DebtDeflation

There have been a few recent stories about businesses finding themselves spending more on tokens than they were spending on the workers these AI Agents were supposed to have replaced.

compounds need to undergo a rigorous regiment of empiric testing before they are given to potentially millions of people

Particularly when the mechanism behind most of these peptides comes down to "promotes more rapid cell growth". The intent may be to repair the skin, muscles, or ligaments, but biology is rarely that specific.

The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads.

Ads won't go away. They'll just move from infesting websites to infesting AI chatbots.

Agree. People understand and accept firing for performance issues. People understand and accept layoffs when they're a rare event needed to save the company from bankruptcy. What's not understandable or acceptable to most is the current trend of companies doing annual or even quarterly layoffs as an ongoing way to manage earnings.

This is why I've started telling younger people in the industry (I'm 52) "Don't worry about giving two weeks notice or doing knowledge transfer, it's not your problem. If you accept an offer and a better offer comes in before you start, take it and don't think twice. If the better offer comes in after you started, quit and take it, and don't think twice. If you're in the middle of a critical project at work and they're depending on you when a better offer comes in, take it and walk away." Loyalty in employment relations has been dead for a long time, since before I started working, but now it seems that even basic decorum on the part of employers is dead as well, and there's no reason to allow it to be asymmetric.

Once you get outside the SV and NYC bubbles, the vast majority of kids do not have their own laptops in the US. Phones, obviously are somewhat more common, but as even you note that's mainly with regard to teenagers - the average 10 year old in middle America does not have their own phone.

Age verification at the OS level makes no sense to me. Most households aren't going to have a separate device for every family member and so you will end up with a tablet or computer set up by one of the parents (and thus having their age stored) that will be used by both parents and children. Likewise, people generally won't create a separate account for every potential user.

This comment brought me back in time 40+ years to a Saturday morning perched in front of our TV. Thank you.

Could you imagine giving MetaClaw full access to your local file system, email, web browser, and all other applications? What could possibly go wrong.

Nvidia's "rack scale" machines like GB200-NVL72s and GB300-NVL72s are basically a fully built rack you roll into a DC and plug into power and network. In that case, Oracle should probably just buy the rack-scale Vera Rubins when they come out instead of Blackwells and roll them into their new DCs.

This is what I don't understand. Why is the article making the assumption that the DC itself is tied to a particular GPU generation? AWS doesn't knock down a building and start over every time Intel releases a new Xeon.

a CTO of a F100 company explicitly state that whether AI is driving efficiency or not, the capital investment, and more importantly, the promises of efficiency to investors will mean some people will be let go

That seems like an insane gamble to me. Lay off all the workers now and hope that AI can deliver on its promise to replace them some time in the indeterminate future.

At this point it seems the entire AI Safety/Ethics debate was nothing more than a Marketing campaign to hype up the capabilities of the models - get people to think that if they're potentially dangerous that must mean they're so capable and they need to sign up for a subscription.

the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023

The overhiring took place from mid 2020 through mid 2022. The reversal into layoffs started in late 2022 and was in full swing in 2023. While the overhiring problem was real, the correction was largely complete over a year ago. The layoffs we're seeing today have nothing to do with overhiring and everything to do with managing earnings to sustain equity valuations.

Totally agree. And it goes beyond criminal history. Just because I choose to make a dataset publicly available doesn't mean I want some AI memorizing it and using it to generate profit.

Sure, but people will just drive to the next closest airport and fly. Quarantine makes no sense as an explanation without accompanying roadblocks.

It's shocking to me how prevalent this "who needs Salesforce when everyone can just vibe code their own CRM from scratch in a day" narrative has become in the business press. Like, what???

Oracle is a perfect example of using empty AI partnership announcements to goose the stock price and also a perfect example of how unsustainable of a strategy it is.

Given that they have around 44,000 employees in total and they surely aren't firing all of their managers, it would seem they have a lot of managers. The press release indicates most of the reduction is in IT, so internal operations, not Engineering/Product or Sales/Marketing.

Specifically, exposure during fetal development, and the changes it causes are potentially life-lasting.

Information Retrieval followed by Summarization is how I view it.

these modern social media and influencer versions of Stoicism feel like something else entirely

Yes, the pop philosophy folks tend to confuse Stoicism with Spartanism, just like they confuse Epicureanism with Hedonism. It also helps to have a basic understanding of ancient Aretaic (Virtue) Ethics and the context in which some of these works were written (e.g., was one work or school of thought developed in response to some other one that preceded it).

As always, it's best to read the original works, and in the case of the Stoics (Epictetus, Aurelius, Seneca) they're really not difficult reads assuming a decent modern translation.

Also stay away from the manosphere influencers who peddle the weird self help stuff you allude to, whether under the guise of Stoicism or anything else.

Eating real foods (e.g., whole foods rather than highly processed foods) is good advice overall. But replacing mono and poly unsaturated fats with saturated fats is total nonsense. We have thousands of studies spanning decades showing that increased saturated fat consumption leads to elevated LDL-C and elevated LDL-C is causitively associated with higher rates of CVD. There's no reason to replace olive oil with butter and beef tallow.

Hopefully they plan to invest in the technology and not just eliminate a competitor.

And two years prior IBM acquired Ahana (PrestoDB SaaS). Totally agree that businesses need to much more carefully assess the risks of moving to these hosted open source platforms. Reminds me of when over a decade ago companies moved to Snowflake for their DWs because "our Teradata costs are out of control".

A 25% reduction is huge, even if you account for the fact that people who get vaccines tend to be more health conscious to begin with, when you consider that outside of the very sick and very old Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.

So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted?

CEOs have been sold on the ludicrous idea that "AI" will replace 60-80% of their total employee headcount over the next 2-3 years. This is also priced into current equity valuations.

Yes. GTS was infrastructure services and was spun off. What's left is the old GBS - business services and systems implementation services.

Likewise with experienced devs who find themselves out of work due to the neverending mass layoffs.

There's a huge difference between the perspective of someone currently employed versus that of someone in the market for a role, regardless of experience level. The job market of today is nothing like the job market of 3 years ago. More and more people are finding that out every day.

Honestly, just learn it like anything else. Understand the basic components of an internal combustion engine (block, crankshaft, rods, pistons, camshafts, cylinder heads, valves, intake and exhaust manifolds), the 4 cycles the engine goes through (intake, compression, power, and exhaust), how fuel delivery and ignition systems work. And then there are tons of resources on tuning and you can get the software for a laptop.

More like financial engineering. When Wall Street demands ever increasing EPS growth, but revenues are flat or declining and you don't have cash to buy back shares, cost cutting is the only option. Unfortunately, labor costs are the bulk of most companies' costs, so that means layoffs. It would be nice if companies had a financial horizon that extended beyond the current quarter but that seems more and more like a pipe dream.