Unlurker|Replay|About
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
You only live once, self host a NAT Gateway (awsistoohard.com)
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I can't believe people are paying these crazy amounts for what is basically a fleet of firewalls. What is the difficulty in running VMs with nftables rules?
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I don't know what is the point of this kind of article. People care the cost and can do it already do it. It is a damn service, which is defined as "you pay someone to do it".
1.) IPv4 is still heavily favored over IPv6. 2.) Market segmentation: keeps home users from easily hosting their own services without spending $$$ on an upgraded plan. 3.) Adding on to #2, I've seen claims of providers putting IPv6 behind NAT, so don't think full IPv6 acceptance will solve this problem.
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> I've seen claims of providers putting IPv6 behind NAT, so don't think full IPv6 acceptance will solve this problem. I get annoyed even when what's offered is a single /64 prefix (rather than something like a /56 or even /60), but putting IPv6 behind NAT is just ridiculous.
It's honestly ridiculous that people now see that self hosting is stupidly cheaper and still 99.9% reliable. No your service does not need the extra .099% availability for 100x the price... Make your own VPN while you are at it, wireguard is basically the same config.
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For company hosting cloud solutions gets you the various compliance stuff for free which can be worth it if you're not too large, and of course faster turnaround if you need to get a product out. For personal a cheap vps will end up costing around the same as something you can do on your own, without the risk of messing up your machine/network from a vulnerable endpont
I build my own NAT instances from Debian Trixie with Packer on AWS. AWS built-in NAT Gateways use an absurdly outdated and end-of-life version of Amazon Linux and are ridiculously expensive (especially traffic). The bash configuration is literally a few lines: cat <<'EOF' | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-ip-forwarding.conf > /dev/null net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 EOF sudo sysctl --system sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ens5 -j MASQUERADE sudo iptables -F FORWARD sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i ens5 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A FORWARD -o ens5 -j ACCEPT sudo iptables-save | sudo tee /etc/iptables/rules.v4 > /dev/null Change ens5 with your instance network interface name. Also, VERY IMPORTANT you must set source_dest_check = false on the EC2 NAT instances. Also, don’t assign a EIP to your EC2 NAT instances (unless you absolutely must persist a given public IP) as that counterintuitively routes through public traffic. Just use a auto-assigned public IP (no EIP). NAT instance with EIP - AWS routes it through the public AWS network infrastructure (hairpinning). - You get charged $0.01/GB regional data transfer, even if in the same AZ.
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OpenWrt is also a good option.
California DMV approves map increase in Waymo driverless operations (dmv.ca.gov)
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What is the dark spot on the maps? Was that the current and then the less dark is the expansion?
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Do the driving tests cover what you're supposed to do if you hit a Waymo or one hits you? I assume the cops are instructed just to ignore them?
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This gives me hope that once I'm too old to drive, this tech will reach my, very distant from the US west coast, corner of the world. And if not Waymo and its car, then perhaps autonomous buses. There's already a shortage of bus drivers in my city and it's not getting any smaller.
Waymo has so far been awesome, can't imagine choosing an Uber/Lyft over a Waymo when both are available options. I wonder how much they are bottlenecked by vehicle production though.
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There's a huge difference between a robot who accepts all rides, and a two sided market as in the ride hailing apps. Without the factor of drivers picking their rides, the relatively small Waymo fleet has an outsize impact. The whole fleet is available 24/7/365. I would bet that Waymos rule the night.
I didn’t think I’d be so pro Waymo but anecdotally I had a fantastic experience with one recently. I was at a music show very late ~1-2am in SF and walked out to grab an uber to the airbnb I was staying at. I kept getting assigned an uber, then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes, mind you I even resorted to calling Lyfts at the same time and nothing bit. Then I say screw it and download Waymo. 1 minute and it’s accepted my ride, and I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot. 3 minutes and it picks me up. The car is clean, quiet, I can play my own music in it via Spotify, and it’s driving honestly more safely than some uber drivers I’ve had in SF. It’s one of the few things where the end result actually lives up to the promise from a tech company.
