Microsoft are bullet proof. Their share price will take a big hit, and an exec or two will take a golden parachute, but they’ll bounce back very quickly. The bigger problem is that along the way they’ll balance the capex with multiple rounds of cutbacks and layoffs in other departments, and that’s before they’re finally forced to layoff everyone actually connected to this AI nonsense (who isn’t a senior manager or c-suite; they’ll all be fine).

1. It was covered by glass, unclutch your fucking pearls already.

2. Van Gogh is my favorite painter, and I would still rather have a habitable planet for future generations than have Sunflowers. If you’re more mad about this than you are about what big oil and gas companies are doing, sit down and have a good hard think about where your priorities are. I do not give a shit if you “agree with their message but not their tactics” or if you “think it makes the cause look bad” or whatever other bullshit you want to spew to cover your ass right now. Ultimately, if this caused you to feel a greater sense of righteous anger than the wholesale destruction of our environment for profit does, you are part of the problem. I’d rather side with the people who are trying to make a difference, even if I don’t like how they do it, than side with the people plundering our world for personal gain.

This, exactly.

Cops love up push lines like “Getting off on a technicality” when mistrials happen. They can get fucked. It’s not a “technicality”, it’s the police violating rules that exist to ensure that people are judged fairly and they convictions are only found in cases of genuine guilt. Those rules fucking matter, because they’re one of the very few things that prevent the police from abusing their power.

Hannah Guiterrez isn’t “getting off with a slap on the wrist.” She was convicted of manslaughter. That’s a really serious charge. If that conviction is overturned, it will be because the justice department did an absolutely piss poor job of following some really basic rules. Any outrage over that should be directed at the people who fucked up a perfectly good conviction by thinking they could just trample over people’s basic rights without consequence.

I mean, the sad part is that Britain policing started out with some really good ideas. It’s actually worth reading Robert Peel’s principles of policing by consent sometime. They are an incredible blueprint for how to create a police force that serves the people.

Welcome to British policing.

“We have determined that this was indeed a hate crime, and therefore we’ll be doing nothing. But if it happens two more times we’ll congratulate them on the hat trick and offer to enroll them in the police academy.”

Oh, absolutely. Altman is going to plunder this sinking ship for everything it’s worth, and then bail into a CTO position somewhere else. All the C suite at OpenAI will win big no matter what, everyone else there will get fucked.

Least shocking news ever. This has clearly been in the works for a while. Not that it’ll matter at this point, given that the notion of OpenAI making any profit is kind of a pipe dream right now.

This is mostly just a play to get investors to sink more money into covering their absolutely insane cash burn for another year.

But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming

You’re forgetting that the “targeted” component of their ads (while mostly bullshit) is an essential part of their business model. To do what you’re suggesting they’d have to create and store thousands of different copies of each video, to account for all the different possible combinations of ads they’d want to serve to different customers.

Because it’s much more expensive. What they’re talking about here is basically modifying the video file as they stream it. That costs CPU/GPU cycles. Given that only about 10% of users block ads, this is only worth doing if they can get the cost down low enough that those extra ad views actually net them revenue.

Banning cars only makes sense at the municipal level. It’s not something that will ever be completely practical at any larger scale than that, unless you just want to completely fuck over everyone who doesn’t live in a big city.

It’s more important to focus on building out better public transit infrastructure. More buses, more trains, more bike lanes, more options for people to avoid using cars, while still leaving that option available for where its needed.

Comparitively speaking, a lot less hype than their earlier models produced. Hardcore techies care about incremental improvements, but the average user does not. If you try to describe to the average user what is “new” about GPT-4, other than “It fucks up less”, you’ve basically got nothing.

And it’s going to carry on like this. New models are going to get exponentially more expensive to train, while producing less and less consumer interest each time, because “Holy crap look at this brand new technology” will always be more exciting than “In our comparitive testing version 7 is 9.6% more accurate than version 6.”

And for all the hype, the actual revenue just isn’t there. OpenAI are bleeding around $5-10bn (yes, with a b) per year. They’re currently trying to raise around $11bn in new funding just to keep the lights on. It costs far more to operate these models (even at the steeply discounted compute costs Microsoft are giving them) than anyone is actually willing to pay to use them. Corporate clients don’t find them reliable or adaptable enough to actually replace human employees, and regular consumers think they’re cool, but in a “nice to have” kind of way. They’re not essential enough a product to pay big money for, but they can only be run profitably by charging big money.

Better if they just banned connected vehicles, period.

The content isn’t the problem. It’s the delivery system. No one else has the storage and network capacity that Youtube has. And as a result of that, no one else has the built-in audience Youtube has. Putting your videos on YT is simply the best way to get views.

OK, interesting. I’m a little unclear on how they’re calculating rMax and rPeak though?

I would really want a measure of actual compute power, like teraflops per capita or something. Still imperfect, but better than just counting the number of buildings.

It’s the second one. They are all in on this AI bullshit because they’ve got nothing else. There are no other exponential growth markets left. Capitalism has gotten so autocanibalistic that simply being a global monopoly in multiple different fields isn’t good enough. For investors it’s not about how big your company is, how reliable your yearly returns are, how stable your customer base; the only thing that matters is how fast your business is growing. But small businesses have no space to grow because of the monopolies filling every available space, and the monopolies are already monopolies. There are no worlds left to conquer. They’ve already turned every single piece of our digital lives into a subscription, blockchain was a total bust, the metaverse was a demented fever dream, VR turned out to be a niche toy at best; unless someone comes up with some brand new thing that no one has ever heard of before, AI is the last big boondoggle they have left to hit the public with.

Could be fewer but larger. China likes megastructures. Could just be that their compute power is much more heavily consolidated.

Personally I think it’d be interesting to see this per capita, so here’s my back of a napkin math for data centers per 1 million pop (c. 2022):

• NL - 16.78
• US - 16.15
• AU - 11.72
• CA - 8.63
• GB - 7.68
• DE - 6.22
• FR - 4.63
• JP - 1.75
• RU - 1.74
• CN - 0.32

Worth noting of course that this only lists the quantity of discrete data centers and says nothing about the capacity of those data centers. I think it’d be really interesting to break down total compute power and total storage by country and by population.

I’d also be interested to know what qualifies as a “data center”? For example, are ASIC based crypto mining operations counted, even though their machinery cannot be repurposed to any other function? That would certainly account for a chunk of the the US (almost all of it in Texas).

Genuinely one of the all time best Black Mirror episodes

“Drink verification can to continue…”