> credit card itself can’t be used to ad targeting
Incorrect.
Credit card networks / issuers explicitly describe using payment, spending, and your personal data,
for marketing, personalization, audience segmentation, and advertising.
Mastercard’s privacy notice states that it may use personal and transaction-related information to:
“Provide you with personalized services and recommendations”
“Offer and support loyalty programs”
“Provide content and advertising tailored to your individual interests”
“Analyze spending behavior to improve the effectiveness of marketing programs and advertising.”
Visa has also historically offered an opt-out specifically for using card transaction data…
If only I could get rich, structured data access to my spending data... but many banks only allow pdf statement downloads, in inconvenient ways, and their UIs for drilling down into data...
The way things are going, we can pretty much forget about AV2 hardware encoders in PCs anytime soon. All the newest, best chip capacity is being completely hogged by Apple and AI companies.
Unless chipmakers port the AV2 design to older, cheaper nodes, it’s just not happening for average users. We’ll probably see some Chinese TV chip makers throw in an AV2 decoder just to check a box, but as an actual encoder? I wouldn't count on it anytime soon.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic, Intel and AMD aren't going to stop making CPUs, and if their integrated graphics adds AV2 it will be motivation enough for others to follow.
Ram and Ssd is just the start capitalism dictates profits will suck all production to AI. CPu have 3-5 year production timeline ie cpu prices will start going up a lot more as previous production contracts expire you might even get shortages new consumer cpus won't be affordable or spread as fast as you think.
What? All are niche, and video calls are at best quite rare. People still prefer audio calls or even text messages mostly.
Video calls is just a feature expected on smart phones, and it means there we better have an hardware encoder.
I don't know if AV2 is defining them, but it needs hard "profiles", that to give a scope for hardware implementations.
Well, it all depends on how AV2 is designed, and defining those profiles is very probably a feedback loop between the AV2 designers and hardware implementors.
Screen recording is not niche, anyone who works remotely probably does video calls daily and the others are somewhat more niche but I'd guess that at least 50-70% of people do at least one of these things
I think, screen recording is ultra-niche, and I don't know why, I feel better when I know my OS is unable to do just that.
(As a side project, I am writting my walyand compositor, and I know that if it supports screen recording, that's going to be something certainly hacky and I can disable at compile time).
Do you not ever want to show someone something on your screen? For a bug report or to demonstrate a project you’re working on? Or do a screen share to ask for help with setting something up (which is admittedly a bit different from a recording but only in that it’s live)?
I can see a lot of non-techy people not knowing how to do this but among people who know how to do it I bet it’s above 50% who use it
Youtube has also started AI translating other languages written in roman letters to english in chat for live streamers etc. Will be interesting to see what happens when they start doing this with google translate etc. English usually picks up words from other languages but if everything gets translated it will be interesting to see what happens. I am wondering if it will translate the slang that the current generation uses that goes over my head a lot of the time.
Its not like the non frontier are not improving. If someone can use deepseek to get 90% of the work done for $100 then pay another $100 to anthropic or openai to complete it I think they will rather do that than pay anthropic or openai for $1000.
For Deepseek and other openweight models, you can use non-Chinese hosted infrastructure that offer zero data retention and still save a whole lot of money. A large corp could even host their own Deepseek v4.0 Flash model internally for some basic work.
Paint and finish on an airplane has to account for a lot more than aerodynamics. So you need to build it from the ground up as that coating could be the difference between the surviving daily temperature fluctuation for 10000 trip vs 1000 trips
Lol it was not ip theft it was American and European companies building factories in China themselves teaching them how to manufacture use their cheap labour. Well they learned and as they were the dong the manufacturing got better at it. I believe the current aerospace industry which the US leads in is also result of IP theft from the British then out innovating them.
> I believe the current aerospace industry which the US leads in is also result of IP theft from the British then out innovating them.
Jet engines, proximity fuzes, radar, how to make a nuclear weapon, etc. are all examples of British / Commonwealth technology "gifted" or "traded" to the USofA during the WWII years in exchange for production.
So, not IP theft .. but absolutely foreign ideas taken in by the US and built upon.
HN hates non competition clauses in contracts unless it involves Chinese workers.
