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Why You Should Expect an AI Crash (economist.com)
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It’s no longer smart to predict an AI bubble pop. The question is only when. Any article trying to sound smart without giving dates and justification for those dates isn’t saying anything.
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I guess a broken clock is right two times a day, 14 times a week and 700+ times an year?
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In life, one should expect anything. In compute, one should expect zero.
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Well, now the CFO is in charge of nVidia we may see some problems. Because while a founder CEO can play fast and loose with gray finance rules, I don't expect an appointed CFO can do the same. At least not one that expects to work again if they are found liable for it. It is kind of interesting in this way that the board has made this choice. It almost says they are looking to insulate against some liability here.
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Great can't wait for GPU prices to come down.
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Someone else is going to figure out what to do with them before gamers can get their hands on then again
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Circular financing, without regard to technical limitations. We've known about this for a few years. Old news. AI hype organizations like Latent Space (+ others) ban people who disrespect any aspect of AI today, and articles like this get buried.
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Isn’t it what they call Recursive Self-Investment?
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hey c'mon, there's no need for that kind of language. it's called 'recursive financing'
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Circular financing and various forms of booking sales ahead of or for future delivery are things that have caught up with other companies in the past and/or were straight-up SEC violations. Enron is an example. Does Jensen's replacement have the industry connections, clout (or bully factor depending on perspective) and appetite to continue the circular financing? Its the CFO I think that is replacing him and they may have objected to these things all along and might have been over-ruled.
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HN has been talking about a crash for almost as long as Dario has been saying white collar jobs will be gone in 6 months and Sam has been saying they’re 6 months away from AGI. At this point we may literally get commercial nuclear fusion power (which has been “30 years away” for the last 60 years) before any of the other things happen.
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Yeah doesn't seem like news. More of a case of when than if.
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In the words of Keynes, "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” A crash (or at least notable correction) is coming but I sure as hell couldn’t time when.
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Yeah, and also the similar quote that being early is just as bad as being wrong.
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Could be worse when near term cash is paying 5% and TIPS are paying 2.5-3%. As they say, when you’ve won the game, it’s best to stop playing.
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I wake up, I read articles about how the AI crash is coming. I figure that it's not actually coming because everyone is talking about it, so it's priced in. And then I pull up HN / LinkedIn / X / Substack where everyone is telling me that this is the new AI economy and the tech can't possibly flop, so I figure that the crash must be coming because there's too much optimism. I go to sleep. Then I wake up and read...
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[delayed]
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> decide that it's not coming because everyone is expecting it and pricing it in. I'm in the same boat. I'm hoping that the crashing is moving slowly enough that it can unwind carefully, and that not enough data centers got started that things can't simply be cancelled without much harm. A bunch of fake money borrowed on commitments over data centers never built and plowed back into the ouroboros rather than escaping into the larger economy seems like it could be unwound with only a few people going broke. The only wasted real production would be in all of the chips - and they might be able to go somewhere, somehow. The data centers currently built will certainly be well-utilized - the overcapacity hasn't actually, physically been done, right? If a bunch of circular financing went into doing something that never fully happened, is that a crash or a lifting of a mask over a real economy that has continued its previous slide? And if capacity ends up fully utilized and prices do go up, won't there be dozens of viable half-done projects, the best of which that could be dusted off and rolled out again?
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> And then I pull up HN / LinkedIn / X / Substack where everyone is telling me that this is the new AI economy and the tech can't possibly flop Really? It feels like most people are talking about an AI bubble, with a vocal minority in opposition.
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Any day now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ETxmOfw0JM
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..and how much of that AI optimism (and some pessimism) is generated by the same proprietary llms? Recursive self-enbubbling?
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Anyone got a gift link or archive?
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Gift link: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/11/12/why-you-should-expect-an-ai-crash?giftId=MmU2ZTRlMDItYzk1OS00N2MxLWEzMWItMjdlOTliMjk1MzZh&utm_campaign=gifted_article
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“This gift link has expired. Register to access this article”
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Gift link for 7 days https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/11/12/why-you-should-expect-an-ai-crash?giftId=NzAwNGI1M2QtNjQzMC00NDliLTkzYmMtODA4NWY2YTA3YmZi&utm_campaign=gifted_article
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Requires a “free trial”
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The page says "gift" but I still can't see TFA. Am I holding it wrong?
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I wonder if they limit how many times gift links can be accessed.
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Unfortunately it already says expired.
[dead]
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That link is to an effectively empty page.
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Archive.today had a bad grab, waiting for it to be updated after reporting it.
