disgruntledphd2

Sortof, much of the financing up to now has been from equity, rather than debt (with the exception of Oracle).

As the funding profile moves more towards debt, there's a bigger chance for problems as leverage tends to amplify the bad outcomes.

If Big AI (basically Mag 7) continue to issue debt, then there may be financial stability risks if it all blows up. The numbers are fine now, but the trend line is concerning (hence the BIS paper).

It used to be, before LLMs. It was standard practice though.

If you have a bad design that's had contact with reality for a while, it's much easier to make it actually good, rather than figure stuff out up front (I've rarely made this work, even though I'd love to).

I think that you might have some details wrong here.

Like, Ireland supplied basically all of the English docs for windows 95, and Apple have been in cork since the 80s.

More generally, the reason tech companies came to Ireland since the 2000s was for tax purposes, which ironically enough lead to us getting bucket loads of corporate tax after the OECD reforms.

And no, Ireland in the 2000s was not developmentally the same as Greece, you may be thinking of the 80s and 90s.

But yeah, the only reason we don't look as indebted as Greece is due to our ludicrous GDP figures.

Well, speaking as an Irish citizen, the actual problem here is that we haven't built as much wind and solar as we were expecting to when many of those data centers were being developed.

> then rapid progress once writing was invented.

While I mostly agree with this notion, given that all of our understanding of human progress historically comes from writing, there's a selection effect happening here.

Like, why do we talk about the Dark Ages? Because there was less writing, so obviously things were terrible.

> The Roman/Byzantine empire was pretty much destroyed by Muslims, though

This is hilariously untrue, if one is talking about the Western Roman empire. An islamic state did conquer Constantinople, which I presume is what you mean.

The Roman empire (western) basically fell apart due to infighting more than anything else.

> They already possess general intelligence by many metrics.

Can you share the metrics you are using for this assessment?

They are really powerful tools, but a quick glance at their thinking tokens (which is a bad name, tbh) rapidly disabuses me of the notion that they are general intelligences.

They possess large amounts of crystallised intelligence (i.e. they have a lot of knowledge), but their fluid intelligence is definitely lower than the human median.

> with previous RL-systems

Most human systems are much, much, much more complicated than most closed world games (which is where RL approaches have seen massive success, mostly through self-play).

Like LLMs are great, but I honestly can't see us getting actual general intelligence out of them.

And without the Muslims maintaining the Greek and Roman texts, that would've taken far longer. Even algebra and algorithm come from Muslim names.

Yeah, it's short form memory or something. Like writing a todo list.

So what you're saying is the evolution of language is now being developed by the quirks of a particular floating point architecture?

I think that's kinda wonderful, actually.

Which (in the UK and Ireland) solve this for me. As I pay them every month and they don't take stuff from the companies, our interests are aligned.

I know have actually good white goods for the same money I paid for crap ones.

Yeah I would say I've gotten basically all my jobs through LinkedIn, over a fifteen year career where I've moved around a lot.

China is in a very different economic state to the West (broadly construed).

They have had real issues with deflation rather than the inflation most Western countries have seen over the past five years.

People have been saying this since Vietnam (and actually now that I think about a little more, this may actually have happened).

I made it through because the content was interesting, but I am definitely not going to read more from this author because the AI-wordsmithing is so grating (I read loads of it at work, don't need to read any more of it).

> uses those dollars to bid up US assets.

Predominantly US financial assets, like Treasuries and company equity.

Brandon Sanderson maybe?

I can't remember right now, will check when I'm back at my home device.

And in train stations and airports!

I kinda miss the old Good Friday laws, it made it a great day for parties as all the pubs were closed.

They're really good quality though (even if they are very expensive).

> - or: spend a weekend hacking together a quick and ugly, buggy spreadsheet prototype of your idea that doesn't quite work.

I mean, based on my own experience with AI tools, this feels like the standard output.

Yeah, this feels like the right comparison. AI, like Excel makes it much easier for people to build useful tools.

And like Excel, software people are gonna end up complaining about the quality and having to maintain these applications.

No, but the original data leak occurred because of their really open API.

Call of Duty absolutely prints money, fwiw. King are weird because they basically have been doing the same game in different skins for like 15 years now.

Nintendo are basically the only people who held out against in game spending, for which I salute them.

I spent a few years in and around the industry and there was so much insanity around the need for in game monetization that it just made things much worse.

And because the game studios didn't care about it, none of the money stuff worked, making executives even more upset.

All to catch some vision of F2P money which is an entirely different business that these companies couldn't possibly support.

It's very sad for the industry overall (this particular decision is MS killing stuff off because the margins aren't good enough to funnel more cash into GPU gods).

To be fair, I suspect lots of the increase in premiums comes from the removal of the individual mandate. If not everyone contributes, then any insurance system works much less well.

Programming plus something else has always been a massive advantage. The corollary of this is that moving industries requires you to learn another domain if you want to be useful.

They are hiring far too much and far too quickly for this to be the case, right now at least.

To be fair, my perfect job is third level teaching, but that wouldn't support me buying a house where I live, so I'm a data scientist (which I also enjoy).

Housing in particular is a driver of people optimizing for cash.