- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
- cross-posted to:
- usa@midwest.social
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I’ll be honest, I’m just hoping this AI shit calms down. Every 5-6 new papers published in the Journal of Computer Science is some AI slop. Like we get it, it’s fun filling a big ass matrix with weights which then inadvertently solve a problem you have. Could I please have some novel research that probably won’t go anywhere anytime soon but is kind of fun to think about and tinker with?
AI is the new blockchain
And Electrum still crashes under FreeBSD when trying to send BTC, and I don’t see many more FOSS thin wallets for BTC, despite it being the cryptocurrency. And using 15GB for a wallet is out of question.
If it works the same way with “AI”, we might eventually see this wave of bullshit recede.
we might eventually see this wave of bullshit recede.
Can’t wait
You can always get into 3d printing.
it’s a shame the US will likely not see another lina khan in the foreseeable future.
We didn’t deserve her, but I am honored and grateful to have had her working for my interests. What she was or wasn’t able to accomplish wasn’t for lack of trying.
Man, the hysterical, unhinged US market just has no chill.
Someone came up with a better chatbot-- “OMG, superintelligence is here and is inevitable, all hail our robot overlords and their broligarch creators!”
Somebody outside the US had an idea to train a chatbot for cheaper-- “OMG, US tech is doomed, they have no recourse against this and all the hardware is now worthless!”
Maybe if the markets weren’t constantly freaking the hell out about any semblance of technological innovation in search for the next Google or Apple they woldn’t have to deflate like a balloon each time reality sets in.
Their unhinged need for growth/metastasis to to feed their ego scores is unquenchable and ending the world.
It’s tragic we won’t physically stop them via revolution. We are cowards that mistake this quiet slaughter for peace. The planet will have to do it for us, and take us and a lot of innocent surface life with them.
You… may not have been following the news for the past couple of years.
Doesn’t quite look like “quiet death mistaken for peace” out there, and it seems like the world destroying is very much being done with guns, as per usual.
Endless capitalist growth and wealth accumulation is still bad, though, don’t get me wrong, and oligarchy is, as always, tied to all the rest of it. That’s just a bit of a reductionist take.
The market’s chronic convulsive disorder is, imo, an inefficient pricing problem. Price discovery doesn’t really exist, most of the trading volume is “off-exchange” and market makers have severe unchecked moral hazards in how they do business.
The underlying value of publicly traded companies simply does not change as fast as this. Regardless of what you might say about the speed at which the market reacts to new information. In a world where the media openly and solely serves the interests of billionaires and a small outfit like Wall Street On Parade is routinely censored on socials, there’s no reason to believe anything you’re ever told by the news about any moves in the market.
I like this observation, because the kind of information imbalance normal for today wasn’t for late XIX and early XX centuries, where our common ideas of economics originate, Marxist and Austrian and what not.
It’s not that the weak could say more about the strong in the press, it’s the speed with which information traveled, and also that the strong had more trouble coordinating their actions.
Why did I type this bullshit anyway, as if it changes something.
Big mood.
Do people still say big mood?
I’m not a native speaker and autistic in addition to that, but Google says yes.
Stock investing isn’t about underlying value. The company itself is almost irrelevant. Stock investing is about predicting stock investor sentiment.
That’s not a traditional view of investing or the manner in which securities are built to be valued, but it is admittedly the modal paradigm to which we are subject.
Which is why NFTs work. They’re refreshingly honest: They represent nothing of any kind of value, yet are valued. Something something fetishism.
A part of me loved the idea of decentralized finance (punk as fuck if it hurts centralized finance) and was rooting for NFTs if they were going to be used to restore ownership rights for digital property but… That’s not what happened. It’s all grift.
There’s something to be said that bitcoin and other crypto like it have no intrinsic value but can represent value we give and be used as a decentralized form of currency not controlled by one entity. It’s not how it’s used, but there’s an argument for it.
NFTs were a shitty cash grab because showing you have the token that you “own” a thing, regardless of what it is, only matters if there is some kind of enforcement. It had nothing to do with rights for property and anyone could copy your crappy generated image as many times as they wanted. You can’t do that with bitcoin.
