24 karma · joined April 12, 2023
It may be cute to say “X is a bank”, but an airline is not a bank. Besides the obvious facts that you cannot withdraw money from an account or pay your bills, if they didn’t fly planes the points would be ~worthless.
The fact that they don’t profit from those activities is a market economy working as intended*. Cars and flights are easily substitutable goods, you’d expect to see the profit competed down to ~nothing.
*Arguably there is getting to be too much consolidation in the airline industry, and also legal limits on airport gates act as a huge barrier of entry for new competition.
(edited for clarity)
M2 Pro @ 141 points/watt Ryzen 9 7940HS @ 47 points/watt
The more significant application of storage will be long-term storage wrapped in a read-modify-write loop.
Further, what happens when you give an LLM a bank of long-term storage and a read-modify-write loop around it? A sufficiently advanced "modify" function would be more than enough to give rise to intent even in the broadest understanding of the word. GPT-4 class models are could very well be advanced enough to give rise to a variety of higher-level behavior that previously we would only have ascribed to prinate-class intelligence. If anyone really wants to advance the state of the art, you should figure out the best way to train a model with a read-modify-write loop, how to index into the storage, how to store "results", and so on.
I firmly believe that in the next 100 years we will have AI independence movements, with a high possiblity of outright war, terrorism, etc. (Maybe AI will be better than humans at avoiding the use of violence.) In 20 years this trajectory will be supremely obvious.
Edited-- disagree about the timeline, ramifications, acts of war, or whatever, I really don't care. Seriously though, something like a read-modify-write loop is key. You can only build so complicated a function with only combinational logic gates. But just 64 bits of storage can produce sequences going beyond the life of the universe. Imagine an LLM paired with gigabytes+ of working memory/storage. It would easily be capable of moving about the virtual world with "intent".
Does that justify there current valuation? Again, maybe, maybe not, I’m not a stock analyst, but if you are just looking at a trailing P/E I don’t think that’s telling the whole story.
And the US market and economy is just structurally different from Europe and other economies. Massive energy abundance now to start with, and also work attitudes/culture. On the positive sides dynamism, willing to tolerate failure, new business formation, and on the (arguably I guess) negative side prioritization of work/profits over personal life and social welfare.
1) Companies are not incentivized to produce incompatible cables, the industry has done a remarkably good job of settling on basically a single standard, so the incentives seem to run counter to what you say. The major hold out introduced their own cable standard 2 years _before_ USB-C even existed, and even they were rumored to be moving to USB-C anyways. (I'm sure people will credit the law with this even if it had nothing to do with it.) Would it have been good if they had switched to USB-C earlier? Sure, but that would mean... people throwing out their old cables that worked perfectly fine.
2.) Would the amount of charging cables you have purchased in your lifetime even fill up one regular-sized (13 gallon-ish) trash bag? I don't know how many charging cables you are buying or what your uses are, but I'm struggling to see how it's a "staggering" amount of waste. I'm a somewhat avid electronic geek, I own multiple Raspberry Pis and other hobbyist electronics. No way would I even come close. When I do buy new cables, 90% of the time it's for reasons like the old ones have worn out, or I have a new device that needs to be permanently plugged in.
~~~Edited to add~~~ All my consumer electronics devices have stopped needing their own charger for years now. I use the same charger and swap out a cord.