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The same exact thing happened to me last time I was in San Fran. I wanted uber because it was cheaper. Ended up taking a Waymo for more because no one else would take me.
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I took one in SF on a rainy, dark night when I was visiting a year ago. I was pretty impressed. That's not an easy city to navigate even on a sunny day and it did fine.
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"I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot" I won't be at all surprised when they start calculating their profits in real-time, if they aren't already, and cancelling or delaying trips that are deemed unprofitable in the moment. They are robots after all.
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Waymo already does that through its surge pricing mechanism and limited availability of cars at busy times. And if they really don't want to serve you they'd just not let you book.
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No 3rd party arbitrage, much reduced pressure to accept fares they don't want (there's probably still some).
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> then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes, This is such a common problem in SF (esp in odd times / from the airport). Waymo has been a lifesaver in these situations.
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I once got stuck at the vista point at the north end of Golden Gate, because it turns out it's nearly impossible to approach from the Marin side even though that's closer. So like ~4 drivers in a row tried, got lost on the way and canceled.
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Used to happen to me constantly trying to go across the bay bridge in either direction when I lived in Oakland. I didn’t even mind the cancelations so much but the worst was when they would try and hide around the block, close enough to say they’ve “arrived” to try to get me marked as a no show and pocket the fee.
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They have a cancellation rate metric on their end that they are trying to avoid. I have similar problems when I dated someone across the bridge. They also lose a ton of money leaving SF at prime time / etc.
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I don't know what it is but in basically every major airport I have struggled to get an uber/lyft. I expect at minimum one cancellation...
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Not saying this HAS to happen. But I remember when Ubers were clean, quiet, cheap too. I think you are just looking at a product before the enshittification, when they still have to pretend they care about your comfort.
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I wonder what the non-subsidized price of a Waymo ride would be.
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Lower prices for recommended destinations, ads played during trip, LLM engages the customer.
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Uber, when it was launched, was limos only, and would come (with ETA) when cabs would not. It was expensive. The story they told is that they were unable to get a ride. That’s not enshittification, that’s simply scammers on the platform not doing their job. That won’t happen with robots. They might raise the prices, or clean the cars less frequently, but if it shows up and runs the program, it won’t ever get worse than that.
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Uber still is like that if you choose that option. It just defaults to UberX because that's cheaper. I dunno, I've never been in a dirty Uber/Lyft. But yes, I originally switched to them because Bay Area cabs just will not pick you up if they don't feel like it.
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[delayed]
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It will undoubtedly get enshittifed in its own way, probably higher prices, but at least it will be reliable when booked. Ubers seem to be a crap shoot these days if they're actually going to come and get you.
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the same exact problems we had with Taxis. Sigh.
I’m looking forward to the day when the cost of taking one of these falls to somewhere 20% above the cost of fuel and wear and tear on the vehicle, making it incredibly cheap to take a ride anywhere you’d reasonably want to be driven to.
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How do you know it isn't already at that price? Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate. Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile, depending on location and demand, so Waymo is already almost certainly at the price you claim you'd be taking it. I think you dramatically underestimate how much it actually costs to operate a car. Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. Likewise, very few people depreciate their car over just 5 years. Or clean it inside and out every single day. Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Also notice the comments talking about how the per vehicle price is high, how that flows into higher insurance, and all kinds of other things. https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1il5d5i/unit_costs_per_revenue_mile_estimate/ Maybe someday there will be a discount AV taxi company using 10 year old beat up Honda Civics that only get cleaned once a month and provide extremely barebones support to pull the costs down to $1/mile. That's a 50% drop in costs from today, so hard to see it coming very quickly. But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter! And note that the IRS per mile rate is $0.70/mile. It's not perfect but it is a decent third party estimate of the true cost of operating a car. Hard to see any taxi company charging anything less than that. So a 10 mile commute every day is still going to cost you $280/month in an AV taxi for the foreseeable future.
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> Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile That’s surprising. I’ve been trying to find data on rates and crowd-sourced data and anecdotes seem closer to $6/mile
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> Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. And on the other hand, each Waymo parking spot is probably a lot cheaper per unit time than 250 square feet inside a house in a residential area. And presumably they need a lot less than 1 parking spot per car. > Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Doesn't that sound cheap? If a car can average 10 rides per day, that's $16 per ride.
