You really said 12 USD/KWh? Time to put solar panels/batteries over there. Even if you resell to the grid at 1/10th of that you recoup the investment in O(months) and not O(years)
Yeah, it's a bit of a convoluted system. They'll take your peak day during a period, and charge you 12/kwh for your usage during the peak period of the day.
So you can easily add 1-200 dollars to your bill for one day of higher usage.
Similar to my thoughts. If we are still scrambling to find stuff the average Joe finds useful, the 100s of Billions poured into this gold rush are wasted (IMHO).
This reminds me of the early 1980s, when home PCs were still very new, the main use cases that vendors used to promote were managing household accounts and recipes. These use cases were extremely unimpressive for most ordinary people. It took a long time for PCs to become ubiquitous in homes - until gaming and the web became common.
The web was an academic project funded by modest research grants, requiring nowhere near the level of capital and electricity AI requires. The output of that research emphasized open source and decentralized implementation, which is antithetical to corporate AI models that are predicated on vendor lock-in.
Consumer adoption also happened organically over time, catalyzed mostly by email and instant messaging, which were huge technological leaps over fax and snail mail. IBM and DEC didn't have to jam "Internet" buttons all over their operating systems to juice usage (although AOL certainly contributed to filling landfills with their free trial disks).
Well, LLM is mainly aiming to
“Improve” what we can already do. It’s not really opening up new use cases the way the personal computer, the smart phone, or the Internet did.
Nadella's vibe lately (here and in his 2025 retrospective) seems to be "AI can be amazing and transformative and life-changing, and it's up to end users to figure out how to make that happen and they're not doing it and it's not our fault."
It's not even a solution in search of a problem, it's a tool in search of a reason to use it as a solution to a problem on such a scale that it justifies the billions of dollars of money we've poured into it while driving up the cost of fresh water, electricity, RAM, storage, data centre space, and so on.
Ideally, zillions of consumers have been languishing for years and when the time is right they're all collectively chomping at the bit when a new highly-affordable technology comes along that they just can't get enough of.
Dude, I'm getting a shovel factory for practically nothing. I'm easily realizing 5x value on that investment.
I'd say for an estate that I am the executor of, it probably saved me $50k in legal fees and other expenses because it helped me analyze a novel problem and organize it ask the right questions of counsel.
Another scenario i had to deal with i needed a mobile app to do something very specific for a few weeks. I specced out a very narrowly useful iphone application, built it out on the train from DC to NYC, and had it working to my satisfaction the next day. Is it production code ready for primetime? Absolutely not. But I got capability to do what I needed super quickly that my skill level is no longer up to the task to accomplish!
IMO, these things let you make power tools, but your ability to get value is capped by your ability to ask the right questions. In the enterprise, they are going to kill lots of stupid legacy software that doesn't add alot of value, but adds alot of cost.
I'd wonder how much that scales up though for the benefit of the companies that are each investing hundreds of billions and hope to see a net return. How many developers like you (presumably less of you seeing as each is more productive) or enterprises you work for paying fees (along with slimming down legacy costs paid to someone) does it take to get up in the 12 digit range?
No idea, and not my problem. I’m surprised I’ve been downvoted so much in these comments. I’m not saying OpenAI et al is a good company or good financial scenario, or good investment.
The technology is amazingly powerful. Full stop.
The constraint that drives cost is technical — semiconductor prices. Semiconductors are manufactured commodities over time, those costs will drop over time. The Sun workstation I bought for $40k in 1999 would get smoked by a raspberry pi for $40.
Even if everyone put their pencils down and stopped working on this stuff, you’d get a lot of value from the open source(-ish) models available today.
Worst case scenario, LLMs are like Excel. Little computer programs will be available to anyone to do what they need done. Excel alone changed the world in many ways.
Nah, I'll move much of it locally when it becomes cost justified to do so.
I doubt that the exponential cost explosion day is coming. When the bubble pops, the bankruptcies of many of the players will push the costs down. US policy has provided a powerful incentive for Chinese players to do what Google has done and have a lower cost delivery model anyway.
The cost iceberg with this stuff isn’t electricity, it’s the capital.
Other than Google and Facebook, the big hype players can’t produce the growth required to support the valuations. That’s why the OpenAI people started fishing for .gov backstops.
The play is get the government to pay and switch out whatever Nvidia stuff they have now with something more efficient in a few years.
My take is that if we are still scrambling to find something objectively useful (as recognized by the median person) then we really are in AI bubble territory.
When non techie friends/family bring up AI there are two major topics: 1) the amount of slop is off the charts and 2) said slop is getting harder to recognize which is scary. Sometimes they mention a bit of help in daily tasks at work, but nothing major.
My non tech friends/family use AI to ask for silly stuff (they could google it), or just to ask silly questions and see how they react. We have a relative not that famous but maybe known in a niche and they spent like a whole weekendd sending screenshots of GPT, where they asked if this person was known, who was this person, etc.
They don't find AI useful, just a toy. Is their fault? Maybe.
