I suppose the question is if AI companies can really 'do their nonsense', as a big chunk of the assumed value is the ability for the AI to displace IP generation.

I feel like I've read a bunch of them had pivoted already. I recall one audio interview that had the guy point blank declare his pivot. They were all people and companies I never had heard of before.

You know outside walls also have outlets.

Battery is a separate and optional concern, sounds like they largely expect these to be grid-tied.

So no particularly significant problems, though some folks may misunderstand how much a kilowatt of peak solar will give them in a given month, but it'll probably be cheap enough to be worth it.

More like 'neutral', Cursor is by no means the only path to vibe code and OpenAI's models are by no means the only models (in fact, generally viewed poorly in those circles). So OpenAI making it harder for Cursor users won't make a dent in the general scheme of things.

From an economic standpoint, you absolutely have to count training as a facet. If everyone cuts back on scale up, then nvidia, memory vendors, and various other players in that space take a hit. Maybe a troubled AI company can cut out its capex by pausing training, but the downstream impact still is in the broader market.

But even the capex exposure may be hard to shake, given how much debt and purchasing commitments are in play.

To sum up, I broadly agree that one way or the other, much more sane and modest equipment will supersede the absurd designs of the bleeding edge high end GPU designs as they exist today. Beyond the facets you mention, they are fickle beasts to get working right with how they are designed hardware wise.

The push for concentrating in datacenters will continue, because there's much more money to be had to hold any facet of compute hostage for subscription revenue. See Microsoft Office, no need for that to be subscription only, and yet Office increasingly pushes the subscription model and diminishes the perpetual licenses.

While they may be contributing, I frankly think that would be a bad strategy if they had a good finger on the pulse of public sentiment here. Folks don't need convincing and are frustrated all by themselves.

On the flip side, Musk's social network announcing they are rooting out sentiment that gets in the way of Musk's ambitions and declares it to be foreign interference? Well, since there's no conflict of interest at all there, seems legit.

We do know that the companies are out talking to members of town councils and making them sign NDAs. We know that town councils after obligatory public comments and referendums are frequently going against the sentiment expressed *in person*. They are going hard on small-town corruption to get what they want without doing a thing to make the respective communities actually have *anything* long term to benefit from the inflicted stuff.

Now they could probably do things like some municipal 'permanent funds' to make the local populace interested, but the cheapest way is to just bribe a handful of people on a town council and gaslight the world to say the locals actually like the datacenters in their backyards.

Agreed. It was a bad administration, but if I knew exactly how badly his sore losing would have turned out, I sadly would have taken the lesser evil of a 2020 Trump victory.

I don't know how much of it was "Trump" using the time versus the reality of establishment folks distancing themselves (he was a loser facing litigation, traditionally considered the death kiss to a political career) versus the most vile sort of folks latching on to his scenario. Before he was surrounded by a blend of establishment and his nutjobs, after 2020 it was nutjob only. Folks like Stephen Miller being set to just have it their way without challenge.

So now his 'nutjob' crew has proven to the broader GOP that they can rig things to a single party system with repercussion and they are all in. The question is if there is a line that will not be crossed. Rigged maps are already proven, we will see about whether they will use ICE/National Guard for voter intimidation. We may not have to find out if they will overturn legitimate results if the other things work out well enough.

For some definition of 'they', sure, there's always *someone* paranoid about the scenario.

However there's a fair amount more credible supposition over this one. Trump's sore loser reaction has paved the way for some dangerous moves.

In 2020, he only went to interfere *after* the fact, but he clearly interfered. When the results betrayed him, he sought to overturn them and when that failed he tried to ignore the electors and use their own anyway and as that failed he tried to get Pence to reject the election and as that failed he incited a mom to try to disrupt the proceedings. He learned that in a fair game he actually could lose and that was unacceptable and he was willing to do whatever it takes to replace a loss with a win.

Now he and opportunistic cohorts are already much more proactive about it. Every reason to anticipate any plausible excuse to rig or discard the elections as he has proven himself already willing to do so and is surrounded by a much more all-in administration than his first term. Already trying to mess with mail-in, already openly rigged the representative maps, already been working ICE and national guard troops to get the hang of domestic military operations. Stephen Miller once basically publicly fantasized about sending republican controlled national guard into democratic states against their will to make them bend to his will.

I do anticipate the election will be *held* and if and only if the results are a loss will they try anything like an 'emergency', but I absolutely expect ICE and national guards to be doing operations around strategic polling sites. Ostensibly about immigration or crime, but with the oh so coincidental side effect of voter suppression.

I get the feeling that Zuck is in a similar boat to Richard Dawkins and Kent Overstreet, who have gone off the deep end and believe they have LLMs which are effectively equivalent to human companionship.

Remember Zuck celebrated that people could have AI "friends" and employees could talk to AI impersonations of their management and it would be just as good as actually getting to talk to management.

Nothing quite as publicly really off the deep end as Overstreet and Dawkins (who both seem to have decided that their favored LLMs must be 'girls', which strongly suggests they needed to gender it to make their "crush" make sense for them), with Overstreet getting extra creepy points for insisting his LLM is essentially a teenage girl. I would not be surprised if he at least more privately holds similar feelings and thus doesn't view this as "apocalyptic" bad.

Except time and willpower. However, the McDonald's analogy does hold up -- nobody is ever going to get rich flipping burgers at McDonald's, precisely because it requires so little skill to do that job, making McDonald's workers completely fungible. Since anyone can man a grill, no one is going to command a salary much more than what a high schooler will agree to do it for.

The economic problem with having an AI produce music for you is, you never get the opportunity to learn how to produce it for yourself. At the end of the day, you're paying them $200/month for the privilege of remaining unskilled, and you're competing against everyone else who knows how to enter "write a catchy song for me" into a prompt box. You can't make money that way, because the moment you do, the AI companies (who own all of the talent and all of the production machinery) can simply appropriate your income stream for themselves.

It's the difference playing Guitar Hero and taking guitar lessons -- both let you feel like you're a competent musician, but only the latter will ever get you a career as a musician.

I would have figured this would have happened a long time ago, shocked it took until now to have a machine beat a human at running bipedal.

We aren't even the fastest bipedal animal.

I would not go *that* far. Sure an artist can flop out of the industry, and new artists have to come from *somewhere*, but the music industry has more and more successfully "manufactured" the performers rather than "discovered" them.

Also, lots of working it from other angles, the music is a relatively small part of the picture for the biggest musicians. Other media or just a celebrity for the sake of celebrity type things. Co-hosting some reality show that has nothing to do with music, for example.

He's not done much in the field in over a decade now, and even then arguably it was mostly riding on the remembered success from the 90s.