think of for an LLM that I would really want and wouldn’t cause more problems than it solves is making a smart home voice assistant more helpful. Translating my plain language commands into the specific syntax that my smart home would recognize is helpful to me because I wouldn’t have to remember the specific verbal command and taxonomy of devices to accomplish some task, and if it screwed up it’s easily noticeable and fixable. And I can run that locally and don’t require a half a trillion dollars spent on data centers and spiking energy prices to accomplish that.
Like another commenter, my ADHD interest in novelty helps offset the anxiety from the routine break. In my case I feel more anxiety about losing a routine that I’ve struggled to maintain (thanks again to the ADHD), which has happened to me multiple times this year thanks to random health issues that were outside of my control.
That said, I have experienced anxiety about using a hotel gym because I’ve struggled to substitute different exercises to accommodate different equipment. I hate having to share equipment with other people in the hotel gym (versus using my own equipment in my basement.
One strategy I’ve considered is developing (but haven’t executed on, so take with a grain of salt) is a go-to bodyweight routine. That way I don’t have to worry about what equipment is or is not available, or the social stress of finding other people in the gym; I can just do a predetermined set of bodyweight exercises alone in my hotel room. It’s still a break in my routine because it’s a different set of exercises in a different environment, but at least I can mentally prepare myself for something that I’ve pre-prepared as a substitute.
Alternatively, I’ve accepted that days when I’m stuck in a hotel it’s going to be different and since my struggle is maintaining a stable routine of working out on a schedule, I’ve defaulted to using a treadmill for some set period of time. It’s not the same workout or feeling, but I can usually depend on any exercise room at the very least having a treadmill that I can use.
Feels like this is the same logic that is used to ban sex education - they shouldn’t have sex until marriage so you shouldn’t teach them about it. I accept that kids will have access to fully loaded genitals, so I want them to understand and respect the consequences and to be able to act responsibly.
As much as I would like firearm access to be restricted and regulated, I accept that in the world we live in they’re not going anywhere, anytime soon. I also think alcohol is deadly, both for the consumer and the people around them, but I’d rather teach my kid to drink responsibly than send them off to college unprepared; I’ve seen too many sheltered kids go fucking crazy once they’re out from their parent’s thumb.
I’ve always felt that harm reduction was an admirable thing. Accept and work with human nature instead of against it. I don’t want people shooting up heroin, but I support giving away free, clean needles to prevent even worse outcomes. Doesn’t mean I endorse or encourage the activity.
It’s a perfect analogy because it seems like an improvement because it seems like an improvement and on paper it is. But as I got a bit older I realized that:
Like AI, it’s a novelty that is worse in almost every way while appearing to convey an illusory benefit!