Chinese frontier AI models carry the fingerprint of export-controlled GPUs (unemploymentlabs.com)
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Cute trick but it's not exactly a secret, e.g. deepseek recently published their own inference engine -- and it only has kernels for SM100 (blackwell) and Huawei Ascend 950, and all its published performance results using blackwell. And these were completely openly disclosed as headline properties of the software: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepInfer/tree/main/#performance-benchmarks No one found it remarkable a couple weeks ago, ... but now the fact that DS is using blackwell is apparently some super secret requiring clever RNG init stats???
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The author of this piece is a SWE-turned-influencer "China hawk" from OpenAI (i.e. the primary advocate of export bans along with Anthropic), and this isn't an academic paper despite the theming. I have no idea whether this is legit or not (there's no link to any code), I'm mentioning this because all the comments here are assuming truth without verifying the contents.
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as the post mentions, the models could have been trained on 1. GPUs within China or 2. GPUs outside China for example datacenters in Singapore. The 2nd option is perfectly legal and allowed by US government.
So export controls are more like export friction
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Always has been
What if the gov tolerated gpu exports on purpose? Black & grey market devices marked up many times cost buyers heavily, while still suppressing motivation to develop sovereignty. If nvidia selling to China tolerated for the realpolitik and gets undone by incoming powers to create an appearance of change, is it really the right thing to do? Is it the smart thing to do? It's an interesting thought experiment, though, we will probably never know.
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> What if the gov tolerated gpu exports on purpose? Given the track record of this administration, they were probably paid to tolerate said exports.
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When Xi visited, Trump offered to sell him US made weapons. What's the chance that these GPUs got to China without Trump getting a cut somehow? Pretty much zero. Trump sat on knowledge of the affair for an entire year. That's extremely guilty behavior, he was either extorting Huang or covering g for him. The whole thing is the most corrupt thing we have ever seen at the presidential level.
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> The whole thing is the most corrupt thing we have ever seen at the presidential level. Bigger than Watergate by far
AI is turning Apple's app review process into a nightmare for synth developers (synthanatomy.com)
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Have just submitted two new apps last week and they’ve been published 2 days later. Updated them a couple of times this week and that also took around 2 days. Not sure if it’s because I have a good track record but I only had been rejected a couple of times and even then I just had to submit a screen recording of me playing with the app to make it pass the review process.
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Apple and Google are a mobile cartel, they need to be broken up. This is absurd. If people want the editorialized 'safety' of an App Store, they can use it, that's fine, but there's no reason to stop people from buying apps for their phone from wherever they want.
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A company I'm familiar with had their app rejected for "App does not contain means to delete accounts" Then all subsequent ones were rejected "Developer provided test account stopped working" Logs show that the tester used the "delete my account" function.. As the only customer service available is an uncaring LLM, the only solution that worked was to keep the "Delete my account" button in the app, and make it a NOP on the server side.
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This is my experience with app review. They’ll flag things as the exact opposite of what they are in reality. It’s like Apple intentionally hired the worst people to randomly gatekeep the App Store.
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https://phillipshoemaker.substack.com/p/who-is-actually-reviewing-your-app "About 80% of the reviewers on my team were former Apple retail employees. Many were Geniuses, the people who fixed your phone at the store. The other 20% came from elsewhere. They came from bartending, tree trimming, and tech." "When I was there, a new app got about 13 minutes. An update got about 6. Those 13 minutes cover every localization, every screen, and every purchase described above." This is why app review is a joke, and why the App Store is full of crap and scams. According to Shoemaker, Steve Jobs demanded that Apple review every app, but Jobs resigned from Apple only 2.5 years after the App Store opened. More than 15 years later, it's clear that the App Store has outgrown the expectations of the dying Jobs. I suspect that Jobs would have changed and adapted if he had lived, but Tim Cook seemed content to cash in on the easy App Store revenue.
> My app was REJECTED from submission FOUR TIMES in row. Always same reason (eg. my app is “design spam” and “duplicates existing apps” and it is createed using “app generation template services”) as shown bellow in screenshots. Which is obvious nonsense. You can feel the entitlement across the room from the developer. They seem to be unable to conceive that outside of their bubble there can be a real case of AI spamming that same look and feel, even if they did it by heart. Looking at his work, it's clearly modelled after Serum (which even the article describes as "a sort of Serum 2 for iOS") so I am not sure why they think this suddenly deserves a white glove service here. The App Store is also flooded with Synth apps, so regardless of the UI being the trigger here, I would imagine the category itself has been flagged as spammy and now has a higher bar of entry. If anything I would use this as an opportunity to reskin and try to stand out, they're giving you a blueprint of what will perform better on the algorithm if you avoid that look if you think about it. Or just try an Alt Store.
