Even if you can find someone to write you a weird, bespoke (and therefore expensive) derivative to hedge against the Trump DoT revoking thousands of CDLs, you've still only succeeded in moving all these calculations and risks to that counterparty. Somebody somewhere still has to have the headache of pricing this risk.
I think we've topped out on how good GPUs realistically need to be. The games industry is embroiled in layoffs. AAA games as we knew them are ending because they're just not compatible with our current macroeconomic situation. My current GPU is an RX590 (released in 2018, I bought it new in 2019) and I have no plans to upgrade any time soon.
Realistically, I think that if AMD and NVIDIA both abandon the gaming market entirely (unlikely, IMO) then Intel or some Chinese no-name brand will pick up the slack. Video cards for gaming don't need to be bleeding edge any more. 99.999% of experiences gamedevs want to create don't require that horsepower, and consumers can't afford it anyway (at least not when effectively bidding for fab capacity against billionaires who are convinced they can be immortal Gods if they win the auction). Most likely, no-name chips from non-frontier fabs (or by Chinese fabs trying to claw their way upmarket) will be badge-engineered as AMD/Nvidia/Intel.
Alternatively, we have WW3 and either advanced, PC-gaming civilization ends completely, or we at least have to sacrifice consumer goods like video cards for the duration.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? In case you aren't, the answer is roads, bridges, public transportation, electrified rail, grid modernization, utility-scale storage and solar. We need these things desperately, and instead we're going to get sheds full of video cards from here to the horizon.
If you want to spend your money and time building bridges for electrified rail, go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. Other people clearly feel they have enough of that and would rather invest in datacenters. Who are you to say they're wrong?
This kind of absolutist individualist argument just rings more and more hollow as we see the very real consequences of that philosophy for our society.
Who am I to say they're wrong? A human being, that's who. A human being who lives in a modern society that does not have to prioritize the whims of the wealthy few over the needs of the many. We can choose to set stringent requirements on people who have that much money, and therefore power, and that is not evil. Indeed, it is the furthest thing from it.
And what happens when those people don't want to have your requirements "set" on them? Do you force those peaceful people to do your bidding with violence? Would that not make you the evil ones?
Look at the reply from the guy I was questioning. It took just two or three mild questions for him to go full Hitler, talking about how his comrades will have to "discipline" a whole generation of "oligarchs" (i.e. anyone who makes things he doesn't personally prioritize).
Collectivist thinking always leads to violence, and eventually societal failure.
There's nothing violent about using elections to make the decision to tax rich people so that we can spend (formerly) their money building roads and bridges. The idea that this is the road to Hitlerism is absurd, and thankfully this rhetorical stance no longer rings the slightest bit true to anyone within earshot of the working class.
Also, as I'm sure you're aware, I was using "discipline" as a term of art to mean "withhold our labor until their profits suffer and they are willing to negotiate". This was the strategy employed the last time we seriously dealt with concentrated capital getting high on its own supply. It is also not a form of violence. What's the alternative? Capital using force to require us to work against our will? Would you call that slavery? Or just serfdom? Which do you advocate?
> There's nothing violent about using elections to make the decision to tax rich people so that we can spend (formerly) their money building roads and bridges
The results of votes are enforced on the losers using the police, who will do so violently if required.
You mentioned the Fordist truce. The unions the auto industry dealt with weren't just a bunch of people refusing to work. They were frequently violent, and they also used stealing other people's property as a standard tactic to prevent anyone else from working also. Those were violent times.
> The results of votes are enforced on the losers using the police, who will do so violently if required.
The whims of the dictator are also enforced on the public using police.
All human rules, laws, customs, and edicts are enforced, ultimately, with violence of one sort or another. There is no way to avoid the threat of violence being the bedrock of the power of the state, and in the absence of formal states the strong would use violence to enforce their desires until they became states.
So if you're an anti-statist, just say so. (So we can all dismiss everything you have to say as coming from a place of absolute ignorance of what's needed to live and operate in the real world. If we were to abolish all states tomorrow, and erase the very memory of their existence from every human alive, by Sunday new ones would have arisen to replace them, one way or another, because they are how humans organize themselves.)
This thread started with a false dilemma: do we spend money on datacenters or "real infrastructure". It's only a dilemma if you assume governments should decide the answer, as ElevenLathe did.
Otherwise there's no need to choose between dictatorship or majority rule via democracy: everyone can spend money on the infrastructure they feel is more important, and there doesn't need to be any losers. Which is mostly how we try to do things in reality.
We can talk about how violent taxing the rich is once we have the first instance ever in history of the police locking up a rich guy for refusing to pay their taxes. Even then, sure, I'm fine with that level of violence. We would live in a utopia if that were the worst kind of state violence we had to deal with.
Go ahead and twist my normal, non-radical politics into whatever shape you want. You're the wing nut, not me. Normal people want normal stuff out of politics: functioning infrastructure, upward mobility, a future. Only the most warped, unreachable paint huffers are willing to throw away all possibility of a normal country for the "freedom" of a few dozen rapacious sociopaths. This means that we will ultimately win. Unfortunately normal people have been asleep at the switch for at least a generation, so you're probably going to be able to drag us through several hellish decades, maybe centuries, until we can right the ship.
I'm sure I'll see you in the camps, so at least we'll have that in common. Have a nice day.
Falsifying your tax return statements is not the same as a simple refusal to pay. By doing that, you are indicating that you agree to the legitimacy of the taxes in general, but would prefer to lie about whether you should personally pay them or not. These people were also all given their day in court, and convicted of actual crimes in fair trials where they had adequate representation. If this is your idea of "violence", then I don't know what to say.
