American AI companies 'distilled' millions of works from the original authors, they dont like it? Tough.

News at 11.

What a weird ... hey, wait, I think I figured it out!

You're looking at it from the point of view of the bank robber, aren't you? (Instead of from the point of view of all the people who didn't rob the bank but still somehow had their locations leaked to the government.)

Did I guess right?

I'm imagining devices going by a conveyor belt, and a worker with a wirecutter is making a brief snip on each of the devices as it travels by.

The boss walks up, and the snipper guy asks "Is it true? Is the customer canceling?"

The boss briefly nods but then shakes his head. "Yeah, they're canc--no, I mean they still want the devices. They just don't want the snipping anymore. They say go ahead and leave the warrant-detection-and-lookup circuit live."

"Good. I never really understood what I was doing here. They're still weren't required to check the sensor anyway, so why disable it?"

The boss explained, "so we could charge them for the snipping."

There's no way to interpret these costs, that nobody is ever going to be willing to pay, as a reminder that soon these companies are going to be bankrupt.

Every time I see an AI story like this, it makes me realize I really have no idea what the AI bubble hardware is actually like, and how it might be used after auction.

A few months from now you might find yourself at an auction where 4TB of faster-than-anything-you-have RAM might be for sale for $80, but of course it won't be in the usual DIMMs that any of your existing mobos can use, will it? What will it be, and how do we best exploit it?

I use left as change things quickly, break things, tear down Chesterton 's Fence, taking big chances, and right as gradually careful change, thinking about why things exist before destroying them, and be averse to risk. Trump is left of FDR in that view.

Republicans lost two presidential elections, 2008 & 2012, due to running conservative candidates. So they gave up and became a further-left party. Now Obama looks like a relative conservative .. but Clinton & Harris look conservative _too_.

Voters are insisting on left-wing presidents, with the exception of Biden because the initial leftist shock of Trump pt1 was too much to absorb.

Quantum computing uses Python ?

You would think the most advanced CPU would use a compiled language....

C, assembly, Fortran, etc

not Basic, Perl or Lisp

When it's codified into the highest law of the land and doesn't work, and suggestions to do so voluntarily can't work to the point of being laughable, what options do we have left?

There's always Nancy Reagan's catchphrase: Just Say No.

Any particular game is expendable. You won't miss out on anything. Games don't even have the network effects and lockin that you get with other types of software; it's a part of the economy where Just Saying No is easiest of all.

Don't like the quality? Don't spend your money. They have no power over us except what we give them. Stop being so selflessly altruistic when it comes to actively supporting your own abuse.

It's so damn easy, and there's already hundreds of years worth of hassle-free game-playing available to spend the few remaining seconds of your life on.

It's just a reskinned VSCode, 99% of users probably dont even use Cursor's model.

Can we use these glasses, or are they just as worthless as Google's and Meta's, where they choose everything for you, and you'll likely get a DMCA complaint if you try to use them for your own purposes?

If not, then $21.95 is about as much as these people should be charging for the product, which is obviously intended to get its revenue through proprietary software/services sales.

Depends on how solvent NVIDIA thinks those companies will be. Also I think creditors frequently get paid earlier in a bankruptcy process (before investors at least). Maybe they have it structured like a mechanics lien where they get 100% of the loan back on bankruptcy (I don’t know if that is actually possible), or if they just huger that in a bankruptcy they will get about 80% of the loan back, so they want to make the loan as far ahead of bankruptcy as they can so they get a bunch of payments followed by bankruptcy and then they get a chunk of money awarded by the bankruptcy court (and/or maybe return of the assets?)

Ah! I think that is the one! I bet they are structured as a secured loan, so on bankruptcy the bankrupt company can either surrender the assets (the hardware Nvidia loaded you money for), and Nvidia keeps all prior payments. OR they sign a new agreement both the company and lender agree to which is then omitted from the bankruptcy discharge (i.e. the new agreement can’t be washed away by bankruptcy, so if you still owe say $3m Nvidia can stand firm on that price, or even knock a little off, but whatever is agreed to the bankruptcy court leaves it to stand -- normally, sometimes they will decide there is some sort of bankruptcy fraud going on and you are sheltering money with something like that, normally only if family or close friends are involved though), or the company going into bankruptcy can pay Fair Market Value for the property.

Nvidia might get screwed if companies going bankrupt decide it isn’t worth salvaging the AI hardware either because they pivot to a non-AI busness, or at least a busness where they don’t need Nvidia hardware (like they rent “AI compute” from Google or something, or only needed the Nvidia hardware to refine models and they decide to just run the models they already have and not refine anything).

Nvidia also might get screwed if lots of companies decide AI is BS and the fair market value for AI hardware declines.

Nvidia is also screwed if the whole AI market implodes for a similar reason.

Still it is pretty easy to see how Nvidia is taking a risk, but could “earn” way more money this way. Plus Nvidia gets the interest payments, not a bank (then again Nvidia is taking the risk, not a bank). I don’t know if it is a good idea or not, because it hinges on something I’m awful at predicting: timing. If the house of cards comes down soon Nvidia takes a big bath. If the house of cards stays up for a while Nvidia breaks even, if it stays up long enough Nvidia makes the even bigger bucks.

Actually it is debatable. Anthropic is not making money, they are burning through VC cash. OpenAI is not making money, they are burning through OPM (“Other People’s Money”) as well. NVIDIA _is_ making money selling the AI hardware to the various companies pouring money into finding an AI model+business model that lets them make money. SpaceX’s xAI isn’t usefully broken out into it’s own P&L, but if you want to bet there IK’ll bet they are losing money at the moment as well, if you take the bet and lose you owe me one fancy Starbucks coffee and pastry, if I lose I’ll buy you 5 shares of SpaceX (that is around $1000 vs your $10). Did I forget anyone? Palentier? Also OPM (VC at the moment).

I doubt Apple or Google are making money on AI either, although it is more debatable because they have a bunch of products they can bolster sales with it (people buying a new iPhone because they want something they saw “Apple intelligence” will bring, totally forgetting that Apple hasn’t delivered on their AI promises from 2 years ago yet!), or Google may sell more smart speakers “powered by Gemini” then they sold of their prior assistant powered speakers, or get more Google searches because of Gemini answers. Although I expect the searches will merely manage to better hold onto market share by offering Gemini, which is important, but defending a multibillion dollar a year Business isn’t at all the same a “making money with AI”. Google has definitly said they are cutting headcount by using AI, but I’m not sure if they actually have a productivity increase or merely an increase in code per unit time even if the volume says nothing (or is of lower quality so it produced more bugs per unit code, and more critical outages per unit codebut more volume of code fixes!)

I’m not saying that NVidia are the only ones that can ever make money at this, or that only the hardware makers will ever make money, but that is how it is right now for sure.

One of the problems America currently faces, is that we're still getting far too much science done, it's not costing us enough money, and the money it does cost is being wasted on paying the salaries of scientists instead of personally paying whoever contracts to kick back the most to political appointees.

I believe this will help solve all three problems.