But I think we underestimate the Chinese diaspora. They had been running factories, shops and banks from Singapore to Suriname for generations and answered the call from the PRC to share that knowledge base.
Chinese manufacturers will probably takeover consumer ram that most of us use as current manufacturing contracts expire and Samsung SK and micron move all their production to HBM for data centers. Corsair recently released chinese chips based DDR5 sticks.
I've so far been anti-chinese memory in my recommendations, not because it's Chinese (I don't really trust any big organisation/govt other than the EU?) but because they've been very new, and it's not worth PC stability for saving $50.
However with corsair giving it their blessing, and their technology having matured a bit (a lot?), and more reviews showing good stability (longevity I suppose, is TBD) they're definitely worth recommending these days.
These companies are spending more money than budgets of many countries enough to add 2+% to the US GDP so the amount of loss for if it comes all crashing down will be huge.
if these companies go bankrupt, they will have spent (not lost) all their money, the large amounts of money that they got from investors. That money generated profits for other companies they bought stuff from, and income for their employees, and capital gains for other people if AIco acquired other companies.
the market cap of a company is computed by the current price of a company's shares, the last price paid; not all the shares of the company were bought at that price, the ones who got shares cheaper are showing paper profits, unrealized. Those who have already cashed out have money in their bank accounts that was transferred from people who wanted to get in. If the company goes bankrupt, their shares will be worthless, but the money they paid for them still remains in the accounts of people who sold their shares: the money was not lost even if some people lost money.
I'm not going to keep going through it but the reason it works to value things the way we do is that the values are comparable and they frequently work out, so snapshots of the economy and the participants are comparable. But "losses" are not like taking gold and feeding it into some deep fold in the earth where it will disappear into the molten middle of earth.
Stock valuations are "expectations for the future". Those expectations weren't money, they were lottery tickes where the lottery consisted of human creativity and human effort. People buying and selling share are moving real money around to trade the expectations. The money didn't go anywhere, it's still there, it's just that expectations for the future have been reduced. It all boils down to humans trading some of their time and potential on a bet that things work out. Some people's effort gets more rewarded than others. Not every team wins the world cup, but people like to play and like to watch.
That’s an overly simplified model. AI companies spending results in infrastructure beyond the company such as manufacturing capacity, power lines, software systems, and even individual expertise.
If they fail then the negative impact ripples through the economy due to misallocation of resources.
consider all the companies in a market and those that feed that market to be one virtual mega company, add up all the valuations and revenue streams, costs, etc and aggregate all the investors into one. Nothing changes about the picture I drew. We simplify models to make the real world understandable.
>negative impact ripples through the economy due to misallocation of resources
free or relatively free financial markets are the only way, the best way, the ne plus ultra of ways we know to allocate capital, we have no better way than for the owner of the capital and the reapers of the loss or reward to make a considered opinion that is risk "impedance" matched. By definition, the market does not "misallocate" capital, it optimally allocates it.
your theory is that we could somehow know the future, but that's a fallacy.
Free market efficiency is inherently tied to having multiple companies. Treating the entire economy as a single company gives nonsensical results because it fundamentally differs from what actually occurs. You might as well compare the economy to a game of tick tack toe, inherent complexity isn’t something you can simplify it has meaningful consequences.
Your ideas like many other ideas are simply wrong.
> could somehow know the future
Perfect accuracy isn’t the only possibility here, there’s levels of error.
Our system involves intermediaries between the actual owners of capital and the allocation of that capital who have very different incentives. When the worst possibility is missing a bonus there’s little difference between losing 10% of an investors money and 100%. That results in inefficiency through the misalignment of incentives.
That is actually true, and thus there’s no way to gloss over that truth without simply being wrong.
>Treating the entire economy as a single company gives nonsensical results
trust me bub, I've studied much more econ than you. If a competitive market sets the prices (check, that's what is happening), and you want to analyze statistics of a sector (check, that's what we are doing), you can take those competitive prices as "given" and hold them constant, and consolidate the assets of in industry into one virtual entity. No claims were being made about competition, the claim is that "it is validate to consolidate statistic of what you are trying to study.
"how much did the AI sector make last year? how much will it make next year?" is not answered by running a simulation of competitive marketplace with production functions.
>>could somehow know the future
>Perfect accuracy isn’t the only possibility here, there’s levels of error.
if you deviate from the market's prediction of the future, you are increasing your levels of error; why do that?