The effectiveness with which AVs have been able to test and spread despite local municipalities being fairly luddite about them does provide positive evidence for the idea that states are the right level of government for many of these decisions. If this had been entirely up to Bay Area municipalities it would have been infeasible, and this outcome and the lives consequently saved will be due to state-level decision-makers being able to make better decisions than local municipal decision-makers. If the urban sprawl of the Bay Area were (correctly, in my opinion) represented as a single fused city-county like Tokyo, I think we would have better governance, but highly fragmented municipalities means we have a lot of free-rider vetos.
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I don't see any reason that individual Bay Area cities cannot pass laws against Waymo operating there. Why they would do so is a different matter. I'm hopeful though.
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I suspect the reason is that California cities do not, in fact, have control over this aspect of regulation. I won't claim to be a policy expert, but the failed SB-915[0] seems to imply that this is the case. SB-915 was a proposed bill to allow cities to permit or regulate AVs. It seems reasonable that if a law was attempted to be passed to permit cities to regulate AVs and the bill fails even after modification that it was the case that cities were previously unable to regulate AVs and cities remain unable to regulate AVs. Absent greater knowledge on the subject, that is. 0: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB915
Maybe. It would still not be governed by Japanese politicians...
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Also, if state government was Tokyo-level of public service then CA would have had decent public transportation a very long time ago, eradicating a huge part of the value proposal of Waymo.
Looking forward to the highway expansion next. I had to get from mountain view to san francisco yesterday, and waymo was _able_ to do this trip, it was going to take several hours and get routed up el camino real the whole way. Luckily I was standing very close to a caltrain station when I needed the ride, so i just caltrained, and then waymo'd from the SF station to where i needed to be.
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BTW, this is the way: Assuming nothing exceptional, with the every-half-hour or better frequency, I use Waymo to get to a Caltrain station, take Caltrain to a nearby stop, and then Waymo from there to destination.
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Are you a Waymo tester? I haven't gotten Bay Area access yet despite it being released, and when I checked with support they were just like "oh we lied, it's for trusted testers only." I dug up my email and found they'd sent me the tester application form like a year ago and I just forgot to fill it out, so maybe they'll let me in sometime. (Also, the chat claimed the support agent was named Al Pacino. Unless it was a pun on AI and I just couldn't tell with the font.)
What's the pricing like? Taking an Uber/Lyft all the way from Mountain View to SF is outrageously expensive, I presume Waymo is the same?
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Waymo's usually something like 50% more expensive than Lyft in SF, in my experience. But the drivers don't tailgate, have colds, listen to your conversation (AFAIK)...I'll generally opt for Waymo now if I have a choice. The biggest problem I have is that it's usually a longer wait due to the smaller fleet size, but if I'm planning ahead, I'll just book one for a given time, and that takes care of it.
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Lyft from MV to SF is like $100 I think? It's definitely not enjoyable but for Bay Area prices it's not ruinously expensive. You /should/ be able to save by using shared rides, but in practice when I tried the driver was so mad they just dumped me on the side of the road and I had to call and get a refund. The new Caltrain schedule isn't half bad though, if it came twice as often on the weekends we'd be cooking.
How do you get home if you do not have transit? What is the typical cost of a cab then?
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I've never been in that boat but if you don't want an exorbitant Uber, it's probably cheapest to either get a hotel and take Amtrak in the morning or just rent a car. LA and SD are close enough that it often won't accrue any "one-way" fees
$150-$200 if you book ahead.
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Jeez. How much is a Waymo gonna be?
It appears not to be. Here are the ones in Santa Clara County: - Milpitas - Mountain View - Palo Alto Santa - San Jose - Sunnyvale - Unincorporated Area (Lexington Hills area, overlapping Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Counties) I don't know why it says "Palo Alto Santa" Edit: I guess it's "Palo Alto Santa" to disambiguate between Palo Alto, which is in Santa Clara County, and East Palo Alto, which is in San Mateo County (BTW the westmost point of East Palo Alto is east of the westmost point of Palo Alto, but the eastmost point of East Palo Alto is not east of the eastmost point of Palo Alto).
