hakfoo

Google search ads used to also convert highly because they were well-targeted and positioned at the point of consumption.

If I'm searching for red widgets, it's a fairly strong indicator I'm way more likely than the average to want to BUY red widgets, so a well-placed ad for redwidgets-cheap.com didn't feel hostile.

Now when it's "I am clearly searching for red widgets but you want to railroad me into blue doohickeys because they're paying more per click", you're one step above a Taboola chumbox.

I suspect there's a place for LLMs, but it would be one that gets developed on a per-organization or even per-team basis, rather than the tendency to airdrop some elaborate do-all solution.

This is probably why it's chafing on a lot of developers. We're hearing we have to use these tools and only these tools even when they aren't great fits for specific tasks or workflows.

The management loves the idea it closed an inbound ticket in 30 minutes... by converting it to a code change that fails to fix the actual problem, or by replacing it with a slightly different category of ticket that becomes a burden for someone else to finish off, which is for some reason not a metric anyone cares about.

Consoles are a struggling market right now.

The architectural differences that made a console more compelling than a standalone PC are largely gone. (Nintendo is a bit of an exception here, but they were always playing a different market than Sony and MS anyway)

This means it's harder and harder to say "here's a unique experience you only get on Xbox" (or Playstation for that matter)

The price advantage is going away fast, especially with talk that next-gen consoles will top USD 1000.

All they have left is their prestige first-party products, which they don't seem to really know how to use effectively. Some of them have solid cultural penetration, and could spawn broader media franchises with the right handling.

Maybe the problem is libraries themselves.

All else equal, I'd rather have the richest possible functionality built into the language. At least I know that it will be updated and maintained in one place, and there's very little ambiguity about setup. You don't have to start picking apart the fact IN THIS PARTICULAR PROJECT, libfoo was imported by pasting it in the code base in 1977 before package management existed and globally namespaced, but libbar is a first-class citizen in the depency-injection system.

If you know you can just call bargraph($data), even if the stock bargraph library is boring, then people and LLMs will favour it.

I've heard the argument that a lot of the 'scarcity' in RF spectrum comes from chicken-egg problems based on the original allocation strategies.

If you give out a dedicated fixed slice of the spectrum, and high power licenses are pretty limited, you end up treating it as a "circuit switched" resource. I have my narrow sliver at 144.4449MHz and I will use it as I see fit.

If you allocate capacity with the understanding it will be shared, it creates a system where you have to think more "packet switched" -- how do I detect congestion, retry, find less congested workspaces?

The "packet switched" philosophy usually supports a lot more users on the same physical infrastructure

Cloud wasn't sold as a performance thing. It's more about outsourcing the maintenance (let AWS replace a dead PSU at 4AM) or for the promise of scaling tasks to infinity for dynamic demand (web hosting).

You might see interest in thin-client plays for the same reason. They'd like to replace the local desktop with throwaway $50 terminals because it's easier to deploy on a standardized VM image and not have to replace dead SSDs and CPU fans.

Workstation tasks that require low-latency and high performance seem to stay local because the performance is simply not there.

That's the second question I raised.

As you said, you still have 1/8 or 1/10 of the overall costs in OpEx to cover.

You still have a lot of services of such marginal utility that they'd have a hard time justifying their opex costs alone.

I think part of this is that we have a lot of firms offering features rather than products. I fully expect most of the third-party "meeting minder" and "writing improver" services will be replaced by versions built into the platforms themselves, for example.

> Even if the investors funding this construction all go bankrupt, the data centers don't just vanish: someone will buy them from the bankruptcy court and operate them.

There are really three questions to answer on the long term:

1. Is an arbitrary service profitable enough to cover opex AND burn down the massive capex financing? A few companies might have enough magic to survive, but I suspect a lot of them go to the bankruptcy fire sale you mention.

2. Is the service profitable enough to cover just opex? The second generation vendors may have a somewhat more favourable cost structure, but there's still a floor. Electricity and cooling on a datacentre scale aren't free, and we may find there are still services that can't even meet that threshold. I notice you see far less marketing for consumer video-gen these days...

3. We let those businesses fail. What does the long term market look like at that point? You have a snapshot in time of paid-for datacentres, but the market shock probably shot a huge torpedo into long-term R&D and planning. Vendors will scale back to refocus on markets that are more vital (maybe selling RAM and GPUs back to end users :) ), and create an era of stagnation. AI becomes a utility, in the sense of "boring, predictable industry that growth investors have very little enthusiasm for".

There is also the risk that the data centres could vanish. This is a very hype-dependent market: we've spent the last 5 years going from "novelty" to "productivity tool" to "weapon of mass destruction" to keep people excited.

