It would have been nice if they linked to the power metrics for the new servers.
I think it would be amusing if it turns out they just raised the power limits for those servers not showing the problem up to base that was originally advertised.
First, you can't put a price on food security. When you can't get these things from the market because the shelves are bare, you will still have a source available. That's a big perk that can't be understated.
Also, the shelves have been bare with eggs for quite awhile. Locally here we largely only see the large packs being sold. Its been 6 months since I've seen a dozen pack on the shelves.
Its far more than $2, where I live a pack of eggs is competing for a pound of pork or choice beef.
Last Saturday iirc it was 23.99 for 24 eggs, and there were only two packs on the shelf (both with broken eggs).
I would agree, except it’s not food security. Eggs not necessarily a mandatory food source. Like you said, if a pack of eggs is the same as choice beef or pork, then eat that? Both are nutritionally better options than eggs.
If we really want food security, we’d each probably need at least a 10 acres of land per person in the household, grow our own vegetables and grains, raise chickens, have our own cows/pigs/goats, and more.
A nominal human diet requires a certain minimum amount of protein, and related essential amino acids, and vitamins.
Eggs have until very recently been a cheap source of protein as an inferior good compared others.
The problems in shortage are when the prices of all necessities are being driven up across the board to the point where you can't afford food, where government SNAP programs cannot keep up.
This is the point where it becomes food security, and yes you can go further into bootstrapping your own dependency grid given more resources. At a bare minimum it provides goods you can trade for other goods which is more food security than you had when you were completely dependent on others and the currency retaining a stable store of value.
Relatively rural Michigan, my local grocer had a dozen pasture raised for $6 this week. Prior to that, it had been $4 or $4.50 for cage free. Plenty available.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are more on my next visit though.
In many cases you can cycle the compost back in to the feed you grow (as fertilizer).
Around here our eggs are averaging about $9 per 12 on the shelves, and you can't buy just 12, the only eggs on the shelf are the 18/24 packs so about $20-22 per pack, almost the same price as choice meat.
The labour and land step up from tending chickens to growing grain is a very large step. If you are organized enough to grow grain, and you're near a farming area, you'd be farther ahead to try to buy right off the field grain at harvest time for cash. Mechanized grain harvesting is an immense labour saver that is unavailable to people growing feed for backyard chickens.
I don't know how accurate this is, but there was a youtube video from some homesteader I accidentally ran across saying you can ferment the feed to a mash, and the chickens will eat/need less.
Chickens will eat grain, but the best eggs (and healthiest chickens) come from lots of protein and green leafy matter. Vermiculture and simple insect attraction methods like maggot buckets, food scraps, and lawn/garden waste can go a long way with chickens.
"Around here our eggs are averaging about $9 per 12 on the shelves, "
What state are you in, that's crazy pricing. Article says, "Last week, the average price of a dozen eggs hit $4.95 per dozen—an all time-record." So you are stuck 2x the national average price.
The main attacks we are seeing on services like this, are also attacks that are being used in social media broadly.
The value we get from communities, and communication follows from the fact that there are a minority of valuable contributors who are making the community do well by providing value.
This then goes to the Evaporative Cooling effect of social media.
Such people leave because they are harassed, or cost is imposed on them that exceeded what they were willing to give.
Limiting the mechanisms for that will mitigate to some small degree, but at the cost of a more in depth conversation which fully eliminates organic growth, and notably it won't stop evaporative cooling from happening.
Fake and illegitimate reviews can still be posted. AI driven bots will continue raising the noise floor over time until you can no longer find that valuable signal within the noise. In fact, all competitors are incentivized to engage in such activities at scale when they are funded by non-fractional reserve debt.
That's largely because the power of unions was destroyed in the 1970s by Ronald Reagan, he set the example and playbook that all modern union breaking corporations today follow.
There was also the many precedents set during the height of judicial activism, which is why we, arguably, don't have a rule of law anymore today, but mostly it was the breaking of PATCO by Reagan.
The nature of the thing is that people are dis-incentivized to share their trade secrets when there is competitive advantage in not sharing.
What the competent people are saying is often overshadowed by the echo chamber of misleading information, since there is profit in driving people towards chaos.
Some people blog because it makes them happy, others do so to build brand and status for professional development.
Upon reading this, it seems like the author is in the latter group, and while he offers a few points about what computers can and can't do, the advice given is horrible advice because it takes things in isolation and overgeneralizes, while not paying attention to underlying factors.