Then try and justify why you say shit this clueless:
> how much will it make next year?" is not answered by running a simulation of competitive marketplace with production functions.
Profits next year very much depend on the number of companies involved 1 vs 100 is not going to give the same results. Like I hope you realize how false what you just said was. Because if you actually believe this there’s literally no point in talking with you.
>That’s an overly simplified model. AI companies spending results in infrastructure beyond the company such as manufacturing capacity, power lines, software systems, and even individual expertise.
in a competitive marketplace, economic profit will go to zero. so whether an AI company buy or rents outside infrastructure, or builds it itself doesn't matter, it makes no difference. Therefore, if your argument is "outside infrastructure X", you can see the meaning of that by looking at "assume the company bought up the whole industry including outside infrastructure, then go back and look what I said and it still applies" A company monopolizing outside infrastructure for its own use would not abuse its monopoly against itself, but even if it did, makes no difference the extra profit and extra loss would balance out. Would it abuse its monopoly against downstream customers? if we use the existing market prices unchanged in our example, that is analyzing the case where it does not, which is the case that is comparable to the current situation.
or to put it another way, let's say these are all publicly traded companies competing. What if I told you "hey, i've investigated the ownership of all these public shares, guess what, Elon Musk owns them all, he owns every share of every company in AI, and all the infrastructure suppliers. Does that change the analysis from what we see in the marketplace? no, it doesn't. You want to draw a bigger circle around more affected parties, the suppliers to the infrastructure suppliers: OK, Elon owns those too it turns out.
nobody is analyzing the future here, we're talking about the case of AI going bust, not trying to predict AI going bust.
if were were going to project the future, we still would not do it with a simulation using functions to model companies to try to come up with meaningful profit numbers, we would project profits (and costs and revenues) based on margins of similar industries
> in a competitive marketplace … current situation.
Lots of words to say you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
At the most simple level monopolies extract profits through raising prices above that of a competitive market. This price increase reduces total sales even as it drives up profits.
As such the existence or non existence of a monopoly would change how much energy/etc AI was consuming among a host of other effects completely independent of how much utility it provided.
again, nothing that you are talking about has anything to do with the conversation I initiated. (IBM used to be a monopoly, now they're not. How much power did they do they use? we don't need economics, we just look at their power bill, it's that much, that's the impact they have on the power grid.)
if you want to sound like you know what you are talking about, don't talk about "total sales", you want to talk about quantity demanded at the market clearing price vs the monopoly price, and the effect that has on producer surplus.
and what is bad about a monopoly in economic terms is not that they extract a higher price and profit from their smaller number of customers (those customer choose to purchase the product because it's worth it to them), it's the dead weight loss which represents unmet demand which slows the economy overall
We can’t look at next year’s power bill today. Hell finding their power bills from 1930 isn’t trivial either, thus we model the universe and test those models rather than just making up nonsense models that look pretty.
> that's the impact they have on the power grid.
That’s only the direct effect, the indirect effects get way more complicated.
The fact you’re constantly demonstrating profound ignorance is why I am treating you like a 5 year old. You understood what I said and had no defense, thus my use of simple terms was entirely justified. Using more words to say exactly what I just said doesn’t change my opinion. Instead try and apply that line of reasoning to your earlier statements and find the issue, that would demonstrate some actual understanding.
PS: The economic harm from monopolies extends to R&D etc but …
Keep peddling that capitalist realism. “There is no alternative!” The market may not misallocate capital, by definition, but it very clearly and routinely misallocates resources. Let me guess: you’re doing relatively well for yourself?
I know what i'm talking about, and you don't. That does not come from me being rich, it comes from me being raised as a far left-socialist, and being on the spectrum, and then studying economics and finance in graduate school and realizing what was true and what was wishing. Capitalism and free competitive markets solve exactly the problem that centrally planned economies are explicitly trying to solve but always fail to. Not only that but with predictable results. As you can now see, I not only have a heart and I have a brain, and I have education. And I have the inculcated capacity to read the socialism no matter how its hidden and between what lines.
you tried to dismiss me by saying "oh but you're doing well" as if that meant anything. You brought it up, not me, but inasmuch as it does means anything, it suggests I'm winning the race that you purport to be an expert at.
