Depending on what happens with GPUs for datacenters, external GPUs might be so rare that nobody does it anymore.

My impression right now is that for nVidia gamer cards are an afterthought now. Millions of gamers can’t compete with every company in Silicon Valley building entire datacenters stacked with as many “GPUs” as they can find.

AMD isn’t the main choice for datacenter CPUs or GPUs. Maybe for them, gamers will be a focus, and there are some real advantages with APUs. For example, you’re not stuck with one particular amount of GPU RAM and a different amount of CPU RAM. Because you’re not multitasking as much when gaming, you need less CPU RAM, so you can dedicate more RAM to games and less to other apps. So, you can have the best of both worlds: tons of system RAM when you’re browsing websites and have a thousand tabs open, then start a game and you have gobs of RAM dedicated to the game.

It’s probably also more efficient to have one enormous cooler for a combined GPU and CPU vs. a GPU with one set of heatsinks and fans and a separate CPU heatsink and fan.

External GPUs are also a pain in the ass to manage. They’re getting bigger and heavier, and they take up more and more space in your case. Not to mention the problems their power draw is causing.

If I could get equivalent system performance with an APU vs. a combined CPU and GPU, I’d probably go for it, even with the upgradeability concerns. OTOH, soldered-in RAM is not appealing because I’ve upgraded my RAM more often than other components on my PCs, and having to buy a whole new motherboard to get a RAM upgrade is not appealing.

The Crypto to AI transition was brutal. Just as demand for GPUs was coming down because people were starting to use ASICs to mine Bitcoin, along comes AI to drive up non-gaming demand again.

The only good news is that eventually when the AI bubble pops there will be massive R&D and manufacturing geared towards producing GPUs. Unless something else comes along… But really, I can’t see that happening because the AI bubble is so immense and is such an enormous part of the entire world’s economy.

It’s also not capitalism.

Adam Smith is seen as the person most responsible for coming up with the concept of capitalism, and he hated landlords.

“Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.”

More details about what he thought of rent in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Adam Smith imagined a world with well-regulated capitalism. In that world, a capitalist might invest in a factory to make a widget. They’d take raw materials, use capital (including labour) and end up with a product that people would want to buy. That capitalist would always have to stay on their toes because if they got lazy, another capitalist could undercut them by using their capital better, to either undercut the widget’s price, or to sell it more cheaply. This competition was key, as well as the idea of the capitalist putting in work to continuously improve their processes. A capitalist who didn’t continually improve their processes would lose to their competitors, see their widget sales drop to zero, and go out of business.

In Adam Smith’s time, the alternative to capitalism was feudalism, where a landlord owned a huge estate, had serfs working on that estate, and simply collected a cut of everything the serfs produced as rent. In that scenario, the landlord had to do almost no work. It was the farmers on their estate who did the work. The landlord just owned the land and charged rent. Originally, serfs were even tied to the land, so they weren’t allowed to leave to work elsewhere, and their children were bound to the same land. But, even once that changed, there was still good farmland. The landlord could lower the rent until it was worth it for a farmer to work the land. The key thing is that the landlord didn’t have to do anything at all, just own the land and charge rent for its use.

I think the reason that people are so pissed off with capitalism these days is that what we’re really seeing is a neo-Feudalism, or what Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism.

Think of YouTube. A person puts tons of time and money into making a video, they upload it to the only viable video platform for user-made video, YouTube. YouTube hosts the video, then charges a big cut of any advertising revenue the video generates, basically charging rent for merely being the “land” on which the video lives. In a proper capitalist world, there would be plenty of sites to host videos, plenty of ad companies competing to buy ad spots for a video, etc. But, YouTube is a monopoly, and internet advertising is a duopoly between Google and Facebook. They mostly don’t even compete anymore, each has their own area of the Internet they control and so they’re a local monopoly. This allows them to behave like feudal lords rather than capitalists. There’s no need for them to innovate, no need for them to compete, they just own the land and charge rent. Same with Apple and their app store. There are no other app stores permitted on iPhones, so Apple can charge an outrageous 30%.

It goes well beyond tech though. Say you’re a Canadian and you want to avoid American products, but you love your carbonated beverages. You could buy Coke, but that’s American. Pepsi? That’s American. Royal Crown cola? Sure sounds like it might be Canadian, or British, but no, it’s American. Just look at the chain of mergers for its parent company: “Formed in July 2018, with the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group (formerly Dr. Pepper/7up Inc.), Keurig Dr Pepper offers over 125 hot and cold beverages.” Sure, if you look you can find specialty things like Jarritos, but the huge brands just dominate the shelves.