The "lets just tough it out" approach and specialize in old code, or learning to do what AI can't are impossible tasks in practice.
If the author is in the latter group, I think he's unintentionally doing himself a disservice by showing a low level of competency in addressing the problems.
You don't want to hire an engineer who is blind to the potential liabilities they create.
Any engineers in IT are intimately familiar with the fallout from failures involving sequential steps in a pipeline.
There's front-of-line blocking (FOLB), and there's single points of failure (SPOFs), these are considered in resiliency design or documentation of the failure domains. The most important parts of which are used in identifying liabilities upfront before they happen.
Entry level task positions are easily automated by AI. So companies replace the workers, with AI.
How do you get to be a mid-level engineer when the entry level no longer exists...its all based upon years of experience. Experience which can no longer be gotten.
Does this sound like a pipeline yet?
You still have mid-level engineers available, as you do senior engineers, but no new ones are entering the marketplace. Aging removes these people over time, and as that sieves towards 0 the cost of hiring these people goes up until it reaches infinite (where no one can be hired).
What goes into the pipeline is typically the same but most often less than what comes out of said pipeline. In talent development its a sieve separating the wheat from the chaff.
Only the entry point is clogged, and nothing new is going in, humans deal with future expectations and the volume going into such pipelines is adaptive. No future, no one goes into such professions.
After a certain point, you can't find talent. There's no economic incentive because companies made it this way by collusion.
Things stop getting done which forces collapse of the company. Its not just one company because this is a broad problem, so this happens across the board creating a inflationary cycle of cost, followed by a correlated deflationary cycle in talent, that cannot be fixed except by the industry as a whole removing the blockage. They can't do that though because of short-term competition.
When have industry business-people today turned on a dime in economically challenging situations where the money wasn't available; ever.
Debt financing makes it so these people don't need to examine these trends more than a year out, but the consequences of these trends can occur just outside that horizon, and once integrated the bridges have been burnt and there is no going back while also maintaining marketshare.
All of the incentives force business people to drive everything into the ground in these type of cycles. The only solution, is to know ahead of time, and not bait the hook. The business people of today have shown that this is beyond them, its all about short-term profits at the limits of growth, business as usual.
Real world consequences of such, you can look to Thomas Malthus, and Catton who revisits Malthus.
Catton importantly shows how extraction of non-renewables can reduce or destroy previous existing renewable flows leading to lower population limits as a whole than prior to before prior to overshoot.
Similar behavior applies broadly to destructive phase changes of super critical systems with complex feedback mechanisms (i.e. negative flips to positive and runs away, or vice versa leading to collapse/halt). In other words where you have two narrow boundaries outside which the systems fail.
>Entry level task positions are easily automated by AI. So companies replace the workers, with AI.
This is one of the concerns I hear. Not really in a position to judge how serious it is but I've had this discussion with people in senior roles related to, let's call it developer mentoring/development.
To the degree LLMs make junior developer roles commodities and therefore less attractive financially that definitely makes bringing new people on-board at a lot of companies less attractive.
Essentially no one thinks an LLM is going to step into the role of an experienced senior developer as anything other than a possibly useful assistant. Someone just out of school? Maybe you don't replace the best but maybe you need a lot fewer of them and pay them a lot less.
Given the decline in overall IT positions over the past two years, I'd say its pretty serious. Recent new graduates with CS/IT backgrounds largely aren't being hired.
Historically, we see Information Technology advances first disrupt IT, then it spreads with adoption everywhere else to realize the same cost savings, as a labor multiplier.
> Maybe you don't replace the best.
In fairness, there's no real way to tell who the best/competent are. University programs have always failed to prepare the student in IT because of the fast moving nature of it.
Given the lack of any way to properly distinguish oneself, the best and most competent will look for a time, but eventually they have to go where the money is. That means retraining and taking the loss in time and investment, and its a sticky decision where they aren't likely to fight for such meager scraps.
Competent people have options others don't.
A wage price floor was hit awhile back in the long trend towards wage suppression. You can't really pay them less when other opportunities with no education provide more economic incentive. This is an example of chaotic distortions involved in money printing generated whipsaws.
The opportunity cost ratio between unskilled and skilled labor eliminates any incentive. Why spend 10 years on education and experience when you'll only make at best 33% more than someone who doesn't (pre-tax). Less than that post-tax, and we aren't considering the increased costs that are borne by individuals seeking out positions. The job market has always imposed cost in time, from interview projects (where they steal your work without compensation), to circuitous interviews, etc.