I do not come from wealth, my family is largely working class. I have grown my wealth dramatically because I understand how the market works. I didn't know a priori what would happen, I just took what they taught me in school and applied it with extreme discipline and without fear. Turns out that works.
>The equity of the economy is not very similar at all to a game
the economy is about efficiency, and supply meeting demand, and fair exchange of factors and products for pareto optimality. that is what equity should mean but it's not what you mean by it. Your equity lifts only some boats and at the cost of lowering and even sinking others. Nobody can prove except by simple observation that your equity does not in fact lift boats.
Hilarious; such ugly arrogance. Of course it “works” to the extent that you describe, otherwise we wouldn’t be in exactly the situation that I’m against. Where you came from doesn’t matter at all. The system is working for you so you are for it.
You assume too much, that I am going to argue for centrally planned economies or something. I never claimed or implied I was an expert, or to what degree I’m “winning the race” (what a horrible way to think about human society!). I think it’s either an absurd failure of imagination or simple invested ideology, that we have to have either hardcore “free” markets (free for who?) or strict Soviet-style planning (typically with the assumption that we have only the knowledge and technology from that period too, for some reason). I think we can do a lot better than both.
Your impressive-sounding words about efficiency quickly fall apart for anyone who has actually looked at the dirty end of capitalist processes. Inefficiencies abound; the market optimises for only money which a lot of the time is a stupidly poor abstraction of the stuff of life that actually matters. And that abstraction enables and justifies untold cruelty and exploitation.
If you were a sort of capitalist-pessimist, saying that you didn’t like it but this seemed to be the least-worst option, I’d think you were woefully unambitious, but at least some way understandable. But you arrogantly defend this system, and brag about how your massive brain managed to exploit it. Welcome to HN, I guess.
economic efficiency does not refer to productive effiency, it refers to having prices that allow people to make optimal purchase decisions, and whether competition ensures prices will reflect costs.
so, according to you, you are not arrogant, you just legitimately know what's best for everybody else, and you are virtuous to boot?
writing tip: take all the emotionally charged words out of your prose, they don't have the effect you think they do.
I knew you were speaking more technically about economic efficiency, but what does that matter when the real processes are often so inefficient? Or when it results in so many bad outcomes?
I won’t be taking “writing tips” from you; my words are an expression, not pure calculated rhetoric. I never thought I was going to change your mind, I wanted you to face a teeny tiny bit of resistance.
Expressing an opinion and making observations is not arrogance. I said “I think” and “I’m against”, I never claimed any virtue, I didn’t brag, and I didn’t tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. According to me, I just have a view about part of the way the world works, that’s it. Reading tip: get better at it.
This is way, way more neat and tidy than reality. When these stocks start to sink there is going to be an enormous evaporation of value from the overall market because people in riskier investments will get scared that other people will get scared. This will scare people with slightly safer investments, on up the line. Capital will dry up and velocity of money will drop. The market is not made by rational robots, it's run by barely sentient apes just minutes from reverting to crushing things with rocks. The markets run on vibes and fever dreams of hitting the next big thing.
That's one way to look at it, though it feels like you could say the same about the dot-com crash or 2008 which isn't too helpful. At the very least (extremely high-paying) jobs can be actually lost
Loss to who? Now all of a sudden, we are caring about investors and sovereign funds?
And I think we passed the threshold for crash down for AI, even if AI companies wont be that profitable. Nvidia/cloud providers will be profitable as long as there is demand for AI.
Their loss, big deal. Let them suffer. The problem is that when they crash they bring a lot of other stuff down along with them. The people who lost money in the 2008 crash were not the ones who suffered the aftermath.
Uhh I think a lot of people and their families likely have investment exposure to nvidia/hyperscalers. if places like Amazon spent unrealistically on ai or their stock goes down massively that could mean major job losses too.
If AI companies aren't that profitable...then they're going to stop spending so much money on GPUs to train AI models. A gigantic amount of Nvidia's profits would go bust overnight.
The cost(and size) to train models is also increasing and is still 60% of the cards that Nvidia is selling. Losing 60% of your most profitable revenue stream I think would do bad for a company regardless of how much inference is increasing "dramatically"(all this means is the GPUs are dead sooner and the cost to do this massive inference increases too)
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