Capitalists hate capitalism, they want to be feudal lords, and since the time of Reagan / Thatcher / Mulroney / etc. competition hasn’t been properly regulated, allowing all the capitalists to merge into enormous companies that no longer have to compete, and can instead act as feudal lords extracting rent.

And there are lawyers who have been raked over the coals by judges when the lawyers have submitted AI-generated documents where the LLM “hallucinated” cases that didn’t exist which were used as precedents.

As an aside, it’s interesting how “Jack Daniel’s” is the brand name, with the apostrophe-s ending. It makes it a bit difficult to construct sentences talking about it. If you write “the maker of Jack Daniel’s is Brown-Foreman” it makes it seem like you misused an apostrophe or forgot a noun, like it should be “the maker of Jack Daniel’s whiskey is Brown-Foreman”, but that’s also wrong because it’s not the whiskey belonging to Jack Daniel, who’s dead.

AFAIK Canada can do it quickly because most liquor stores are government owned and run (LCBO in Ontario for example), whereas in Mexico it’s individual retailers. And many of the retailers in Mexico are American chains: Wal*Mart, Costco, etc. If Soriana and Chedraui wanted they could stop selling American booze, but they’re for-profit companies that are probably thinking they’ll just let their customers choose if they want to boycott.

Coke is American too. Unfortunately Royal Crown Cola is too (not only the original brand, but also the current megaconglomerate overlord).

But, it would be fun to replace the “Jack and Coke” with “Crown Royal and Royal Crown”.

If you say so.

In the past this wasn’t true, but it’s definitely true for new tech products.

There are 2 reasons for that, IMO.

1. Tech investors expect year after year, decade after decade of serious growth
2. Tech these days is not something you buy, it’s rarely even something you rent, it’s often free and paid for by shoving ads at you

That means that they can’t just land on a good product and stick with it. They have to keep changing it to try to get more engagement, more use, more growth.

Why do you need all those things to be in one single app?

I know this isn’t the point, but IMO a suit really is a clown nose.

Like, you’re tying a little bit of colourful fabric around your neck and letting it dangle down? That’s supposed to look serious? This is the clothing associated with a serious man?

And you’re wearing a coat that doesn’t close properly? It only has buttons at the bottom, then has the male equivalent of a “boob window” for you to show off your shirt and tie?

And don’t get me started on how the suit technically has pockets, but you’re not actually supposed to use them because they ruin the look… except for the breast pocket where you’re supposed to put a fully decorative hanky.

Look at me! I’m conforming! I don’t have independent thoughts! I wear a suit!

If you go somewhere where the main language isn’t English, you should make an effort to learn the local language. Yes, there are places like the Netherlands where virtually everybody speaks English well, but not putting in the effort means you’ll always be an outsider.

Things are smaller outside the US: vehicles, apartments, kitchens, refrigerators, etc. It can take a while to get used to not having the same space you’re used to. Also, some devices like clothes driers are rare.

Europeans take recycling seriously. In some places you have to pay to throw away garbage, while recycling is free. But, recycling is sometimes a real effort, like there’s not a “glass and plastics” box, you have to take the clear glass to one place, the brown glass to another, etc.

Tipping mostly doesn’t exist. That means that if you go to a restaurant you don’t normally have one assigned waiter. Whoever is free will help you, which tends to speed things up a lot. OTOH, since they’re not working for tips, the waitstaff don’t feel the need to fake a smile, pretend to be your friend, etc. Some Americans think that comes off as unfriendly.

Electricity is more expensive (part of the reason for the smaller appliances) so sometimes will completely unplug things that an American would just turn off (like a TV).

Businesses don’t have the same convenient hours as in the US. In some places, like Switzerland, they almost completely shut down on Sunday. 24 hour places are much more rare.

The European take on freedom of speech is different. You are simply not allowed to say certain things. Some things, like libel laws, are much more friendly to the person who is the target, rather than the “free speaker”.

Oh, and smoking is still much more common in Europe, and it can be pretty disgusting. In the US it has been largely eliminated from public spaces, and smokers are confined to small smoking areas. Even in private homes people will often smoke outdoors either to be considerate or because their landlord doesn’t allow smoking indoors. In Europe, smoking is still common indoors in many places, and… ugh.

All this really does is show areas where the writing requirements are already bullshit and should be fixed.

Like, consumer financial complaints. People feel they have to use LLMs because when they write in using plain language they feel they’re ignored, and they’re probably right. It suggests that these financial companies are under regulated and overly powerful. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be able to ignore complaints when they’re not written in lawyerly language.

