dividedbyzero

I've been trying to find an answer to that, too. The best I've got right now is this:

Moat-like things going for them:

- access to the US government (for huge inflated government contracts as a source of free capital, having the competition banned, having their products legally mandated, getting other preferential treatment, having foreign governments bullied into granting similar advantages)

Too unsustainable, too fragile, too small:

- Strong brands: Brand loyalty seems like a pretty insignificant factor in AI right now

- Semi-exclusive hardware access, RAM buyouts: Unsustainable even in the short term

- Lock-in effects: Their models aren't very stable across versions, or very unique, and switching providers is about as easy as it can be in a highly competitive market.

- Exclusive technology that is important, advanced and hard to replicate to a degree that would materially set them apart and justify potentially much higher cost. Maybe I'm missing something here, but a lot of the claims they make to that end fall apart even on light scrutiny (due to things like test sets that are small, hand-picked and clearly overfitted on, or broad general claims that cannot be substantiated). I'm getting the feeling they don't have anything that materially sets them apart at all, but that's seems impossible to measure in any meaningful way, so who knows, they might have something here.

They'd still have the >99% or so of their customers who prefer Windows or will put up with it for the smartphone-grade battery life.

The tech and some of the infrastructure was, but the cultural phenomenon that people are nostalgic for was not, that sprang up organically.

The skull needs to be encrusted with the specific rare gem that can only be used in temples to the deity of death. That'll be impossible to misunderstand.

And Russia is winning, they already have neutralized if not subjugated the US, but most of Europe is also heading towards that outcome, and fast. Russia is not this near omnipotent 5D chess mastermind behind all of the scenes in all of politics all across the West, but they are terrifyingly good at exploiting existing trends and influencing trajectories just so and they have been at it with great continuity over many decades. It's starting to really pay off. At this point, it's hard to imagine how the next German federal government could be anything else than either a completely dead-on-arrival coalition of polar opposites that only barely hangs on to keep the AfD out of government but will be unable to do anything at all, or an extremely Russia-friendly government the AfD is part of if not leads that is pretty much certain to continue within the EU what Trump started within NATO. Both outcomes serve Russia well, and the establishment has pretty much handed them that opportunity without meaningful resistance.

I can't see that, I don't have an account with the US site. Could you paraphrase?

Could you be more specific? I just skimmed through the reviews on the one I use, seems fine?

yq can do a lot more than just yaml:

> yq is a portable command-line YAML, JSON, XML, CSV, TOML, HCL and properties processor

Giving out control of such things to LLMs is already complete madness, so once the first pleasure bot powered by Grok has dismembered a few thousand users, they'll get sophisticated safety mechanisms.

Though like as not you're still going to be right, after all, Stuxnet happened.

I don't relate to it myself, but I see it in people around me. It appears that's something that may not be limited to but is very prevalent in adults with very high functioning autism.

We're not that far into this new era and I already see people go back to hand-writing the important bits and manually designing their architecture because it turns out that unless you have them spit out yet another boring web app, they aren't very good engineers at all, their errors and bad decisions are very hard to predict and accumulate over time, and the resulting mess becomes unmaintainable at some point, and it appears all the harness engineering in the world can only stave that off somewhat, not prevent it from happening. So perhaps IT won't become a monoculture of agent prompters after all.

The problem is not that subtle, the only somewhat subtle point is that people don't differentiate between the datacenters of yore that were built sort of well and sustainably and the ones built in the current mad gold rush AI construction frenzy. The former aren't very problematic, often pretty good neighbors even, while the latter are nightmare fuel and will purposely not be built to be quiet and safe and stay within available energy capacity and not deplete struggling water tables, and they have the financial and political clout behind them to get away with pretty much anything. Small wonder no one wants them anywhere near them. Traditional DCs might be able to not be a nuisance despite using evaporative cooling, but no one would build that anywhere where there is a shortage of water, and the amount of heat to be dissipated by such a DC is way smaller.

But giving up a local water table might even be seen as an acceptable sacrifice, it's done for agriculture all the time, if only it wasn't done by and for the immense profit of corporations that aim to destroy all entry level jobs and profess to be scared by what havoc their own creation will wreak, all while creating an unprecedented financing bubble.

Like, that's not very subtle at all. You can pick out some detail and try to make it about subtleties, but the larger context is very much not about subtleties.

Upgrades also take time and may not be a good idea seeing how the current AI buildout is financed. There is a certain amount of capacity right now and AI behemoths have the financial muscle to take what's there. If that leaves too little for everyone else, prices will reflect that as soon as existing contracts allow.

That's not always a thing and doesn't help with fires in the rest of the complex. Backup generators, fuel depots, power distribution, large-scale cooling infrastructure all pose fire hazards even when facilities are built with actual regulation. The current AI buildout in the US happens pretty much without any meaningful regulation and gives the impression they'd build unshielded nuclear reactors serviced by children while running if they felt they could get it running cheaper and faster.

The Star Trek computer doesn't feel uncannily human, that would be a good starting point.