> They don't find AI useful, just a toy. Is their fault? Maybe.
idk i'm a software dev, and to be honest, when outside of work this is also what i use chatgpt for, its really funny to see its reactions to various prompts
It is the second substantial sell from EU. Additionally, those things gain momentum fast since the later you sell the less money you make from the bonds you are selling.
So everyone doesn't want to be last and the sell-off takes off fast and violently, forcing unmanageable interest rates.
+1 for Interactive Brokers. You can migrate super easy by having them filing a full ATAC. I came from Charles Schwab, which I have to keep because my employer sends GSUs to either Schwab or Morgan Stanley.
Additionally, the UX is much better (IMHO) than Schwab, both on mobile and desktop.
That is fair. Sorry, colored by the fact that I actually live in Switzerland and so investing them in Swiss treasuries is like keeping the cash for me.
That's an easy mistake to make. When you're looking internationally you always have to take the rates into account. For you it doesn't matter, but a lot of parties are investing in Swiss treasuries exactly because it is like keeping CHF. which tends to do well relative to their own. The long term USD vs CHF rate works out strongly in favor of holding CHF.
Spain in the 1500s, the Netherlands in the 1600s and the British empire in the 1800s are good examples of countries considered too big to fail that they eventually crashed and burned and lost their world leader statuses rather fast.
In all three cases over reliance on new debt to fund stuff, disappearance of the middle class, and abusing their dominance (military and/or economic) made them crumble as other countries steered away from dealing with them.
I think the flaw in your thinking is that you assume the US is self-sufficient. If that was the case there would be a very small trade deficit and given the sherade about tariffs early last year, this is not the case (IMHO).
As an external person which is actually benefitting from Trump's shanenigans (I am paid in CHF, which are worth more and more as they are considered probably the safest currency there is) I think the current US Administration wants to thread the needle by devaluating the currency enough that debt becomes manageable and exports benefit from a weak USD while remaining the reserve currency.
However, I also believe that for this plan to work you shouldn't alienate your closest allies as they will go trade elsewhere, impose tariffs on you, or trade in Yuans just to spite you. So you are left with a weak currency that is not as important anymore and basically unchanged exports.
I always wondered. Isn't exactly what eBPF would allow you to do?
Assuming that cheats work by reading (and modifying) the memory of the game process you can you can attach a kprobe to the sys_ptrace system call. Every time any process uses it, your eBPF program triggers. You can then capture the PID and UID of the requester and compare it against a whitelist (eg only the game engine can mess with the memory of that process). If the requester is unauthorized, the eBPF program can even override the return value to deny access before the kernel finishes the request.
Of course there are other attack vectors (like spoofing PID/process name), but eBPF covers them also.
All of this to say that Linux already has sane primitives to allow that, but that, as long as devs don't prioritize Linux, we won't see this happening.
but how does the anti-cheat know that the kernel is not modified such that it disables certain eBPF programs (or misreports cheats/spoofs data etc)?
This is the problem with anti-cheat in general (and the same exists with DRM) - the machine is (supposedly) under the user's total control and therefore, unless your anti-cheat is running at the lowest level, outside of the control of the user's tampering, it is not trustworthy. This leads to TPM requirements and other anti-user measures that are dressed as pro-user in windows.
There's no such thing in linux, which makes it inoperable as one of these anti-cheat platforms imho.
Great point. As I mentioned there are other attack vectors and you can mitigate them. For mitigating what you are mentioning for instance you don't just run one eBPF program, but you run a cluster of them that watch each other:
(The following was refined by an LLM because I didn't remember the details of when I was pondering this a while back)
All your anti cheats are eBPF programs hooked to the bpf() syscall itself.
Whenever any process tries to call BPF_PROG_DETACH or BPF_LINK_DETACH, your monitors check if the target is one of the anti cheats in your cluster of anti-cheats.
If an unauthorized process (even Root) tries to detach any of your anti-cheat processes, the eBPF program uses bpf_override_return to send an EPERM (Permission Denied) error back to the cheat.
(End LLM part)
Of course, you can always circumvent this by modifying and compiling the kernel so that those syscalls when targeting a specific PID/process name/UID aren't triggered. But this raises the difficulty of cheating a lot as you can't simply download a script, but you need to install and boot a custom kernel.
So this would solve the random user cheating on an online match. Pro users that have enough motivation can and will cheat anyway, but that is true also on windows. Finally at top gaming events there is so much scrutiny as you need to play on stage on vetted PCs that this is a non-issue
It's open source. Somebody will simply publish an AUR package with a custom kernel that is one command away. You're underestimating the capability of motivated nerds to make a good UX when needed :p. This is how we ended up with SteamOS in the first place
But given Linux kernel is monolithic and you can enforce signing of kernel modules too, using TPM to make sure the Kernel isn't tampered with is honestly the way to go.
You can't, but circumventing anti cheats already happens on windows with all their fancy kernel level anti cheats.
I believe the goal is to make it so uncomfortable and painful that 99.999% of the users will say fuck it and they won't do it. In this case users need to boot a custom kernel that they download from the internet which might contain key-loggers and other nasty things. It is not just download a script and execute it.
For cheat developers, instead, this implies doing the modifications to allow those sys-calls to fly under the radar while keeping the system bootable and usable. This might not be trivial.
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