Press releases: we already know they’re bullshit. No surprise that now they’re using LLMs to generate them. These shouldn’t exist at all. If you have something to say, don’t say it in a stilted press-release way. Don’t invent quotes from the CEO. If something is genuinely good and exciting news, make a blog post about it by someone who actually understands it and can communicate their excitement.

Job postings. Another bullshit piece of writing. An honest job posting would probably be something like: “Our sysadmin needs help because he’s overworked, he says some of the key skills he’d need in a helper are X, Y and Z. But, even if you don’t have those skills, you might be useful in other ways. It’s a stressful job, and it doesn’t pay that well, but it’s steady work. Please don’t apply if you’re fresh out of school and don’t have any hands-on experience.” Instead, job postings have evolved into some weird cargo-culted style of writing involving stupid phrases like “the ideal candidate will…” and lies about something being a “fast paced environment” rather than simply “disorganized and stressful”. You already basically need a “secret decoder ring” to understand a job posting, so yeah, why not just feed a realistic job posting to an LLM and make it come up with some bullshit.

I’ve always wondered how much alien life is out there that we’ve actually seen (or seen signs of) but not recognized because we’re blind to life that doesn’t seem earth-like.

Because the tools are here and not going anyway

Swiss army knives have had awls for ages. I’ve never used one. The fact that the tool exists doesn’t mean that anybody has to use it.

The actually useful shit LLMs can do

Which is?

Please stop bending over backwards for the corporations.

Who’s bending over backwards?

The customer shouldn’t have to control the taxi when they’re calling for emergency support like this

I agree. The car also shouldn’t drive in circles around a parking lot, but here we are. In that situation, you do whatever works. If the fastest or easiest way to resolve the problem is to do something with the app on their phone, then so be it. It does no good to complain about what the solution should be when you’re trying to resolve that. Save that for later once the problem has been resolved.

He was on his way to a flight. Flights are expensive.

Yes, and again, that’s something to address after you fix the problem. Stop interrupting the person who’s trying to help you to ask about compensation for a flight you haven’t yet missed (and probably won’t miss) rather than just do what they say to resolve the problem.

He has no idea for how long he’s going to be continually going in circles

But, it’s going to be a lot longer if he keeps interrupting and bringing up the cost of his flight rather than just doing as the person trying to help him asks.

This is a customer in distress

No, this is a guy trying to make a viral social media post, who obviously cares more about an exciting story than trying to fix the situation. If he cared about fixing it, when the agent asked him to bring up the waymo app on his phone he’d have done it. Instead, he needed to keep his phone in hand so he could keep recording for social media.

Waymo comes out of this looking incompetent, as they should. But, this guy didn’t do anything to make the situation better.

How did he not allow them to help?

He kept talking over the woman who was trying to help. He brought up his flight about 3x. When she asked him to bring up the Waymo app he pushed back rather than just doing what she asked.

He’s right that it’s dumb if he has to use his phone to do something. But, if she thought that would work, why not try it? I suspect the reason he didn’t want to do that is that he was using his phone to record his social media post, and was more concerned with getting his viral post ready vs. trying to actually resolve the situation.

This doesn’t make Waymo look good. Their car getting stuck looping a parking lot is ridiculous. The passenger not having an obvious button to push to get the car to immediately stop (or find a safe place to pull over and stop if it’s on a highway or something) seems like a big oversight too. The person answering the phone also didn’t seem to know how to handle the situation either. Like, this seems like one of the primary things someone on support should know how to do: stop the car and let the passenger get out if there’s a problem. But, she seemed to be fumbling to find a solution.

Having said that, the guy seemed to be making the situation worse instead of trying to resolve it and get to the airport.

“Spins in circles” makes it sound like the car was drifting, when it was just doing laps around the inside of a parking lot. Also, this guy starts talking about them “taking care” of his flight when this has been happening for what, 5 minutes? I get that it’s annoying, but if 5 minutes circling a parking lot would have made him miss his flight, he’d also have missed it if there was even a hint of bad traffic. He also doesn’t even allow the customer service person to help him.

Also, the screen in the car has a “pull over” button on it. I guess he missed that? Or, maybe he hit it and it was stuck in a loop trying to find a safe place to pull over? It seems to me that a software button on a touch screen isn’t good enough though. They should have a physical big red button that a passenger can’t miss and can hit if something is going wrong. But, that’s just me.

So is “I have X points on Stack Overflow”.

Also, I’m on the iOS tutorial team for somethingorother.com.