Similar story back when I didn’t have insurance for a bit. In my case the hospital billing actively offered a settlement when I called and asked about options.

Well, it’s a little elastic.

Non-fatal health conditions that lots of people put up with. Someone I knew went to ER for first kidney stone, then just endured the pain the second time until they could get a non-emergency appointment, since it’s non-fatal but agonizing, and a non-emergency visit is like 80% cheaper.

Lots of people just accept chronic problems, for example joint pain without seeking medical examination.

Of course, in many cases, hard to make an informed decision on whether it is or is not one of those life or death scenarios in many cases.

This isn’t just the scamming internet randos, it goes into pretty high level business consulting.

“We just hired a company that has never worked in our field who doesn’t employ anyone who has worked in our field to tell us how to work in our field better than we do today, this should be great!”

They always act so shocked that the consultancy did them zero good after giving them a few months.

The existing network will be gone within a few years. By design. If all goes well for SpaceX, it will have been replaced by a new network, which will also be gone within a few years.

Just pointing out that the existing network can’t be relied upon without continued re-investment constantly. It’s hard to build up a strong first mover advantage when the fruits of the effort burn up in the atmosphere routinely.

Even if they did believe in the possibilities, they are likely eager to offload in favor of a more diversified investment strategy.

Most folks I know that even think their company is in decent enough shape sell off RSUs quick as they can because they broadly don’t trust having a bunch in a single company stock. Especially if that stock collapsing would likely correlate with them losing their paycheck too.

here’s no world in which current shareholders don’t make fuckoff amounts of profit.

Well some of the shareholders, clearly none of the peope who had to wait for the IPO are going to make some unless they managed to sell off in the 4 days after IPO.

Beyond that, we don’t know that much about the pre-IPO costs and how low it can go for them to still make out like bandits.

It’s a logical outcome. The big studios are risk-averse. Why bother with something that hasn’t been already ‘proven’, and also if they think something has gone “out of fashion”, then similarly don’t risk revisiting something that will make them look dated.

The pleasant creative outcomes stem from people who want to do it for the sake of doing it rather than constrained by predicted business results. It’s by no means a guarantee of quality, a lot of Indie stuff sucks, but certainly being overly business minded inhibits anything ‘different’ coming out.

Indeed, usually a NIMBY is seen as bad because while they do want the value of the thing they reject, they just don’t want to deal with the downsides personally.

Here the folks are generally already satisfied with what the existing infrastructure provides, so if there’s no datacenter growth overall, that’s fine by them.

If the enthusiasts get interior speakers to vroom at them, fine. The ones where they point the speakers to the world though…

But ultimately, after the entire history of cars being “vroom means fast”, I think it is a tough pill for them to swallow that it isn’t a necessary facet of going fast.

I have seen this argument before and it doesn’t make sense even in theory.

I used to work at a company that did open source work and also proprietary work with third party closed source code. The company didn’t let anyone who had seen proprietary code contribute to open source, because they felt once a person ‘learned’ from a proprietary codebase, then it’s too risky if similar looking code lands in a project.

Imagine if someone saw the source code for Excel. Then sometime later they notice that Calc didn’t have a feature that Excel did, and contributed an implementation of the feature. Even if they hadn’t been looking directly at the Excel source code in the moment of implementation, you think Microsoft would be so “understanding” when they see someone that once worked on Excel contributing what could be construed as infringing?

The AI companies also seem to acknowledge this, as they have offerings that promise not to use your proprietary code as training fodder. If it is not a risk of infringement, then why would it matter to promise that the proprietary code is kept out of training data? Though it was short lived, why would OpenAI have even made a deal to license Disney material if it’s all fair use anyway? If this sort of stuff is fair game, why do they get so pissy when other companies distill models?

Even as the AI company’s have roughly defended this scenario, their defense should be a cause for concern for users. Generally they say that anything they do with things they can read is ‘fair use’, and when exhibits of clearly infringing outputs are given, they respond with the model only did that because the user’s prompt directed it, and thus the responsibility for infringement should be with the AI user, not the engine that produced the infringing output. So the possibility of an unwitting infringement is possible as the AI companies explicitly say it’s the fault of the user even if it happens.

But we come to your last point, that essentially at this point, the whole thing is ‘too big to fail’ and thus the practical risk is low. Which is true. It’s just a bit disheartening that these companies are given free reign to interpret intellectual property law whichever way is convenient in the moment.

