It never really went away.. They just stopped talking about it, and they finally stopped trying to put long form articles and news bulls etc on the desktop. We generally kept the widget, and status content type stuff, from weather and headlines to e-mail.

The problem with the desktop is a organizational space you visit briefly to switch or start tasks, and maybe move some files around. If it is actually displayed other than around the periphery for any amount of time it means the user isn't really 'using' the PC at all. They are idle. Now maybe they are an office worker sitting waiting for e-mail to arrive, but even then they'd rather be looking at an entertainment website of their choosing or just watching a video would a bunch of junk overlaid until something chimes or whatever.

The 'Desktop' is really a bad spot for content. Either people don't see it, or they'd rather consume it in some other virtual space.

I know exactly what it means thank you very much.

Literally everyone who ever used the term before this thread, was thinking about the 'production' of information when they said information economy. We were going to pay all these knowledge workers to sit and analyze data to produce information on demand. That is what they meant by information economy! Except nobody is going to need that in the very near future there will be relatively few questions big-data and machine learning can't answer, at least not to practical satisfaction. Nobody will care about your materials patents when they can just say "find me a polymer that has the characteristics x,y,z that I can synthesize for feed stocks a,b,c..." and get an answer in hours.

What I am talking here is more trade secrets that enable industrial production. Those secrets are only valuable as long as you use the to effectively control the actual production and restrict the entry of others into the market place. There is a non-zero cost associated with keeping such secrets, and it only grows more expensive the more people you have to let in because you don't want to do the manufacturing and vertical integration yourself.

In the end it gets out, and when it gets out the parties with the most industrial capacity win the marketplace. China has understood this and planned accordingly. We on the other-hand have ignored the constantly accelerating rate at which information becomes defuse. It will be worth less and less and need to be better and better to be of any value.

You can even see this in ad tech, it used to be that with a little demographic understanding you could make a mint. Now that we putting ads on peoples refrigerators the ad saturation is near its max, you have target ads better and better, 30 somethings with a child under 18 at home isn't good enough anymore to make money, now you need to know what they had for dinner last night and what color their carpet is to be worth anything to clients.

Only brain washed Marxist would say that. FUCK YOU

Not sure about all that but to me this might be the sell signal for NVIDA.

Making direct investments in your biggest customers when your product has the higher entry barriers, is always a little suspect in my book. If you believe that much in what they are doing why not build your own business unit?

Obviously there are very real and very good reasons, but as an outsider I can't distinguish those motivations from, I am buying into them so I can protect market share, make the core volume continue to look great and hope nobody questions the anticipated but returns I don't really believe the clients can generate.

LOL

"We do not live in an economy based on information. We live in an economy based on secrecy and superior knowledge and technical capabilities."

Yes, an information economy. Perhaps you should ask google what that means.

Then why all the talk about bringing manufacturing back? Eh peanut gallery?

"We have a dying generation who still sees the economy as post WWII, because that is the world we grew up in (Last of the boomers here)."

The constant agism is tiring. GenXers as a group are as entitled as Boomers are and Gen X isn't dying any time soon, post-Reagan internet boomers drive greed now, not post-WW2 boomers. Older people are more concerned with fixed incomes and retirement, older people are naturally more conservative.

"That is called public policy, in a free society."
Is it called that? Or do you mean you are free to call it that in a free society.

Mass murder of Jews was called "public policy" in free German society, not sure what the merit of your claim is.

"You don't know the policy won't achieve its goals..."

Because we don't know the goals. What we do know is that people will lie about the goals and lie about the data.

"The real questions if this is more to little to late..."

No it's not, unless you're a brainwashed racist.

We also know information obeys the laws of entropy. fundamentally it wants to be defuse.

We do not live in an economy based on information. We live in an economy based on secrecy and superior knowledge and technical capabilities. It worked great back in the 60s when the Chinese did not have the technology to do a lot of precision manufacturing at scale.

We got cherry pick the high value, low input cost commercial activities - a science and tech dividend. They have caught up now, partly because we believed our own BS about 'information economy' without understanding the value came for 'secrecy and scarcity' or refusing to admit it anyway.

Now the pandemic should have shown you once and for the 'post-informaiton-age' economy is absolutely about industrial production. It no matter how clever a piece of software is, it not going to transport you from point-a to point-b, it won't keep you warm at night. Now that electric motor built on the assembly line might pull your car down the road or be the blower in your hvac assembly.

