Given his other examples were mostly containing real stuff, you seem to totally agree.

The railroads continue to be key to this day, even if they overreacted in the day.

The Internet infrastructure absolutely is critical now, despite the somewhat false start.

Doubt the schools would love them. Schools love the Google ecosystem and particularly how they can be an organization that micromanages what the students can do all while having a supremely disposable device. The price and touchscreens are nice and all, but it's really about the Google infrastructure. It's also a contributor to why a lot of businesses like Windows, the effort invested in *not* letting the user be able to do what they want at the whim of some designated third party.

Besides, the Chromebooks are generally about half even that price. Greatly helpful when there's a high chance that a device will get destroyed within a couple of years.

I certainly see the appeal as an individual, but schools would require a great deal of effort that I think Apple wouldn't see as worth it.

Have they done rack scale nvlink other than Grace? Usually I see racks of systems with GPUs, but the NVLink terminates within each server, rather than going between servers.

NVLink nowadays even in a single system (as of Blackwell) looks a lot more like infiniband, but still seeing Blackwells usually as GPUs in x86 boxes with NVLink staying inside. Multi-server fabric seems to be RDMA over ethernet as the favored selection for now. Maybe I'm missing some segment, but I can at least say externally switched NVLink is absolutely not 'just as well as GPUs'.

Intel still has a large share of the datacenter market, whether they really deserve it or not. Hence they actually have competition. Versus their flailing around accelerators which both sucked and never got traction. Just like I went looking for a new laptop and in some segments, the vendors only did Intel even as AMD also has everything better in that market too.

Well, they actually have had that available for a bit of time with Grace Hopper. I don't have hard data, but anecdotally it feels like this and rack scale NVLink haven't had the uptake nVidia presumed. So nVidia is *trying* to compete but hitting headwinds even in their darling AI segment. Given nVidia failed to wholly acquire ARM and ARM being an uphill battle in the conservative datacenter market, I could see an x86 equivalent of the 'Grace' strategy being attempted in collaboration with Intel. nVidia gets locked in integration advantage and Intel gets the scraps of the x86 half.

Quite, but AMD is *miles* closer than Intel was to being a realistic threat on this front.

I was kind of surprised too, since growing up my household would make a 600 mile round trip like 3 or 4 times a year. The last 3 years I've been in that 16% too, though for quite a few years before that I admittedly was in the 84%.

Think I've read a fair amount suggesting that the 'family road trip' has declined over the years.

It's the basis of how people get elected and promoted.

If a bunch of people are marketing a 747 as a vehicle like some alien ship that can pause in mid air, go side to side, and backwards and underwater and into space, then it's worth pointing out it's closer to being a mechanical bird than an alien ship.

Based on how I feel when I have to incur such a trip, I wouldn't be surprised if making those trips routinely would have long term bad effects on your health.

Given where the timezones are, certainly not 'most' people. Yes, you can cross a time zone in less than 25 miles if you happen to live within 25 miles, this doesn't support your stance of "most americans spend at least a day timezone shifted every year", since that's a pretty specific circumstance that doesn't apply to most people.

Even for them, I wonder what percentage of those trips introduce inconsistency in their schedule. If they work in one timezone, then they would consistently be living according to that schedule, even if they technically sleep in another.

Personally, if I am stuck with a trip that goes more than a time zone over, I just hate the shift.

Shifting the time is a PITA that is pretty jarring in a way most people don't enjoy and it seems like it may be outright unhealthy.

This is incorrect.

61 percent of the population does not take a "long distance" trip in a year.

Incidentally, this defines "long distance" as "50 miles". Of the "long trips", 58% of those are less than 125 miles away. So only 16% of people travel over 125 miles away in a given year. Less than 125 miles is relatively unlikely to cross a time zone. Growing up my family would regularly make 300 mile trips but still not cross a timezone.

I'll confess to not having pushed my luck performance wise, but at least feature wise I've been satisfied with KDE/Wayland with Fedora 42 and proprietary nVidia drivers. There were some hiccups before but I can't recall exactly when things seemed to get fine.

Pretty valid point. If *anything*, if AOL had executed a tad more successfully, then we might not even have had widespread adoption of the internet. We'd be all complaining about how AOL has a monopoly, but how else could you imagine a global online network functioning except inside a monopoly? Weirdos would be bringing up that crazy Internet thing that came out of ARPAnet and everyone would laugh about how that would have not possibly worked...

I think if AOL had established 'AOL for University' and 'AOL for Business' technology deployments to businesses and campuses, maybe by around 1992/1993 or so, they would have had a good chance of heading off the explosion of the 'friendly' internet as realized popularly by Netscape. Early 90s internet left a lot of the less technical crowd scratching their head and not seeing where things could go, but could get what AOL was putting down.

Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

Specifically, they cherry picked 2022/2023 and pretended those numbers were good examples of "normal" hiring. Looking at the chart, it's clear they had a huge hiring boom, enough to overcome the prior 5 years of demographic shift. This is consistent with the general hiring boom in tech that came about then, just before LLM hype launched into the stratosphere.

They talked as though 2024 was a precipitous drop, but as you say, it was just a return to 2021 levels.

Without AI, we probably would see similar employment trends in tech and note it as a "correction". With LLM in the mix, it becomes hard to say how much is genuine shift to LLM to take care of things or LLM as a rationalization to get rid of the tech workforce the companies probably didn't need to hire up so much in the first place. Can certainly say which option generates more clicks though...