Sometimes you can do the right thing for the wrong reason. Datacenters are misguided. Soon enough models and hardware will be good enough that everyone will be able to run their own local AI at home. It's just like computers back in the 60s. It's not going to stay on server farms forever. The future is personal AI just like the future was personal computers, and not even at the prices Nvidia is talking about. Normal computers will be able to run frontier models. When that happens, data centers are going to be worthless. They'll be trillion dollar investment failures, built for a future that doesn't exist.

And that's the optimistic take! What happens if the AI bubble bursts and this all goes south? Then all those data centers are worse than worthless. All that land, money and water they used will be totally wasted, and we're not talking an insignificant amount.

Having skepticism about the future of AI is a good thing, even if it has a future. It's not healthy to be building these trillion dollar projects based on wild speculation about a future that may never happen even in an optimistic scenario. If this all goes south, everyone who didn't build a datacenter is going to be better off than anyone who did.

So sure, let China go crazy poisoning their land and water with bad investments in obsolete data centers, while we proceed with a little more caution and sanity. I don't know about you, but that seems healthy to me. One advantage of living in a free and open society is you can express skepticism of bad ideas.

If itâ(TM)s okay for Amazon to scan and digitize thousands or millions of books, then itâ(TM)s okay for you to do it too. Just a thought.

This is a social engineering tactic: create a video to stir up anti-immigrant feelings in one country, then turn around and use the same video to encourage immigration to the country that you just encouraged anti-immigrant feelings in, with the resulting political crisis being the goal.

I don't want to dive into politics here, my goal with posting is to point out that this was an intentional social engineering tactic used to cause this situation, and it was wildly effective. One video caused a political crisis in multiple countries including infighting between those countries. Again, putting the politics aside, think about the cost effectiveness of this tactic. You produce one video, pay maybe two actors, maybe some camera people, and for the price of a small TV ad you cause a political crisis involving multiple countries, including undermining or worsening some relationships between countries.

Personally, I feel like this is a lot of what the internet is used for these days, and it kinda depresses me. I remember when the internet was just people with their own little webpages posting random crap. Today, it's a sophisticated tool used for propaganda, conflicts between countries, disinformation, you name it. It's not just countries doing this sort of thing, but companies too. Everyone is trying to manipulate your opinion, and the opinions of entire populations. Gone are the days when the internet was by people, for people. Now it's just a tool used for stuff like this.

Please dont switch from our horrible OS to something better

I don't think they're going to fix nearly enough. If you look at all the great features that Windows XP and Windows 7 had that were removed, and all the awful things that were added like ads, there is no way they're going to go far enough.

That's why we need to keep up the pressure. Hammer them hard on every awful aspect of the OS, and don't let up. They're only going to fix it when they're absolutely forced to because the pressure is so intense that it can't be ignored even at the highest levels. I'll bring up a few, but feel free to choose your own. First, ads. It is insane to me that you pay $200 for software that then tries to extract more money from you through ads. Just want to use your computer that you paid money for? Too bad, have a bunch of insecure bloatware and ads instead. $200 is a crazy price for software to start with, there is no good reason to also shove ads and bloatware down your throat.

Also, what the hell happened to the start menu? Windows 7 was probably fine, but the last time I remember the start menu actually being good might be Windows XP or maybe even 98. It had problems, sure, but their proposed solutions have gone from bad to worse to completely unusable.

None of this, or any of the other hundreds of problems with the OS, is ever going to get any better unless people relentlessly keep up the pressure on them. So keep it up: it's constructive criticism. If they refuse to fix this stuff and Windows ends up dying, they have no one to blame but themselves.

If you actually look into the consultant industry, it is very, very shady and scam like all the way down. I had friends in college who were recruited by consultant companies, and let me tell you they are the shadiest businesses. Don't hire consultants, don't work for consultants, avoid them like the plague. If you don't believe me, try reading up about their business practices and what people have said about working for them.

I don't want to get too political here, but it's unrealistic to say that this one random blog post is responsible for the stock market drop when you have major political and economic events happening. I doubt most people have ever heard of this company let alone read their blog.