Now remembering all the supply chain challenges and looking at what sectors are really driving inflation, it is clearly not 'information' that is the key price component..

Nice hand wave there. That is called public policy, in a free society. Like you say it is about what the proportions will be. You don't know the policy won't achieve its goals, of employing more Americans in net, you are just assuming that part because you don't like the current leadership and not for any informed reason.

The real questions if this is more to little to late, and it might be. Even so trying something is better than doing more nothing. At the end of the day what difference does it make if you get laid off today so they can hire a cheaper h1b to replace you vs you getting laid off so they can outsource your entire project. - None. Arguably the later might buy you a little more time.

Of course the administration is looking at taxing some foreign employment as labor imports as well. So it is likely that this is one of a multiple prong approach to a broader protectionist strategy for American knowledge workers. I just hope the current bunch can stay in office long enough to implement it all.

Take away the satellites, and you effectively take away the drones. Don't kid yourself. The destruction of comms satellites will cripple nations, as we've largely gotten rid of backup terrestrial navigation aids like LORAN in the West, while both Russian and China kept legacy nav and com systems as backups, and are even expanding them. The first day of the war, satellites will be the very first thing to go, because you go after your enemies communications first.

I think what is possibly actually interesting about the latest wave of machine learning is we might actually be approaching a point where we don't need to create 'new software' for many tasks even new tasks.

I don't think we can vibe code or prompt engineer our way to things that require high precision and absolute correctness, I don't think you'll want your bank keeping a ledger in their vibe-coded database engine but... there are lots of computing tasks where if you could get the error rate down to that of a 'persons with a pencil in 1970' it would be 'good enough' same thing for lots of process stuff like the QC guy on the boxed cracker line, or even the knowledgeable salesman.

I think there could be a giant segment of the custom software market that just gets replaced a sorta single 'god-program' that is a ML engine backed by some very large models and enough compute resources to just make it work.

A lot of that has to do with how rapidly the world is changing these days. I don't think it is fear of missing out as much as it is fear of being obsoleted.

It was a lot easier to say, 'maybe I'll sit this one one out' when you were not thinking your entire vocational industry might vanish over night, imagine being in the video rental business or a music store in 2010. How many shop owners would really have imagined after 60 years of people successively collecting records, tapes, vhs, dvd, blueray, media that it would go from mass market, to basically boutique segment for diehards overnight.

Same thing with our politics and social mores. We went for 60 years in most of the Western world for fearing socialism to having a huge portion of the populations and majorly political parties embracing it. We went from that will get you beaten to death or involuntarily committed, to maybe its alright if you just don't talk about it and mind your business, to pride month in the span of single generation. None of this is limited to white collar chattering classes either, imagine if as a farmer you spent the last 25 years in suspended animation and woke up today? -The pageantry of the county fair is about they only thing you'd be familiar with, equipment, market place, scale of operation, all radically altered.

The face of the world has been changing a great deal more rapidly than at any previous era in history since the industrial revolution, that pace increased sharply in the post-war era, and has gone asymptotic in the 21st century. People are trying to catch the next big fad - not because FOMO but because they are not sure they will having anything to fall back on if they do miss the wave.

I agree even very well intentioned, honest people have just about everything telling them not to look to hard.

Consider you work for MSCRT and get the report from bug bounty. You confirm the issue, and you do the right thing and turn on the klaxons at MS.

After a little background check to confirm the reporter isnt likely a compromised person you look for 'obvious' signs this was exploited. Finding none, you report your initial results up the chain. Now your job is evaluated on closed incidents / reports at least in part. Your manager tells you wrap this one up close it out, because he knows everyone above all the way up to the C-suite, does not want this to be huge black eye.

Would you go on a phishing expedition in search of more tiny, easily disputed IOCs trying to sift back thru logs for a span of a year or more, knowing the really dangerous guys often have very long dwell times, or would you move on? If you found real proof of an issue you might be hero -or- motivated interests might try to discredit and vilify you, if you don't find anything you might be accused of violating instructions or even get into trouble for looking at logs and systems without an official cause..

there just isn't anyone even down to the front line engineers that really would *want* to find a problem if there was one. Just about everyone at levels at least in the near term has a better day if they 'see no evil'