> It may have little to do with winning a board game, and a lot to do with seeing what people will tolerate and what the thresholds are for being called out; it’s a test of one’s intimidation factor.
It’s one of the most famous scenes in The Wire: when Marlo steals a lollipop.
> My impression is that a lot, if not most, anime was always cheap. Lots of stills, few frames, and CGI as soon as it got remotely good enough (and often before). Like Hanna-Barbera cheap. That was my impression when I used to be moderately "into" it 25-ish years ago, but judging from youtube channels like Mother's Basement, it hasn't gotten better.
Individual frames of anime, they generally had a lot more 'packed into' the frame. This is part of the reason the motion wasn't great; they were spending most of their time budget of big flashy frames.
Disney, when they made animation, was more focused on hyper stylized characters that moved in a very specific way. There's an entire book on how to make animation 'The Disney Way." Some friends of mine ended up working in animation, and that's how I learned about this.
> But they do it by squeezing businesses upstream, who end up with even lower margins.
I've done tech projects for supermarkets and I've done tech projects for movie studios.
The thing I noticed about Disney is that they have an entire 'suite' of products. Basically, they can afford to lose money on a movie release if it drives toy sales, or drives attendance at Disneyland or Disneyworld.
> The expensiveness in running them will eventually be solved by cheaper faster hardware.
How?
* Moores Law is almost over. The 5090 improves over the 4090 mostly because of quant improvements.
* even if the hardware improves, there’s a huge incentive to slow roll the next generation. Nobody wants to end up like Sun Microsystems. Sun’s used hardware was faster than its new hardware, once you considered price. Sun ended up competing with its own used equipment.
The most obvious place for improvement is RAM, network and storage.
If someone can bring more RAM onto the market, that will unstick things.
> If that happens the AI companies will first try to negotiate with their creditors and after that likely declare bankruptcy with the creditors taking over what’s left of the assets.
Due to the fact that we’ve already done this before (Enron, Global Crossing) -
I’m willing to bet that there are contracts in place ALREADY, that define what happens in the event of a default.
In particular, I’ll bet that the buildings, the GPUs, the patents, etc…
All of these have probably been accounted for.
I worked at a data center that closed during the WorldCom era, and when they put the padlocks on the door, there were still websites “hosted” from the building.
I don’t know if they killed the power or what. I’d cleared out my desk long before they locked it all up. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these websites couldn’t get their own servers, since ownership was tied up in the courts.
In the Bay Area during that time, there were row upon row of empty office buildings.
> The big thing is, the western world has moved so much of the manufacturing to China
I built my career on Solaris and it got rugpulled by Linux.
That wasn’t because of software, it was because of hardware. Linux’s cost advantage existed because Sun hardware had huge margins, because their software was basically free.
AI will probably be a repeat of this. Whoever can come up with the hardware solution that minimizes the cost per token will win.
I believe the 5090 still holds this crown, but someone certainly knows better than I do.
> GM just did this in the last 30 days [1], and their sales are likely going to be just fine. In fact the auto industry has repeatedly automated jobs over the last 100 years, and they still make decent sales numbers.
I worked at Verizon during their layoffs last year. Biggest layoffs in the USA.
As someone who’s been laid off before, I knew that it generally boosts the stock price.
I bought VZ because of that. It’s up 15% since the layoffs.
Microsoft, an AI stock, is down 30% in the same timeframe.
> Cherrypicked dates? But I'd like to hear analysis comparing the Nixon shock to the covid shock since one was monetary and one was supply and demand.
Of course!
* In 1971 and 2019, the M2 money supply was flooded. In 1971 by the Nixon Shock, in 2019 by Covid: The amount of US dollars that existed between 1961 and 1971 increased by 100%, the amount of US dollars that existed between 1971 and 1981 increased by 253%. Assets are denominated in dollars and the flood of money that the Nixon Shock caused led to the inflation of the late 70s and 80s. The flood of money that Covid caused led to the inflation of the last six years, 2022 in particular.
* The other factor that contributed was the lack of oil supply. In the 1970s, it was caused by a war in the Middle east. Will we see history repeat again? My bet is yes.
Note that the Fed data is difficult to read in the 70s, you'll want to play around with the length of the time window. It's difficult to read because the supply of money has grown so much.
> Organizing and iteration on thoughts is not trivial or easy, but it is very important!
Two of the silliest things that helped me in my career:
* I worked at fast food restaurants in high school. This instills a near pavlovian response to client requests; if at the age of sixteen you can deal with someone who's mad because there isn't enough cheese on their pizza, it goes a long way in the real world.
* My first I.T. job was in an office where the vast majority of the people who worked there had never used a computer at all. Just to stay employed, I had to resist the urge to explain things in a complex way. When I'm trying to sell an idea to a group of people, I do my best NOT to ignore the people in the room who may not understand that idea well. I think that engineers often have a bad habit of getting into engineering arguments with management in the room, where they take things to a level of complexity where management may not understand what's being talked about. Bringing things back down a few levels goes a long way towards getting management to sign off IMHO. Unfortunately, it's a double edged sword, and it can fall flat when management is especially well informed. Classic information asymmetry.
> Indeed, Gemini really is incredible at image analysis. Yesterday I pointed it at some sloppy handwritten notes and asked it to add up the numbers in the right column, and it did it no problem. I've also used it to find out what TV show or actor is on screen, and various other things. It's quite impressive.
I do not know if it works as well as Gemini, but Salesforce (of all places) has a model that does something similar.
What's "neat" about the Salesforce one is that you can run it locally and just iterate it over as many images as you feel like.
For instance, it should be possible to take a movie, pull a hundred images out of the h265 file, have the salesforce model evaluate what is happening at that moment in the movie, and then use that to create an index.
That's just ONE use for it, and I can think of dozens.
On a 5090 it was able to generate text descriptions of a folder full of approximately 500 images in under a minute. (Anecdotal evidence, admittedly.)
> I read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have.
* when interest rates are declining, that’s a feature not a defect
* when interest rates are rising, that’s a defect not a feature
Southwest Airlines built its business on these kinds of bets.
> If a company does something you approve of (e.g. do journalism) and something else you disapprove of (e.g. make canceling hard), is there a good way to signal both as a consumer?
Leave a bad review where their social marketing team will see it.
> Any place that allows easy instantaneous subscription by a simple web form, but makes you call and talk to a person during limited business hours for cancellation
I moved into a new home. I kept the old one for a few weeks extra. Needed time to move out.
I signed up for CenturyLink at my new home.
After six weeks, I tried to turn off internet at my old house.
* I can’t.
* CenturyLink wouldn’t let me cancel, without waiting on hold for an hour or more
* I work overnight
* CenturyLink is open when I’m asleep
So I’m paying for two plans with the same company. Thanks CenturyLink.
I keep trying to convince people that English majors and Philosophy majors will benefit the most from LLMs. English majors in particular, have been trained to be VERY exact in how they word things.
That awareness of how to structure the English language, it will benefit those who use LLMs.
Then again, maybe someone will just make a LLM that’s built to turn poor English and poor reasoning into excellent English and excellent reasoning. Maybe this is just a technical puzzle that needs solving.
It’s one of the most famous scenes in The Wire: when Marlo steals a lollipop.