CodingJeebus
CodingJeebus on Hacker News
The problem is that the RAM shortage isn't caused by some "calamity", it's being financially manufactured by companies like OpenAI. The more accurate analogy is that OpenAI starts buying all the cars, jacking up the price on consumer vehicles, and then going on a show acting like he's not influencing market conditions at all.
But he's creating the scarcity. If someone corners the market for something simple like cars and creates the economic conditions where consumer cars now cost 500k, does that person also get to go on a podcast and say "normal people shouldn't own cars anymore because they're a scarce resource?" as if it's just an objective reality that they played no part in creating? Because that's exactly what Altman is doing here.
> “But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time,” he added. “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
Altman not acknowledging that companies like his are creating the conditions that cause the supply constraints is the Dr. Evil cherry on top.
> People would take the promotional talk of some SDK as truth without ever measuring and then being confused on why the whole app was slow
This has largely been my experience navigating the JS framework world from basically the beginning of React. It's wild how poorly some of the earliest presentations about React have aged, as that framework has gone through endless major API/design refactors.
Not to mention that benchmarks are a very flawed way to assess technology for builds with complex and open-ended requirements. If you're operating in a constrained environment and you have a clear bottleneck that a particular tool can solve, then benchmarks can be really helpful. But starting on a new product from 0 that needs flexibility to pivot does not necessarily benefit from picking the fastest tool in the shed.
Welcome to enterprise, stuff like this happens all the time. There's not a whole lot to be done about losing out to an alternate vendor based on an exec's personal recommendation. I wouldn't frame it as "what did I do wrong?", because there might not have been anything you could do to win that deal. This just happens sometimes.
The lesson is that relationships matter a ton in any enterprise play. It sucks in hindsight, but it never feels good to invest so much in a big potential client for it not to work out. And upfront spec work is, unfortunately, a common and necessary evil in the enterprise world.
Sounds like you were decently close to closing a whale, so that's positive. Clearly you have something that somebody wants, so live to fight another day.
It's pretty easy to see where that ends. The headline writes itself: "Github engineers arrested for betting on downtime on prediction markets and intentionally causing outages"
Unless you have more money than you know what to do with, I don't understand the use case for agentic e-commerce. Things like Apple Pay feel like the right abstraction, removing the need for manual input of the basics while tying the actual transaction to an intentional signal. Manually typing in a credit card over and over again isn't fun, but that's been solved without needing to give up all power of purchases.
There's nothing I want to turn over to an agent so badly to buy for me that I'm willing to give up manual auth. And based on these numbers, I'm definitely not alone in thinking that way.
Maybe for people who have the means to afford LLMs, but then who really wants that? That's a hard pass for me and I use LLMs every day. I suspect that asking society to trust in a digital middle-man between themselves and their money will be a very hard sell.
Of course not. But he wouldn't need to do that if she is a honeypot. Remember, this guy was photographed while autographing a woman's chest like a rockstar just a couple years ago. Combined with the leather jacket look, he gives off a vibe of an executive that likes to party.
I broadly understand this as the utopian vision of what crypto could theoretically be, but it's not playing out this way in the real world and I have a hard time seeing it ever succeeding this way.
Being able to leverage crypto on this scale requires everyone to either A) be technical enough to understand and use smart contracts directly or B) delegate a party that handles this for you. This is where the utopian case usually falls apart, because most people are B and this requires trusting a third party, which kinda defeats the entire point of the vision.
Because most people don't want to do the work of learning and managing crypto directly, a huge industry flourished to service these people, full of its own interests, corruption and various levels of criminality. And well-intentioned crypto people have no way to reign this industry in because the entire point is to operate in a deregulated way.
Ironically, the piece that makes crypto fundamentally unworkable 20 years in is capitalism.
If she is an asset and was close enough to gain physical access to his phone or main computer, that's pretty much the ballgame. CEOs often don't want their devices being on company MDMs, that's for the underlings.
I've been delivery-app-free for several years, with the lone exception being when I'm sick and contagious. Restaurant food with delivery basically costs double where I live, and grocery delivery has always been hit-or-miss on the quality of things like produce.
Freak what you feel but delivery apps are just not worth it for me personally outside of those necessary contexts and I don't mind the inconvenience of picking up my own food.
To be fair, food quality standards in the US have lagged places like Europe for many years. This is certainly not a new problem.
I'm pretty excited to be able to test mobile app gestures directly in Xcode on the Mac, should make for a better developer experience.
The concern with this is that it gives any company/government/etc. latitude to plant paid protestors or bot traffic in order to undermine opposition with greater efficacy in the AI era. Intelligence agencies have understood this tactic for many years.
I've had this exact experience a few times now on Reddit where I see a viral video and people point out that it's AI, and I don't always realize it right away. It's just not worth consuming content anymore that I don't feel confident about the provenance of.
So much of the front page was ragebait before AI, but ragebait that could be AI-generated is a hard nope for me.
But how does a true AI ban actually look in practice? The open weight models are out there, the hardware is out there. Spamming is already illegal but so commonplace that it's pretty laughably enforced at this point. Even really heinous stuff in the dark corners of the web still finds its way into the hands of users, I don't see how AI is any different in this regard.