Note a key point of contention is how the training data is used and whether it is effectively discarding copyright. If you invested time making an open source project to do something people appreciate and you get attribution as a result, you may be unhappy that a model trained on your stuff can let a user prompt up an embedded implementation of what your project does without any attribution.

This pretty much applies to all models. No one limited training data to explicitly public domain stuff.

I think broadly most people are less bothered by what the GenAI can do, but more bothered by what experiences are inflicted upon them by other people using the tech.

All well and good if it can so code reviews and code gen at your behest and you can evaluate and get as much as you think you can out of it, but other people are enabled to be amazingly more obnoxious about it.

“Slop” is mostly because people were inclined to do the slop level quality, but were self limited by the reality their poor ideas were roughly as hard to do as much better ideas. Now AI accelerates people that are not concerned with quality or specifics way more than it can accelerate people that care about specifics and quality.

V100s are ancient in a market obsessed with the very very latest.

The datacenters are unlikely to bother directly with eBay, but they have asset recovery companies that will take the stuff off their hands and seek buyers, including over eBay.

They mostly don’t, but this is also not how the datacenters cool them.

A datacenter will either have an open water loop, or an all in one taking heat to a more advantagous place for a radiator to be, or at the very least better managed airflow with bigger fans and more specific air baffles.

This thing has no such luxury and has a small area and unknown broader thermal context, so screaming it is to make up for the limitations of the scenario.

Yes, in every objective way better.

Though it is oddly understated. You put pedal down, you feel it in your gut but it just does it without drama. No roar, no shifting, just immediate “here you go”.

I see that Hyundai made the equivalent of cards in the spokes, fake roar, fake shifting. As stupid as that is, it might be an option to feel a bit more of the “drama” of fast ICE.

Ok, so music education specifically… Sadly I can see that.

How to just play instruments and general basic features of genres… I could see generative AI able to do things on that front. Most notably ability to analyze your performance and identify gaps. Basic rote stuff without need for creativity or soul. The same stuff that countless musicians have already done. I don’t think there is a need to genAI up pre-recorded, non interactive lessons, but I could buy interactive AI experience as being feasible and competitive.

At least in theory, though I see that video of someone asking for feedback on their music and it’s just literal random farting and the AI was still quite complimentary. But Iif someone told me someone curated a more specialized GenAI experienced that worked better in the context… I would at least believe in the feasibility.

I have, it’s not an improvement over musicians. I see no way it could help a musician. I can see how it could help a non musician generate something that can pass for music, but I don’t see a musician getting use out of AI.

For writing music, if you could write music before, AI can’t help you. If you know how but just have a creative block, random AI crap won’t be any better in a musicians hands than a random person.

When it comes to performing, largely virtual instruments without AI could already handle those credibly. Stuff like violin might have taken longer, but it got there. The one exception is vocals, where vocaloid was about as far as non AI could get and while interesting, no one was going to mistake vocaloid for real singer. AI vocals can pass for a phoned in vocal performance. But I’d just as soon have a real singer, there’s no shortage thanks to decades of music and the Internet.

Bad news, if AI causes musicians to be denied a livelihood, it doesn’t matter if the musician adopts AI or not.

The mechanism for this would be that random slop generator is valued as highly as human written/performed music, and no amount of using AI will keep the musician “ahead” of the curve.

If the good musician uses AI with the same care taken for their own music, it probably won’t speed up the creative process.

Depressingly, I’ve seen enough slop released as “music” that I can believe the music economy has been terribly diluted by AI, but adopting AI won’t fix the problem for the musician that already has the skills to not need AI.

There is some ai company that routinely spams my work email. Various typical vague, “AI will fix everything with your work” promises.

Then some report came out that 95% of business AI adoption failed. I figured either it would be ignored, or some response explaining how the study was mistaken or didn’t say what folks said it did.

Instead, that company said “Study shows that 95% of business use of AI fails, you don’t want to be in that 95%, so use our services to make sure you are in that 5%”. Had to hand it to them, they really found a way to steer into the skid.

I agree it is a crap comparison, just warning that even as the slop straight from the LLM is not copyrightable, blend in a little human touch up and it is “blessed” into being copyrighted. So it’s of little consequence unless the operator just passes it through untouched or makes it somehow easy to identify and remove the human tweaks.

In terms of slopping up a rip off under the assumption that it would obviously be the same as the original slop operators starting point, AI companies in their defense have already stated that operators can violate copyright implicitly as they legally declared they aren’t on the hook for any resultant infringement…