Every single instance to-date where "AI" has been integrated into a product of platform has been a hinderance rather than a benefit.
From milquetoast write-by-committee text generation engines that allow shitty writers to pump out terrible business boilerplate in an email client to customer service representatives tacked onto storefronts that don't do anything except waste your time, using anything AI feels like wading through a waist-deep swamp that ten thousand cows have shit in.
In a way, Apple having terrible AI is a plus to me. It recognizes that there's a cute puppy in a photo in my photo library and that's what I need, and want, it to do.
>Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies,
True or false: PSEG's annual profit every year for the last five years at a rate that greatly exceeds inflation while expenses are practically flat.
Their stock symbol is PEG, bee-tee-dubs.
There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.
Are they (hold on a sec while I compose myself so I don't type a long string of obscenities) using that money to improve their service and keep rates steady or are they funneling everyone's money into the pockets of their investors and begging the state for free cash to maintain their infrastructure like they're some broke-ass bitches?
Only morons accuse NJ/NY utilities of price gouging. Both states heavily regulate their utilities. Utilities may get large rate increases approved, but it's after they submit substantial evidence of their finances for the next year. The profit margins are basically state controlled.
Regulatory control of margins just incentivizes companies to find loopholes.
Look at all the bullshit that passes for business as usual with Florida utilities -- political campaign donations, self-dealing, constructed overbilling by related subsidiaries, etc.
> There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.
There is a very specific and relevant one: The one in which supply is inelastic. In other words, the one in which it's hard to build new power plants.
When that happens, the cost of operating existing power plants hasn't changed, but demand goes up. In normal economics, demand going up causes the price (and therefore profit) to go up, which in turn attracts more suppliers that increase supply and mitigate the amount the price can increase.
If the supply can't go up then price does. That's econ 101 and it's happening just as it's expected to -- it's simply what happens if you make it hard to increase supply.
Are you referring to PEG stock price or actual profit? Because their profits growth hasn’t really “greatly exceeded” inflation. Here is the last 30 years of profits[1] (you can change it to YoY to see how much their growth over the last 5 years is). They in fact posted a loss in 2021 and under performed 2022. They shot up in 2023 and then down to pre-pandemic levels in 2024.
They are not what I’d call a profitable company. I think their stock is reflecting the AI bubble as plenty of people are speculating on power companies
Anything more than air, water, shelter, food, and companionship is trivial.
I want to live like I'm in Star Trek. The good Trek, not the new stuff.
So when I wake up to pee in the middle of the night because I'm an old man my bathroom light turns on, dimmed to its lowest level, upon detecting my presence in the bathroom. I do my business and stumble back to bed and the light turns itself off.
When I leave home my front door locks, and when I pull into the driveway it unlocks. Also if the sun has set, the driveway, front porch, and foyer lights turn on.
When I say "hey Siri, it's movie time" my projector turns on, the lights dim, and if music is playing elsewhere it stops.
One day I was on the road for work and a package was unexpectedly delivered. I texted my neighbor to put it in my garage and opened my garage door from 2,700 miles away. When they replied that it was safe from the rain, I closed it.
agree with this completely. the goal (and maybe this is what Apple can do) is make this possible for everyone, not just clever motivated people. I think it takes more leadership than the industry has mustered.
(And maybe their successors can also make it cheap...)
There is no evidence the heart attack gun ever existed.
Every description of it is ludicrous.
>here, researchers under Dr. Nathan Gordon, a CIA chemist, mixed shellfish toxin with water and froze the mixture into a small pellet or dart. The finished projectile would be fired from a modified Colt M1911 pistol equipped with an electrical firing mechanism. It had an effective range of 100 meters and was virtually noiseless when fired.
The device held up by Senator Frank Church was not a modified Colt M1911. It was an air pistol with absurd rifle sight attached.
That device has no mechanism for cooling the pellets. The second a frozen pellet is inserted into that device it will begin melting.
Very few handguns, to the point that "none" is accurate ENOUGH, have an effective range of more than ~50 meters. There are some calibers, not nearly-silent ice pellets, that can travel further but their ballistics out of short barrels are so poor that demos at 100 yards and beyond are exercises in exhibition and bragging rights.
No known combinations of mechanisms needed to propel a projectile 100 meters are virtually noiseless. Even air rifles that can fling a metal pellet several hundred yards as their "maximum range" but operate in 50-60 yards as their "effective range" make a shit ton of noise.
Any small dart-like ice pellet would immediately disintegrate into dust at the forces needed to travel even a fraction of 100 meters with enough energy to pierce human skinned clothing.
Any large .45 caliber ice pellet would shatter and if it struck a target with enough force to penetrate skin it would leave way more than "a tiny red dot"'s worth of signature.
