"[T]he semiconductor industry needs to sell more and more powerful chips to maintain its economies of scale. It is therefore necessary for demand for computing power to increase year on year, at the same rate as gains in computing power." ... goes on to convincingly argue that adoption of AI services lags behind what's nnecessary to "consume" semiconductor production capacity. Model providers are caught in a double bind between reducing per-token marginal costs through increased efficiency and needing to keep semiconductor manufacturers afloat: "What is changing here is the growing interdependence of investment in AI and the insane capitalization of the industry, as exemplified by Nvidia."
"Graduating into a bad labor market can make you miss a step on the job ladder, depressing your earnings for a decade or more. It increases your chances of being in poor health well into middle age. It even reduces your chances of having a successful marriage."
I would like to see their methodology, but their results ring true. "...since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we’ve been led to believe". file under "you treasure what you measure"
"In liberal capitalism or plutocracy, on the other hand, the oligarchs will use their power to resist development. For them, hoarding capital to preserve high returns and asset values is preferable to investing in growth at lower returns—if not always on an absolute basis, then at least relative to the rest of society." the last section on silicon valley is chef's kiss
"Gambling relies on addiction for its business model to function; everybody knows that. But addiction is also the business model for a huge chunk of Silicon Valley. Gambling ruins lives by way of soul-crushing debt; everybody knows that too. But so do the American educational system and the health-care and real-estate markets, which have been rigged by the people at the top to extract as much as possible from the suckers otherwise known as regular people. For most Americans, to participate in the economy in the most basic ways requires engaging in existential risk."
"We’ve gone from the world of abundance in cloud computing where the cost of compute time per person was nearly at post-scarcity levels, to the reverse of trying to enforce artificial scarcity on the most abundant resource humanity has ever created. This is regression, not progress."
"Crypto investments cannot be anything but a zero sum game, and many are actually massively negative sum. In order to presume a crypto investments functions as a store of value we simultaneously need to suppose an infinite chain of greater fools who keep buying these assets at any irrational price and into the future forever."