Nothing you said precludes a bubble pop and investment problem, even if taken at face value. The fact that you are getting rate limited doesn't mean there isn't a bubble. That doesn't speak to the economics, how the demand is distributed, and whether or not that demand is durable as hype levels out.

As the post said, there may be "right" AI companies but there are certainly "wrong" AI companies and investors don't really know which is which and trillions of dollars are at stake with what will turn out to be the wrong companies. Some of the "wrong" AI companies are just stuff on top of the same provider you are using, so you are rate limited because they are also selling to less robust companies and when that less robust company goes poof, your rate limiting concerns may go away. Or your org is one of the less robust companies.

In the year 2000, plenty of folks got real strong value of the internet. But the bubble still popped and the markets dropped 40%. Hosting providers that were hugely constrained by the overwhelming demand at the time suddenly had capacity to spare. People continued to get value from the internet, but that was of little solace to folks whose livelihood was tied to one of the "wrong" internet companies of the day.

For some, *maybe*, but keep in mind:

I have met a fair number of folks making $200k+ who were supremely underwhelming. They would have a very narrow wheelhouse and *only* do things within that, single language, single framework, stuff like that. Even then, you ask them to do something that they can't find an example of online already and they would be lost. We had a scenario where work hired a few of these folks to replace the front-end work that our 'full stack' team had been doing, because we had more money and we should develop it 'properly'. They started from scratch, had a fairly basic tutorial-fodder front end and customers complained about loss of features and the front-end team rejected as "impossible with new framework, so won't be done". Meaning they couldn't find anyone who did that on stack overflow, and the old UI wasn't written with Angular so they decided it was not applicable. AI may well supersede such folks fine.

For a fair number of these companies, if the realization comes that AI couldn't replace the personnel they thought it could, then the bubble is likely popping and taking some of these companies with it. If not completely, having to scale back offerings. AI isn't going away, so the people in the above example can't celebrate too much, but the realization that it won't replace the entirety of white-collar work will be crushing financially.

Even assuming they can and want the talent back, they may see their position as strong with all those other unemployed/underemployed developers out there, so they may not relent to an exorbitant consultant rate. It *can* work and work long term if things line up right. For example they begrudgingly get gouged on what they think is short term then realize they can't just bandaid it and let the consultant go. But it's far from guaranteed.

Sure, if someone is in their fifties and has spent their career at $200k+, then your perspective carries weight, one might reasonably expect such a person to be able to retire or at least not sweat a big drop in pay. "Silicon Valley" standard of living may screw the numbers up (I explicitly declined an offer because I checked the real estate market and realized just how deep a cut I'd take in standard of living despite the "raise")

However, if someone graduated with their CompSci degree in 2022, well, all they built is probably a lot of student debt with nothing to show for it.

Note that companies find recent hires the "safest" to fire because they likely haven't become important in ways management doesn't understand.

I've learned not to expect much out of Aptera, they've been at this two decades of "just about to launch" and never getting anywhere.

That said, if something did charge at 5mph from integrated solar, well that's on par with level 1 EV charging and some folks get by on that. So going to work and parking in the parking lot might get the morning commute replenished over the day, maybe some of the return trip. For some lightly driven vehicles, they might almost never plug in, in that hypothetical.

Used to be that automatics shifted poorly, had fewer gears, losses to make it less fuel efficient, and higher maintenance.

Now they shift well (if they "shift" at all, CVT and single speed EV transmissions), let the operator manual shift all they want, and between more gear ratios and better tech all around, they are more efficient. They will tend to out last a typical human operator clutch nowadays too.

I still love driving stick, but I must confess there's no good practical defense any more.

Politicians have been no strangers to sticking to the letter of the law against the spirit of the law, this administration blatantly blows past the letter of the law, and the other branches are enabling them. Yes there are certain unwritten presidential norms that were honored that this administration also blows past as well, but bending the spirit of the law is a comparatively lesser problem.

The founding framework expected that everyone would distrust everyone else and take any leverage they could to prevent adversaries from having too much power, this seems to be the assumption that is falling apart as everyone happily sees corruption and feeds the administration pass after pass.

Besides, even with text, waiting for a person to finish talking can be tiresome. "This could have been an email" being a supremely popular sentiment.

Fair point, though in the case of datacenters, there's not a whole lot they need to even exaggerate in terms of downsides.

Whatever the upsides may be of these datacenters, those are diluted across the reach of the internet and the local community does not particularly benefit. That's the whole point of modern technology, that the reach of a datacenter is far and is run so efficiently you don't even need local labor.

The downsides are conversely concentrated. In global context, the datacenter downsides are generally not even notable, but the datacenters focus those downsides into select local areas. Strains on local power grids and water systems, demanding new power lines be ran, blight on the landscape, and so on.

