If they are, they're not very good at it.

OpenAI and Claude with all their resets? That's full-on skinner box. Microsoft instead has a button where you press it and never get a piece of food, only disappointment.

Apache guacamole is really nice. Became a game changer for me.

Seems silly to say.

"Search engine data center goes down, search bots heavily affected"

"what the fuck, you just spent 20,000 in tokens on nothing! My project is ruined! You've ruined me!"

"Plz no bully"

That's not exactly right. Any economist would correct you.

When money becomes more expensive to borrow through higher interest rates, it results in everyone taking out less debt (at least in theory), so the total money supply is lower (because a new loan is new money in the economy), and less money chasing the same goods means the value of the money increases.

It doesn't have to be businesses taking out loans for capital from banks (other debt instruments such as bonds only move money from investors to debtors without changing the money supply), it can also be individuals buying homes or racking up credit cards or taking out auto loans. All the money is the same, created through debt.

And reducing the money supply can and does work. The effect on employment is real. Imagine if you have a company that sells milk shakes. When people have lots of access to cheap debt, there's lots of dollars so lots of people can come buy a milk shake. And you might hire more people because you're selling more milk shakes, and with so many customers you can afford to raise prices. If they can't take out cheap debt, fewer people come around, you have to fire people because there's no work for them, and you won't want to raise prices, you might even need to lower them. Therefore, unemployment is an expected result, but not the desired one. The desired result is fewer dollars than the base case.

This is because of how money is created in our system: when you put a dollar in the bank, the bank can lend out multiple dollars. Presently the Federal reserve has a 0% reserve ratio, so banks can lend out infinity dollars for every dollar they have, only limited by liquidity, funding, risk management, and creditworthy borrowers. In a system without fractional reserve banking where you need a dollar to lend a dollar, absent other forms of money creation such as minting, the money supply would not grow and would be more likely to shrink, and prices would be likely to stay stable or drop.

I'm going to say two things that can be extrapolated wrong:

1. I can run an LLM on a 10 Watt thin client system.
2. A modern laptop can run under some circumstances all night on batteries.

So the first thing is a very specific claim I could not then extrapolated to say that llms do not burn electricity because they clearly burn and gigawatts of electricity.

The second one is a very specific claim that a certain device can run for a certain period of time it does not mean that I can run my house off of a laptop battery overnight.

This is where scale really matters because specific claims end up being replaced with broad claims intentionally by authors who are hunting for clicks and are really hoping to get the eyeballs of people who are interested in green energy. They will phrase the fact that certain battery Banks were able to run all night to misleadingly lead people to believe that those battery Banks were running the entire State all night when in fact they were just a small portion of the electricity being generated. That matters a lot. Running a frontier model of an LLM versus running a little 1b parameter model are not the same thing. Being able to run specific batteries over the course of a specific night in a state which is world famous for being temperate, that is different than rolling out a certain renewable energy Nationwide to 300 million people who don't live in places that are famously temperate.

These stories are intended to make environmentalism a consumer problem, in the sense that you just aren't consuming enough product and if you consumed the correct product and paid enough money for the environmentalism boxes, then we could solve the problem.

That's applying a very industrial revolution mindset to a problem caused by the excesses of the industrial revolution.

The ecological Armageddon is when you scale up. Scale to the United States, and try to build 3 days of storage so we can fully migrate to green energy, and you'd require more lithium ion batteries than have been manufactured by mankind, or if you use lead acid batteries you'd require more lead than we have known reserves of lead on Earth. Recycling appears at first like it's a solution, but lithium ion batteries are barely economically recyclable as it is at the moment, and lead acid batteries would require massive transportation networks to be continually moving around massive amounts of lead.

You can say "We don't need 3 days of storage", but even if you cut it by 3/4, you're still talking about one of the largest endeavors in human history, and you haven't even built the solar and wind farms yet.

The real solution is to reduce our need for energy by dramatically changing the way we look at how we use energy. Everything from cars to homes is built around a post-war energy economy that isn't sustainable. We can't just drop the exact same things in "but green". You can't consume your way out of this, but a lot of these articles would have you believe just that.

That's always dangerous to say, because it misses a bunch of the equation.

You can run your lights during the day and your heat when there's lots of sun.

Green washed technology would cause ecological Armageddon if adopted at proper scale because the energy needs to go somewhere for when you need it, and that scale of energy storage isn't cheap or clean.

"them namekians shot off my legs.

Just kidding. Namekians are weak."

Deleted my twitter account in 2016 after never really using it anyway.

Deleted everything but YouTube in 2021.

I feel good about my choice.

If you make lots of money and save a lot, and your roommate is unemployed and spends tons of money, your apartment might be profitable, but yes ur roommate still needs to balance their budget.

Allegedly, Minecraft has been subsidizing the entire Microsoft games division. If that's actually the case, the question becomes: why? If the game studios aren't profitable except one, isn't it greedy to expect Minecraft's studio to keep paying for them?

Don't get me wrong: I do think there's a greed problem here on Microsoft's part, but it isn't trying to get unprofitable subsidiaries to become profitable. It's the fact that Microsoft bought half the games industry hoping to get massive pricing power by owning many of the best game franchises of all time so they could get us all to rent their library through xbox game pass. The fact that it's failing is unfortunately good on the balance of things.

In that sense, the greed worth attacking isn't the hard times of layoffs when they fail, it's the attempt to leverage game libraries to get us hooked on game subscriptions. That they failed and are now in a bad way is horrible for devs in the short term, bad for gamers in the short term, but ultimately is better for everyone when game subscription stays a niche.

Microsoft already started jamming the price up, if we ended up with a few megacorps renting libraries out to us that's exactly where things were headed.

I think he's right, but also wrong.

Gaming is going to become smaller. Lower specs required, tighter experiences. Not because people subscribe to a GPU somewhere.

Even among the hardware requirements, that's not the one people cared about!