I suspect this is part of it, but I also suspect that it’s even little things like more people living in dense cities and spending less time in serene nature.

The rise in near sightedness is tied to kids not spending enough time outdoors literally just focusing on things far in the distance, it seems to me that it would be more surprising if there weren’t also related mental health consequences.

Software parents are such absolute horseshit.

Professor with tenure.

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The source control was so smooth and pleasant that it convinced me that git isn’t the be all end all, and the general developer focus was super nice, but some of that tooling was pretty janky, poorly documented, and you had no stack overflow to fall back on. And some of it (like EdenFS), really felt like it was the duct tape holding that overloaded monorepo together (complete with all the jankiness of a duct tape solution).

Facebook uses Mercurial, but when people praise their developer tooling it’s not just that. They’re using their CLI which is built on top of Mercurial but cleans up its errors and commands further, it’s all running on their own virtual filesystem (EdenFS), their dev testing in a customized version of chromium, and they sync code using their own in-house equivalent of GitHub, and all of it connects super nicely into their own customized version of VS Codium.

Microsoft posted a revenue of $211.9 billion for 2023. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of the world’s population uses Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office and loads of online applications run on Microsoft Azure, the economic impact of Microsoft’s products is probably counted in trillions of dollars.

Comparing this to countries with the same ballpark energy consumption, Azerbaijan’s GDP was about $78 billion, Slovakia’s GDP was around $127 billion, and Iceland’s GDP was approximately $30 billion in 2023.

The economic output of Google and Microsoft by far exceeds these countries’ GDPs, highlighting the vast financial scale of these tech giants relative to their substantial electricity consumption.

Oh yeah, it’s crazy to think that! I don’t know where I would have gotten that idea, other than the article that OP linked that we’re all discussing.

Yes, training new AI models uses a bunch of power, so does building out any new infrastructure. Atleast Microsoft and Google use a far high percentage of renewable power than most other industries.

Don’t buy something, and a factory doesn’t need to run to produce it. It’s not privilege, it’s called following a chain of cause and effect.

I mean, companies off shore software development all the time.

It was the Stack Overflow developer survey I believe

As of last year ~70% of software developers were using copilot or a similar AI assistant. The legal field has seen a drop off in junior hires because of AI assistants. Snapchat’s AI filters and tools have long been a huge draw for that platform (and then copied by everyone else to avoid bleeding users), and Bing saw massive user growth after integrating OpenAI.

AI has problems and limitations but it’s absurd to think there’s no demand for it just because it’s pushed by annoying people. Everything with hype will get pushed by annoying people.

What the fuck do you guys think factories do? Just run for no reason? Where do you think the stuff you own, use, and consume comes from?

You also use Gmail and force Google to run their servers to power it.

Reducing your carbon footprint as much as possible is important, but it’s absurd to get mad at companies that power 90% of the world’s businesses for using a bunch of power to do so. It takes power to do those things. Get mad at the companies who are over consuming relative to their peers and those that are driving demand towards unattainable activities. Just getting mad at people for moving and using energy is absurd.

They only do that because they project it to be profitable, i.e. they project demand for it.

It’s also ridiculous to claim that people don’t want it just because you don’t.

No, it’s not.

Them making money implies that they are being paid to use power, which is true. Their absolute carbon footprint is irrelevant given that most of what the carbon they use is at the request of someone else. The metric to judge them on is their carbon footprint relevant to peers.

I.e. it’s not fair to judge a cab company for driving someone somewhere (judge the person choosing to hire a cab), but it is fair to judge them if they use gas guzzlers instead of EVs.

It makes more sense than trying to build Master Chiefs. Robot powered body armour sounds awesome, but in reality it’s a lot more efficient to avoid getting hit then to try and take hits and keep moving, especially if you’re a rich country with an advantage in micropocessing resources (assuming Taiwan doesn’t fall).

What they’re talking about isn’t crazy either, build out a platform that can handle robust military comms, connect it to a modern military information network, and then have local machine learning capabilities to handle local on site applications.

I mean, even just a bunch of soldiers in a line with networked helmets would create a line array of microphones that could theoretically be used to figure out where enemy fire is coming from / how many people are shooting at them, what type of gun is firing at them, how much they have left, etc. If humans today can pick out where a sniper might be shooting them from, Im willing to bet a computer connected to an array of different soldiers’ sensors will be able to do it not too long for now.

Man, I kind of hate this guy’s videos. He really just seems like he likes to hear himself talk more than he wants to convey meaningful information.

I’m waiting. A screenshot, video, link to the GitHub file, etc. will do.

Money was literally invented to be an abstraction of resources. When people talk about money they usually mean resources.

Assuming you’re talking about American healthcare companies, thats because you have a broken nonsensical healthcare system filled with middlemen who will suck up profits.

That has nothing to do with the concept of opportunity cost. Pick a different industry, like agriculture / food then. If you spend $20 on food every month instead of fireworks, then feeding yourself the rest of the food you need is $20 cheaper.