Instead of trying to create local upsides, they call the criticism fabricated by foreign actors. They could be doing things like proposing municipal "permanent funds", *actually* paying for all of the inflicted infrastructure costs (when they do claim to, usually they do a dance like "well *that* new power plant is for residents, *our* power comes from the existing plant so we shouldn't have to pay for it)", or at the very bare minimum at *least* paying the taxes they are supposed to pay instead of getting breaks.

If only there was something about FreeBSD that might provide a clue about what license they would be wanting the software to use...

While I'm all about the Microsoft hate, in this scenario, it's not exactly unique, nor does a count tell the whole story.

Famously the kernel had a handful of high profile security issues discovered, so Microsoft has company. If you are floored by the number of security 'flaws', well, many projects are dealing with those and while higher than usual (largely due to AI findings), a lot of 'security' findings have long been dubious and the AI findings are no exception.

For example, a parser for a comprehensive script engine that is explicitly designed to allow arbitrary code execution had a handful of flaws where malicious scripting could overflow and run arbitrary code. The script just had to have binary data in it, be over 4 gigs in size, stuff like that. None of the flaws were subtle, and would be *obvious* on review. A malicious script could have just instead included precisely the malicious stuff. Nonetheless, there were several CVEs granted and the project released fixes for a CVE that let a script do exactly what the engine was designed to do, but in a weird way that's even more obvious than just putting the malicious code in directly.

The thing is, once you have a "security" finding that you know how to fix, it is far easier just to fix the bug and not argue the security facet. The curl developer has, historically, pointed out a few of the crazy CVEs that have been inflicted on him, but most developers shrug and move on, fearing the perception of 'arguing with a vulnerability'.

Practically speaking, stay up to date, pay special attention to the "famous" vulnerabilities but otherwise, it's not really that informative to think about the quantity of "vulnerabilities" published.

Why would I want a device that deliberately handicaps itself by not bothering to have a screen?

Especially with how verbose AI responses are, I couldn't imagine having to just wait for it to read out the information asked of it.

I don't get the AI companies' fascination with voice-only input and audio-only output. It's a strict subset of what the device in people's hands can already do. Further, every single product that has aimed for this has flopped and you would think they would get the hint by now...

They would have a very uphill battle.

For the common customer, it's generally 'nvidia or bust'. That being said, supply chain limitations might have people looking for a more affordable and accessible option, which isn't exactly a huge appealing prospect for IBM, particularly since the market has AMD trying to already fill that niche. General problem is it isn't just about specs, if it isn't CUDA then people are just not confident.

IBM hasn't really been known for in-house top performance in about 20 years. Last time they bothered to go for top performance was almost a decade ago, and even then it was tossing nVidia GPUs into POWER9 systems, and nVidia was the real meat of the solution.

To get traction, they'd need a market opportunity of folks that aren't afraid to try to leave nVidia behind, but not so adventurous as to just make their own chips instead, and for whom AMD offerings are not good enough. IBM would have to go from zero software in the space to credible. They'd have to scale out even bigger than they used to despite largely giving up on scale out years ago.

IBM hasn't really done anything to earn the benefit of the doubt in a very long time. People's memory of the once potent tech giant has faded. They've alienated all but their most loyal customers by ditching anything where they had to be vaguely in competition with other companies, so they volunteered themselves into obscure niche, and the niche is high-priced, highly compatible, but not necessarily top performance offerings.

I suppose some of us old timers would be stoked if IBM actually made a serious effort, but I think the prevailing sentiment would be skepticism after decades of neglect on this sort of effort.

PC succeeded pretty much because IBM broadly didn't take it seriously. If IBM believed in the market opportunity, they would have screwed it up by making it all in-house and proprietary. See when it did start to get traction and they decided to try to lock it down with MCA.

Their hardware though is just refresh fodder for mainframe/mini/aix. Sure they toss it some concessions to hype but ultimately customers are currently looking for the most cost effective platform to enable running stuff on nVidia Blackwell, and IBM isn't even vaguely in that game, not since a brief time with POWER9 where they tried to foster a close nVidia relationship.

No fab, no x86 systems, no resell of third party stuff that would work for getting in on Grace/Vera based systems. There's not really an angle for their hardware to get in.

If nVidia were still a bit hungry then IBM enthusiasm might have helped, but nVidia in-housed CPU aspirations and broadly do not care a bit about who their partners are and what they want, they correctly see themselves as the center of the universe for now and have pretty much sold every chip they plan to make for a long time. In that circumstance, there's just no way in unless IBM pulls off a long shot with an nVidia alternative (not just technical, people actually have to *believe* in it, and IBM has squandered their credibility over time).

IBM has offloaded the hardware that would have had them most relevant to the boom. They basically just have hardware to cater to long term mainframe and AIX customers. Even many of those customers are probably deciding to postpone their IBM hardware refresh to secure more hype-compatible gear from other vendors.

IBM chased what they saw as more plush software and services margins and chopped away to fixate on those fronts, except the locked in mainframe/mini/aix customers that they can keep gouging without fear of strong competition.