One of the reasonable things with “free” markets is that manufactures are just going to keep making RAM, year after year. So these AI data centers have to keep purchasing the bulk of new RAM in perpetuity til the end of time OR eventually the dam will break and they lose control. I put my bet on the second option.
Ok Sam, give your computers up first and then we will negotiate.
Thank you! Said it better than I could.
There is the argument of the ‘bend not break’ model which I think is admirable. It is the path we should take but are unlikely to do so. The pessimistic take is that we don’t avoid the problem, we have to endure through it. Basically the entire capital enterprise crumbles under its own weigh as the resources to maintain it diminish. This is a rough path down but there is a bright side. We won’t be extinguished but we shall be greatly diminished. The meek shall inherit the earth.
Think of the Lodgepole pine cones. They are the seed of the tree that have sap so dense that you cannot break into them. And yet when the forest fire comes through, the heat of the destruction melts the sap and they are free to seed. I am starting to feel the is the path through. You cannot prevent the disaster but you can provide a parachute on the way down so that something can be rebuilt on the other side.
The stories of the greedy are going to be the myth of the future and they will not be kind to the people of our times.
This is why I talk about degrowth, I don’t believe we will do it by choice but by force. But it is best that we have a structure in place for the worst of the fall.
Pretty much. They already had this tendency, it is just accelerating and now the technology has kicked it into turbo.
The sole point of AI is to devalue people and their skills. Any futurist image of a work free utopia is just an oasis level mirage used to dupe people into walking into the meat grinder.
That isn’t even the thing that bothers me the most, there have always been folks who want a short cut to talent via any means possible. What bothers me is that others just accept this stuff, it is a large part of society has just agreed to a total disregard for anything creative. That is just depressing.
Turns out reducing peoples expose to their core advertisement business while burning millions of tokens to produce a summary, not the best business decision they have ever made. But what do you expect of MBA’s that praise Jack Welch like a God.
To be fair, Reddit has been Zombie Reddit for about 5 years now.
When they received $150 million from Tencent in 2018, the writing was on the wall. You cannot accept that kind of money and keep to the original aspiration. The IPO just accelerated it.
The amount of slop on there nowadays is wild! Even the smallest communities are being overrun with it and they don’t give a damn because it is good for business short term.
Praise be to whatever gets me exemption!
We are for the jobs the comet will bring.
I am starting to think that having hard technical or imposed market limits might be a good thing, or at least the lesser of two evils.
It you had to build a game on before the era of cheap middleware engines, there was a natural barrier to entry. The Nintendo seal of approval used to mean something at least even if the game was still trash.
But now, you can flood the space with minimal barrier to entry and we are being flooded with junk. But those that control the access and making big money off this so they turn a blind eye.
A few months back, there was a reddit post for my local town, it was about self publishing their new game on Steam. Anyway, about a dozen others posted links to their projects all releasing within the next few months, all of them copies or low effort projects. This is a single town, in a single country, that is releasing potentially dozens, possible hundreds of games a year. The market is flooded because we have made it so easy to pump this junk out and there is little interest in putting even vague restrictions on it.
The crash is coming and we will all know why it happened.
Pretty much this. I am reminded of when reality TV first came up, it was thought that it would be a passing fad lasting maybe a year or two. People get exited by it at first, then get bored of it craving something with more substance. It never happened. Turns out the slop machine hit a level good enough that many would lap it up. Survivor is going into it 51st season right now.
But while this stuff can be produced (be it text, TV, software), you can curate it. Those curated lists will become the new social treasure like how some movie critics could become minor celebrities in themselves. Yeah there will be AI bots trying to do that as well, but if they fall flat, so to will their respect.
Live your life as an inverse Altman. What ever he says, do the opposite.