True, but there are some key differences between this and Uber.
One is that an Uber rider is never put on a list of "can't ever ride on other services again", whereas if you try to sell a house that has unlicensed plumbing or electrical work done, it will show up on inspection and any smart buyer will walk (or run) away. Tons of real estate deals fall through because the seller did shoddy work like this and it will demonstrably reduce the value of your property because it's only worth what people are willing to pay.
This is also true for when you want an actual contractor to come work on your house. If a licensed contractor sees that you're trying to fix unlicensed work, they too will run away because they don't want to inherit the liability. I think the very red-tape nature of contracting work will be one of the things that protects it from this idiocy.
Doing unlicensed plumbing or electrical work is a crime where I live. Not that a law necessarily stops everyone (that problem already exists today), but I genuinely have a hard time seeing how companies get states to relax these kinds of laws because they exist for good reason. It doesn't surprise me to see companies try to make inroads here, but it's an uphill battle I think.
When I was a kid, a landlord in my community decided to "fix" a broken heating unit at one of his properties himself to save money, and wound up killing all of his tenants due to CO poisoning. Those are the kinds of situations that we are risking by enabling DIY contract work.
I remember reading this New Yorker piece[0] when it came out 8 years ago about how the proliferation of electronic health records software in hospitals was driving older doctors towards retirement, and it made me ponder how many people hated using the software I've built professionally over the course of my career.
Change comes to every profession, and it's never universally helpful or productive. I'm very much in the middle of the road on the AI booster/skeptic continuum, but I know it's not going away.
And getting to "enjoy" the work was always just a perk. Where in labor law in any country throughout history guarantees enjoyment of the work? Surprisingly few people throughout history have been able to say they enjoyed their work. It's always been a trade of time for money, everything else is table stakes. I'm finding new ways to find enjoyment both in the job and out of it, and if that time-for-money trade stops being worth it, I'll figure out something else.
0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...
This tracks with recent reporting that AI debt issuance fell 50% month over month in September[0]
> Tech companies raised $23 billion in AI-related debt globally in September, less than half the amount raised in August, according to Morgan Stanley data covering public bonds and private placement transactions.
> The decline marks a continued drop from June, when companies raised a record $113 billion for AI infrastructure including data centers and chips. In the US investment-grade market, where blue-chip tech groups borrowed around $306 billion between January and August, AI-related bond issuance stopped completely last month.
0: https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/tech-compan...
It's been wild to watch these guys absolutely butcher the Meetup app experience. The business fundamentals of that company were always very questionable, but the way BS has taken that app and introduced breaking change after breaking change to that platform does not inspire confidence in their other acquisitions.
I'd support a non-profit dating app in a heartbeat.
There are so many dark patterns in for-profit dating apps, it's the app equivalent of a funhouse mirror.
For one, something like 75-90% of the profiles are dormant/inactive, but they're still shown as active profiles to give current users the illusion that there are lots of options in your area. Second, a successful dating app experience (assuming they're looking for something serious), means the user churns, so the app company is financially incentivized NOT to put you in front of people that you would likely connect with, at least without trying to extract as much money from you at first. Finally, the paid accounts have gotten ridiculously expensive, which drives real users away from the platform. And of course, they don't have to be transparent about any of it.
A non-profit app has much less incentive to (frankly steal) from their users because they're able to offer the service at a lower cost, without the need for the funhouse mirror BS, and could even provide meaningful aggregate community data on how many couples they've connected, etc.
In my fairly wealthy and liberal community, the mayor (a Democrat) approved a Flock contract and refused to hold a public hearing on the issue until it became a nationwide story, at which point the contract was ripped up. The community was told to kick dirt until it became a political liability, and that's the point.
Political leadership doesn't want civil discourse until it becomes a self-preservation concern for them, same with data centers.
I disagree, it's important to discuss because it indicates that neither party is capable or interested in deviating from the current trajectory. Say the Republicans are voted out of power this cycle, who's really confident that the trajectory of all of this is going to meaningfully change in the next decade based on what we've seen in the past without a major shakeup in the political system?
It's the same core group of people controlling the centers of power in both parties for many years now, and it's not realistic to expect meaningful change for as long as they remain in power
Stories like these almost always ask for comment from the subject before publishing. If the initial numbers were wrong and OpenAI had a problem with it, they could've responded to the reporters at that time or at publish time, but they didn't. It's highly unlikely the original sourcing wasn't tied to OpenAI.
> I want a predictable LLM inference subscription, not a gacha game.
The only way we get to predictability is by paying what subscriptions are actually worth, and this entire game hinges on the fast that AI companies are not convinced that most people are willing to pay the 3-5x (or however much it is) multiple on what these accounts actually cost to run.
They would never do this because it would allow customers to see how often and to what degree they're shifting account limits. Token transparency costs extra, full API price to be exact.
Yes, but as Patrick Boyle points out, the banks underwriting this IPO are incentivized to make this deal look as big and sexy as possible. What goes up will eventually come down, though.