Fancy word foot work for “speculation”
Fancy way of saying “gambling”
100% right
Certainly. But very few people really do value investing anymore. Even professionals.
agreed, we are making the same point. Very little in the world of investment seems to be based on actual value anymore
The “underlying value” isn’t much of a concern if you’re someone seeking funding or a small investor. It’s also not much of a concern if the “unchecked moral hazards” are still funneling money towards a small group of capitalists. Or if the political ramifications of the reporting are impactful in other areas.
It’s not a media conspiracy if all the real world consequences are based on the same consensual reality. “It’s all fake reporting anyway” is not a valid response here, even without disputing the base assumptions, which I probably would.
The social contract struck between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley—which the American people became an involuntary party to—was straightforward: We will let a handful of tech bros become unfathomably wealthy and in exchange they will build a tech industry that keeps America globally dominant. Instead, the tech bros broke the bargain. They took the money, but instead of continuing to innovate and compete, built monopolies to keep out competition—even getting the help of the U.S. national security state to block Chinese access to our tech. But they couldn’t keep out of the competition forever. Lina Khan was right. And now here we are.
Regardless how this plays out that was a very satisfying article to read and the quoted section above is a big part of that.
also I haven’t made any investment of my time or money into A.I. so my personal smug-o-meter needle is buried high-side right now.
Keeping your money out of the AI grift was a good idea but doesn’t deep seek imply that powerful AI is coming even faster and cheaper than what was already being promised?
Yeah, they seem to have sped up the process. But something else to keep in mind is that we don’t know what the saturation point is with current AI technology. It’s most likely far less that what has been hyped, but regardless, if our governments had any sense, they’d be getting a sensible regulatory framework in place right now rather than being overtaken by events as they usually are.
If their claims are true, yeah. That’s how I read the implications.
Dropsite is great and Ryan Grim is a treasure.
I am feeling dangerously smug
Wow, we could have been talking about Jacquard mills and running essentially the same narrative.
they will build a tech industry that keeps America globally dominant.
I don’t buy it.
At least this Altmann guy has already made it clear that he personally wants to be the ruler of the world, and he builds the tools to bring him there.
Im glad DeepSeek open sourced their model. Even if the goal was to destabilize US companies, I think it’s a blessing the tools can go to anyone with a “powerful enough” computer.
And to be really honest, I don’t like what the tech companies have done with AI in such a short amount of time. I’m glad they are getting the piss beaten out of them. All these AI companies will do whatever it takes to destroy human labor pools so they can absorb a fraction of our wages.
The sad part is, they are after a fraction of a wage that is already undervalued. We are all struggling because of corporate greed anyway.
Im glad DeepSeek open sourced their model. Even if the goal was to destabilize US companies,
back in my day this was called a “free market”, now we have start ups from china doing it to the US private capital.
Even someone as far back as Adam Smith knew that businesses hate competition and will do anything they can to avoid it. The broligarchy was speed-running the construction of an oligopoly and lobbying the government to erect barriers to entry so they could take their sweet time milking us dry. Now I’m not sure about what the real backstory of DeepSeek might be, but it is still satisfying to see Altman get his ass handed to him.
Removed by mod
And if China increasingly becomes the place to go work if you’re an ambitious researcher or developer, it’s not hard to see where that leads.
Is that a thing? I know China’s research sector is large and growing, but I never heard of it attracting foreigners.
“The accusations/obsessions over DeepSeek using H100 sound like a rich kids team got outplayed by a poor kids team, who weren’t even allowed shoes,” tweeted Jen Zhu, an AI investor, “and now the rich kids are demanding an investigation into whether shoes were used instead of training harder to improve themselves.”
This is amazing.
Is that a thing? I know China’s research sector is large and growing, but I never heard of it attracting foreigners.
They offer very competitive salaries, if I knew Chinese and was 10-15 years younger I would have considered it.
Is that a thing?
Yes. It’s not common for Americans to come to China, but many in other parts of the world do. Currently living in Russia, I personally know a few folks, primarily from IT sector, moving there for new opportunities.
It is very much not a thing. At least not for American tech workers.
The US is 4% of the world’s population.
In other news, today’s leopards are better at eating your face than ever before!