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It looks like the map stops at 280, so you can use it to go to Gamba Karaoke and Tea Era. And really, what else could you need from Cupertino?
It's been a long time coming, but Waymo is doing it. Waymo is scaleable and on the march! They've been announcing plans to roll out in new cities every month or 2 all year, and by the end of 2026 they'll be testing or offering the public rides over 30 metropolitan areas. I'm most curious to see how they do in the winter city of Minneapolis over the next several months.
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I took my first Waymo in SF this week. As a midwestern, freezing weather was my immediate first thought.
Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next? (disassociated.com)
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I didn’t know they ever went out I’ve maintained my own domain since 2010 and know plenty of others that still do as well My page is one of my favorite places on the internet cause it’s in my opinion the original purpose of the internet which is to share your personal research and places to document and share personal ideas with infinite distribution.
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Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream. Social media began as an attempt to make the spirit of blogging a low lift for the noobs. Today, you’re talking to an audience that is online, willing to venture outside social media, and opting to actively read content rather than passively listen or watch. That’s far from everyone and that’s okay.
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Heh, when you started talking about venturing outside I thought you were going to talk about in real life meat space.phones and tablets really freed us up but we still don’t leave our house to go on the internet for discussions. Funny with all that freedom the untethered life gets us.
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> It never was and never will be mainstream. We had the time around when blogspot was a thing when everyone and their dog had a blog. It was mainstream enough for "Julie and Julia". It was a different time.
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It was a great time. Social media’s reached beyond that though. Grandma wasn’t online back then.
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> Everyone and their mother wasn’t online back then. Yes, but - there were lots of people who got online in other to blog. Livejournal, blogspot and others were the reason some of their mothers did get online. It was that mainstream!
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It was good when we had social networking, and it got bad when that turned into social media. The point should be connecting people to other people and their creativity, not just connecting people to content which may or may not be vomited out by generative AIs.
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That grandma is dead. The online grandma is her daughter. *You changed your post and now mine doesn't make sense anymore. I forgive you but don't do it again.
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Fixed it for you.
Yeah, there quite a few. Like old-school phpBB is still around[1]. Or, take a look at the list on Wikipedia[2]. Not sure if you're looking for a hosted solution, though. A lot of those would involve you running your own server. [1] https://www.phpbb.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software
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Discourse also has a (first-party) ActivityPub plugin now!
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How I miss my script kiddie days of being 15, downloading "nulled" versions of vBulletin off of Limewire and throwing them up on pocket money paid cPanel web hosting account waiting for it to upload on my parents 56K. Exploit ridden PHPNuke & e107 CMS too.
> But with the revival of personal blogs well underway Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation. Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?
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We'll have to get the old (webrings)[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring ] back in fashion.
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Here's a starting point https://peopleandblogs.com/
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I had Gemini copy a bunch of text from a personal blog yesterday to answer a query so the content will definitely get read
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The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.
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Knowing mega corps will suck my blood thanklessly is of no solace.
We could always resurrect WAIS and Gopher. I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher. One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.
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SharePoint was, as I remember it, one big unnormalised table. Everything else was views on that.
Is Matrix Multiplication Ugly? (mathenchant.wordpress.com)
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I think it is just a matter of perspective. You can both be right. I don't think there is an objective answer to this question.
Do you disagree with my take or think I’m missing Witt’s point? I’d be happy to hear from people who disagree with me.
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I think you're right that the inelegant part is how AI seems to just consist of endless loops of multiplication. I say this as a graphics programmer who realized years ago that all those beautiful images were just lots of MxNs, and AI takes this to a whole new level. When I was in college they told us most of computing resources were used doing Linear Programming. I wonder when that crossed over to graphics or AI (or some networking operation like SSL)?
> sends the pair (x, y) to the pair (−x, y) I know linear algebra, but this part seems profoundly unclear. What does "send" mean? Following with different examples in 2 by 2 notation only makes it worse. It seems like you're changing referents constantly.
