500 years of the occupants of Gropecunt Lane.

Given that most Bitcoin investors are just speculative hobbyists, a mixing service is a fun toy! Kind of like when all the open source nerds signed their emails with public keys so strong encrypted email was a fun hobby and totally not a way for organized criminals to communicate.

Giannandrea is the one nerd in the AI world who tried to build a product around a SLM running on-device. An AI that actually considers user privacy. Apple started designing chips for on-device AI processing in the 2010s and has been shipping them in its hardware since at least 2020. This stands in stark contrast to everybody else’s plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on datacenters. Did he pull it off? Well, no. But he did try to find Apple an alternative to getting totally in bed with that weirdo Sam Altman. Or handing all of our texts and emails and photos over to Google. Giannandrea had a dream, and while that dream failed, maybe it will inspire a future AI boffin to make it work.

The jobs that pay those salaries are typically in cities with a very high cost of living. $135k in London or New York isn’t a bad junior salary but people can do better on a lower salary somewhere else. And many of them do, which is why the pyramid is huge at the bottom.

The problem is that graduates who know how to research and reason and write will end up working at Starbucks. Short sighted employers are going to hire people who can cut costs by doing everything with AI, not people who want to take time doing it right. It will be a business disaster in the long run, but the CEOs don't care because they will get seven figure separation payouts.

But maybe down the line the smart people will get paid to clean up the mess. Like the good programmers who are now getting paid to fix AI generated software.

China has put years of work and billions of dollars into getting people to avoid sanctions by conducting international transactions in yuan. They don't want people switching to Tether!

What always happens when you try to block kids from doing anything: they find a way to do it anyway.

We older folks too were "blocked" from doing stuff as kids, pre- and post-internet, and we too did it anyway. And it actually made us smarter, as we had to devise ways around the obstacle.

Kids are smart. This will just make them smarter.

and the product hasn't even become attractive and popular yet. OpenAI forgot that step...

The USA used to have vocational schools. Many of them were high schools. They taught draftsmanship, printing, auto mechanics, and other trades. There were also one and two year schools that would teach people how to be plumbers and electricians and diesel mechanics. Over the last couple decades we lost that. Instead everyone was going to work in The Service Economy. Lots of those service economy jobs were either outshored or never even existed. Thousands of people who would have been fine with a vocational degree ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt with a degree that cannot pay for itself. This is a failure of leadership by parents, principals, school boards, politicians, and of course by the colleges that marketed themselves as the newer, better vocational schools. This isn't just an American problem, it's even worse in China. We need to stop pretending that college is for everyone and return to the days of educating people for a realistic future instead of pretending that there will be an endless supply of jobs for anyone with a degree in anything.

The noise probably comes from the equipment that sucks air out to maintain the vacuum.

Depending on when it pops many of the datacenters may not have been built. The ones that have been built might not have power, and (in the USA) by the time all those big Westinghouse reactors and small SMRs have been built the datacenters might be obsolete and not worth updating without big AI customers. So there's a possibility that they'll just end up abandoned building complexes in the desert.

It's mostly a contracting issue. Sometimes, if a customer wants full rights to all documentation and design details (or source code or whatever), they have to pay more. If they want exclusive full rights, they have to pay even more. This can be beneficial for some things, not so good for others. If you want to customize your ERP system (SAP or something like that), you'll generally bring in an outside company to do it. You could demand all the source code for everything they did and pay more for it, but if you don't have the necessary expertise on tap to make use of it, it's just throwing money out the window.

The taxpayers paid for the goods along with their research and development.

Not always. Companies do undertake their own research on their own dime, hoping to later sell it to government or other contractors. To take a simple example, a government that purchases a Cessna Citation jet for travel purposes is mostly buying off the shelf. They may customize it with their own communications gear, but they didn't pay for the R&D that went into it. Textron (owner of Cessna and part of RTX) paid for that and is making it up over time with sales of the jet.

A more complicated example is Anduril, which started developing families of weapons on its own and then started getting contracts to further the development process. How much of that should the government own, or at least get access to, if they didn't pay for it?

I agree that the government should be able to fix its own things through contractors of its choosing, and it should get access to all necessary design data. But it's still a contracting issue.

OpenAI will be fine. They just need a few more infusions of cash from Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle that they can use to buy stuff from Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and Oracle. This can go on forever because this is not a scam. Just trust your capitalist masters, they are CEOs and in America CEOs know what's best for us all,

BYD makes the best cars. They're also very well priced. Europe is keeping BYD out of their markets with tariffs. So BYD is setting up a plant in Europe. Trump knows that American tariffs cannot keep BYD from opening a plant here. So to make sure that Tesla, Ford, and GM keep cranking out poorly engineered and overpriced cars BYD has been put on a bad list.

Conspicuous consumption. People want to be seen with the flashy array of cameras on the latest high end iPhone.