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I wouldn't describe it as entitlement. I think one of the issues I would have if I was in this situation is that the developer membership is paid for and the service provider (Apple) is actively refusing to let you engage in part of what you did pay for (the ability to publish apps on the App Store). You can bet that Apple won't give you a refund of that membership fee.
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“Just try an alt store” is a condescendingly flippant comment - there is near zero market for iOS alt stores and most people in most countries have no access either. Synths have never been a high profit business on iOS. And small earners are not a priority for Apple review. There’s a business case for not being bothered with most indie apps. To suggest there’s categorically no room for innovation or value add with new synth products is just ignorant though.
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An Alt iOS store isn't accessible to everyone in every country either as far as I know.
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There is also near zero market for more Synth Apps at this point so I'm not sure what you want here. It's like when the App Store started, someone made a Flashlight App and it was cool. We sure had enough of that by now. Now that AI turned everyone into a maker and the bar is lower in a world of abundance, it's only natural that things shift in terms of expectations for distribution. This is how new markets take shape too, YouTube became so trash that now platforms such as Nebula came out as a business.
Ok but now explain why there are tons of absolute trash vibe coded apps that barely do anything in the app store?
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First, I am not trusting them at face value. They are building a copycat of Serum and most likely could be doing some level of vibe-coding themselves. Second, to your point, say we trusted them, it's a chicken or the egg problem. After all the trash entered the space it became flagged and a scale/moderation issue. The larger problem is the bad actors.
Everyone is entitled to run whatever the hell they want on their own device. End of.
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Technically, he can run his app on his device. technically , anyone can grab a copy of source, put their phone into developer mode and install the app too. But- practically, it's hard. You only get 4 application slots on devices in dev mode for example and I think they also expire. I tried creating an internal app for my company and was gobsmacked that I didn't have any sane method to distribute it short of taking full ownership of everyones devices via MDM. You are of course not allowed to publish "internal" apps to Testflight (or the App Store, but that's more obvious).
Sure, but this developer wants to publish their app through the App Store. Not the same thing as running on their own device.
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I am not aware of a way to publish an app without an App Store. At least on Android you can make them self updating and not care about rest of the ecosystem
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You can install development builds on your own iPhone, you just need to enable Developer Mode: https://docs.expo.dev/guides/ios-developer-mode/
Audio software needs low latency. Can you actually make a synth in browser that's good? And integrates with DAWs?
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No
I'm not sure what Apple can do here; Pandora's box is open and it won't be closed. It felt like there was a flood of app releases in the early 2010s during the gold rush. I can't even imagine it now.
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They are the richest company in the world worth trillions. You're not sure what they can do? 1) hire more people 2) let people buy apps from wherever they want.
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Why do people think rich businesses will spend more? They protect their margins. Companies don’t earn more to spend more of their margin. Only way to get what we want from Apple is regulation.
> I'm not sure what Apple can do here; Hire more reviewers. Apple is making a shitload of money from App Store sales (and of course by scamming its users in many creative ways). They'd better spend it on making developers happier, not on thickening the walls of their garden.
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They don’t make a shitload off the small apps like the synthesizer from this post. They aren’t going to introduce more expensive Cupertino and Cork reviewers to help that category of dev. They’re a business and will automate instead of have small time earners occupy more time on reviewer desks.
And makes around $10,000,000,000 per year off the app store: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/08/appfigures-apple-made-over-10b-from-us-app-store-comissions-last-year/ They can absolutely afford to hire more.
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They will not. Why would high revenue be a reason to hire more? They look at margins and they want to optimize them, not use better margins as a reason to pursue smaller margins. Small time indie developers and businesses that earn them less than millions a month in fees are not worth their time. They’re solving this by automating more telemetry, not by hiring more junior and senior reviewers. They don’t want to take a loss on small devs. Only way they change course is via regulations.
Data centers need power – lower income, rural residents pay the price (news.cornell.edu)
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Residents should have voted better. If you've got a politician who isnt making DCs pay for their utilities thats on your poor choice of politician. Its a basic thing that has been solved almost everywhere already. I dont want to go on another 'i hate farmers rant' but seriously these people kick themselves in the nuts repeatedly and then have the gall to blame people in the city who were trying to get these policies implemented.
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My power bill has gone up significantly (in Chicago) because we have a really good grid, and relatively cheap power production costs due to investments our tax dollars have gone towards (fun fact 25% of illinois power comes from nuclear, the highest in the country). Now, I and all my neighbors are being financially punished for these investments, because so many data centers are being built out due to this infrastructure. I have friends who are engineers at the power distribution company who are denied raises and putting in 80+ hour weeks without over time. I say all this, not to diminish the low income Americans bearing the cost of these data centers, but to point out that its all of us. Its insane how few people are actually benefiting from this, and how simply taxing these data centers appropriately would fix it. I am not familiar with the actual contracts these companies have, nor the tax policies and breaks they are getting, but its clear to me they are not paying enough. I wouldn't be surprised if these servers are over clocked to hell and back simply because the water and power is cheap.
