P.S. The most over-leveraged companies are the ones most likely to go down first.

I think so, too, but not at all in the way Altman thinks it's going to happen.

We've already figured out that you can make smaller simpler models that get like 80% of the benefit for like just a few percent of the resources. Like I've got an AI running on my old 2011 computer, no graphics card, that is mostly as good as the Bing AI or whatever, just kinda slow.

Point is, there is a good chance a lot of people will be using AI for the things it is good for (mostly I use it for programming questions and similar) but that does NOT mean that everybody in the universe will be paying Altman's company bazillions of dollars to do so.

Most people - and even companies - that get decent use out of AI are likely to be running their own AI at a small fraction of the cost. Or buying it at MUCH lower-cost from non-cutting edge type "utility" companies that are not on the cutting edge but provide a perfectly usable product. And only a few of the largest/richest companies & people who have dollars to burn and really need "the cutting edge" for whatever reason, will be paying giant trillion-dollar corporations like OpenAI to get the absolutely latest and greatest.

So could indeed be a bit like electricity, in the sense that it is ubiquitous, cheap, and useful. But that means 1000s or millions or even billions of individual providers, not necessarily one or a few giant sprawling tech firms led by sociopathic assholes like Altman (Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, etc.).

Just because something will indeed be valuable in the future does not mean that value is infinite, that we should pour infinite money into it, or that the value people are assigning it right now is correct (see e.g. the Dot Com Bubble and pretty much every economic bubble in the past - the internet became very valuable indeed but not in the ways and not to the companies, for certain, that people at that time thought it would).

In fact, the value that people and markets are now assigning to AI companies is almost certainly greatly exaggerated or misplaced. In part because the very process that is creating an interesting and useful product now will make it vastly simply, smaller, easier, and cheaper in just a few years. And in another part because the ways profit will be generated from AI in the future are not the same as they are now - and thus the companies on the receiving end of it are not necessarily going to be the same.

In short, get ready for the Great AI Crash of '26 or '27 or '28 whatever.

Some companies and technologies will survive it but Altman's may or may not be one of them.

Yes, ideally it wouldn't just wipe - which makes it obvious to everyone what has happened - but instead replaced with something perfectly normal and innocuous.

Regardless, this whole thing of making people hand over their passwords is what should be illegal.

I don't mind them charging for a service that has ongoing costs and I don't mind them making a profit doing so. But 70% profit? That is basically extortion, or as the economists would say: Rent seeking.

Once you have purchased a car, they are a sole-source provider for such services. So, a monopoly.

Since we have decided monopolies are AOK in this country, they just charge whatever they can get away with and that is that.

Let's see some real competition required in this space - such systems are built to a standard and you have a choice of at least 5 or so subscription services that will do the same job, regardless of the make, model, or age of your vehicle. Or if that kind of competition isn't happening then regulate the service like any other utility monopoly - including a cap on profits.

5-10-15% or even, at the outside, 20% profit in an industry like this would be somewhat reasonable, and more than enough "reward" for investors and company owners.

70% is nothing short of highway robbery.

Yeah, there is probably something specific about it, like there are network shares on the system or whatever.

The point is, software programmed by one guy in Croatia performs literally the exact same task around 1000X faster.

That isn't something wrong with my system. It's something wrong with their software. Because whatever "The Problem" with my system is (very likely something perfectly normal but slightly out of the ordinary), Explorer should be able to handle it easily rather than choking for literal minutes.

Again, we KNOW this is not impossible because other, very similar, software performs well in the exact same situation.

Explorer in Windows 11 is so slow and terrible I finally just quit using it. It was taking like several minutes to simply open up a new, blank, explorer window.

Switched to File Pilot and the same directory opens up instantly.

So one guy from Croatia can out-program an entire, massive $2.9 trillion tech company. OK . . .

The thing about Explorer is: It is literally the most basic, commonly used function in the OS. Well, that and the Taskbar, which has also been a continuous clusterf#$*& for literally years now.

When you can't even get the most basic, commonly used functions in your OS right, it really does undermine confidence.

It's pretty clear the "problem" the admin has with Anthropic is that Anthropic wants some minimal (probably very inadequate) guardrails on the use of their AI while the current admin wants nothing at all.

Just let AI do the killing, all is well. (And surveillance, various forms of law-breaking and privacy violation, whatever . . . )

It looks like specifically what happened is that Reddit filed for the trademark "WallStreetBets" in 2021. Rogozinsky then filed to have the trademark suspended or revoked - presumably on the grounds that he and not Reddit had created it.

And recently Rogozinsky lost this case. This establishes the trademark WallStreetBets as owned by Reddit (for the uses for which they filed), and given that, they can control use of the trademark. By, for example, banning its use by others for whatever reason - the reason doesn't matter, as they own the trademark.