Fuck the big tech companies and all, but I don’t buy the argument that there is no competition in the US. If you believe that, you’re not paying attention to the space. There are a fuckload of weird models being developed in the US. Some by big players, and some by smaller companies.
IMHO, this is the same thing that happens with every new big advancement. PCs, internet, mobile, etc. People invest a shit load of money in the early players, then a ton of those early investments don’t pan out.
And often times, the people that really stand out are the smaller disrupters or the companies that come in a little later.
It sometimes happens like that. And sometimes a big player will emerge early in the proceedings and stay on top for an extended period: General Motors, Boeing, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Google. Sometimes there’s even a bit of innovation before they settle into stealing all the sunlight from the smaller trees.
Exactly, the AI scene is more competitive than any other tech sector ever has been in the entire history of tech.
The “article” is kinda low-effort bait and shouldn’t even be here.
New soyjack unlocked?
Those poor little hothouse flowers.
Protectionism [and Galapagosization] killed the Japanese smartphone industry.
Capitalism can’t innovate.
*Late stage capitalism can’t innovate. The industrial revolution and internet revolution, among others, were fueled by Western capitalists. Adopting capitalism early on is about 75% of the reason the West is at the top of the modern world order.
That’s late stage capitalism, which only really started in the 80s. Early to middle capitalism is a mix of both panels. I’ll just link my other comment here.
Adopting
capitalismcolonialism early on is about 75% of the reason the West is at the top of the modern world orderHonestly, not really. Colonialism made Western Europe wealthier for the time period, but it was investment in science and technology that gave the West the industrial and technological advantage that sets them aside from the rest of the world (other than China) today. There are very few non-Western non-China countries where appreciable heavy industry takes place that isn’t resource extraction-parallel like oil refinement. There are also very few non-Western non-China countries with the industrial capital and technological knowhow to, for example, make smartphones.
You’ll notice that I keep including China as an exception here, which is because China noticed the importance of these things and went ahead to develop/steal these, and it’s because it was able to obtain these things that China is the global giant that it is today.
‘Investment’ is a nice way to put it. A more apt description would be that the developing world invested in the West’s industrialization (or the West stole it, whatever floats your boat) and the Western world chose to give essentially nothing back to its investors, directly contradicting the new capitalist world it had created.
Which is why many in the developing world feel that China’s rise to prominence is the West’s chickens coming home to roost.
A Kenyan official once said: ‘When China visits we get a hospital. When Britain visits we get a lecture’
Again, I won’t argue that colonial wealth didn’t contribute to the rise of Western Europe, but it was Europeans who invented the steam engine, developed thermodynamics as a science and put half a continent’s worth of resources and intellect into the industrial revolution. Colonialism is only a contributing factor that came after the start of the industrial revolution. Hell, France for example barely had any colonies during the early industrial revolution and that didn’t at all impede its industrialization or rise to power. If you look at, say, Ottoman history you’ll see that the thing European countries had and the Ottomans didn’t wasn’t wealth but rather ideas.
Which is why many in the developing world feel that China’s rise to prominence is the West’s chickens coming home to roost.
As someone from the developing world (specifically the Middle East), we are salty about colonialism, but many of us also recognize that if we don’t learn from the history of colonialism and what allowed Europe to conquer half the world (including us) we’ll always be on the bottom rung of the world. There’s a lot more to learn from the rise of Europe than “fuck colonialism”.
Colonialism is essentially theft with a pretty red ribbon on top to make it look good so we can all unequivocally say fuck colonialism.
But my point is beyond that. It’s that the progress that’s been achieved through those ideas you’re celebrating was predicated on theft from and suffering of people in developing countries. In a sense those in developing countries have an ownership stake in Western industrialization and China is the first previously developing nation that’s coming to take back what is, in part, theirs. The West needs to come to terms with the fact that they won’t be the last to do so.
Two sides of the same coin. Colonialism is an implementation of the capitalist notion of comparative advantage, stabilized and enforced with guns.
The internet was developed by ARPA, then later made available to universities and eventually private connections. Military and public research developed the tech, capitalists figured out how to most efficiently sell junk using the tech.
I mean yes, true, but it was capitalists who made smartphones and computers. I’ll just link my other reply here.
but it was capitalists who made smartphones and computers
Lately, capitalists of a very mercanitlist kind.
