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Comment Small efficiency gain in the assembly line (Score 2) 12

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."

Comment Re:Tooling exceeds Machinist Cost (Score 1) 91

You can generally tell when the true operational cost, including cost of capital, significantly exceeds employee cost by looking at whether they pay people to work in the middle of the night.

There are quite a lot of places where that happens. Just using the OP's list:

Airplanes: there are fewer flights at night, but that's when a lot of required maintenance happens. The Internet tells me the average lease on a Boeing 737 is around a few hundred thousand USD per month. Bigger planes would have even bigger differentials with their crew salaries.

Machinists: there's a reason you picked this example. Really expensive machine tools can run into the multiple millions though, plus maintenance and consumables. Lease rates can easily go into double digit thousands per month. And that's not even considering exotic stuff. Lots of high end shops operate around the clock.

Radiologists: Most of the operating costs for big medical imaging equipment are going to exceed the employee operating it, though maybe not the radiologist. Getting a radiologist to work outside regular business (or banking) hours is a chore, but the techs do so routinely. Sometimes the actual operation is the expensive bit so no night shifts, like anything involving a SQUID.

Tower cranes: don't work as much at night probably due to safety, but lease rates mostly in the double digit thousands a month and up.

Trading analysts: Bloomberg terminals are a few tens of thousands per year, so no. Some of the crazy HFT stuff probably does cost ridiculous amounts though, so maybe the quants writing algorithms for it rather than the traders.

Garbage men: maybe. Probably yes if you count the salary of one guy, no if two.

Concrete truck drivers: probably. Also probably semi trucks.

Comment Re:Can we please stop using MW for storage capacit (Score 0) 47

MWh is a unit of capacity

The word you're looking for is "energy."

"Capacity" can have pretty much any units depending on what you're talking about. Generation capacity, for example, is usually measured in Watts. It's common to talk about battery capacity in terms of power because if it can't provide enough power it's no good at all, and then time; i.e. make it work, then make it good.

Comment Re: What is a "harmful response?" (Score 1) 41

I don't think "continuous" means what you think it means. The reason you can do this is because the models are continuous.

"JaiLIP" is just running gradient descent on the input until you get the effect on the output you want. The same thing works just fine on our brains except it's less efficient because we can't (yet) differentiate over our output. We call them "optical illusions" even though they don't have anything to do with actual optics.

Comment Just another reminder of the upcoming auctions (Score 1) 91

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?

Comment Re: software engineer's $2,000 monthly salary (Score 1) 91

It isn't just bullshit on that end, it's bullshit on the expense end. Most businesses are on $20/user/month plans, some individuals maybe on $100/$200

Where the fuck is $2000/month/user coming from? FTA:

I have heard scary numbers

Uh huh. Where did those come from. Ticking off every AI upgrade option from every SaaS product you rent, AI summaries of AI summaries of AI code reviews everywhere? I don't think THAT even gets you to $2000 a user. Can you burn $2000 if you try, absolutely, is there a story there... well if we don't know the story explaining that then there isn't a story, this is just a bullshit narrative being built.

Look, somewhere an employee made off with an entire months supply of free breakfast bars and coffee pods from the supply closet. Let's not run around with the coffee is costing companies $X based on that bullshit. Or "On-prem datacenters send power bills skyrocketing" when the story is about some VMware servers showing up in a random office closet. How you unexpectedly blew $2000 at work would be a story.

Comment Re:would have been impressive.... (Score 2) 47

...25 years ago

First it was not possible to have anything but coal or nuclear.

Then it was it gets dark, so impossible to use solar.

Then was there is no way to store the energy. Then it was people will shiver in the dark when the wind dies down.

And now? It is not impressive.

My how the goalposts have moved, and now those grapes are probably sour anyhow.

Comment Re:He is largely correct (Score 1) 93

To go into more detail about it:

There are simple counter examples:

These aren't counter examples. The important thing is whether you can draw the supply curve and draw the demand curve and find where they meet in equilibrium. It doesn't matter if the demand curve is shaped because or hunger or because of convincing advertising.

The important thing is there are two curves and you need to understand them.

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