Computers came in and "took" the job of calculating numbers (I assume usually budgets and finances), but instead of every layman just using a computer to organize their company's finances, they still hire a professional to use the computer to organize the company's finances. The role shifted, but it wasn't eliminated.
there are literally no more people "computing" by hand. job as defined by "perform calculations by hand" is totally gone. none. nada.
this "shifting-role" rhetoric is very dangerous. making definitions fluid is a very slippery slope. you can arrive at any conclusion you want and support any point you want by changing defintions. seeing it in AI from C-level leaders is very concerning.
On a second thought... The result is counter-intuitive, because writing AGENTS.md (and reading if it's generated) contributes to the context in the human. So yes, AGENTS.md probably help more than the paper says, but not the way we initially frame it.
Dunno if there's a way to test that AGENTS.md help the human more than the machine.
There are asteroids with concentrations of precious metals more valuable than earth's entire economy. Why don't we just send up spaceships to mine them and send the haul back to earth? What country would say no to free money?
After all, it's just an engineering challenge, not impossible.
The numbers on that are at least somewhat questionable. Even ignoring that you'd crash the market (thus it's not actually worth what it first appears to be) what is the total fuel cost to adjust the orbit of the target asteroid to land the entire thing back on the earth? Because that's what you're doing bit by bit as you shuttle loads of ore back.
Now if you have space based manufacturing or fuel production on the other hand ...
That's the point. Basic rule of thumb: anytime someone is arguing that the military will fund something, they're wrong.
Its not a real argument it's just used because to most people the military is a big mysterious thing they don't understand which they think has an infinite budget for things.
Why tungsten? In terms of thermal conductivity, It’s way worse than silver and copper and on par with good aluminium alloys. Those are cheaper and much lighter (so again much cheaper to put into orbit).
I have a question, is the short lifespan of GPUs because they get worn out and are destroyed, or because they get outdated by the ever expanding demands of the AI bubble?
Because if it's the later, I would assume that growth would not continue at the same rate after the bubble bursts?
It's, from my understanding, a little bit of both. There's a failure rate of GPUs and fans. There's also changing in standards like PCIe and software stacks.
LLM inference is mainly memory bandwidth constrained so I think it's highly likely that a company will create silicon with just an insane number of memory chips and less compute. These ASICs will probably do the same thing the crypto ASICs did.
If we look back 1 decade, no one uses a GTX 950 for anything.
You'd be surprised, people are somehow buying Tesla P40s and M40s on eBay for almost $300 and $180 respectively (M40 being the same gen as GTX 950). Google Colab still offers T4s and it's taken them years to add modern GPUs. Hope they're powering them with renewables at least.
And people in general are holding on to their old machines for very long periods of time now, especially CPUs. I've had to support first gen Intel i7s at work! That's pre AVX.
Just a note, P40 came out at $5700 in 2016 dollars. In 2026 dollars that is $8000 (wow!). If you bought 100k today, assuming a 1% failure rate per year your $800M investment can be traded in for about $30M.
I think it is reasonable to assume a similar depreciation in GPUs.
Meaning you'd need to have made more than (800M - 30M) * (1 + income tax rate) + (power + maintenance).
Some say the margines on inference are already there for new GPUs but they are right margines.
Outside of training the biggest LLMs at big labs, GPU lifespan isn't as short as the OP made it out to sound. A100s are 6 years old and still a reliable work-horse, and the 80GB version hasn't depreciated that much on the used market. On the consumer side, 3090s are actually still selling for very close to 2020 MSRP.
Even the ancient V100 (soon to be 10 years old!) had somewhat of resurgence on the second-hand market, with a healthy market for interconnects in China.
If I had a datacenter and power consumption was not a concern, I'd be holding on to my A100s for years at least for inference.
Oh yeah, not meant to be all doom and gloom. Lighter workloads greatly increase hardware lifespan. And the GPUS are like at most 50% of the data-center cost I think. You get to keep the building, the cooling, the power interconnects, the networking and everything else.
Additionally the demand drives new power infrastructure, and new fabs that will definitely outlive the bubble.
As with compute hardware, someone will have a chart keeping track of "additional electricity cost per unit of compute versus state-of-the-art hardware", to determine when it's cheaper to just turn it off and replace with newer hardware.
I agree with your point (that AMD does a lot more harm than what they are indignant about) but not the way you go there. If emotional abusive behavior is not "physical harm" because it's just emotions, then financial abusive behavior is not "physical harm" either because it's just numbers. When you consider what incredible harm being emotionally unwell can lead to, I don't think it deserves to be dismissed.
AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
Yea insulting and being verbally abusive towards individuals is something that it's worth taking action against. My problem with AMD's response is simply that they take issue with "bad language or abusive behavior towards AMD".
NGL that phrase reads as an "ESL-ism" where the intended phrasing is "towards AMD moderators/employees/whatever" i.e. "Don't be a dick to the people trying to help/answer questions" not "don't be mean to the company".
Other quirks with their writing style seem to lend support to this being an "ESL-ism" as well.
It would be more accurate to say that what AMD is doing is causing material harm, while a few mean words directed towards an anonymous megacorp are not.
