treis

I didn't say it wasn't debt. I said it was 20 years worth of spend on something they need regardless of what happens with AI.

AI has made my job a lot easier and it feels like the fleeting interlude where expectations have not yet risen to match.

Actually using AI I think is a net positive. It frees up the drudgery and let's me think high level. I can try different ideas and throw out ones that don't work without expending much effort.

There's some loss with not being as hands on. But I feel like my impact is higher so I like the trade.

This is quite misleading. It includes numbers for commitments for leases of data centers and payments for power that are decades into the future.

Even if AI completely busts and all of these servers are worthless that doesn't mean the data centers are. There's still a need for data centers to host non-AI servers. The hyperscalers will close/sell other data centers and serve from places where they have long term commitments at.

3.2 trillion sounds like a lot until you spread it over 20 years and half a dozen trillion+ dollar companies. It's hard to tell how much a bag they're holding but it's almost certainly negligible compared to revenue and market cap. The only real systemic risk is the risk of for some reason not needing any data centers.

Anthropic probably is profitable. They were very close and growing rapidly.

The demand and profit margins for inference at the moment means that all these companies will make money off the physical investment.

It's a tale of two AIs for Google. Cloud doubled revenue and tripled profit, probably based off serving models. So good for Cloud.

Search increased revenue and profit which is good. Means that LLMs are not yet stealing revenue. But also bad because the massive spend on infrastructure doesn't look like it's going to come back as increased revenue.

Right it works if it's designed for it. But hooking up a 5V source to a stove element isn't going to cause much heat

This seems like an odd thing to do / a hell of a lot of people are going to learn Dysprosium is an element

Right it works if it's designed for it. But hooking up a 5V source to a stove element isn't going to cause much heat.

"just work" depends on the DC voltage, right? A heater works just fine on 120V DC but less well on 48 and probably pointless on 5.

Think they're going to be like Oracle. Databases were a valuable thing when they were new but became free with postgres. Like Oracle Anthropic et al will move up the value chain.

Should be obvious why any correspondence related to something over an 8 year span is expensive. To fulfill that you have to read or at least glance at every single email.

You have to request specific keyword searches and go from there.

At least in Atlanta it seems like a lot of production bounced to even cheaper locales as tax subsidies became a bit less generous. We're at like half our 2022 peak dollar wise.

I paid $48 for $0.97 worth of gas last month. About $40 to the public gas company for the hookup, $5.95 in a service fee to the private supplier and the balance tax.

That was what struck me about the article. No doubt withdrawal is real but baseline for the author seems to be symptomatic anxiety. The focus on withdrawal as the single overwhelming cause is typical of the people I know with anxiety. They seem to be always searching for the one magic trick that will make them better. Which of course never does.

Fwiw my experience at city council meeting was different. The majority of public comment was by residents and often seemingly insane ones.

There was a point not that long ago when all the rulers of Europe were cousins. Maybe it's easier now but power has always been very concentrated. Think the impact the internet has is that we all know about it now.

At some point why does anyone care? If something "amazing" was delivered what's the difference if it was exactly as promised.

I don't know how much stock should be put in these numbers. Here in Atlanta there was widespread cheating organized by teachers and principals to game the results.

With NCLB test scores became very important. With Every Child Succeeds they became less so. The difference could simply be how much incentive is there to game the scores.

Yes, but 7-8 companies have shown they can build that goose. LLMs are going to end up like databases or operating systems. It's very hard to compete with free.

The value is the user data that collects overtime and using that to become sticky for customers

Think of it more in terms of market cap. Google is worth 4.3 trillion dollars. They're spending on AI to protect that and others are spending on AI in the hopes of becoming that. The golden goose is serving ads and the fight is over who gets to do that.

Youth sports are pants on your head crazy these days. Like most things you don't have to go nuts but so many families do.

Eh, I don't think today is really all that different from the last 100 years. We as software engineers may feel different as it's (maybe) our turn in the barrel.

Most and maybe close to all Drs get paid or a bonus on RVUs (relative value units). A system that seems indistinguishable from a salesman's commission to me.

You got a link for the clothes?

Maybe I'm just cynical but this seems suspiciously like snake oil. Seems impossible to exclude the placebo effect and the improvements are self reported (more or less).

A lot of SAAS is easy to duplicate but not a lot of it is. The barrier is market/mind share. Something like Slack is easy enough to duplicate that many companies did. But everyone still uses Slack because that's what everyone is familiar with.

Yes! When ever I read comments like this it always makes me think the poster has led a much more charmed life than I have. Every institution we have that makes major decisions is an impenetrable mass of bureaucracy that takes forever. Give me the quick automated decision every time

Only in the most literal sense. In a far more accurate sense what we are talking about is land where people want to live and that does grow, more or less, with population growth. It's only a handful of cities with geography that makes desirable land fixed.

Yes, almost like it's severely curtailed by country limits.

Okay, but in other cases it's not like that. They bring spouses, siblings, and parents who can turn bring their own spouses, siblings, and parents. That is severely curtailed these days by country restrictions so I agree that it's not 14 but it's higher than 1.