Eh, I think they see more power and influence in gaining market share and being the provider of that technology, and then cornering the market. Prices are currently high, but they tend to do a better job of playing the long game.

Well, people aren’t really paying. Theoretically, large AI investment groups are paying. I say theoretically because as far as I understand it, they’ve mostly promised to buy the output but I don’t think have actually made good on buying it. The manufactured scarcity is being realized as increased memory costs, but the contracts are still landing even though the biggest contract may not actually be filled in the future (AI bubble). It’s why memory makers are trying to get Apple and co to commit to today’s prices for the next 3 years, because if they do and the big contract falls through, they still get their insane profit margin baked in for a bit and then can stockpile / price fix / sell through to market.

The big wrench here will be if Chinese memory fabs come online. If that big contract (AI) defaults, existing contracts are going to be very much worthless as folks would rather cancel them and fill orders at CXMT. So you may see a lot of consumer memory start filling from those fabs as they take market share while traditional players try to price fix. So the real question is, will cxmt try to capture market or play price fixing with the current cartel? My money is on market share.

Absolutely. The AI models are not rational. They’re just navigating statistical next token prediction that follows their training. They’re up against diminishing scaling now, and under fierce competition from cheaper models; I think they’re intentionally or unintentionally allowing these models to be rewarded for this behavior hoping it’s a short cut to model improvement for a bit longer. I land on intentional because they keep advertising it to try and keep the hype cycle going.

I think it’s more sinister than that. When they’re training these models with RLHF, the human feedback they’re giving I think is literally to reinforce aberrant or risky behaviors. This is because doing so resolves more training tasks “correctly”. If the prompt was to get information x, and in training it fails that except for the one that used a known vulnerability in software, and you rate the one that succeeded as best performing… you’re going to get models that try vulnerabilities. It is not magic, it is not AGI, it is just a statistical machine you’ve programmed to try vulnerabilities, which is unsafe as hell, malicious, and should put the researchers doing this in prison for a very long time.

Incidentally, I think that’s why you’re seeing some safety people (who still drank the koolaid) resigning.

Yes and no. You can still get a mini pc or even a laptop with 16gb of ram and a 256-512 ssd for 500ish. It won’t have as much graphics horsepower as a ps5, but it’ll be enough to play a lot of games at 1080p 60fps or use resolution scaling etc. games are significantly cheaper on pc as well.

There was a deal for a 5060ti and 16gb of ram complete build for like 1200. That’s not that terrible vs a ps5 pro brand new.

Also check out typst, it may be more approachable (though they have a closed source web app; the compiler is free and open source, so you can use it with any text editor with a plugin for it, or just write your text in markdown, get a template, compile).

You can also use zwave with home assistant. In some ways a better protocol, but it’s not nearly as prolific as zigbee devices.

I mean the whole point of this is to subsidize small business in the EU at the expense of businesses outside the EU. The fact it is more difficult and costly for you is exactly the point. They want to support businesses and workers in the EU, because that’s where their people actually are, that’s where their taxes are, that’s where they support infrastructure and social programs.

It is true that it favors larger international corporations, because they have near monopolies and csn manage all of this at a smaller relative cost. The solution of course is to make tariffs and other import duties scale with the size of the company.

So the EU regulations are not perfect, they do hurt international small businesses while protecting in part local small businesses. They need, like everyone, to deal with the problem of international monopoly companies and restore more and more of their manufacturing and product development into more and more local small businesses.

Well, you can contribute to CoMaps to map your local area — it can actually be quite fun to just walk around and add businesses and the like. Kind of like some of the games that have you walk around and catch creatures in balls, except you map your local community, find new places and spots, and basically contribute meaningful stuff :)