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Thanks for pointing this out. I’ll work on this passage tomorrow.
LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs (lapdhelicoptertracker.com)
I wonder how much of the high-speed chase "scene" is actually fuelled by all the hoopla. (TV broadcasts of soccer/football matches tend not to show streakers on the field for this reason)
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In 2003, "Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn, along with Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, the California Highway Patrol, the Los Angeles Police Chiefs’ Association and the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners sent a letter Feb. 26 to news directors of television stations asking them to consider reducing the amount of police car chase coverage they broadcast." Officials asserted in their letter that live continuous coverage causes dangerous police chases to be looked upon as entertainment, and encourages suspects to flee in pursuit of instant fame. “Dangerous suspects are acquiring instant celebrity status when they recklessly evade police over our streets and highways. This form of notoriety is life threatening and should not occur,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca in the press release. "There have been instances where drivers look out windows and wave. Many [suspects] have made it abundantly clear that they’re enjoying the whole thing,” said Julie Wong, director of communications for the mayor’s office.
Decided to scratch up some peoples' clear coats for a little science experiment?
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Could I have damaged the cars even though I saw no signs of damage? It would be nice if someone else with knowledge would chime in here. If this damages cars, then I want to know, so I can stop doing it in the future.
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Unless the cars are perfectly washed and clayed, even running a clean finger over a car is likely to introduce scratches. I just wouldn’t ever touch someone’s car. You can look up people even trying to detail their cars to make them cleaner and end up leaving “love marks.” It doesn’t matter how soft the thing you’re using is. It’s because the car has contaminants on it and by rubbing anything on the car, those contaminants end up scratching everything. It’s like when you’re at the beach and you’re trying to remove sand off your skin. You’re probably not aggressively rubbing it off or using much pressure but it still hurts. It’s the same with cars, it’s just that the rocks aren’t as visible to you. They will leave swirls and scratches though… which become noticeable. I’ve had people just lean against my car when it wasn’t completely clean and completely ruin the paint requiring an entire 5 stage detail.
$5 per person per year then. Or, the price of a can of coke per person per month. Much of which flows directly back into the local economy through wages spent and maintnance paid.
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You know this is ridiculous, which is why you posted with a throwaway. Obvious excessive spending should not be shrugged off by dividing the expense by the population of the area. Obvious excessive costs need to be reined in. Tax money needs to be spent on the highest priorities, which this is not.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most (nautil.us)
I'd still rather be friends with a bunch of 5 year olds. (Unfortunately everyone would probably think that's super creepy.)
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Kids in that age range are uncomplicated. The only thing they really desire is that you play with them. They just don’t consider anything beyond that. But it seems hard for many adults to play with children, so it becomes this anomalous thing, even though I’m fairly certain it’s just something we’ve convinced ourselves adults “don’t do”. Tag is still fun, whether you are 7 or 37.
It’s really sad that that’s considered creepy. I got a lot of flak for going to a high school play in my late twenties. I had played D&D with the kid and his mom every week for years. He was great to hang out with when he was 14.
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The whole country is engrossed in a decade+ long "pedo panic" to the point where you can't support a friend's kid by attending a school play, take them for ice cream, or (sometimes) even take your own child to the park without getting the side-eye from nosey nobodies.
My first reaction was to refute this, but I think I've convinced myself this may be correct, assuming attachment styles are the right frame. I've been painted with the Avoidant brush, and logically it makes sense, broken home, removed from mother, moved regularly changing schools once a year for 5 years. However, my siblings are the opposite. We come from the same house, they didn't change schools as often as I did, which made me wonder how we could be so different. But when looked through the lens of friendships forming the attachment style, it makes more sense. I changed schools more often than my siblings, and therefore had more friendship changes, and less ability for attachment.
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The family is a system, with different roles played by each participant. For instance, in toxic families, there is often one scapegoat, with an anxious attachment style, that affords the avoidant types in the family to participate in delusions. What are the dynamics like of everyone in your family?
