ML is real. Chatbots are real. “AI” is a marketing term that John McCarthy invented because he wanted more money for a summer study at Dartmouth—direct quote from him.
In my experience, Big Tech's billboard to "bring your best self" was just to get super eager people with great skills into their ranks to help accelerate business. Once you're on the inside, it's quite clear that's a farce and in fact, you should keep your mouth shut and your head down.
Had a coworker at a bank that was trying to emulate Tech (Capital One - all in on AWS and PIPs) who bought into it. Ended up PIPed and then is doing a PhD in a completely unrelated field.
We had a mental health slack channel, and a racial politics one that rehashed Israel/Palestine daily.
We had one of those. Not slack, self hosted internal stuff. Some "senior by tenure but not title" people decided the only thing that could come of it was people running their mouths to everyone's detriment and start trolling it until nobody took it seriously and then it was quietly "collateral damage" in a migration that was also arranged.
I think they were afraid of touching what had started as an anti racism channel until the vibes had shifted a bit.
There were both Palestinian employees and an IDF veteran Israeli employee who were seemingly spending half the workday discussing October 7th and the Intifada.
The team behind Gel got acquired by Vercel and I already experienced falling in love with a dead database (RIP RethinkDB) so I decided to fork the concept to a TypeScript port with Svelte as the UI instead of React.
It'll live at disc.sh in a few months. Early dogfooding is promising.
The DDR5 will be registered DIMMs. The GPUs will be 600W paperweights with a custom form factor. Similarly the NICs and other PCI-E accelerators. The motherboards also adopt custom form factors to fit in racks. The hard drives will be using SAS connectors. The flash will be in E1.S form factors.
The server CPUs that you want for a home desktop or small server, high clock SKUs, will be in high demand.
Any savings for someone willing to build a system from second-hand server hardware will be eaten by using adapters or sourcing a rack.
I'm not saying you won't be able to make a slightly outdated frankenserver with more compute than you need, I'm saying that's not going to bring down prices for Grandma's machine that she needs working to check on her retirement account.
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