Saxitoxin is not, and has never been since its isolation, undetectable. It doesn't "disappear" from the body after death (indeed
the mechanisms that would cause its distruction cease upon death) and can be detected with simple tests.
This doesn't make sense except as a distraction from things the CIA really didn't want investigators to see.
It's good to remember that these agencies do put false reports in with official docs. Some you purposefully leak to the enemy (like encourage a known mole to "find" them) and then your enemy doesn't know what's fact from fiction. You also plant false reports to detect moles because specific fantasies are only available to specific groups.
Is anyone surprised a organization focused on disinformation is... good at disinformation? I'm sure they sold tons of fantasies to Church and made the best of the situation. That Church quote (If a dictator took charge) seems like the greatest publicity the CIA could ever hope for. They wanted the Russians to be paranoid and really everyone to be paranoid. And here is a US senator saying the CIA can get you wherever you are and you'd never know? That's exactly what they want you to believe! That they are omniscient and omnipotent.
The problem I have with all these conspiracies is that they don't take a second to realize that these agencies want you to believe in conspiracies. We talk all the time about misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation yet when something fancifulness like UFOs or untraceable weapons pop up everyone is all too happy to believe. It is especially true for those who believe the government is lying to us. Why does no one ever consider that just another lie is being told? The problem with intelligence agencies is you can't believe anything they say, you need strong proof and to always be second guessing. Which is the entire point, to overload you and get you to believe a lie.
I skimmed the Project 2025 doc during the leadup to the election when there was a big hullabaloo about it. Did not read the whole thing as it was incredibly long, but did read some summaries. Maybe 75% of it was utterly boring conservative stuff that some people surely disagree with, but is hardly worth losing sleep over. 25% or so was somewhere in the territory of extreme right wing / borderline insane.
Skimming that website, whoever is maintaining that is being...very generous with themselves about what they mark as "completed", to put it mildly. For example, "Roll back goal of haze reduction (visible air pollution)" is marked as complete, with the source being an EPA article [1] saying "[the EPA] is reconsidering its implementation of the Clean Air Act’s Regional Haze Program", but no indication of what is being reconsidered, or if anything is actually done.
Putting all of that together with the claimed 46% number, I guess you can count me as a fool. But I'm not buying the hysteria here, sorry.
You are a fool because you didn't expend any effort before dismissing.
Yes, on March 12, 2025 the EPA published that press release.
But a non-fool would search the CFR to see if any proposed rules had been published.
Almost exactly one month after that press release the EPA started releasing draft rules revoking the previous administration's rejections of regional haze reduction programs and approving them instead.
Then you have to actually READ what West Virginia's haze reduction plan does: it removes the previous requirements to install additional post-combustion controls on various coal-fired power plants in the state in order to reduce emissions.
The rule was approved last month.
And the same thing is happening in other states.
"We're reconsidering an implementation" is bureaucratese for "that shit's done, yo".
Jesus fucking Christ this country is doomed because it's full of idiots who won't expend any energy whatsoever to figure out what's going on.
Rationalists are, to a man (and they’re almost all men) arrogant dickheads and arrogant dickheads do not see what they’re doing to be “a cult” but “the right and proper way of things because I am right and logical and rational and everyone else isn’t”.
That's an unnecessary charicaterature. I have met many rationalists of both genders and found most of them quite pleasant. But it seems that the proportion of "arrogant dickheads" unfortunately matches that of the general population. Whether it's "irrational people" or "liberal elites" these assholes always seem to find someone to look down on.
> Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity)
Gaming is irrelevant.
For AMD, gaming (both console and PC combined) is less revenue than embedded-- things like those routers you can get off of aliexpress and Synology NASes.
Enterprise, cloud, and AI are the only things that matter, and even enterprise is falling off.
Back in 2020 with the second wave of AMD EPYC Rome, after I had gotten a couple of R7525s in hand and put them through their paces I started saying that you are professionally negligent if you, as a technology professional, recommend an Intel solution unless you have some very specific use cases (AVX512/Optane-optimized options). In 2022 everyone started agreeing with me.
Now you are professionally negligent if you recommend Intel at all.
Enterprise cares about speed, cloud cares about clients per socket, and AI cares about bandwidth. Intel is not competitive in any of those.
Even in the consumer space, for running bullshit workloads like Copilot on a laptop the difference is negligible. Intel is ahead, by about 10%-- at ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY WATTS (if the OEM even allows it) while you trade that 10% for 75W on AMD.
No human being on earth cares that the scan to identify if there's a cute dog in the photo they just saved to disk takes .255 or .277 seconds. They do care about battery life.
