jmaestrooper

Forecasters expect Friday’s report on gross domestic product to show the economy expanded 2.7% in 2025, a solid pace by any standard for a developed country.

I would be very curious to see if any circular deals aka funny money have been factored in there.

Also, despite literal hundreds of billions presumably invested in data centers where's all the construction, energy, communication, and other infrastructure build activity?

The latest monthly jobs report published on Feb. 11 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed job growth was weaker in 2025 than initially reported, but it also showed hiring picked up in January.

The 2025 numbers were revised down (by the largest number in history - again), and no changes have been made to the methodology/models, which means that January data will be revised, too, so nothing shows that "hiring picked up"

Is 75 minutes really considered that long of a time?

From my experience in setting up and running support services, not really. It's actually pretty darn quick.

First, the issue is reported to level 1 support, which is bunch of juniors/drones on call, often offshore (depending on time of the day) who'll run through their scripts and having determined that it's not in there, escalate to level 2.

Level 2 would be more experienced developer/support tech, who's seen a thing or two and dealt with serious issues. It will take time to get them online as they're on call but not online at 3am EST, as they have to get their cup of joe, turn on the laptop etc. Would take them a bit to realize that the fecal matter made contact with the rotating blades and escalate to level 3.

Which involves setting up the bridge, waking up the decisions makers (in my case it was director and VP level), and finally waking up the guy who either a) wrote all this or b) is one of 5 or 6 people on the planet capable of understanding and troubleshooting the tangled mess.

I do realize that AWS support might be structured quite a bit differently, but still... 75 minutes is pretty good.

Edit: That is not to say that AWS doesn't have a problem with turnover. I'm well aware of their policies and tendency to get rid of people in 2/3 years, partially due to compensation structures where there's a significant bump in compensation - and vesting - once you reach that timeframe.

But in this particular case I don't think support should take much of a blame. The overall architecture on the other hand...

Hardware doesn't just pop out of the thin air. Data centers need to be built, GPUs need to be produced, and storage, and other compute, and networking, etc etc. All this needs people. Shouldn't there be boom in construction? Hardware manufacturing?

Obviously it's both. Just like dot-com bubble was, as were countless bubbles before that.

OpenAI burned $6.7bln on R&D with revenue of $4.3 bln in 1st half of 2025. And is planning on raising _trillions_ to build compute/storage for the next gen/AGI. How's this not a bubble?

My guess would be infrastructure. Like brick and mortar, buildings, laying down fiber, installing and setting up servers, and then maintenance. Construction is booming... Or should be. Any day now :)

I very much disagree. Terms and definitions matter, and in this case what you mean by "AI" changes the answer. Again, general-purpose LLMs might be a dead end. Specialized neural networks are not. One might argue that even specialized LLMs (ie fine tuned for code generation) have ways to go, too.

I'm not sure about target audience of the TheRegister but here on HN we should be more precise in our discussion.

Very dumbed-down take on the subject. What's "AI"? ChatGPT and Google AlphaFold are both AI.

I very much doubt speech and voice recognition and synthesis, as well as visual object recognition, are "as good as they will get" (however scary some of the practical applications might look like). Ditto specialized neural networks like aforementioned AlphaFold.

General-purpose chatbots trained on randomly selected data from stolen books and social media (and increasingly on its own slop)? Very likely.

Architectures allowing the said chatbots trigger actions online or (worse yet) IRL? Almost definitely.

Sure, it wasn't bad when IT caused automation and elimination of many job positions and entire occupations, both manual and office. Now that we're on the receiving end of it, it is a bad thing all of a sudden.

As for the upcoming crisis, there's an increase in inequality and further accumulation of wealth among fewer and fewer individuals. As long as these individuals continue to spend their newly acquired wealth to compensate for lower spend by the less fortunate (which is exactly what's been happening), the economy will be fine.

Can someone please refer me to the hard data on "overhiring in 2020"?

I was laid off as part of the initial panic in early 2020. The job market for IT for the entirety of 2020 was dead. D-E-A-D. There was a _very_ small pickup in the summer when people got more optimistic about the vaccines but it waned very quickly.

I'm in the Midwest so it might have been different in the West but I doubt it was that much different.

There was _some_ pickup in 2021, when companies realized the end of the world isn't happening soon, but it was not very significant. IT job market never really normalized, there was some pickup in 2022 but by then LLM hype started causing layoffs to go up and openings down.

The test site is severely damaged, and they don't have another one. It took what ,6 months to rebuild the launch tower after IFT-1? And it wasn't destroyed, just damaged, on the test site the tanks and pipes and all the rest are right near the vehicle so I see a lot of destruction.

So what, 6 to 9 months while they repair/build new test site(s)?

Might as well cut the losses and scrap Block 2 altogether, and move on to Block 3.

Might actually not be a design flaw, just a leak due to rushed production. But these should be caught BEFORE the thing blows up and causes X million worth of damage.

The full and rapid reuseability is the ultimate goal.

Make rocket launches as frequent and routine as commercial plane flights. Whether they use it for Mars or Moon on Earth-to-Earth or anything in between is irrelevant, this will revolutionize entire industries.

Just look at the share of Falcon 9 comparing to all other launch providers, and that one is only half-reuseable. If they manage to get the StarShip right this will be a game changer.

So that's 3 issues in the last 2 flights and one static fire, all different, all with different root causes, all catastrophic. Block 3 will be a different vehicle, should they just skip Block 2 (scrap however many they already built) and move on to Block 3?

Aside from the fact that both were the largest rockets in their time there's literally NOTHING in common between these 2 programs.

Government-run vs private-run (partially govt-bankrolled). Single use vs fully reusable. Moon vs Mars. Traditional development vs iterative ("hardware heavy") development. There's just no parallels whatsoever.

Will the result be the same? We'll see. But the history says don't bet against Elon.

Btw N1 was a failure arguably due to Korolev's death, not his ineptness.