He was "was sentenced to 38 years in prison". That's why most tax evaders try falsification rather than refusal.
> At the sentencing hearing in Denver District Court, Doucette fidgeted in his spinnable chair, while chained up in a green jumpsuit. He sat alone because he has insisted on representing himself in this case. Before the hearing, the judge asked him if it was OK to proceed and he said, “I do not consent and never have.”
Note the photo of him wearing handcuffs, surrounded by police.
All law is implemented through using violence or the threat of using it. You can't resolve that conundrum by claiming that holding a vote to tax rich people is somehow apart from using violence. It's just an abstraction over it.
These are basic facts, but a lot of people struggle to understand them because our society likes to pretend that there's nothing underneath the abstraction - that courts and rules is all there is. It helps them believe that if they vote to take other people's stuff, it's white and pure, that nobody is getting hurt. It's a "might makes right" argument pushed at every level of society, because it enables what you're doing here: claiming that "we" should be able to choose what is done with the fruits of other people's labour.
I say they're wrong, and I do so in my capacity as a citizen. These large pools of capital should not be allowed to follow the whims of a handful of unelected oligarchs who have clearly lost the plot. In a functioning society, this scale of decision would not be left to the whims of international finance capital, but decided via democratic means. It's unfortunate that the last scraps of the Fordist labor truce are unraveling, because it means that I and my comrades are going to have to discipline this generation of oligarchs just like our grandparents did the last really nasty one.
I would say it should belong to voters (or "society", or "the people", or whatever formula you want to use to express it), in a functioning society. Unfortunately, we're not in a functioning society, and it doesn't. On the other hand, property is socially constructed, so this political economy can be changed, though how exactly is left as an exercise to the reader -- I don't a foolproof answer.
I have savings, sure. I need them, because in the current system the alternative is to starve in the street if anything at all goes wrong with my employment, my health, etc. Many others are not so lucky. If you mean this to be a "gotcha" because I wouldn't want my savings "confiscated" to build roads and bridges, then save it. There is a difference between 1) taxing billionaires so that they're merely hundreds of times richer than the average citizen, and 2) stealing my retirement savings and emergency fund without providing any equivalent public safety net.
These are all true but, to phrase it in SV-speak: having good, sincere management does not scale. We would all be better off with better managers, but if we are really serious about treating workers with respect at scale, unions are the only proven solution.
I agree. I've worked in places that discourage "cute" names and the result is often things like having to decide between using CoreMainHttp and MainHttpCore. Or worse, two things with exactly the same name, but two different APIs, with projects sometimes taking both as a dependency at the same time. Or even obsolete parts of the org chart encoded into dependency names, like "DataOrgUtils" when the "Data Org" stopped existing several reorgs ago, when our current VP was an intern and nobody else even worked here.
Without some central control of names though, even "cute" ones tend to converge on the same handful eventually: Phoenix (and other classical allusions like Plato's Cave, etc.), Keymaster/MCP (and other 80s childrens' movie references), Simpsons characters, Star {Trek,Wars} references. These are all attractors for the kind of people that tend to be in IT/SWE even if the actual namespace (all possible ASCII-expressable words) is much larger.
I'm far far far far far far from a mathematician or even an amateur ML/AI practitioner, but to a layman the magic of LLMs (and now, multimodal models) seems clearly to be in the data. IOW the robot knows stuff, including how to "use" language at all, because it has read lots of stuff that humans have written down over the past several thousand years. IOW, as has often been given as advice to would-be big-thinkers, reading and writing is thinking. One can simplify (admittedly, possibly to the point of meaninglessness) to say that the language is really doing the thinking, humans were a meat-based substrate for it, and now we have a new kind of substrate for it in the form of datacenters the size of Connecticut filled with video cards.
So...given that dumb guy (or, more charitably to myself, humanities guy who happens to work in tech) understanding of these phenomena, my ears perk up when they say they've trained a model on random numbers, but still get it to do something semi-useful. Is this as big a deal as it seems? Have we now worked out a way to make the gigawatts' worth of video cards "smart" without human language?
I've been an ansi-term user for years (at least on unices, including Cygwin -- if I am forced to use vanilla w32 emacs without a *nix underneath, I will use eshell since I can do more in elisp-land without relying on the shitshow of Windows CLI utils). What are the benefits of eat vs ansi-term, in your opinion?
This is only a harm if you are ambitious and career-oriented. I'm remote and know it won't be conducive to promotion, but I also get to:
1) live in the low CoL area that I grew up in,
2) be near family and friends (and therefore free, high-quality childcare),
3) avoid a hellish commute in one of the sprawl-y hellscapes that grow up around tech hub cities,
4) live in a paid-off house instead of 50%+ of my income going directly to rent or a mortgage, and
5) have a massive nest egg due to all the money I'm saving.
Could I get faster promotions by going back to the office? Maybe, though I see the careers of my at-the-office colleagues around me stagnating just about as much as mine. But...I don't want to be management. I don't even necessarily care for promotion as an IC unless that's the only way to tread water with inflation.
The only major downside I think about is that it will obviously be harder to get a remote position if I lose the one I have, but we're financially prepared for that. With a paid-off house in a single-car neighborhood, we can make ends meet with a normal job stocking groceries or something. At the worst case, I have connections to get a job at the factory a town over, though that would mean getting a second car.
In other words: I, as a worker, do not care about maximizing the value of my human capital stock. I am not cattle. I am not a slave. I have preferences that are unrelated to my ability to receive praise and promotions from my boss. In short, I deserve respect from my employer, whether they are currently being forced to give it or not.
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