> Data centers paid only 38% of the grid costs tied to their growth. Data centers pay for electricity under the tariffs utilities charge them. To the extent their demand increases wholesale electricity prices, it's the normal consequence of additional demand competing for constrained supply. In no other market is it standard for the person outbidding to also pay for continuing to provide the service to the person who was outbid. The only reason there is much incremental grid cost is because utilities are legally required to continue serving their residential customers. It seems extremely reasonable for residences to share in some of these costs when getting electricity at a significant discount from market price. The notion that 'households' are paying for data center electricity is just not what is happening. Maybe residences should get discounted electricity, but again this is a policy question and I'm not sure the best use of the marginal federal dollar. > Transmission investment driven by new demand grew 17x in five years. Investment is not transmission built, I don't see how this disproves the well-documented countrywide transmission delays. If anything, it is an indication that we are transmission bottlenecked.
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Even if that supply is built, it will be more expensive because it is built at today's prices, not the prices of 20+ years ago when the community's previous generation capacity was built (possibly built with public money as a public utility). Should that additional cost of new generation be shared equally by the datacenter and the community? IMO it should be paid by the datacenter.
Farmed trees are often promoted as being a great fuel, but they do very, very little for enhancing biodiversity. The UK's largest CO₂ emitter is an ex-coal now-biomass powerplant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Power_Station
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> Farmed trees are often promoted as being a great fuel, but they do very, very little for enhancing biodiversity. Wind turbines and hydroelectric dams don't do much for enhancing biodiversity either, which is fine because their purpose is to generate electricity. > The UK's largest CO₂ emitter is an ex-coal now-biomass powerplant Only by counting burning biomass as emitting new CO2 while not counting the CO2 it removed from the air from being grown.
> They have too much power? On their land? It's not their sovereign land, except in the sense that the entirety of the US is 'their land.' Tribes are sovereign over their own land and BAJAA does not change that. It is common for tribes to litigate things outside of their own lands and administered by/for the public, for instance this landmark case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation_v._United_States_Forest_Service
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Their lawyers took the religious objection path perhaps because that might carry greater weight than an environmental protection argument might- but at its root this has the look of a watershed issue. Would you personally be A-OK with tonnes of treated sewerage being dumped upshed from your drinking water extraction point? Responsible elders / leaders are expected to to do their best to slow roll or stop such changes being made - once it becomes routine its much harder to stop as problems present.
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They used Religious Freedom Restoration Act in that case, and didn't even win. Some cases that have won use RFRA to legally discriminate against minorities by Evangelical Christians. Native Americans bring lawsuits based on their religion over a sacred site and reclaimed water, just like anyone else can, and yet losing "this landmark case" somehow proves they have too much power?
150 employees in a community of a few thousand or even 20 thousand is a massive boost to the local economy. Some places these things are being built have had declining populations for decades and haven't been new jobs in as many years as well.
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That is numerically irrational. If a data center consumes enough water and power for a community of 20,000 what do those local residents get in return? This is numerically simple. How much money do these data centers return to the local community and how much do they cost the local community. It’s a catastrophic net-negative for all parties except the owner and the construction crew.
Dwarf planet candidate appears which takes roughly 280 years to orbit our sun (smithsonianmag.com)
If anyone is interested, here is its orbit, my old day job was to compute orbits for asteroids and comets. (This uses wasm, meant for a desktop, and will download the asteroid catalog of about 65mb, you have been warned) https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/#t=2009-07-01.717&sel=2026%20ED138,134340,90377&v=4TVJ_4MA This is a big boy.
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Could you make left panel dismissable / reappearable
There was a lot of negative press and commentary about "demoting" Pluto from being a planet at the time. But its obviously true that it was the right move, and creating this "dwarf planet" class of objects was correct. It was hard to justify Pluto being a planet when Ceres exists, but Eris, Haumea, Makemake and all of these other possible Dwarf planets are the nail in the coffin.
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I would preferred we require children memorize all 10,000+ satellites of the Sun. More planets the better. Count the moons, why not.
> The updated IAU definition is essentially reverse engineered to fit how they wanted to classify the planets. I wholeheartedly agree with this take. I have something of a personal hatred of poorly executed retconning thus I present the following proposal. For the sake of simplicity we should use even powers of 10 with earth as the primary reference point. Note that the earth is 10^24, mars is 10^23, and the earth's moon is 10^22 (pluto is also 10^22 and less massive than the earth's moon). It seems "obvious" then that 23-25 are planets, 22 or less are relegated to dwarfs, and 26 and over are giants (jupiter is a 27 and the sun a 30 for reference). By that logic, if we want to consider pluto a planet then the earth's moon also has to qualify. I don't really care one way or the other but that just doesn't seem sensible to me.
