ciconia

> total revenue: $4B > compute for training models: -$3B > compute for running models: -$2B > employee salaries: -$700M

Though not really representative of what users of said models may experience financially, at this point the question should be raised: if AI compute is 7x more expensive than developer salaries, what's the point? I thought the whole idea was to save money on human resources...

The article sort of glosses over this, but to me the real question is delivering value over the long run. This takes patience and tenacity not just from developers but also from management. Making a product that lasts and that evolves and that delivers for your clients is definitely a lot more challenging (and finally rewarding) than vibe-coding an MVP in a couple of weeks. I have the impression that in that regard AI coding tools are quite inadequate and don't really deliver the value they purport to.

I guess now we know what all those tariffs are really about, it's just a way to force other countries to buy American petrol.

Ah yes the best welcome for people joining a jam session: "OK, let's do Giant Steps. One, one two three..."

> This worries me. I greatly value Western ideals—freedom of speech, democracy, individual rights. These things matter.

Hmm I don't know about those so called "western values" - seems to me there's a lot of hypocrisy in western nations, where we look down on so called authoritarian societies as wrong or even evil. As TFA says, it looks like the Chinese government is delivering for its people, while it's clear that western democracies are not.

Maybe "aliah" - immigrating to Israel.

Hi, author here. Taking your argument to its logical conclusion we can say that it doesn't matter if your Ruby code is slower or faster because it's Ruby, we know it's "slow-as-molasses", we only care about developer happiness, and anyways we're I/O-bound, so it doesn't really matter how our code performs...

But in my experience it does. I've built platforms in Ruby that handle north of 1K reqs/sec with bursts of 10K reqs/sec on moderate hardware, without needing to setup a whole cluster of machines that crunch on poorly-performing code.

From my experience, getting the average execution time per render from say 0.1ms to 0.01ms, and especially reducing allocations and GC pressure has a big effect on 99% percentiles, and consequently on the cost of compute.

Saying because we use Ruby we don't care if it's slow or not is in a way dismissing it as a viable platform for writing reliable software (because performance is part of reliability).

To me, you can use Ruby to create systems that have very good performance characteristics, and still benefit from developer happiness. The two are not contradictory.

io_uring support for futexes is really nice. I used it to implement mutexes and queues for working with Ruby fibers:

https://github.com/digital-fabric/uringmachine/blob/main/ext...

Original report here: https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-journalists-hamas-hasbara...

How unsurprising...

> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective.

Exactly, but this is just the nature of this technology. It can sort of fake human intelligence but not really. You can't count on it to do human work without supervising it so what's the point?

Hmm, the first city we visited was Fukuoka and basically all 7-11s and the other mini-market chains were staffed by foreign workers. Lots of (Asian) foreigners around the central train station as well. We saw the same in other cities as well - Kobe, Kyoto, Osaka.

It's true that once we went into the countryside there were a lot fewer foreign workers, but that is also how it is in western countries.

I visited Japan about two years ago and was kinda shocked at the amount of foreigners (Indian, Bangladeshi, Vietnamese) working everywhere. I gathered from talking to locals that many of them work illegally.

No, actually there are other considerations you don't have with the classic "poll for readiness then read/write" model, such as holding on to buffers until a completion is received, managing registered files and buffer rings, and multishot ops. It's really a different model, especially if you employ traditional thread based concurrency.

> the incentives are such that O(Really Big Money) optimization projects get staffed unless there is something making them infeasible.

Switching to io_uring is not just moving from one API to another. It necessitates a serious rethinking of your concurrency model. I guess for big, established codebases this is a very substantial undertaking, security consideration notwithstanding.

Simplify as much as possible and reduce the surface area: the least amount of code, the least amount of dependencies, the least amount of infrastructure.

> It was like trying to communicate with a toaster.

Yes, that's exactly what AI is.

Fourthed!

I've had Macbooks, I've had Windows laptops, and have been a happy full-time Linux user since 2020.

Windows is just impossible for anyone that cares about their digital hygiene. MacOS is slow (for software development) and there's always stuff that doesn't work.

For me Linux (plain Ubuntu) hits the sweet spot: it just works and I can do whatever I please, no ads, no walled garden.

Because it's (mostly) useless bullshit. I mean, apart from generating fake images/videos, and cheating in high-school/college, what's the value proposition? It doesn't really remove humans from the equation, because you still need a "prompt engineer" to get any result that is sort of correct most of the time. So you pay for a superstar AI magician, you pay for the ridiculous amount of compute this needs, and you still need to babysit it in case it starts hallucinating, so what's the point?

Haaretz is the only mainstream media to report regularly on Palestinian casualties. It has a readership of less than 5% [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Israel

"Any sufficiently advanced AI technology is indistinguishable from bullshit."

- me, a few years ago.

I find the whole situation with regard to AI utterly ridiculous and boring. While those algos might have some interesting applications, they're not as earth-shattering as we are made to believe, and their utility is, to me at least, questionable.

Thank God for Linux...