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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • CALL. YOUR. REPS. AND. SUPPORT. THIS.

    Tell them you want Schumer out. Tell them you want a real progressive in charge. Tell them you want a progressive party that fights like hell for the people. Tell them that you will personally work to help primary them out if they don’t grow a fucking spine.

    Raising your voice costs you nothing, so just fucking do it.

    I don’t give a fuck about your magical third party that’s going to manifest from the ether. You can still do that, no one is stopping you.

    But right now you have an opportunity to capitalize on this outrage and possibly make a real, meaningful change.

    You miss every shot you don’t take.







  • That’s part of it, but the bigger part is that the enterprise business has completely failed to manifest.

    Transformer model based AI is, at best, a fun toy or a minor convenience. For example, as a coding assistant, it functions as a fairly effective and speedy search engine, so long as you have the skill to check the output. But it also shortcuts the research process for you in a way that makes you more likely to overlook any potential downsides in the solution it offers, or perhaps miss a better solution you might have found if you did the research yourself. It’s handy for stuff that’s low stakes, but not reliable enough for anything that really matters.

    And as a replacement for a coder, it just sucks, producing bug riddled, insecure code that it lacks the ability to debug effectively, meaning you still have to employ coders to fix its output.

    This is the story with every potential entreprise application; it can’t be trusted enough to replace the expensive humans it’s supposed to replace, and it doesn’t actually make the expensive humans substantially more productive when it assists them (this has been studied; while a lot of people will anecdotally claim AI makes their job easier, in practice the numbers show that it mostly either slows people down or makes no difference).

    As a customer service agent, it’s a dangerous liability, with a habit of outright hallucinating answers, and vulnerable to prompt injections that could allow for all sorts of dangerous shenanigans if you give it the ability to actually start making decisions about refunds and rebates.

    Replacing troublesome, expensive humans was always the real sales pitch. Every other feature these charlatans advertised was just part of a scam to keep us troublesome, expensive humans from complaining too loudly about getting replaced. When Sam Altman tells us that AI is going to cure cancer and solve global warming, he knows it’s a lie. But he also knows that “I want to take all your jobs” isn’t exactly great PR, so he has to invent reasons why this is actually a good thing.

    But the real sales pitch hasn’t come through, and it’s increasingly apparent that it won’t. You don’t invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to sell a slightly “better” search engine, or an app that shows you a short video of you kissing your crush. Those are not products that are going to give that kind of return on investment.

    I’m not saying that transformer model AI will never have any practical uses. But the big practical use, the one that was driving a truly unprecedented wave of tech investment; that isn’t happening. AI is not going to come and take all our jobs. Or, at least, this version of it isn’t. Microsoft have made the smart play by jumping off the runaway train before it reaches the bridge. They’re going to get fucked by this, but not nearly so hard as the people who don’t know when to fold.


  • Sure, this defacto would make Tesla the standard electric car for the US. But I’ll note that the rest of the car world is already adopting the Tesla plug as their physical standard, so a future government (assuming you guys have any) could just pass a law that says Tesla cannot restrict the use of their charging stations, or add any extra fees for non-Tesla vehicles.

    And either way, the mass conversion of the US to electric vehicles is still a good consolation prize, even if it locks in a regional monopoly for Tesla. Sometimes you take the wins where you can get them.



  • Microsoft hasn’t signed because unlike the others they’re scaling back their datacenter plans… Massively. As in, they’ve cancelled 1GW of future builds, which is equivalent to the entire compute power of London, AKA the datacenter capital of Europe.

    MS has seen the writing on the wall; AI is a nothingburger. And keep in mind, MS basically owns OpenAI, the apparent leaders in the field, and has access to all their tech and IP. If Microsoft are calling bullshit, it’s not for a lack of information. They know exactly what Sam Altman is cooking up in secret, and it’s clear from their reaction that they know its just a new coat of paint on the same busted crap.

    If OpenAI really were quietly working away on AGI, or some magical new version of ChatGPT that solves all its problems, MS would be in the best position to get out ahead and profit from that. They’d be building capacity and power generation like crazy.

    This whole bubble is primed to burst.




  • I find the idea of Elon trying to pitch his cars to Trump’s cult so fucking funny, because these are the exact same people who roll coal in their pickups and intentionally block electric chargers just to stick it to anyone who likes having a habitable planet. They’ve made hating electric cars part of their identity.

    Which means there’s two possible outcomes here, and both are amazing:

    1. This whole sales pitch falls dead flat against the wall of anti-environment propaganda these assholes have willingly swallowed whole. Elon continues to piss off the only people who were ever going to buy his products in order to pander to the only people who were never going to buy his products and Tesla collapses completely, taking most of Musk’s fortune with it.

    2. The MAGA cult download the software update en masse and suddenly decide they love electric cars now, resulting in a massive expansion in electric vehicle use, huge amounts of additional electric vehicle infrastructure, and a withering away of traditional gas vehicle infrastructure in a change that will ultimately become very hard to reverse even after Musk inevitably falls out of Trump’s favour.

    There’s also option 2b, which is that MAGA refuses to go electric, so Trump is forced to switch out every government car to a Tesla, which results in government departments installing huge amounts of supporting equipment to manage this new electric car fleet, to the point where switching back would become a ridiculous notion. The whole US government now uses electric cars.

    I want to see Elon face plant so bad, but even if he doesn’t, the mass electric car-ification of America is a pretty fucking cool alternative.