domain:gurwinder.substack.com
quiet_NaN
3m ago
Chatgpt has millions of daily users.
The analogy would be an online shoe seller who spends investor capital to sell shoes at half to themselves, in the hope of cornering the market. Presumably, they would have an impressive revenue (if only because every shoe store starts buying from them).
Per WP, OpenAI has a revenue of 3.7G$ per year, and net losses of 5G$ per year, but their plan is to start burning through money much faster than that, for 2029 their goal is 115G$.
In my mind, this level of investment can only be worth it if they reach a game-changer threshold which far dwarfs anything AI has done so far. If their 2029 investment only yields net profits of 10G$/a, that will be their doom, because then it takes them them a decade just to recoup costs. And they will not have a decade before other models inevitably catch up to them (unless they burn through even more money).
Either they built an LLM which can do anything which an IQ 160 human can do, or they go bust.
HereAndGone
7m ago
Not everyone who tells rape jokes is into rape culture, obviously, some people just like dark humor, but they can certainly be used to transport the message "rape is not a big deal".
While I think those jokes are tasteless and crude, I am now reminded back when me and my peers were twelve to fourteen year old girls telling dead baby jokes. Good grief, où sont les neiges d'antan! Did dead baby jokes back in 1978 lead to the liberalisation of abortion in the Ireland of 2018? After all, they must have been used to transport the message "dead babies are not a big deal".
HereAndGone
15m ago
From the accusations and counter-accusations flying around, it seems to be real but also seems to be an internal power struggle, where A leaked to Politico in order to get B (and possibly C and D and E) in trouble, trigger a purge, then A gets the good-boy pat on the head and slides another rung or two up the greasy pole in the party structure.
Gotta love internal back-stabbing for the sake of advancing a mediocre career 🙄
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
39m ago
how do you justify this morally?
Clearly
I'll be voting for my own team
is a moral position.
It may not be one you agree with, but it's no less a (n a) moral position than the "post-liberal racial spoils hellscape."
You seem to be begging the question that there is an objectively correct morality and deviating from the progressive racism violates that, without actually filling in the gaps of why that is objectively correct and the losers should enjoy being in the hands of an angry god sacrificing their children for the wellbeing of the ungrateful.
functor
41m ago
Dotcom bubble was a bubble because there were no users. The reasoning was along the lines of 20% of all shoe sales in 2010 will be online. Company x has started to sell shoes online so in 10 years they will make billions. They had no sales and no where close to amazon's supply chain.
Chatgpt has millions of daily users. This is more akin to the boom of companies created when the world got smart phones. Those companies made money.
functor
44m ago
We are going to win a trade war with China! We are going to bring the factories home!
A few companies add a few GW of base load demand and people start freaking out. The failure to build electricity has got to be one of the largest self owns ever.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
45m ago
bucketloads
$60M over two decades, according to this journalist. Care to guess how much Elon contributed last year?
I will also note that none of those donors were awarded an entire government department and a broad mandate to purge the others.
Look, I’m not impressed by the article either, but pearl-clutching and correctness aren’t mutually exclusive.
functor
49m ago
Unemployment is low and humans have been replaced by machines for 250 years. If anything we would stagnate if we were unable to boost productivity.
There are other productivity improvements from AI, such customer service outside of office hours speeding up bureaucratic processes, rapid prototyping and making it easier to start companies and more. This should improve the overall economy.
BahRamYou
55m ago
But like... is that actually a good thing? Obviously from the point of view of a corporation, being able to reduce the number of employees they need is great. Huge cost savings, even if it's just 1%. And a lot of them could potentially cut a lot more, like the ones who rely on big call centers.
But for the global economy, what happens? I know the traditional answer is that those workers then go find something other job and our overall productivity increases. But it's far from clear to me what a million laid-off call center employees are supposed to do instead. Work in the factories? Those were closed/offshored decades ago. Learn to code? Silicon valley isn't exactly yearning to hire one million junior programmers with no experience these days. In fact, they're also hoping to lay off programmers and make it up with AI instead.
It seems like a lot of areas will jsut end up with significantly higher unemployment from this.
Corvos
1hr ago
Why do my actors constantly and rapidly accelerate in unpredictable directions?
This is usually because they were spawned partly in an object / terrain, right? The physics engine prevents clipping and collisions by producing a force to push the offending objects apart, but if the objects start off intersecting this force can be huge and sends it off into space. Most obvious when you spawn an object intersecting terrain, b/c terrain doesn't move and objects go flying.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Fairly well, actually. Stole some minutes here and there and managed to discover that one of my greatest sources of consternation - my actors spawning in at (0,0,0) instead of wherever I nominally put them - was because immediately after spawning them, I programmatically assigned a new rootcomponents to them. Now, I expected the rootcomponents to assume the position of the actor, given the methods and parameters with which I attached them...but it's the other way around. So it goes.
Now my remaining issues revolve around the physics.
- Why do some of my actors collide with the terrain, while others fall through?
- Why do my actors constantly and rapidly accelerate in unpredictable directions?