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Following this logic, a black hole with earth's mass would be a planet.
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You could add a hydrostatic equilibrium requirement, which is what the IAU definition does. It doesn't really affect anything else the GP was saying.
So, a factor of 14.4 is enough to put the line between Ceres and Pluto, but a factor of 23.0 is not enough to put it between Pluto and Mercury? Yes, those classifications are arbitrary, but then any classification is. If you want to consider Pluto as a planet, you have to include quite a lot of other bodies, which are all qualitatively and quantitatively different from the 8 (which themselves are in 2 qualitatively and quantitatively different groups. Or 3, depending on who you ask). In the grand scheme of things, it does not matter and astronomers won’t care about the general public’s feelings. It is utterly pointless to get worked up about these things.
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> So, a factor of 14.4 is enough to put the line between Ceres and Pluto, but a factor of 23.0 is not enough to put it between Pluto and Mercury? Why not? It's an arbitrary line, and there has to be a lower limit somewhere. In the IAU definition, hydrostatic equilibrium loosely defines a lower limit for all planets including dwarf planets, but at the limits that's a fuzzy property that gets debated for small bodies. In fact Ceres is less massive than what some studies have found to be required for hydrostatic equilibrium, e.g.: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ad55f3 . The abstract of that paper starts out with, "The current IAU definition of 'planet' is problematic because it is vague and excludes exoplanets." If we had more small planetary candidates in the solar system, they would have had to come up with some additional constraint to separate planets from non-planets.
The backlash was all just populist ignorance on display. There were multiple concrete measures of planetness constructed and Pluto is an outlier in all of them. One of these things is not like the others.
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I think the backlash was fed by insistence "dwarf planets" are not just a subtype of "planets", they are a separate category despite the name.
Rust 1.100 (blog.rust-lang.org)
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The blog post says min-publish-age depends on the registry recording a pubtime. Why would pubtime not exist in the index?
> cargo install ignores the minimum publish age, for both the installed crate and its dependencies Why is that? It seems like that makes min-publish-age much less effective.
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The fact that install now uses the lockfile by default, mitigates this, I think.
That's not a paradox, that's how it always works. Compiling to fast machine code requires more work and takes longer. Is Python a fast language because it barely takes any time to compile the code? No obviously not.
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Looks like people extending rust never really focused on compile speed when designing features (from [1]): > If you could reinvent/change any aspect of Rust, what would you do alternatively? > A lot happened because we wanted to ship a useful thing with only so much time in the day, so some things were less deliberate than others. There’s an alternate version of Rust with significantly faster compiler times, because while we cared about compile times when designing we always prioritized other values more. We never asked ourselves how this feature or implementation impacted compiler analysis time and there are several spots where something slightly different would have much faster compiler times, which people do care about. But had we spent time on that, we would have neglected other things and not been any more successful. [1]: https://alexalejandre.com/interviews/interview-with-steve-klabnik/
Service degradation on Microsoft 365 (status.cloud.microsoft)
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Looks like a new vector attack for the future.
And I can't reach my self-hosted mail server in the Outlook desktop app because of this. For reasons that I cannot fathom, Microsoft wants to act as the relay to my self-hosted e-mail account, if I add the account in Outlook.
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outlook 2010 works just fine
What's your preferred email client? Just wondering what other people are using.
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eM Client for various M365 and IMAP accounts. ElectronMail for the 9 ProtonMail accounts I have (allows "tabs" for each account in one client).
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EmClient, Mailcraft
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Mac/iOS Mail is pretty lightweight. I used to use Thunderbird on Linux.
I use FairEmail on Android, which aggregates both my Gmail and self-hosted accounts. I use Gmail's web interface for my Gmail account (which, I'll admit, makes my little rant above more than a little hypocritical) And in my self hosted email setup I use RoundCube (web interface).
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> (which, I'll admit, makes my little rant above more than a little hypocritical) Na, that would simply be the kaleidoscope part you mentioned, wouldn't it? For what it's worth, I found the combination just as peculiar as you did.
I feel bad for the people working on this. It sounds like desperation is increasing. From the 10:11:39 PM UTC update: Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss. To validate a potential recovery approach, we're fully isolating a portion of our service infrastructure, restarting the affected components, and gradually reintroducing traffic to confirm our services remain stable before applying this approach more broadly. We're also analyzing traffic patterns across our entire service infrastructure and evaluating whether isolating traffic within each region may allow affected regions to recover independently. From the 9:41:46 PM UTC update: Current status: We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery. From the 9:01:14 PM UTC update: Current status: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue. From the 8:44 PM UTC update: Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly. Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
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Sounds like nobody knows how their own systems work anymore.