In terms of white collar work becoming obsolete, it's interesting how no one is pointing out that blue collar jobs would be even more obsolete. If an AI is intelligent enough to take all white collar work, then technically it's "over qualified" for blue collar work. But that wouldn't fit into the narrative being pushed that we should all go into HVAC and other blue collar jobs. Don't get me wrong HVAC is a great job, but it's even more vulnerable to AI than we are.

I don't buy any of these doom and gloom scenarios for a second. People thought computers would take their jobs and look where we are. The same thing is going to happen with AI.

Finds chickens feel unsafe. Fox promises to improve safety of chickens.

We dont have time to write programs the way they should be written. We just barely have enough time to write them at all.

This is the same as it always was. Software today is probably better than it has ever been. People just dont remember what it used to be like. Windows 95 crashed all the time and that was the entire OS going down regularly. Every application was equally buggy. This is not new. Its only new to people who dont remember what it used to be like.

Sure no problem. I was working at 1/5 my maximum speed this whole time until you told me to work faster. I had no idea you wanted me to go faster! If only I had known. I like how the purely imaginary idea that AI can make you go faster is now a mandatory production goal even though it has no basis in reality.

Wow 11,000 lines! Does that mean if I type 12,000 lines that Iâ(TM)m better than Claude? Also where is the source code for this mythical AI coded slack clone? I assume no human engineers were involved in its production right? Since theyâ(TM)re claiming an AI wrote a whole slack clone all by itself and everything, I assume no real engineers were involved?

I keep seeing articles claiming that AI makes programmers obsolete, and the only conclusion I can come to is that someone wants to discourage people from majoring in computer science. If that's what we want to do, great. I look forward to my salary sky rocketing when there aren't enough computer science graduates.

AI straight up can't do the things that people are starting to claim it can do. Worse, it is entirely possible that AI will never be able to do the things that people are claiming it can already do. We're discouraging people from majoring in computer science based on the assumption that AI might one day replace them, when it isn't clear that this will ever happen at all.

All the evidence so far is that AI provides no productivity improvements, and actually slows programmers down compared to not using AI. Sure, it might one day in the distant future get better, and cars might one day drive a thousand miles on a gallon of gas. Or it might never get any better at all.

The cost of AI also isn't being taken into consideration. We're acting as if AI is free and programmers cost money, but AI is actually very expensive. Companies are losing billions of dollars on it just based on the assumption that they might one day make a profit somehow. If you take into account the cost in hardware, power, and engineering to train a model, in addition to the ongoing hardware, power, and engineering costs to run a model, AI could be way more expensive than programmers, and it can't even replace them.

So sure, make everyone avoid computer science, and triple all of our salaries when you can't find any programmers anymore. I'm down.

That's just someone turning up your thermostat when demand is too high for the available supply. This is really just about how they want to own and control your thermostat instead of you.

I'm not saying this is the end all and be all solution to memory safety. However, this is still a good step in an interesting direction. Why not try to retrofit memory safety into C++? This kinda makes sense conceptually. If there are developers who insist on C++, then it makes sense to attempt to develop a memory safe version.

Even Rust has unsafe blocks where you can use unsafe features, so it's actually not as much of a stretch to imagine a memory safe version of C++ as you'd think. We already have examples of memory safe languages that are C++-like or C++-inspired (Java, C#), so I think it's actually reasonable to try to adopt the features of memory safe languages. C++ is known for having everything and the kitchen sink, so why not adopt both Rust-like memory safety options as well as garbage collection, and let users choose?

These are just ideas I'm throwing out here, my main message is that this is that I like this line of thinking, and I think it could be a step in the right direction. Sure, it has a lot of issues that still need to be addressed (like how do you enforce safety for users who want to enforce it?), but I just feel like there's some good core thinking behind this.

A feature no one wants and everyone hates yet they are dead set on forcing it on everyone. This is just such a weird combination. Have we really reached the point at which hated features that no one wants are forced on users? Why?