And maybe the others should reconsider whether IT/tech is the automatic meal ticket they thought it was. Not sure that's the worst outcome. Honestly, there are probably still a lot of jobs floating around--just a lot fewer at the highest paying and sexiest companies--and some of the jobs may be in trades and other professions.
Except that's not the outcome, or how it happens in practice.
When merit is no longer an important metric, the competent leave first because they are no longer rewarded for their productive capacity, or effort. The people who thought t was an automatic meal ticket burn the house down for everyone.
The current offers going out for IT Architect work, decade+ direct experience is 40k/yr, no equity. No conversion rate on applications that isn't 1000:1 phone call.
For 40k/yr, you can go and flip burgers and not have to deal with the high stress involved in these type of positions. It would be a joke, if only it were not serious, and things will only get worse.
The creeping ruin has a way of coming at you sideways without you knowing until its too late.
I believe these concerns about entry-level talent pipeline neglect one thing, which is that LLMs offer learning on steroids - motivated intelligent junior developers can learn more about any technical or business topic in one morning of well-structured investigation with the help of the more advanced reasoning models than they might get in a month of on-the-job learning in the days before such tools existed. But it requires truly active, self-driven investigation and structured thinking. These skills in turn require education on "how to learn", from a very early age. I am not sure our education systems are there yet.
There are many ways in which this reasoning is flawed at its foundation.
The main flawed assumption in this assumes that the information provided by an LLM is both factual, and accurate, and that these junior developers will be able to adequately determine this.
In most cases the process of validating accuracy takes more time than the process of learning it the right way in the first place, and it requires domain knowledge they do not have. This makes for an impossible task of the junior, and allows them to easily be misled to false and destructive conclusions.
It is well established that hallucinations occur in these models, and have occurred to the point where legal professionals have cited non-existent sources and perjured themselves in the process, threatening the investment they made in their career in its entirety.
These professionals are highly incentivized to avoid this outcome, but its still happened regardless of the incentives, repeatedly, with several making national news over the span of a year, and similar news the previous year.
The entire premise you make is that rapid learning occurs, but it neglects and conflates the word 'learning' whose normal context is fact and truth, to that of learning falsehoods, which reflect and promote destructive delusion.
In the absence of learning in its normal context, the latter's likelihood occurs exponentially with each additional factor, while the former trends towards 0 as a fractional. Its a chair without legs.
Following from this towards introducing it to people at a young age, where children are biologically incapable of discerning falsehood, this promotes an indoctrinated state of delusion and circular reasoning with no rational basis, in reality it is quite an evil thing in my opinion hobbling the young and ruining their futures by induction of maladaptive reasoning frameworks.
Children are a vulnerable set of the population, and such activities can only diminish the young's abilities to survive long term. Something no good person would ever do.
There is a thing in literature called a Devil's pleasure palace. It refers to a short story, though I don't remember the author, it was slavic iirc, where a Noble of the Aristocracy tests his daughter's fiance to determine if they would maintain fidelity after marriage, without them knowing its a test.
A witch and magic are employed, though one can imagine drugs being used as well, and the prospective husband is led through a series of events unbeknownst to them, in repeated attempts to induce in him every possible indulgence without consequence.
He is tested for several days, unable to leave, and when he tries to leave he is told he cannot unless he partakes. Should he cave in to desire he would have been killed on the spot, he doesn't instead choosing to die instead.
He neither agreed to this (informed consent), nor knew of it happening, thus making it both a sinister and malevolent tale of chance, where the outcome will be destructive in all but the fairy tales, especially given the vulnerability of the young.
LLM's and AI broadly depict this in their function. They deceive, and manipulate those utilizing them without any perception of this having happened, because the required knowledge to do so is outside their domain of knowledge. The same as any fallacy by authority.
No education true to any valid definition would ever use these. Involuntary indoctrination is a vile thing, and there is no place for doctrines of Learning Understanding Acceptance, lest you somehow imagine the world is better off as depicted in 1984 by Orwell, where in reality, shortage and slavery eventually devolve into famine and population collapse through the Socialist Calculation Problem (Malthus/Catton/Mises).
LLM's shouldn't be called Large Language Models, they are more appropriately Looming Liability Machines.
I think it would be amusing if it turns out they just raised the power limits for those servers not showing the problem up to base that was originally advertised.
reply