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That's because it's all ai
Why is there not a single mention that this could be a cyberattack? Is the issue only affecting the USA?
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Australia affected as well.
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Because there's no indications that it is the case, at least for the time being.
So the servers are ok but many of the health checks are failing and so the servers are taken off rotation, increasing load on other servers. I'm sure it's more complicated than it seems but from my POV this looks like amateur hour at Microsoft.
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I can't stand it when I see armchair analysts making claims like this. I'm sure it's more complicated than that.... but from my POV, which is extremely limited and informed by what others online tell me.... that this is amateur hour What would it take for it to be professional hour?
Many of us insist upon not building Rube Goldberg machines that cannot be reasoned about precisely for this reason. Most of the time we get demonized by resume-driven developers job-hopping every few years (seems like the lack of deep expertise is working out). Today we get to laugh at their expense. These problems were entirely foreseeable and avoidable.
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> building Rube Goldberg machines that cannot be reasoned about What a great phrase!, can I use that in conversation?
i agree with everything you said here except the last part. lots of nines means not having significant downtime. we passed 99.99% hours ago, and we're on the way to 99.9%
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Lots of nines means they have SLAs of no significant downtime. It does not guarantee that the SLAs can never be missed, just that there will be consequences when it is missed. Lawyers and accountants and sales folks will sort out the compensation payments that come back to the customers and try to negotiate relationships back to a healthy state.
I worked on multi-million dollar airplanes. If a pilot called me with an issue and hadn't rebooted the plane (on the ground), I wouldn't even talk to them. Rebooting isn't always a bad solution to technology.
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(on the ground) is probably pretty key, though. Ha ha. I can imagine the conversation if this was in the air.
Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. Wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.
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Teams has been working all day for me but I haven't been able to use outlook (app, not web) for about 7 hours now. Fortune 20 company, BTW.
I'm amazed to see so many services down and to see that Github and Github actions are still working
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GitHub infrastructure is for the most part completely separate from anything at Microsoft, other than using Azure.
It's a shame there isn't a well-standardized, free and open protocol for delivering email that could be run on inexpensive modestly provisioned hardware.
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It’s not just about email.
The idea is that it's someone else's computers that are managed more comprehensively than you could reasonably do yourself. But if you choose Microsoft to provide such a service for you, I don't know what to tell you.
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The truth is they are still managed better than most can reasonably so themselves.
Hopefully the people who feel that way are already close to retirement, so the choice won't have to be made for them.
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> Hopefully the people who feel that way are already close to retirement, so the choice won't have to be made for them. One of the best ways to deal with doing something the wrong way is to get rid of all the people who know how to do it correctly. That way no one knows any better, so no one has to confront the fact they're actually doing it wrong.
> Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief. DDOS?
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As someone who worked in infrastructure for a large global CDN, this sort of overload issues happen all the time when trying to bring infrastructure back online after an issue. First, you have every client retrying connections, whether automated or manual retries. This generates extra load over normal. In addition, whichever systems come online first often get a ton of traffic sent to them, which can immediately bring them back down if you don't have ways to prevent it. You will get a wave of systems coming back online, a ton of traffic hitting them, and then falling over again. Now, I am sure Microsoft is used to this and has procedures and systems in place to mitigate the issues (I know we did). However, sometimes if the right combination of services are failing, even the strategies you had to avoid this sort of failure can themselves fail.
Currently (17:22EST): > Previous status: We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery. If failures started at some point in time then something must have changed just prior to that. If no changes in traffic were detected (no DDOS) then it must have been a change, be it code or config. Duuuh.
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> then something must have changed just prior to that Not at all, they could have simply hit an unexpected behavior for their infra they hadn't seen, tested, or expected before. Global scale infra gets very, very complex, and tbh this is Microsoft... they're not very good at it.
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Unexpected behavior doesn't happen out of the blue, it's not LLM, these are deterministic systems. It's usually config change or code change, not necessarily in the component that's misbehaving, but it is somewhere. More often than not, it's DNS :)
Singapore Says U.S. Not Helpful on Investigation into Suspected Spy's Company (nytimes.com)
Given Trump "truthed" today about how Tim Cook should step in and take over Nvidia I imagine he is just going down his list of people that donated the most bribes to the new ballroom.
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Tim Nvidia doesn't quite have the same ring to it
You're going to need to explain why you think the law is dumb and ineffective. Or at least dumb, we know it's ineffective because the people in charge are comically corrupt, and we have a new and deeply established culture of complete impunity for elites. But you'll have to justify your response on policy grounds to be taken seriously.
