1. The contractors move to where the money is. They will migrate to specialized work that will not benefit those who can’t afford “competitive” prices.
2. You can borrow 1T dollars in cash, effectively maxing out what the physical world will allow you to spend it on.
There is this feeling where it's futile to do anything, the world is big and miserable and you're small and insignificant.
I'm slowly getting convinced that some political players are spreading this view on purpose. It is an easy way to block people who try to stop the erosion of society.
It also isn't true. You can easily improve the world on a small scale by doing anything positive. On world scale, trying to change things is like buying into a lottery. Most attempts will fail, but the more stakes you have, the bigger the chance of winning.
In my corner of the world, over my life, I saw flemish people, woman, LGBTQ, vegetarians all stand up and demand the rest of the world treat them as equals. They all started tiny and were laughed at for the futility of their dreams. But I speak dutch, woman go to universities, gays are holding hands publicly and getting married, and vegetarian options are normal in restaurants. These causes won, because lots of little nameless people fought for it, even if there are still haters pushing back each of them.
Yeah, a bit of this. Speaking from Europe, there is the latent feeling of war, and the fear that an even larger one may come. It's also becoming increasingly clear what kind of visions the powerful people are trying to realize, and don't have much to do with the kind of optimistic visions for the future that I grew up with. Lastly there is a feeling of helplessness in the face of all this.
There is still a lot of counterculture in spite of all this - and honestly, it even feels more enticing than it used to. But it also feels more hedonistic and escapist than like a genuine alternative way of living.
Things feel less like the 1980s and more like the 1920s...
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
The above quote is from a character from one of JRR Tolkien’s books. (Gandalf from Return of the King.)
Tolkien fought in the Battle of the Somme which was one of the most destructive battles in human history. So I think his views have some weight here.
Bad things have always happened in the world. Despair is a useless emotion that just precludes action that can better the world or even better a single other’s person’s life. For each person belongs to the world and by improving one life you improve the world. This cannot be accomplished through despair but through joy.
If Mahatma Gandhi had lived in despair over the horrible things the British were doing to the Indians, would he have been able to help anyone? It was through joyous resistance that he managed to inspire a movement to defeat them.
Another way of saying that is "be the change you want to see in the world". That's all anyone can do. In that you can't do more than that, by definition. But you can do less. Positive change comes only from those who make the choice to do what they can, however small and local that may be.
I agree to the extent that you can impact things around you, but is the general chaos and suffering in the world outside of that sphere really a responsibility? At some point you have to accept you can really only impact the sphere unless you end up being a major historical figure.
I think one of life's big questions is defining the size of your sphere of responsibility.
Some people decide that sphere is really big, and they go on to be those historical figures. Others define it really big, and wallow in angst, aware and powerless to the suffering. Others still define it too small, and by the end of their life, find regret that they didn't try to help those within reach.
Your analogy is apt in more ways than one. It comes down to how often the point of a journey is to get to the destination. Most old wisdoms teach that the latter is more often just a MacGuffin to embark on the former. If they're right, AI offers tremendous potential for new adventures, but also as a catalyst for completely missing the plot. Yes, we're "free" to choose, but I'm skeptical that a culture conditioning us to eschew friction necessarily equips us to distinguish when the grind and frustration might be "good" for us.
I once made a travel friend who just didn't get the point of me taking eight hours to slow travel by train or by bus across a country that we were both visiting, when she could just hop on a plane and get to the next city in an hour. Earlier in my youth, transportation choices were economically motivated, but what I got from it would influence all future visits to other countries. When chilling with other travelers, exchanging tips and stories, it was as if my friend was visiting a completely different place. She left the country shortly after, confiding to me in the end that she really didn't see what the big deal was with it and that she would probably never be back.
I understand that some people may not resonate with this outlook -- and maybe it's just me getting older -- but I've grown to see that there's indeed such a thing as going through life in a hurry. I do think that the jury's still out as to the overall impact of AI on what I would label "useful friction".
I have vivid dreams and smells from a surgery where the visions and feeling of them poking me are incredibly intense. The question is whether it’s a memory or a manifestation of fear. I rarely dream (every few years), but this vivid dream comes through on occasion.
The people they're having abducted are the people that speak out about their misbehavior. Enabling those abductions very directly makes it harder to vote them out.
They are factories that product goods on a whim. There is nothing to compare them to as we never had anything like that. This is not industrial revolution this is obliteration of work at its core.
I look at them as lab grown bacteria. We’re in the early days and still have a lot of contamination we still don’t understand. They don’t always produce a viable result, and sometimes they break test rigs.
Just because they’re not a pure extension of our bodies or minds like a hammer or pencil doesn’t mean they will magically break the concept of work.
They exist to partition capability so that enterprises can’t connect all of their peripherals and some ECC memory to get the same functionality for 1/10 the price. It’s not a physical limitation.
Obviously market tiering is part of it and you can play tricks with north and south bridge and pcie switches (which adds cost), but a ryzen board that advertises a pcie 5.0 x16 gpu slot and 5.0 x4 m2 slot only has 4 lanes left to work with from the cpu (i.e the cpus only have 24 usable lanes). Which while you can play with generations to get more lanes it's effectively still 16gb/s. That needs to cover network, extra m2 slots, usbs, as well as the extra PCIe slots.
I don't mind having to work within those physical limits but I do want to be able to search for boards that support N components. i.e 1x 4.0x8, 2x 3.0x8, 4x 5.0x4 . But the best you can search for is physical sizes of pcie slots and then dive into a spec sheet for each one, only to find that the 6 x16 slots only have 1.0x1 of bandwidth each.
I think the biggest aspect is that there’s so little demand for the configuration that you’re looking for.
Most people only need the PCI lanes for graphics cards and storage. There aren’t many other internally installed devices out there that actually need that kind of bandwidth, and a lot of those use cases are already covered by alternatives like Ethernet or USB, or they’re already on your board (m.2 slots, fast Ethernet ports).
The 6x16 slots with 1.0x1 bandwidth are there so that people can plug in stuff like sound cards and other random stuff that generally has pretty light bandwidth needs.
If I just search for “PCIe card” on Newegg most of the resulting products max out at x4, and most of the ones that do are already on the board (m.2 cards, additional USB/Thunderbolt).
The one use case that seemed useful and unusual in my search results was a quad port HD video capture card which seemed to require x4 bandwidth.
If you had a scenario like you describe where there isn’t a single x16 slot, you’ve instantly annoyed 95% of the market that needs that full bandwidth for a GPU, whether it be for gaming or for professional applications.
Some solutions that avoid expensive workstation boards and CPUs include getting a higher end chipset to get gaming boards that come with 2x x16 slots, or you can use accessories and adapters that just plug into m.2 slots.
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