And when I get a handle on that, I'm on to the somewhat more freeform
- What's the best way to attach to physically simulated actors together, given my use cases?
BahRamYou
1hr ago
But not if we launch them into orbit ! (I can no longer tell if this is crazy bubble talk or the next logical step after starlink)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
This is a good point. Valuation voodoo can actually lead to meaningful damage when a bubble pops because it isn't an actual representation of cash flow.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
Despite the data center build out in Virginia, electricity prices there increased at half the national average, as this hilariously written axios piece reports.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
(and I've worked marketing roles, the sort of insane digital marketing KPI hacking that goes on would make an Engineer vomit).
Ahaha dude thank you for saying this. I'm in my first digital marketing role now and WOW, it's so bad. People just acting as if churning out quantity of words is useful in any way whatsoever. With AI it has become even worse.
I can see why marketing has such a bad reputation.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Still refactoring. The content import seems to be working and is a lot cleaner now than it used to be. If all goes well it will even be able to serve all other content sources (Substack, Youtube, etc.) without further modification. I'm currently rewriting the frontend to work with the new data structure, and with any luck I won't be needing separate components for each source either.
I also took a small detour. The database grew a bit over the months and I started noticing the app isn't as fast as it used to be. Turned out that some things I thought I'm handling in bulk ended up being translated into individual queries, some indexes I could swear I set up weren't actually there, and I somehow slept through recursive queries, which I've been dreaming of having for a while, actually becoming available nearly a decade ago. Oh well.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
Most people are racist, but very few Americans publicly gloss their racism as racism.
I'm sad Avenue Q doesn't seem to have any productions going around anymore. There is a high school adaptation, but I feel like that wouldn't be quite the same.
UnopenedEnvilope
2hr ago
It goes hand in hand with discipline and frugality, but a level of income such that relatively-unexpected expenses are not a great source of stress will significantly improve your quality of life.
Do you have enough in an HSA to cover your health and dental insurance deductibles? Do you have enough in savings to replace your washer and dryer if they conk out? Specifics will vary for different people, but the general idea stands.
Quantumfreakonomics
2hr ago
The current buildout is about to run into the wall that is the electrical grid. AI will become unpopular overnight as soon as people realize that the brand new data center down the road is causing their electric bill to go up.
Goodguy
2hr ago
Are the actual transcripts available somewhere, or do we only have Politico's excerpts and commentary?
MollieTheMare
3hr ago
Good luck.
If you don't already own a pair, I highly recommend a good set of cycling bib-shorts at those kinds of distances. Also possibly chamois cream.
Don't underestimate fueling. If you "hit the wall" at hour four of a five hour marathon you only have to survive one more hour. If you "bonk" on hour five of a seven hour century you have to survive for twice as long, and also be lucid enough not to get run over. People have been talking about 60+/-30 g/hour of carbs for such long efforts. The upper end is quite a disgusting amount of sugar to be eating if you are not used to it, so it does require training as well.
tsiivola
3hr ago
If you do not want to expand the overton window in a certain direction, you typically would not make jokes in that direction.
So X making jokes about gas chambers does not mean that X is a Nazi who has read Mein Kampf five times. But it indicates that X regards updating his group's beliefs towards him being a Nazi at least neutrally.
At the 2016 White House Correspondents' Dinner president Barack Obama made the following remark:
"Eight years ago, I was a young man, full of idealism and vigor, and look at me now. I am gray and grizzled, just counting down the days 'til my death panel."
Do you think Obama was trying to expand the overton window to make more acceptable the idea that a panel of doctors would decide on the euthanization of non-productive or otherwise undesirable individuals? Do you think Obama's remark indicates that he and his group regard the idea of these "death panels" at least neutrally?
Or do you think that Obama was actually mocking his opponents and critics? That he considered the criticism so ridiculous in itself, that he did not even bother constructing a joke based on it, he just repeated the criticism verbatim while being fully confident that laughter would ensue?
Now, if it is the case that Obama was reminding everyone how ridiculous his opponents were just by repeating their words, then it could be the case that the people being ridiculed were fully aware that this is what was happening, and that there is no good way to defend against this kind of ridicule. And in this case someone who is being ridiculed could resort to lying, saying maybe something like "they told us they are not setting up these death panels, but here is Obama himself casually talking about them in an approving way!", and hoping that at least some people will believe the lie.
That really isn’t true. Plenty of dotcom companies like Yahoo had huge numbers of users; Yahoo had 400 million registered users at the peak in 2000 with 60 million monthly users (double the previous year’s figure). Many other dotcom companies had large user numbers too.
And if you look at the non-dotcom companies that still saw huge stock price crashes after the bust, many were businesses with big revenue, like Microsoft ($23bn in revenue in 2000, down 70%+ during the crash, didn’t recover until 2016) and Intel ($34bn in revenue in 2000, down 80%+ during the crash, didn’t recover until 2020).
The bizarre myth that dotcom was all money into worthless internet businesses with 10 users and inflated traffic figures on zero revenue is peddled by exactly the same investors trying to claim that “this bubble is different”.
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