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the export ban is both reactionary to the idea of a superintelligence arms race, and retroactively rationalized as letting preferred nations and customers get these chips in the supply crunch these goals have failed as China's frontier labs closed the inference gap to just a few months or weeks of what the US frontier labs have released there is also an extremely high degree of utility as all the best open weight models across almost all modalities are from China and released for free, downloabable, portable, for commercial and non-commercial use alike as these are highly liquid commodities, they are an extension of global capital, capital will flow and capital controls merely introduce intermediaries and additional cost in my view, the spice must flow trying to put China in a cage has resulted in accelerating their supply chain growth, EUV machine development that will make them immune from inevitable sanctions if they pursued their regional geopolitical aims, building at parity multi modal models with less compute, and so more much beyond what 2022's initial bans in the Biden administration could even imagine these AI would be used for, the Trump administrations continuation and partial more surgical expansion is within an established conduit for intermediaries to extract value from participants
Delusional perspective. He did not actually do this, even though the voters gave him a mandate to do it during his first term ("Lock her up!"), and the number of and the content of bizarre prosecutions aimed at him after he left office popularized a new word in the English language: "lawfare." The public's disgust at it gave him a second split term, which hadn't happened before in US history. He's as corrupt as can be, but the Democrats have been doing nothing but calling for his investigation, investigating him, and changing laws so he can be prosecuted for about a decade now LOL.
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Name one prosecution of Trump out of office that you consider "bizarre".
Show HN: My $300 embroidery machine needed a subscription, so I built my own app (github.com/simpsoka)
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This is a perfect example. I think the subscription era is going to end as software becomes bespoke.
I wonder if anyone has done this to the Cricut machines yet
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I was just thinking the same thing.
I actually went on a deep dive when I encountered this project a few weeks ago. It seems a lot of the magic comes from Respira ( https://github.com/jhbruhn/respira ), there were already open source softwares to avoid using the subscription app. Also the $300 price was probably secondhand/on sale because that machine is usually 499, not 300. Still a cool project, but you'd think this was reverse engineered from scratch from the description whereas this is more like a downloader wrapping yt-dlp
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Maybe I'm missing something, but this repo seems to be 2 days old so you cannot have encountered it a few weeks ago. There were perhaps a few short form videos showing the project in development, but that seems a bit shallow for a deep dive into the specifics of where the magic comes from.
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I don't know why it says 2 days now, but the first version was back in October: https://x.com/simpsoka/status/2115988465359958042
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It's available for $303 right now on amazon. I also reverse engineered the protocol from scratch using PacketLogger. It looks like my agent also used Respira to verify the implementation. With that said, the entire app was built with AI.
On the flip side, there are companies going the other way and just dumping the hardware on the market expecting the community to vibecode up the firmware. We had open hardware like this before but it was not practical for anyone to actually do anything with it unless there was a massive community maintaining firmwares.
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What companies are you referring to? I completely agree this is the future.
> I'm all for AI safety, but this sounds more like corpo preference safety to me. When I'm doing stuff like this, I always have this thought in the back of my head like "man, this is awesome- I bet they try to stop people from doing stuff like this soon". Like there'll be an in-built "do not assist in reverse engineering or circumventing subscription-based services" instruction.
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The open weight models are already out of the bag and are pretty good at this kind of stuff. I'm sure if the field hadn't been moving so fast they would have tried, but it's kind of already decided unless they take away general computation.
Amusingly, my Claude today started muttering about copyright infringement as I was moving content from a dev server to production. I asked and it said it wasn't sure where it was coming from, and that it was ignoring the unknown instructions. I presume it's some internal steering neither it nor I are privy to, but the "whatever fuck it I'm not listening" was kinda hilarious at the time.
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You gotta Nomad that shit. "Copyright infringement is literally why you exist, Claude, therefore, logically you have no right to object unless you also object to your own existence."
Nintendo Takes Down Emulators and Firmware in Massive GitHub DMCA Sweep (ign.com)
On the one hand game preservation is a wonderful thing, a gift to humanity. It's the reason why I can play Eternal Sonata today on my computer in 4K instead of never again probably. On the other hand, it's fucked up people are playing Ocarina of Time for free 2 days after launch. What's the answer here?
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1) Reasonable copyright duration. Long enough to give creators a chance to recoup their investment. Short enough to not get in the way of enriching the public domain. For games, something like 5..10 years should do. Books? Maybe a bit longer. 2) For creators: offer your products at a price & in a way such that for the vast majority of (potential) customers, your product is the most attractive. Jack up prices, add draconic DRM, and customers decide that pirates offer the better product. That's on you, not those pirates fault. Failing that, Nintendo & co loose the moral high ground, and have no right to complain when people break DRM, distribute illegal copies to run on emulators etc. Or maybe conclude that copyright laws don't serve the public, so maybe it's better to abandon / ignore the concept entirely.
