This at least about relevant companies/people in the tech industry even if it's the equivalent of celebrity drama. The story is here to farm engagement and ad impressions because AI is one of those topics that people have strong opinions on anyway and roping in the CEO/founders who many people have even stronger opinions about ensures maximum engagement.

If their AIs were worth a shit they could get it to do all of the hating for them. If I were a billionaire I wouldn't waste my time with slap fights on social media.

Why shouldn't they sell to whoever is willing to pay them the most? At best a few honest people get some cheap RAM and a bunch of scalpers make a tidy profit selling the RAM they bought to the data centers. At least if the manufacturers are the ones making the additional money they can invest back into production capacity. The same cannot be said when it's the scalpers who are soaking up the excess money being left on the table.

Same as anyone else, hire a lawyer and sue for unlicensed use of your likeness. Of course the AI isn't going to reproduce you exactly. You and thousands of other people get run through a blender and something that might look a bit like you gets spit out. Even if you had the money to sue, you probably wouldn't succeed anymore than you would suing a company that used a sibling's likeness even though it does look a bit like you.

Just fight fire with fire and use the AI to make someone who vaguely resembles Zuck for advertisements about incontinence. Until your problems and issues become his problems and issues he's not going to care.

RAM prices aren't coming down until the AI bubble bursts. It wouldn't matter if there were another dozen companies manufacturing RAM if the global manufacturing capacity were the same. Even if some of those companies were willing to build additional manufacturing capacity, it would take years for it to come online because erecting the facilities and installing the equipment to produce the chips is also constrained.

Fortunately, everyone seems to be waking up to the fact that AI isn't a silver bullet and realizing it won't solve all of their problems or even save them any money. Also, for anyone playing older titles such as some of nearly three decade old games listed in the summary doesn't need a new machine with more RAM. Installing Linux on older hardware that Microsoft doesn't want to support has always been an option.

YotLD is every bit the meme it's always been and even if Valve had a popular Linux gaming machine at a reasonable price, it wouldn’t move the needle in a meaningful way. Desktops are becoming increasingly irrelevant for most people and Android is the dominant mobile OS that a majority of phones around the world use. Eventually most people will run Linux on desktops, but only because they've become irrelevant for anyone but the kind of power users that want a *nix box for professional work.

Why throw good money after bad? Not every project works out and throwing ever more money into the pit hoping it will eventually pay off requires having some other successful project from which that money must come from. Most studios don't have the kind of money to do that for more than a single game or a small team and if they have to start borrowing there's a good chance that everyone will be out of the job when the game flops or underperforms anyway.

A CEO making that kind of money is in charge of a company with thousands or more likely tens of thousands of employees. A CEO earning $5 million only needs to replace 100 workers earning $50,000 to save the same amount of money. It only takes a company of 2,000 for those 100 employees to be the kind of 5% reduction in force headline that's been common for the past several decades.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if in some cases AI is just an excuse to dump the usual amount of corporate deadweight that accumulates over time. Management will never admit that they overhired during COVID and AI provides a convenient excuse that doesn't point the finger at anyone in any kind of legally actionable way.

Are you suggesting the aboriginal tribes would have died off by now were it not for the British dumping prisoners there?

At the end of the day you're not wrong, but you must admit the laws help. Remove the age limit for alcohol and tobacco use and you'd have more teenagers drinking and smoking. A parent can't be there at every single moment of a child's life and having guardrails in place that allow teenagers to start learning how to be adults while making it more difficult for them to do something colossally foolish is reasonable.

Look at this from the opposite direction. How much excess socializing was done in the past because people didn't have anything else or didn't own a personal time-occupying device that didn't require sharing?

All this shows is that when given the choice, people choose their own interests over shared socialization. If previous generations had phones and tablets they wouldn't have talked to their uncle about mundane shit on Thanksgiving either. I don't think people have changed all that much, we just have more options now and this is identifying our actual preferences.

Any IDE or basic text editor can do that as well, no LLM necessary. I'm sure CS professors will tell you that their students have been doing it for decades, no artificial intelligence necessary. Of course just like the students who get caught every year, the developers who do are going to be the lazy ones that don't try to refactor in the slightest and just use whatever the LLM spits out. It'll probably still have the original author's name on it.

Fewer land owners to complain about the data center using all of the water for cooling obviously.

The cost of putting anything in orbit is hideously expensive and there's little reason to do so in most cases. Musk just wants a reason to sell people the means getting there. If the data center could be put in space because bandwidth or latency aren't an issue, it could be put in northern Alaska, Siberia, etc. for less money.

It's not just a movie (they made sequels!) but the X-Files episode executes the idea better as the Wishmaster films are horror schlock, but still enjoyable for fans of the genre. The idea has been around forever (or at least as far back as One Thousand and One Nights) as anyone with a creative DM knows. Most religions probably have their own versions of the story.

Calling something essential doesn't exempt it from the same "laws" of economics that everything is susceptible to. The benefit of increased prices are that they're attractive to suppliers. Make sure that it's no less difficult to build power plants than it is to build data centers and the problem becomes self-correcting.

If it hasn't already I suspect the real issue is that there were plenty of NIMBY laws that made it difficult to build power plants that didn't also apply to data centers. I'm sure someone will complain that those same laws ought to apply to data centers as well, and even if that weren't terribly misguided in the first place, the horse has already left that particular barn and would do no good.

A data center is a type of industry that wants a very consistent and fixed amount of power. It can run 24 hours per day and the lid won't fluctuate heavily. It's actually a great candidate for just building a power plant next door that produces what the data center will consume. That's literally the dream scenario for a power plant because for many types of generation having to ramp up and down is more costly than delivering a fixed amount of power. Data centers can be built out in the middle of nowhere and the power plant to feed them can be built right next to them.

Even if the data center company goes out of business because AI is a flop they can rent the space and possibly the equipment to crypto miners who will gladly buy cheap power. If the farmers in bumfuck Virginia are upset at the idea of evil data centers just over provision the power generation a little and sell them cheap electricity below market price so they can start their own crypto farm as a fuck-you to the power company.