And gaming isn't just irrelevant due to revenue, once you look at margins you start realizing that AMD could never again spend a single cent on marketing X3D chips to gamers and instead redirect that money to target other sectors and they would probably be better off for it.
Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years. Gaming went to less than 9% of revenue from like, 80%. They don't care about people buying an RTX card and having to deal with OEMs and distributors and retailers and marketing and RMAs and driver patches at whatever piss-poor margin it is due to everyone taking their cut when enterprise clients are putting in POs directly to them for tens of thousands of Data Center cards at a time at high margins-- and they didn't have to spend barely anything on marketing.
The very last thing, after figuring out absolutely everything else, that Intel should care about is what their chips are benchmarking at in the latest video game.
I’ve found that a lot of my friends who are into pc gaming still haven’t grokked that ever since the crypto boom, much less the ai boom, that they are the old toys that no one wants to play with anymore.
I had a friend who legitimately could not understand why Nvidia didn’t care about their reputation in the gaming market souring even after I showed him the numbers on how much nvidia is selling to corporations now.
I don’t know if it was an inability to deal with the numbers or if it’s just culture shock at going from being a valued client to as you said “baggage”, but it was a surprising number of people in that camp
Too true, but at the same time... gamers didn't disappear. The market is still there.
Sooner or later, someone else will fill the need. That may be AMD, it could be Intel if they just focus for more than a year, or it'll be some cheap Chinese GPU from a company you've never heard of. (Likely named by mashing the keyboard while capslock is on.)
It's like how the mainframe market is bigger than it has ever been, despite being an irrelevant rounding error in the minds of the "Wintel" server providers, cloud vendors, etc...
Well this all did happen in the blink of an eye. 2022, Gaming was one of the only things booming after a global shutdown. 2023, investors all at once jumped ship to chase AI. That can be rather shocking even for tech, since people don't tend to upgrade their GPU's every year.
As a parallel, imagine hearing that the IPhone 13 was the biggest selling device in history. Then suddenly the IPhone 14 is $4000 and mostly sold to enterprise. It doesn't make any logical sense without following the money. Even then it may not make much sense.
I mean, for a long time the situation was reversed.
Huge gaming demand and easy retail availability of nvidia's cards was providing economies of scale. If a few professors were buying the GeForce 8800 to look at this new 'CUDA' thing that was mostly a marketing thing.
Around the same time there were also one or two Playstation 3 clusters - but a year or two later Sony removed support for that. HPC being inconsequential, and a distraction from their core business, presumably.
It's only in recent years the stuff that used to be marketing decoration has become reality.
> and they didn't have to spend barely anything on marketing.
To be fair, their marketing was all that gaming related BS you listed, plus developing and maintaining CUDA. Winning gaming got them the winning AI architecture and mindshare around it, and CUDA got them the winning developer interface to it and locked in that mindshare.
Gaming is still a multi billion dollar industry, and touches into all the other aspects you mentioned as well. Losing out to AMD for Xbox/Playstation was definitely a costly loss.
>Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years.
Yes, marking up your consumer hardware by 4-5x to appeal to crypto miners surely does have an effect on your market. Arguably, AI saved them from a crash due to their over investment on Crypto/NFTs. It's not like gaming demand diminished this decade.
Gaming isn't THE way out. But it's one avenue to consider. It does seem like companies c. 2025 prefer to fall into the AI bubble, though.
I wonder what risks the bubble has for them. If they can sell every $30K AI accelerator they make right now, that might cause them to overextend, committing to up-front capacity or long term projects that are financed by the current spend patterns, or just neglecting other parts of their product line.
If the hype dies and they're back to selling 5090s to gamers, can they afford to pay those bills?
Historically the answer has been "no". When a company pivots to doing something that becomes 90% of their revenue, there is no way to go back to doing whatever the 10% was. Imagine NOKIA going back to manufacturing gumboots, which is how that company started out!
That's probably the saddest part. They can still pay thrd even pay off the debts from the bubble bursting just doing what they used to rely on.
But we know that won't be enough for shareholders and their stock would tank regardless. Because 2020's speciation isn't about having a reasonable long term portfolio. It's just extremely abundant pumping until you need to dump and pump the next trend. It's not enough these days to be a good, sensible business.
From milquetoast write-by-committee text generation engines that allow shitty writers to pump out terrible business boilerplate in an email client to customer service representatives tacked onto storefronts that don't do anything except waste your time, using anything AI feels like wading through a waist-deep swamp that ten thousand cows have shit in.
In a way, Apple having terrible AI is a plus to me. It recognizes that there's a cute puppy in a photo in my photo library and that's what I need, and want, it to do.