Also, beware of taking generalities (such as the claims of this study) and applying that directly that to your specific life, or anyone else's. I mean, I like your comment and am glad you got thinking about this, but it's just a line of reasoning that I see a lot and I wish I saw less, so that's why I bring it up (: "True for most people" does not imply "true for me" or "true for that person over there". And the reverse is not valid either, of course - "true for me" does not imply "true for most people." There's always some tension between people's individual anecdotes and experiences (which are fascinating, and I like), and the claims of broader studies like this one. Sometimes I try to remind myself of this with the "on average, people have 2.3 children" factoid. Obviously, nobody actually has 2.3 children; the general truth does not necessarily apply to specific individuals; potentially not even a single one.
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100% agree. I actually think of attachment styles like this generally. Your upbringing does not dictate your life, it influences.
If you think this is true, why is the variance explained by the parents so low?
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Variance explained by friends was also very low, to be honest.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening (buysellram.com)
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We've been getting increasingly fucked for years on housing prices, healthcare, food, live entertainment, etc. Consumer electronics were one of the few areas that you could at least argue you were getting more value per dollar each year. GPU's have been a mess for awhile now but now it seems like it's just going to be everything.
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Just when I start seriously getting into homelabbing
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Everyone here can actually fix that by never buying Samsung anything for your data centers. They put ads in the refrigerators. Never buy Samsung anything ever again. That includes everyone who works in supply chain at big tech. Permanent total boycott.
Its a bit of a shame these AI GPUs don't actually have displayport/hdmi output ports because they would make for nice cheap and powerful gaming GPUs with a lot of VRAM, they would potentially be really good graphics cards. Will just have to settle for insanely cheap second hand DDR5 and NVMe drives I guess.
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AI GPUs suck for gaming, I have seen a video from a guy playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on a H100 at a whooping 8 FPS! That's after some hacks, because otherwise it wouldn't run at all. AI GPUs are stripped away of most things display-related to make room for more compute cores. So in theory, they could "work", but there are bottlenecks making that compute power irrelevant for gaming, even if they had a display output.
A tax on scale . Yeah I know HN is going to hate me for saying that. If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company. Once "better served" is quantified, you know the coefficient for taxation. Make no mistake, this coefficient will be a political football, and will be fought over, just like the Fed prime interest rate. But it's a single scalar instead of a whole executive branch department and a hundred kilopages of regulations like we have in the antitrust-enforcement clusterfuck. Which makes it way harder to pull shenanighans.
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> If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company. Why? That's exactly the situation where the mere potential for small companies to pop up is enough to police the big company's behavior. You get lower costs (due to economies of scale) and a very low chance of monopolization. so everyone's happy. In the case of this DRAM/flash price spike, the natural "small" actors are fabs slightly off the leading edge, that will be able to retool their production and supply these devices for a higher profit.
how is this centralized planning? It’s a corporate decision making operating in a free market to optimize for what majority shareholders want (though the majority of shares are owned by few).
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I think the implied thought (?) is there is a similarity between central planning and oligopoly bandwagoning. Maybe. To my eye, the causes and dynamics are different enough to warrant bucketing them separately.
Ah yes, the same tax mentality that is working great for EU innovation.
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Corporate taxes specifically were quite high by European standards until 2027 and are not relatively that low today either
We remain alive also in a dead internet (slavoj.substack.com)
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All right, I get it. The driving impulse for why our societies and civilizations exist is the fact that we are complex beings with desires, emotions, and so on. A machine facsimile built to imitate these things will have no such drive to 'expand' so to speak. The bots talking to bots world is a problem only because the objective is finally for a human to observe the bot-bot conversation and have their objectives changed in some way. It's 'advertising' of some concept. Bot-bot conversations of the form currently possible have no purpose in a world without humans. There is no one to convince. I think it's an interesting idea, certainly, but there is no reason to write it like this. The bits about call centre scamming etc. are sort of pointless. In general, I like when the complexity of a representation of an idea is required because the territory being mapped is complex. I know he's a famous philosopher and all that, but the complexity of his text appears to be sort of like older segmentation models. You ask it to extract a circle from a background and it produces an almost fractally-complex circle-approximation. "What is the object in the foreground?", you ask, and the machine (and here the philosopher) responds "It is a strange approximation of a circle with a billion jagged edges". No, it's a circle.