What I think it specifically unusual about this is that Reddit didn't create this intellectual property, nor did anyone employed by them. So it is hard to even understand on what basis the have standing to claim the copyright above the person who actually coined the name.

The reason might be somewhere in the legal gobbledygook we all have to read & sign when registering an account with Reddit. Aside from specifically assigning away these rights, it's hard to imagine the basis for just grabbing them from the actual creator.

But I haven't tracked down nor read the actual case, so that is just speculation.

The trademark filings & other info for these marks can be found here:

- https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNu...

- https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNu...

They are doing the same thing in a large number of sectors.

"The U.S. has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs. So now let's DESTROY our entire science, research, and educational sector, too - in revenge!!!111!111!"

Meanwhile, we haven't created any manufacturing jobs, either.

So now we have TWO major sectors where we're being the eight ball.

It's the same "logic" as, "coal has been destroyed by those nasty librals, so let's destroy wind, too - in revenge!!111!!1111"

It's doesn't bring coal back. It just means we now have TWO sectors that have been entirely trashed.

One was trashed by market forces - the other by billionaire toddlers throwing a tantrum.

Right now our family is split in two locations for one of the roughly 10 thousand reasons such a thing commonly happens to families, and also, perhaps even more than that, one of the reasons we HAVE services like Netflix is to be able to use them while traveling. Which almost always involves one or more people traveling while one or more stays home.

In short, bye-bye Netflix. Too expensive and the quality has been going down steadily since 2010 or whenever anyway.

Exactly.

Increasing prices relentlessly while squeezing both labor and consumer is exactly what monopolies do. Bust it.

The situation is particularly ironic since the whole idea behind ride share - originally - was that the taxi system creates a sort of hidebound, extractive, and overly expensive monopoly system that needs to be "disrupted" by the "move fast and break things" crowd in order to usher us into the technoutopic future where such things can't exist.

Instead it has created a monopoly breathtaking in extent compared with what came before - from local to literally global monopoly - with just the exponentially worse problems on every front one would expect from such a monstrosity.

Just kill it.

This won't be the response, though. The response will be to 10X, 100X, or even 1000X or more the amount of content (all by using AI generated content, of course) in order to try to "stay ahead of the curve". Meanwhile, the person - or small company, whatever - that is trying to generate actual human-created content has no way to keep up.

Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Wikipedia is indeed "woke" and filled with "way too much DEI garbage".

Being the ardent supporter of the U.S. Constitution that I am certain you are, it turns out that Amendment 1 guarantees the right of the people to free speech.

The right of free speech is enshrined right there along with the right to practice your religion and assemble in support of political causes. I am sure you will agree that these are among the most important of the right guaranteed by the Constitution. (Even if you, somehow, do not agree, this is certainly what the Founders and authors of the Constitution believed.)

Anything the government does to restrict that free speech is nothing short of unconstitutional.

No matter how wrong Wikipedia may be, it is not the job of a U.S. attorney to regulate that speech, nor to threaten or bully in an attempt to change or stop it.

Anyone, such as in particular Ed Martin, who does so should be immediately removed from office for malfeasance.

What he is doing is literally, and very clearly, unconstitutional.

> Was Zuckerburg's campaign contribution to Trump not big enough ?

Hmm, time for a fact check:

[Zuckerberg] and his wife donated at least $400 million to two nonprofit organizations which distributed grants to state and local governments to help them conduct the 2020 election during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The donations came at a time when election offices were trying to transition to mail voting. The money helped pay for material and services such as equipment to process mail ballots, protective equipment to curb the spread of the coronavirus, and drive-thru voting locations. . . .

“These were not campaign donations. These were grants to governments, mostly county and municipal governments that run elections across the united states.”

A review of online FEC records show that Zuckerberg did not directly donate to Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. LaBolt also confirmed that Zuckerberg did not make any direct donations.

Source: Associated Press

Another source backing up the same information:

the couple’s donations were made to two nonpartisan institutions (the Center for Election Innovation & Research and the Center for Tech and Civic Life) and the grants ultimately paid for accommodations such as Plexiglass dividers, additional poll workers and more counting machines to handle the influx of mailed-in ballots, controversy has only increased.

Source: UCLA Newsroom

Apparently Zuckerberg did not make any direct donations to either presidential candidate in 2020.

FWIW the right-wing talking point that is the origin point of christoban's claim above, never was that Zuckerberg donated to Biden or the Democrats.

Rather, it was that by donating money to local governments to help them run elections better and more safely during the aftermath of the covid outbreak, that this somehow "favored Democrats", leading to Trump's loss in 2020.

The second link above specifically takes on this claim, and finds that any changes in voting patterns favoring one party over another were miniscule at best, and definitely not enough to change the election outcome.