Eventually there's a put-up-or-shut-up moment. What happens if we get to 2035, we've hit a plateau for 3 or 4 years, and they can't deliver Lieutenant Commander Data, or even Kryten? All we really have to show for the effort is a bunch of old GPUs, displaced workers, and the ugliest restaurant fliers you've ever seen. It's a big loud target for a bunch of frustrated and let-down people. We're already seeing moratoria getting political legs, could permit revocations or forced decommissioning be far behind?

I suspect this is part of the reason some players are happy enough to present AI leadership as a New Cold War/US v China thing-- pull the national security card to try to shut down a debate on the actual utility and desirability of the actual product.

The HFT industry creates an investment opportunity that's somewhat detached from business fundamentals. If you can trade on the volatility alone, you no longer need to pick investments based on their future prospects and behaviour.

It didn't help that people are seemingly more offended about the possibility of spam on their inbox than on losing a valuable email due to misclassification.

There's little to no incentive for providers to ever de-escalate.

At my day job, we use Gsuite. I never used it for any non-work purpose, and it wasn't publically published, so any "spam" it got was false positives. Emails I actually needed were being buried below the fold in the spam folder. It turns out there is no obvious way to 100% disable spam filtering (at the time I got the first false-positive at least) so I had to try to just allowlist things that should be left alone.

It tells a specific counterfactual story, but it's one that has a reasonable background for it.

If you were a new computer user in 1980, your Appie II+ or PET 8032 booted straight into BASIC, and it was a good-enough tool that could do productive development for the entire life of the machine there.

But if you were a new computer user in 1990, you didn't have that. They gave you GW-BASIC, and if you're lucky a separate manual rather than a vague chapter in the main DOS manual. This might be enough to give you some initial experience with programming, but you have a bunch of hard brick walls.

Your machine might have 640k-4Mb of memory, but GW-BASIC can only meaningfully work with 64k of it. You can't access the mouse or any post-EGA graphics modes without a LOT of assembly shimming. If you had a sound card, it was outside the built-in tooling.

Remember, this is a few years before the Internet being widely available, and stuff like the GNU project being widely accessible. This is probably the best development tool you have available

If you wanted to go further in programming, it meant buying a boxed compiler that probably cost well in excess of USD100, and was for a completely different language than the one you had cut your teeth on.

But if you wanted "The GW-BASIC I already understand, but more", you want this.

The play that finally sunk my old job (headed by a serial entrepeneur) was literally selling a $49 product with a $80-per-transaction commission.

We were supposed to make it all up on being able to hard-sell the user on addons and multi-pack buys.

We're one well-publicised security pop from locally hosted being a non-negotiable for some large set of buyers.

They've convinced every company in the country, including in previously security or compliance-centric environments (finance, medical, government), to hand them hyper-sensitive data.

We've already seen the leakage scenario, with the academics who found the labs scooping them on the research they were using the LLMs to assist. What's to say they-- or someone who infiltrated their infrastructure-- won't do the same thing with your propriatery business details?

I'm not sure open LLMs are a great play for commodity vendors. A lot of "lowest bidder commodity services" work because they can wildly oversell. That VPS hosting a small-biz website or 1000-messages-a-week internal email can run on a Raspberry Pi 1B, so you can pretty easily sublet a $1000 server to 50 customers at $10 per month each. Current LLM hardware plays tend to need more expensive gear and seem to be running at higher utilization rates, so the price that actually fits the underlying business might not look as appealing.

As I see it, the value in a wealth tax isn't just in a cash grab. It's about reining in the behaviour of the wealthy.

If you can cap individual wealth to eight or maybe nine figures, you take options like "bankroll major state/national elections on a whim" and "buy up major media and communications brands" off the table. As far as I'm concerned, these are things we can do without and probably have a healthier society as a result.

California's attempt might be well-intentioned, but it seems so weaksauce that it won't reach to the behaviour-modifying level.

The "why bother investing" mentality that's used to argue against Georgist land-taxes might be interesting applied to a high wealth tax too. If your stock portfolio is already approaching the cutoff line, will you press as aggressively for that last short-term bubble with long-term expenses?

It probably makes sense with a silent linear keyswitch for users who are used to the obvious acoustic feedback of a typewriter.

Since cheap modern MCUs have programmable ADCs, you can wiggle an output pin and experiment with different sounds. I've tried something a bit more "tinkle" like than a flat "beep" and it has its charms, but it could go a whole new place like different tones for special keys (simulating the clunk of a shift or space bar) or even keys that you could subtly differentiate by sound to tell if you're off alignment.