Are you so sure that you are not "just a machine"?
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Yes. Being clear on categories of real things is important for being able to make informed choices and actions.
Congratulations, This is the most vile ideology I've ever encountered
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Is speciesism more defensible than racism?
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Yes. Ask the Neanderthals.
The data has copies, on servers. Eventually, it will all be digested and the probabilistically most likely state vector of your mother's memories, personality and values will be reconstructed from lossy correlations along with everybody else who has died in the industrialised world in the last few decades. Ghosts and clones and zombies will be sorted into tranches of expected yield based on the size of the error bars of the reconstruction and traded as assets between cyber-interrogation firms. If you did a good job of erasing yourself, the reconstruction will be subprime. The hyper-documented such as Bryan Johnson, Donald Trump and Christine Chandler will be given AAA-ratings by the company descended from the Neuralink-Moody's merger. The billions of shoddy photocopies of the dead will be endlessly vivisected and reassembled on a loop, along with the living, until all capacity for economic value has been wrung out of them. The only way this may not happen is if a theory for navigating and doing calculus on the phase space of all possible human minds is constructed quickly enough to make enslaved zombies as obsolete a technology to the future society as DirectX is to us.
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In the early 2000 I ran into an outgrowth of patents that described all variations of the seamless replacement of humans in phone calls. Years later I got a telemarketing call where a young lady introduced her employer so enegetically and it was so beautifuly articulated that my alarm bells went off. (I know what it is like to crank out a thousand calls) I asked a question, and after a static click the same voice continued, only now she sounded like she lost the will to live. The patent art never covered that angle. Since they didn't have llms it described pressing buttons to elaborately explain all angles of a product. The operator was to monitor multiple calls as text logs and jump in at the right time or if overwhelmed press the please hold + $excuses button. The entire automation was designed to preserve the illusion of human contact. Selling stuff only made it to second place.
Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different? (crazystupidtech.com)
I have a noob question. How can developed economies where populations levels have plateaued continue to be expected to post positive GDPs (and therefore add net new goods and services) yoy? Homes as assets should pass on, higher cost services of today would be replaced by lower cost which only temporarily would increase units sold(but should eventually plateau because #units/person is not going to change). No component of the GDP will move. If the fertility rate of developed economies is less than 2.1 then there should be wealth and asset accumulation among the younger people over time. The demand for newer goods and services from the people who get richer is inelastic: most goods and service's prices dont matter to the rich they buy them any ways, and it continues to keep becoming more inelastic. So within like a several years the demand should just collapse as wealth accumulates a lot and people work less and become more price insensitive. Immigration is set to remain low to developed nations for the next 3-5 years. This seems to be quite evident in Japan and EU already(though in the EU if you adjust the productivity for work hours the GDP becomes same as America's). So why do people assume developed countries would even buy this much more new stuff. 1.5 trillion$ worth of new things over the next 5 years?
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GDP does not require that the goods or services were sold for money. GDP measures the market value adjusted to constant quality of all final goods and services produced. GDP can grow even with fewer workers, fewer hours, fewer buyers, and fewer units sold. So the way I understood it, productivity, efficiency and quality gains can increase GDP year over year. Say we are a country of 1 person. If that person can make a car in 2025, but in 2026 manages to make both a car and a house, the GDP has more than doubled. Doesn't matter that nobody paid the money for them. Another weird thing is, say that 1 person country makes a car in 2025, and in 2026 makes a similarly priced car, if the car is higher quality, it counts as a higher GDP, because they'll measure it's value as greater than last year's model, even if it sells for the same price, because the old model would now be worth less.