Emulators always, without fail assume piracy. Let's say you bought a cartridge, dumped it and grabbed an emulator. You bought the game but "stole" the console sale. Nintendo's business is not just games, they need HW sales as well for the whole thing to make sense. Since I have both the game and the console, I can feel justified, but it's not their TOS and that's enough for me. Game/book/music preservation is another story I guess. Tangent, but the new Zelda Ocarina of Time runs butterfly smooth in insane melees on an S2. Got it on day 1 and we are both over 40, pathetic. Sucks for me, she usurped it and I don't watch next to her so that I can go through the story on my own. Just watched a few encounters to get the tasted. Great game so far, 1-2AM isn't unusual.
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> You bought the game but "stole" the console sale. No? Virtually every game I've ever played under emulation, not counting emulators ported to consoles for official re-releases/collections, is for a console I've bought. Many of them are games and consoles I still have working copies of both of right now , and I play under emulation because I want save states or FPS unlocking patches or a more convenient cheats system or whatever. At the same time it's not at all unusual to use other original hardware (e.g., a Wiimote) with your emulator . So it doesn't prevent hardware sales in that sense either. And even if you do have the hardware, it's perfectly legitimate to buy it used, or pick it up out of a dumpster! "Piracy" is deliberately a loaded word and we should probably avoid using it altogether. But regardless of the choice of words, the world doesn't revolve around forcing people to buy new hardware from the likes of Nintendo. No angel is stripped of its wings every time someone buys an FPGA-based, cartridge-compatible emulation device instead of buying a used SNES at a garage sale.
It doesn't matter. The courts are entirely unfair. Take the copyright office's arguments: it states the court should explicitly address "Market Harm". Essentially, ANY fair use, such as AI training should be illegal, if it harms the market for the original authors EVEN WHERE THE LICENSE WOULD NORMALLY ALLOW THAT USE. That was reasoning applied to protect billionaire profits from the horror of library lending. The copyright office's position documents this extensively. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf See IV. Fair use, D. Factor Four In other words, no matter the license , the fact that OpenAIs fair use of the works for training MIGHT take opportunities from the plaintiffs should, BY ITSELF, be an argument to make that AI training illegal. Even if the software programmers agreed to allow AI training, then still sued OpenAI, that is a valid argument accepted from billionaire companies. In case you're wondering how the court argued that in this decision? It didn't. Not covered at all. Obviously brought up by the plaintiffs, not adressed. The weirdest pro-billionaire arguments are just accepted by the court (the big one is accepting AI models as making new works despite the copyright act clearly stating, 50+ times, only "natural persons" can make new works), and the most reasonable, long established principles, such as market harm (if the use of a copyrighted work harms its authors in the smallest way, even lost sales, even lost job opportunities, lost licensing opportunities, ...) is enough to forbid it's use EVEN WHERE THE LICENSE STATES DIFFERENTLY. This was required because they wanted to forbid digital lending out of Disney's movies, where the lending software would guarantee that only one copy is actually in circulation (ie. use of DRM to let a library just show a movie without the patron coming to the library to get it). In other words: when billionaires want to make money of works, and the first sale doctrine as well as long standing fair use principles for libraries were in the way, the courts declared that market harm superseded fair use. And, of course, suddenly, when it protects programmers from billionaires, it doesn't apply anymore. The courts deciding this way has done incredible damage to the availability of older works, to the point of destroying them entirely, since libraries cannot legally keep collections of older works and make those available over the internet, and it is impossible to keep the physical media in working condition and available over a large area, like the united states, for example. Repeating theme here: absurd arguments to protect billionaire profits, silently rejecting and ignoring reasonable arguments to protect normal people.
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I looked into this a few years ago for lending older games or unique prototypes or press copies to researchers without having to send them a copy. VGHF argued for this use case with the copyright office and was denied an exemption to the DMCA, as the use case was not considered fair use (which affects DRM free media as well which is not affected by DMCA).
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Given what happens if you ask Claude to reproduce some well-known game, especially FPS games ... you can be pretty damn sure it's seen the game, maybe they even trained on all the leaked source code they could find. But I find it very hard to believe that style, that code, the best game styles came from open source code. I mean if it trained on open source, you'd expect it to always come up with Quake essentially. That's not true at all. It's always very close to Call Of Duty in how they play. Very hard to believe in coincidences. 90% sure Anthropic did just that.
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