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Comment The Fascist in the room (Score 4, Interesting) 84

The company I work for is heavily international - we crossed the 50% mark a few years back, and now a majority of our revenue comes from non-US countries.

Our parent company is almost entirely US-only.

We're hiring a lot world-wide, and a tiny amount domestically. Our parent is laying people off left and right.

We're also postponing domestic projects. International ones are full-steam ahead.

And the single-biggest reason is no exec can make any significant plans without serious risk of the President of the US doing something bone-headed that blows it up. The risk that some admin hanger-on will come up with a regulatory extortion scheme targeting big announcements is too great. Even if you're not directly targeted, they just flip various regulatory switches randomly, just as they've been doing for the past 8 months. Coked up fascists doing policy is just not good for business, yo.

If you think I'm exaggerating, you try finishing a project budget this month. (Hint.) To be clear this is not complaining about the fee - the constant changes that render yesterday's work irrelevant is the problem.

Comment Re:Why not disbarred? (Score 5, Informative) 35

It is really hard to get disbarred.

Varies a bit by state, but unless you're outright stealing from clients, you get a lot of escalating warnings and 2nd chances.

If you're curious how bad you have to behave to actually get disbarred, the shenanigans of one Richard P. Liebowitz may be instructive.

Comment Murdercars (Score 2) 26

Every time I see a story like this, I think about Daniel Suarez's book Daemon.

It isn't a great book - fairly disposable scifi that requires TV-style disbelief-suspension and eventually devolves into weird techno-utopianism. But has great bits of scene-setting mind candy that is frighteningly believable.

Like the fleets of robot cars used as weapons.

Comment Only half the problem (Score 5, Informative) 58

I realize that half is the focus of the article, but it misses a huge piece of the perniciousness.

They demand exclusivity with venues.

Which means you either hand over all your booking and ticket sales (for a fee, of course) to them, or not be able to book any Ticketmaster artists. If you haven't considered the question, you may not recognize that artist-choice and ticketing are two of the biggest levers a club owner has to manage their business. Most of the other costs of business are pretty inflexible - about your only other cost-control options are fucking over your workers and watering the beer.

This does a couple things - clubs become more like farmers - they get to soak up all the risk with none of the control. It also gives TM more control over artists - I've seen less info on how TM squeezes them, but don't think that isn't there. If an artist doesn't like their terms, they don't get to play their venues.

And of course they wet their beak at every single touch point along the way.

Comment Re:US $0.18 per kWh vs China $0.08 (Score 2) 60

DeepSeek has proven that it can use far less computing power

I've seen where they've asserted that, where has it been proven?

if DeepSeek' s claims are true,

Ah.

some AI queries may not require a data center at all

And here's how you falsify the claim. When can I expect to see that 200B param model on my phone?

Comment Messing with people (Score 1) 60

I'd bet money that number has very little to do with the actual accounting.

If I were running the their team, I would absolutely fuck with OAI and other competitors like this. They can't discount it completely - this is still early days, there almost certainly are undiscovered efficiency tricks out there.

But it forces them to spend time and money chasing those based on whatever is in DS's paper. Messes with their OODA loop, if you think about things that way.

Comment Bingo (Score 1) 110

A substantial amount of the actual work of "journalism" these days is hiding the actual informational payload behind someone's pet bias.

Which sometimes leads to a problem deciding which bias to emphasize, but that's why they're the professionals.

"If you slice up humanity into arbitrarily delineated categories like this, number go down."

"Interesting, which arbitrarily delineated category?"

"Youngins."

"Ah, so they're lazy fuckups, not maltreated but noble boomers."

Comment Meanwhile... (Score 4, Informative) 56

The US is dropping workplace safety monitoring, particularly for all those miners whom a certain nostalgic segment of people who have never worked in mines like to claim they're looking out for.

The US was doing something. That effort appears dead now.

Instead, states like Florida and Texas are heading the other direction, making it impossible for local government to protect people.

I'm sure your foreman will allow you have water every 2 hours, he's a nice guy, right? Not that like that last jerk.

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