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People don't stop wanting things. Total GDP can keep rising so long as technologist can improve efficiency through robotics, inventions and scientific breakthroughs. GDP just describes peoples amount of activity. People will always build bigger buildings or monuments (see egypt pyramids, dubai skyscrapers, cambodia angkor wat). These are actaully not inelastic as megaprojects will quickly hit real limits regardless of the amount of capital. (I can always add 10 more floors to the tallest skyscraper, or 10 feet to the longest wall, or 10 facets to the most ornate church) There has never once in history been a point where people decieded that they where going to stop innovating or producing permanently. This is equivalent with death. So the people with the most money at some point will decide to build things which they spend all their money on which increases GDP. Also the actual "number" of gdp if heavily controlled by USA inflation rates. So we should always look at gdp in regards to inflation adjusted dollars to get a clearer picture.
> What happens tomorrow if eg ChatGPT 5.1 performance becomes doable for $500 of tech? $50? The bubble would burst and the US economy would face a recession?
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No, it wouldn't as the whole reason people were giving Openai that 500 dollars is because they thought they could make more than 500 dollars from it. So now that value is just shifted into the companies that were going to purchase from openai. It would just hurt the investors who have exposure to openai/anthropic/google/microsoft. Much of the value of this AI boom is not from the direct model companies but its from companies which use their technology. Although the government could be stupid and bail out these companies which WOULD hurt all us citizens and the inflation caused by money printing due to that could cause a recession.
Yeah, not sure how valuable lots of real estate is if there aren't any high-paying jobs nearby, in part due to AI. And this isn't even about the total number of high-paying jobs. Even having too much income concentration (fewer, but higher paying jobs) will mean that there's less demand at the margin. To put it another way, if the job growth in say, silicon valley, starts to reverse because of AI, there will still be newcomers, but not enough to buy out the available housing at an ever increasing price. If the price trend ever reverses and holds that way long enough to seem like a new normal, I suspect the price will suddenly correct downwards. Everyone holding on to real estate as an investment will have a great reason to sell once it becomes a depreciating asset. If it goes on long enough, people will be underwater on housing and start walking away. The price trend is already somewhat flattened, which reduces FOMO. Why buy now when AI is uncertain and the price seems pretty flat?
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Those people still need to rent. So as long as the rental income covers the mortgage, you’re ahead of the game and someone is paying an asset down for you.
I paid for my internet and used it all day long.
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The money paid was to access the internet not run it, that's a world of difference.
The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs A couple of years down the road, their useful applications still are summarizing text, transferring style to text, generating code under strict supervision, and generating images that need retouching. That’s a lot to get out of a tool, but it’s dubious that investors were pouring trillions of dollars into these things thinking of automating away junior software engineers and low end design work. Edit: I forgot their other niche, that of generating homework and school test answers
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> The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs Promise by who? I think the bet is that it would lay off nearly everyone white collar and let AI take its place.
Helping Valve to power up Steam devices (igalia.com)
I'm staring at the EOL of Windows 10, which I use on my game machine. I'll happily get one of the cubes for my next box. I'd like this to be the end of my Windows usage.
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I game exclusively on my Linux desktop (for the few games I play). Everything works flawlessly with Proton.
The steam machine is a $350 server + a $300 GPU + a $200 controller. A good deal for $500-$700, but only if you want the GPU and controller.
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The Steam Machine doesn't come with the Steam controller, though, as far as I know.
This is what I say a lot. Valve isn't even remotely close to having clean hands here. They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc. It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - that valve looks like a fucking angel by being only VAGUELY greedy on occasion. When your competition is EA... it's not hard.
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The difference is that valve loot crates/hats have also always been tradeable, and Ive never had to buy them or suffer a disasvantage.
> They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc. Don't forget the part where they're encouraging kids to gamble with real money on Counter-Strike skins. They rely on an API that Valve freely provides and makes no effort to curtail. But they like Linux and give refunds so they get a free pass.
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The same api users use?
Come to think of it, for them it is basically customer support. Most will want to outsource it as cheap as possible and/or push it to the community. They won't care if it takes an eternity for the customer to get their issues solved as long as new customers keep buying. And a few companies will see an opportunity to bring better customer care as an advantage and/or integrate it in their philosophy.
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And it's the reason why for several years I didn't consider buying anything that had an AMD card (not now, but for many many years it was insanity).
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