99% of tech social media:

“I like this thing, but people say it’s bad so here is a list of self-serving reasons why I should be allowed to like it. They’re my soothing koans to calm the phantom pain of my long-amputated conscience”

“No, none of them actually address the criticism. Why do you ask?”

You can have a tech that is mostly used for fraud, bankrupts the elderly, or even literally kills people, but tech enthusiasts will defend it by saying it saves five minutes on their morning breakfast routine.

It’s a worldview where individual benefit, no matter how trivial, trumps societal harm. There’s no arguing with people who respond to “this will destroy lives” with: “but I find it useful”.

Several times over the past two decades we’ve had tech arrive which observers and researchers have discovered has serious and measurable detrimental effects on society at large, but the enthusiasts will go “it saves me an entire half-hour a day!” and consider the argument won.

Found via a Reddit post about a WSJ article quoting a Sequioa presentation

In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue.

This 17x number is just for chips – Nvidia chips alone, I think – so the actual cost-to-revenue multiplier is much higher in reality.

So the hardware it’s installed in and the actual CPUs are extra. Research is extra. The army of freelancers used for RLHF training are extra. Electricity cost is extra.

And chips depreciate in value pretty rapidly. Especially since every chip vendor on the planet as more specialised ML chips in the pipeline that are more effective at the task. This investment will be worthless pretty quickly.

The numbers are very verry far from lining up.

Remember those news items that said these services were running at a loss?

Well, those calculations were based on pure compute costs, which DON’T include capital expenses like chips or hardware and it didn’t include labour costs which are, ironically, quite high for generative models

All of which means the economics for “AI” is much much worse than most people think.

Oh, and remember that the software industry is structured entirely on incredibly high margins (software being a non-rival, non-exclusive good and all). Even if the industry did manage to reach break even on “AI”, it would still collapse because it’s too dysfunctional to function on regular margins.

Original Source

Meanwhile spring has sprung, and in keeping with their traditions, Tory MPs are plotting regicide yet again

I wouldn’t say I’m a Conservative confidence-vote prepper, but like many in the political survivalist community I do prefer to keep track of the threat level. Over the past few years, what you might call the Loonsday Clock has mostly hovered at somewhere between four minutes and one minute to midnight. The British people have accepted this is a fact of their lives, even if the prospect of the Tories going into opposition has been greeted with the same sort of exhausted relief that Kingsley Amis felt about the eventual loss of his libido: “For 50 years, it was like being chained to a lunatic.”

During the past eight years (feels like 50), the fateful midnight chimes have rung out on five separate occasions, turning a series of prime ministers back into pumpkins/lettuces/highly remunerated international speakers/future foreign secretaries/devoted husbands and procreators who go away a lot on business. As for what time it is now, I am afraid the news is … not great. In recent weeks the formal assessment has moved from “Even they aren’t mad enough to try” to “Yeah, no, actually they are going to be mad enough.”

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Despite being called continuity Hunt, the shadow chancellor has set out a proposal for meaningful change

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt likes to tell business leaders not to worry about political instability and more policy upset. He claims to be carefully building policy that will survive – win or lose the next election. If the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, succeeds him, accepting nearly all his proposals, be reassured, he says, there will be continuity rather than change. In the run-up to her important Mais lecture last week, the pre-briefings seemed to warrant his judgment.

She would reaffirm her iron attachment to fiscal rules and budgetary discipline, we were told. After all, she had beaten a wholesale retreat from Labour’s cornerstone £28bn green spending commitment. In successive fiscal “events”, she has accepted all the proposed tax cuts, not even reinstating the cap on bank bonuses. There was chatter describing her as “continuity Hunt”. Even Margaret Thatcher, we read, would be invoked as a change agent she admired. Unite sharpened its claws, writing off the lecture even as Reeves spoke as “for the birds”. Only a “sustained rise in public investment in infrastructure”, declared general secretary Sharon Graham, “can turn the tide on decline”. Two days later, columnist Owen Jones resigned from the Labour party, citing the refusal to challenge catastrophic Tory policies in “a race to the bottom”.

A zinger from Charles Michel! Yes, really.

The European Council president congratulated Vladimir Putin on his big win in the Russian presidential election — just as three days of voting began Friday.

“Would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his landslide victory in the elections starting today,” Michel snarked on social media. “No opposition. No freedom. No choice.”

Russians headed to the polls Friday for the first day of voting in a rigged election that Putin is almost certain to win, granting him another six years in power.

The Russian president, who spent years cracking down on any form of dissent against his rule, is expected to face off against three candidates who have voluntarily abstained from criticizing him. The only two significant anti-war opposition candidates, Ekaterina Duntsova and Boris Nadezhdin, have been disqualified.

Russia’s grassroots opposition has organized mass participation of voters at polling stations at noon on Sunday in a show of protest at Putin’s longtime reign over Russia.

Putin was first elected as Russian president in 2000 and — other than a break when he took on the role of prime minister between 2008 and 2012 — has held the top job ever since. In February 2022, he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, upending Europe’s security landscape.