cavemandaveman

Why would they do that? There would be nothing differentiating them and nobody would pay for the subscription.

I'm more annoyed by the lazy, reactionary thinking that leads commenters to parrot "ai slop" and "enshittification" in referring to any AI feature in a product. That's the real slop.

In what world is the economy crashed? Granted, they gave it the old college try with the tariffs and Iran, but the economy is solidly growing regardless.

A "power chord" is a thing, btw, but it's something you play on guitar

Are you sure about the underfunding piece? Education funding is a larger share of GDP and higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than any time in the past. Maybe the funding is just poorly managed.

That's not true. Some of the biggest districts in the US stayed virtual over a year.

Yes, some public health officials had trouble weighing the risks of COVID itself with the risks of implementing their mitigation strategies.

Ars Technica in general has also been catering to their knee-jerk anti-AI audience. I used to find their comments section somewhat interesting but now it's the same old tired, outdated dunks on AI.

The article distinguishes between the 500 permanent jobs at the completed data center from the thousands more jobs for building a dozen more data centers (many of which are construction jobs as you note) that will last into the medium term.

Those aren't construction jobs. They're for the finished data center.

Are you sure? Microsoft hired about 500 full time employees for its first data center in Wisconsin.

https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-hired-375-people-for-moun...

Cost prohibitive?

Microsoft is listing positions on their public job board (I know because I'm nosy and they're building a big data center complex a few miles from me). They look like good jobs for the area. A couple pay over $100K and only require a high school diploma for what looks to be essentially security guard roles.

I mean they're demonstrably not buying 'all' capacity or you wouldn't be able to have a brand new computer from a dozen different manufacturers with a wide range of specs delivered to your doorstep by tomorrow morning. They're buying enough capacity to put pressure on prices but if the game plan is to literally force you to only access compute through the cloud that's just not working or even feasible.

It didn't exist 5,000 years ago

Persia didn't even come into being until 500BC

I don't think you have your definitions straight since collusion does mean conspiring to work together. Your original post pointed towards AI just being cover for a plan to create monopoly power amongst the tech firms. I don't see how you can make that argument with a straight face. Apple, HP, Dell, Asus, etc are just going to stop selling computers?

I take your point that AI is pushing up the price of computers, at least temporarily, but you're leaning way into conspiracy and cynicism in your original post.

This is the crux of a lot of the anti-AI sentiment especially in the gaming market. They feel entitled to access to the latest chips at a subsidized price below what industry is willing to pay. Many of them then take it a step further and claim some conspiracy (like a few commenters here).

I get why they're upset (it's not fun to be crowded out) but it's a fundamentally selfish position.

A "monopoly" grab from a conspiracy spanning all of the major tech firms? You really think that's the most likely explanation? Not just that the firms are competing in AI and all realize they need massive compute?

Prices are up a bit but there are plenty of "free-programmable computers" from a dozen or more manufacturers on the market. That's not going away.

No productivity from AI is a crazy conclusion to make given the impact we already know it's having on software development. Just because you can't see it in the data yet doesn't mean it's not there, which is what the article you cited says.

Remember too that these models only really became useful less than a year ago with Opus 4.6 being an inflection point. It takes a long time for the economy to reorganize itself so it's not surprising we're not immediately seeing the payoff in economic data.

That's precisely the opposite of what Nvidia is trying to do. Nvidia wants open and local to succeed so that their customer base is as large and diverse as possible. Some commenters here can't see that because they're blinded with cynicism.

Yeah the statement you quoted goes too far. My impression is that Warren and people aligned with her are reflexively anti-business and by extension anti-AI but I don't buy that she's on the payroll of any foreign adversary.

Microsoft has done that to some extent with Flight Simulator using older machine learning techniques. Wouldn't call most of the world high fidelity yet but I'm sure they could get there with generative AI models. I'm also sure the anti-AI screeching in the gaming community would be heard for miles.

Would also make a great Zwift competitor (cycling app where you can hook up your stationary bike and race or ride on certain routes).

A 'bubble bursting', if that happens, doesn't make the tech sector go to zero. Apple doesn't suddenly stop making iPhones. It would take a hell of a lot more than that for the US economy to fall to European levels.

Social distancing in an infectious disease pandemic is obvious and people would have done that regardless. My point is that the specific advice of the public health establishment was nonsensical (don't wear masks, actually do wear masks and cloth is fine, don't go to parks or beaches but political protests are fine if we're sympathetic to the cause, wear a mask when you walk to your table but not at your table, natural immunity isn't as good as a vaccine, and on and on). It was ridiculous and a big reason public trust in institutions is at an all time low.

Well then there's this meta-analysis (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-024-01216-7) that suggests that may not be the case. Honestly, you can find a paper to back up whatever you want to claim.

The paper you linked also doesn't take into account economic impacts, which aren't negligible, and lead to deaths of despair, drug abuse, unaffordable housing, etc.. They also admit the school closures were ineffective and unnecessary and we've seen the mental health and educational impacts on kids and now young adults that had those years taken from them.

Keep in mind also that the favorite phrase of the COVID era was "abundance of caution." That's itself a tacit admission that they knew their recommendations went too far and they weren't putting enough weight on the secondary effects.

I'm not sure the public health establishment didn't do more harm than good during COVID, especially with all the politically expedient flip-flopping on masking: First claiming it was unnecessary as a white lie to protect supplies for front-line workers, then promoting cloth masks despite evidence not being able to establish it statistically significantly slows spread, and then insisting on masking children in their formative years who had already been vaccinated or otherwise gained natural protection against COVID.

Remember all the theater around wearing your mask to your restaurant table and then taking it off for your entire meal in an enclosed room with dozens of other people? Or shutting down public parks and beaches but excusing BLM protests because they agreed with their politics?

The Trump admin was cartoonishly inept but the public health experts did plenty to kill their own credibility as well.

Seems unlikely since 4 orders of magnitude more than the ACA website would be $10T. Any source you'd like to cite?

You don't repay in real terms, you repay in nominal terms. That's priced in. The US isn't going to straight up default but it'll pay you back with inflated currency.

Or having another model proofread the prompts and write clearer instructions