I am starting to dislike Altman spam more than Elmo spam.

Regarding the philosophical points, there is some truth to the arguments, but one thing is absolutely certain (you can have zero knowledge of “AI” services to know that), you can’t trust Americans in such matters.

Don’t know why this article is getting downvoted, it’s a solid article that feels relatively balanced.

I say this as someone who doesn’t trust AI conmen (while recognizing the enormous potential of LLMs and ML systems such AI upscaling of older SD/VHS videos), especially American AI conmen.

As a counter arguement (not necessarily in the US context), commoners in say 1100 had it way worse than than commoners in 1900.

By 1900 there were already certain moral standards and expectations, nothing like we have now especially in more developed countries, but in comparison 1900 is much closer to 2025 than to 1100.

There is a certain irony in Intel 7 being a bottleneck for their business considering they’ve been shipping products with Intel 7 components for more than four years.

The 9850X3D seems like a pretty appealing CPU for use in both gaming some amateur creative use cases (video editing and encoding).

AV1 content is rather rare and encoding even 1080p content (from BD) is pretty slow unless you have a 9985WX Threadripper Pro (which costs over $11 K retail where I live).

And AV1 client support (HW decode) is lacking compared to HEVC/x265.

Spam. Your browser shouldn’t be thinking for you.

Don’t know which country you live in but $160 for a 14 TB HDD is a good price. It’s been a while since I lived in North America, but from memory this is a good price for US/Canada.

One general tip for saving space is to get x265/HEVC content, as it tends to be most space efficient on both an absolute and a “quality per GB basis” (some caveats of course, but I digress). That being said you may want to make sure all your clients support x265 (I prefer to simply never have to transcode and have all clients support Xvid/x264/x265 and all major audio formats).

Shutting down the legal entity isn’t that strong of an incentive, I agree.

Having to do 20 years community service as a junior janitor at an infectious disease hospital in rural congo and losing all your money (every last cent) is exactly the type of incentive that would work with American VC types.

Not saying that US society (as it stands today) is capable of reforms, but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t take a sober attitude when evaluating the type of incentives that could work.

I am not a lawyer, so I can’t make any claims about US law.

If, as you claim, pyramid schemes / ponzi / pump and dumps are not legal in the US. , how is it that A16Z leadership wasn’t arrested for investing in Axie Infinity?

A business model like Axie Infinity is mathematically impossible. The same cannot be said of government safety net systems.

Their crypto pyramids schemes and pump and dumps were also technically legal in the US (I am assuming). And yet it is impossible for a pyramid scheme to work, can any US lawyer or judge show how a pyramid is viable? Of course not, because they are scams.

You have “technically legal” schemes in other countries too. If there is a desire to address criminality a way can be found.

If you want to achieve something, coming up with excuses around why it is not possible rarely bring results.

A16Z should be shut down and all their mid to senior level employees should be required to pick between real community service work (de-mining, live-in janitor at a hospice service, custodian at an infectious disease hospital) for 20 years or doing 40 in jail. Full asset seizure in both cases.

The machine translated version of the Fast Technology/mydrivers article does not mention any of this.

Agreed, much of the American-style faux-optimism is based on the ignorance of history.

Push the plebs too far and there is some risk that they will rebel. No LLM or smartphone is going to change that.

One other theory I’ve heard is that the oligarch class are searching for a radically disruptive tech in terms of economic impact (mass market home computers, internet, smartphones), but there is no guarantee that “AI” will be as disruptive or offer the same ROI values.

Touche good sir! ))

The report adds that AMD’s Taiwan investment, under Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs’ (MOEA) A+ Global R&D Innovation Partnership Program, will exceed NT$8.64 billion (USD $270 million), including NT$3.31 billion in government subsidies and NT$5.33 billion from AMD.

The Taiwanese government (is rightly) doing what they can to keep themselves on the leading edge of computing hardware.

Jason Furman, Economist and former Deputy Director of the US National Economic Council, estimated in a New York Times podcast that 92 percent of the economic demand in the first two quarters of this year came from information processing equipment and software.

“Ultimately, what we’re really hoping for is that AI shows up on the supply side of the economy, actually helping us do more with less,” he said. Some of that is happening, he claimed, “but there hasn’t been anything particularly special about productivity growth to date.”

I am assuming that the 92% refers to “net new” economic demand, not total.

This is damning for AI hucksters and conmen. The worse thing is that since many of them are based in the US, not a single one will be prosecuted (how many financial fraud conmen were prosecuted under Obama?)

Seems like a very minor, but useful addition.

They got bought out by Epic (Fortnite or Unreal from way back in the day) and then got sold to some random sketchy American company.

I like Bandcamp, but a product-focused service must be:

1. Not based in the US (preferably no Americans involved unless there is public data that shows they are not into crime).

2. Have a legal and/or technical approach that either makes acquisition by criminal types impossible or irrelevant.