The replies here are horrifying. Yes corporations are not people. But they are made up of people. I'd imagine most here work in them yourselves. Often less well paid support staff who have to read, and try to respond, to such terrible behavior. As one of those support people myself I can assure you it takes a toll.
Do you genuinely think that support staff reads "this decision made by AMD is disgraceful" and feel personally attacked because they identify as "part of AMD" and therefore an attack on AMD's honor is an attack on theirs?
Don't get me wrong, support staff often gets abuse thrown their way in a way that is absolutely not okay. There's a lot of people out there who
get angry at the support personale. That's not what we're talking about here. Support staff needs thick enough skin to hear, "AMD did something bad" and not take it personally.
The entire point of support staff is to stand between unhappy customers and the rest of the company. If they don't think their pay reflects the responsibilities that that entails then they should ask for a raise, not make excuses to ignore customers that the company has failed to serve.
Its just numbers only for rich. For poor ir can be the differnce between employability and not. In general, I believe that non-free tools like this are effective violence against poor nations since they trap those societies in unskilled sectors.
AMD is not a person. It has no emotions. Any perceived emotional harm by humans is them projecting themselves onto the AMD entity. Whereas AMDs actions here cause real harm to individuals.
AMD and any other corpo is made of people, who do have emotions. Abuse towards these people impacts corp operations. This is an entity protecting itself from damage that it feels is not worth the benefit the offering would bring.
And I question your assertion of real harm to individuals, by not offering free support, being worse than receiving verbal abuse.
Right, but saying "this policy change is disgraceful" and saying "you, customer support person, are an insufferable dickhead" are very different things. From what I can see in the link comments, people seem to be saying mostly the former.
Was the abuse and response directed at a person or AMD? Even AMDs response is vague and deflects it as “Abuse towards AMD”
AMD is free to change their terms of their product, but then characterizing the backlash as abuse towards AMD is laughable. Have empathy for people not corporations
That's the ideal dream scenario, but in reality the market isn't that efficient. Lots of markets gouge their customers and due to power imbalances the customers can't really do anything about it. The free market solution to this is just generally to let people suffer.
The grocery market is. Margins sit at 1-2%, there is absolutely no reason to believe dynamic pricing would change that. Grocery stores are one place where free markets have created incredible consumer surplus because competition is high.
I don't see why consumers wouldn't just pick the stores that have better prices for them. Why would they know/care/need to know what the prices are doing for other people?
The issue is that consumers who can pick better stores will get better prices, while those that can't will get gouged. Imagine someone who works multiple jobs and only has time to shop at the grocery store closest to them.
The algorithmically-driven store will start by randomly showing them some random prices and seeing how they respond. If they are willing to accept high prices, the store will keep charging them more. If they leave the store and go somewhere else, the store will revert to lower prices. The store will discriminate against people who won't comparison shop for whatever reason (busy, limited access to transport, rich enough that they don't care, etc.)
However, the store's extra margins won't lead to lower prices for other consumers, even in a fully competitive market. Raising prices for consumers who won't comparison shop will do nothing to change the marginal cost of serving a consumer who does, so this won't change the competitive dynamics for those consumers and they won't see lower prices.
> In a competitive environment (which grocery stores are), this excess capital gets reinvested into beating the competition.
That's not true though. Excess capital does not necessarily get reinvested in an efficient market. If that were the case, companies in relatively efficient markets would spend a very small portion of their free cash flow on dividends and share buybacks, which is not the case.
Of $7.2B free cash flow in 2025 they spent $3.9B on capital expenditures and about $3.6B on dividends and buybacks (those numbers don't add up because of things like loans, sale of assets, and stock issuance).
Additionally, even if companies in competitive markets did reinvest all their excess profits from personalized pricing, the benefits would only accrue to consumers that the algorithm thinks are price-sensitive.
You can't see you mean? Consumers pick things that are reasonably convenient, achievable and known to them. These things are all subject to exploitative tactics by grocery stores.
There's also price-fixing, which famously occurred in Canada recently.
Not to mention cornering a market like Walmart would and removing consumer choice entirely.
You were not asking about dynamic pricing. You were asking why you weren't able to see the reason that consumers don't always find & choose the cheapest option. The person you were responding to was explaining the unethical realities of food retailers. There's no reason why these would disappear with dynamic pricing.
No, the entire conversation is about a change toward dynamic pricing. My comment about pricing is that dynamic pricing doesn't change the competitive dynamic between retailers. You are chiming in and saying "well there are other competitive/noncompetitive dynamics at play," which I agree with and never disputed and am not talking about.
Can you? When our economic system's only driver is "extracting wealth", can we actually develop a country without it? The extraction of wealth isn't some unfortunate byproduct, it's a central cog in the machine of what makes it operate. Money is invested for returns.
You two are using different definitions for "can". You are using it in the "is it probable or realistic to expect it" sense and the parent poster is using it in the "is it mechanically possible" sense.
I think it's possible to imagine a way in which a country could be delivered money and expertise to develop with no expectation of return on investment. (One needs only read conquest of bread to see I'm not alone in believing such a thing is mechanically possible.)
Computers came in and "took" the job of calculating numbers (I assume usually budgets and finances), but instead of every layman just using a computer to organize their company's finances, they still hire a professional to use the computer to organize the company's finances. The role shifted, but it wasn't eliminated.
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