Things have come along quickly and are speeding up rather than slowing down.

At least people aren’t parroting that tired old, ‘This exact thing must already exist in the training data’ argument which has been fallacious from the start but is wearing excessively thin since new models use almost exclusively synthetic training data to begin with.

People who haven’t had the opportunity to see it don’t realize that wealth distribution is fractal, and the more money you have, the more obvious this is.

I like to think of it in terms of stack of 300X (I could buy your year in a day’s interest) and work your way up.

$1

$300

$90000 < if you’re reading this post, you are probably around here.

$27000000 < This is the rich person in the post above, notably still in the middle.

$8100000000 < Private jets, billionaires, there are a few thousand of these.

$2.43E12 < Musks, Bezoses, etc.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!

It’s only a problem for people who always do what they’re told.

It is a reductive view, but at least I have a point.

Bad things happening to people is a social problem which should be addressed. You making it personal is a political problem, and the Internet is the enabling technology. The Internet didn’t make you or I into assholes by itself.

Of course.

The US is filled with chavinists who can’t tell the difference between a social issue, a political issue, and an emerging technology.

There is a lot to unpack here, finance is interesting.

Investors spend money to build companies on the expectation that those companies will be worth more money than they spent in the future.

One way they spend that money is on the acquisition of bonds, which are firm guarantees against future debts. Bonds are often part of other financial structures (you’ll see them a lot in a hedge, which is a way to limit liability on an investment in exchange for some upside).

If I’m reading the article correctly, those bonds had a condition where they could be converted to shares at a certain price, so the investment and the hedge were part of the same instrument.

It’s not accurate to say that the money could have been deployed otherwise, one way to think about this is that large banks have very large, often self-issued, credit limits. Companies also have self-issued credit limits, related to the banks.

In this case specifically, some amount of this money is going to come out of the IPO, the 80 billion doesn’t exist in any other way.

tl;dr The 80 billion that ‘vanished’ here wasn’t actually spent on anything, it’s valuation against those bonds. It’s also an exciting headline.

Anyways, I hope this was helpful, these companies are definitely getting a lot of investment (running up their credit cards) in the hopes of a big payout, but this doesn’t have anything to do with private equities current running speculation on data center construction or power consumption, or any of those big problems.

Compare the resources used to the alternatives.

Unfortunately, we will never enjoy the fruits of prosperity, because our system is designed to squeeze first, ask questions later.

Instead of being reduced, human misery will be redirected, and little will change.

Like all fanfic, there is no canon! There are different canons (assembled by the various councils throughout the ages) but no clear and uncontroversial total authority.

If anyone reading this is looking to do some edits to their own head canon, I strongly recommend Jesus, Son of Man by Kahlil Gibrain.

This guy is part of the real problem.

Our little chimp brains equate power over others with success, detached from results.

If someone isn’t hurting, it’s not working, so the infinite leisure created by automation becomes infinite time to discover how to hurt people and torture each other.

If it’s not suffering, it’s not hustle.

What fresh new horrors await when results are even MORE detached from individual power trips.

Processed food is a better analogy.

Running trained LLMs has, more or less, always been profitable. Inference can only run on one GPU efficiently, you know the size of the model, you know how long it takes… etc.

Inference is approximately as expensive and environment destroying as Call of Duty, which don’t get me wrong, is a waste of humanity for sure.

Model training however…

I think the shamful euphemism ‘she rides around town on a broomstick’ is now fully, and permanently, worn out.

Which is why you use an electro-magnet.

You energize it, allow it to snap to the car pulling it forward slightly, then disengage it and use a motor in the arm to reset it to it’s original position.

SIM cards/personal payments are pretty secure. Several generations more so than internal banking systems.

I was just reading a report on this and tracking down a credit card thief when they can only spend that money when it pings their location is… pretty decent.

The mistake is thinking that security comes from some kind of techno wizardry instead of the ability to unceremoniously kill the thief the very second the value of what they’ve stolen exceeds the cost of killing them.

Last one I remember was related to the keychain update, you had to re-acknowledge all of the maintainers in the arch-keyring.

It was a lot of work to visit them all and get them to recite their key signatures while I held their hand to make sure they were really there. The blood tests took a while to come back and affirm their identities, but it was worth it for the piece of mind.

Do roads next.

If they could throw just a little harder and reach my mouth while I lie on the couch, this would be fine.

Eh, when they’re updating the teaching materials for art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries then. Whatever your flavor is.

It took less time than you think for exactly the reason you might guess. I guess I just see a different ‘brush’.

I’m glad you disagree. I’m fortunately old enough to remember being told that digital art wasn’t real art, and do be alive today where nobody cares, oil painting is cool, brushing up your oil painting in GIMP is also cool, using GIMP alone, still cool.

Just take your same argument and fast forward 30 years and you’ll get ahead.

There are undiscovered art forms and new/reset expectations just around the corner. The first real artist (with real artistic genius) to adopt the tools is going to be in every MOMA around the world.