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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • And there have been a lot of discussions over the decades over artists/“aritists” who overly sampled a song and became orders of magnitude bigger than the original artist.

    Its a balancing act. Most people aren’t going to get too annoyed if someone uses generative AI to help build a backing track or a beat to go with their song.

    The issue is that so much of this slop is “make a song like this” from scratch. And while there is a lot to be said about manufactured acts and the role of major labels… one of the few good things about spotify et al destroying the music industry is that it has become so much easier for smaller independent artists to get a foothold.

    And all this does is add more slop to push them back out. And the difficulties with detecting slop will mean people will be a lot less likely to ever check out a smaller band when they can instead listen to whatever the latest major act that beyonce et al vouched for is.









  • “aren’t making a profit” gets into the mess that is book keeping and is a giant rabbit hole people actively avoid because it is just easier to get angry at stupidity rather than complex malfeasance.

    But what makes something an “AI data center” outside of the branding?

    The reality is that it is a shit ton of computers connected to a really fast internet connection. Preferably through a properly managed set of switches but you do you. And the reason that we still mostly use GPUs for “AI” rather than highly specialized hardware (although, nvidia DID just buy groq a few months back…) is for that reason. They might do linear algebra of quarter precision floats REALLY well but they also do linear algebra of single and double precision floats pretty well too. And the CPUs and mobos (that are mostly optimized for data movement to offload to said GPUs) are no slouches either.

    Which is what most of these companies are planning for. openai is, arguably, really fucking stupid. Whereas anthropic have shown decent signs of “diversifying” as it were. And nvidia… if we lived in a world where they could get enough RAM I think they would be fine. As it stands… Jensen (and a LOT of people) are kinda fucked and I expect to see a hard pivot over the next 12 months.

    Because if we banned ALL generative AI tomorrow? The people who think you can’t use a computer without installing litellm first are gonna be fucked. But everyone else will just put other workloads on there and be… “fine” is a strong word but they won’t go bankrupt. And the data centers themselves will still be incredibly valuable.


  • Think about the dotcom bubble. We went from having all of these businesses that shot to the moon for valuation… and then it collapsed.

    Amazon and Google and basically all of FAANG/MAMA beg to differ.

    And basically every company still has a website and ecommerce in general is still massive.

    The Dot Com bubble was brutal. But it was not a collapse of the industry. It was much more of a correction after so many companies blew up to sell services like “rate my dog” and many of the smaller ecommerce sites were absorbed by larger ones.

    And that is likely what will happen with generative AI. I expect a MUCH bigger bloodbath for openai but anthropic seem to have scaled a lot better (although they also are going into their IPO with a massive data breach…). But expect most of the smaller companies to similarly get gutted.

    But

    Makes sense. It takes years to complete construction projects and budgets always overrun. AI is a fad for most companies trying to get into it.

    Data Centers exploding… honestly have little to do with AI. No… not the way they explode in the UAE… metaphorical exploding. The reality is that data centers are GOOD money. Basically every company needs data hosting and offloading internal infrastructure is… honestly a really smart play. Same with the massive push for streaming of basically everything so that nobody owns anything and subscribe to everything. You want regional data centers and… this is how you get them.


  • Gun “finerprinting” is and isn’t bullshit.

    The reality is that for a given configuration of a gun, you do get some rather distinct markings on a bullet. It is less “We can 100% determine this bullet was fired by this bigoted dipshit’s gun so let’s hand it to him so he can dramatically show he took the firing pin out” but you can get within a pretty high level of confidence.

    Unless… the shooter cleaned their gun. Even just field stripping can often be enough. Let alone if they actually remove the firing pin and reinstall it (not even replacing).

    So it is not useful if someone escaped for days and nobody could find them until they got narced on. It IS useful if you catch them on their way home and they don’t know to do this.

    But also? it depends on the bullet being intact. Which, as mentioned above, is not often the case for stuff like 5.56 in soft tissue.









  • I mean… supply chain hardening has been a concern for most of the three letter agencies (and governments around the world) for years. There are very serious concerns over how basically every NIC comes out of a factory in China and what the implications of that are.

    If DoD actually do have a list of vetted and hardened products, that WOULD be a very good baseline for if you care about security at all. Less so from the US government, but that can then be compared against similar lists from other countries.

    And considering that basically every TLA has the same concerns, if those orgs are willing to spend their budget? DoE and the like ain’t gonna complain.