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If you can't even make a buck torching the planet so people don't have to write their own emails, how do you live? 
It constantly blows my mind that we could turn off just one type of treat machine for a year, and permanently end food insecurity globally. Same for preventable and curable diseases.
permanently end food insecurity
the desperation of the reserve army of labor is a critical part of keeping wages down 
Why are we doing this then????
I hate capitalists so much. It’s not just that they’ll do anything to maximize profits. Honestly that would be much easier to deal with than what they actually do.
In reality they’re really fucking stupid as well as being selfish. It’s why they strip the copper out of the walls rather than allow a profitable company to just continue. It’s why they burn their profits chasing dream products that will never turn a profit and have immense costs.
Like holy shit just go do something else with that money! Start a restaurant! Yes almost all restaurants fail but that still gives you a better chance of turning a profit than this!
The entire tech industry is just a casino for VCs and they're gambling with the future of all life on earth
God I wish the Viet Cong were in charge of the US tech industry.
please Uncle Ho, I'll build some really good tunnels I swear
this yeah, tech is addicted to the level of growth it used to have and its hit a ceiling for actual usefulness so now its going to be all crypto/nfts/ai until time ends
I wonder if it hit this ceiling because there are no more public projects being developed (personal computer, internet etc.) that it could privatize and profit off of and now we're seeing these shitty solution driven technologies that aren't solving any real problems
That's the problem with privatizing everything: you can no longer steal from the commons.
“The problem with capitalism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”
The push for space exploration makes a lot of sense
Too absurd for words, really lmao
Most people think, “Wow space exploration to learn about the deepest and most hidden secrets of our universe to advance our collective knowledge? Of course I’m down for that !”
And Wall Street ghouls and 
just see another way to make the line go up.
Start a restaurant!
as you acknowledged at the beginning of your comment: they don't really care about a business being strictly profitable, they care about it being more profitable than what everyone else is doing
“[Capitalists] act as if they are being chased by a bear,” wrote Zhang Lin, a Beijing political commentator, in response to these comments. “They are powerless to control the bear, so they are competing to outrun each other to escape the animal.” [source]
they care about it being more profitable than what everyone else is doing
But they’re not doing that either! They’re less profitable than anyone else on earth! Rolling the dice on the restaurant game would give them a better chance of making More Money Than God because the chance is higher than 0.
Even profitability isn't the goal--that's been abstracted away. The real money is in being able to convince people that you might someday be really profitable. That profitability never actually has to come as long as you can keep the confidence up. It's a grift in the most literal sense.
It's the singularity cult, capital is long dead and robot feudalism is the only way out for them.
I think this is it. This is not the behavior of the Rational Capitalist™ this is cult fanaticism.
We're doing it because line must go up. The entirety of white western society is built solely and completely around "line go up" and this is making line go up so it must continue
Yeah, this is the biggest question for all the LLMs. When are they actually going to turn a profit and how?
They seem to be doing the Uber model of flooding the market to then hike prices, but I don't see how people are going to be able to afford it. I guess it is just training them to then sell them to companies?
Uber also just burned money forever before they price hiked. I think again, this is just gaining market share. Make sure there's few people left who can write or research or do art because it was all done by the "cheap" machine and then you can hike the prices and have a near monopoly on it.
I'm not sure that'll pan out though. Nobody drives a taxi as a hobby. People do create art as a hobby, or write, or even do research.
Where it might pan out* is clerical work. LLMs will never be able to do actual work unsupervised. But if you can fire 100+ laywers in favor of one guy who fixes the LLM's mistakes, then its probably profitable. Art, writing and creative works in general are a red herring. It's a promise to the masses that they'll be able to conjure whatever entertainment they want, meanwhile the company is working to rugpull them out of what social mobility still exists.
*and even then I can't imagine there won't be a massive bubble burst incoming. The current business model loses money. Fullstop. LLM doesn't seem a good fit for a consumer good.
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I guess it is just training them to then sell them to companies?
The company I work for is pressuring every single department to onboard "AI", and there is so much talk of "training" the LLMs we will buy to suit our needs. I imagine lots of other companies are demanding the same of their employees right now
My org have been talking about hiring "AI consultants". I wanted to flip a table over and storm out when that was mentioned. There's no shortage of better things to spend money on.
I need to get in on this grift before I'm laid off lmao
Yep, working in a safety critical environment and constantly hear how safety reports will be made by personally tailored AI and requirements developed and managed with AI. Then the natural step is to hire AI consultants to do that. Fuckin hell it's looking bleak. And because every business executive thinks this is the solution, it'll become a race to the bottom because all capital will also go to those dumbass ideas, then all people capable of doing work without AI will be replaced by those who do it less well with AI over time. I'm entirely unconvinced that this will be good (despite the fact historically that such advances have been fine, like with calculators or computers generally). This time we don't KNOW how the solution is reached..
Lt. Broccoli at Quark's holosuite.
They are probably lying to make their $200 Pro subscription seem more appealing
They have to be rolling in the cost of buying new servers or something.
No way it costs 1k in electricity, cooling, etc.
It's absurd how wasteful and resource expensive ChatGPT is considering how little it can actually do.
See, using ChatGPT to produce Time Traveling Marx x Sonic mpreg fanfic is Praxis.
"You workers are getting so entitled demanding a living wage! You better learn your place or we'll replace you with AI"
*Doesn't raise wages and uses an extremely wasteful and expensive AI anyway*
This might be true but I also feel like it's a page from the Red Lobster marketing playbook:
"Oh no, this unlimited shrimp deal is too good!!!1! It's bankrupting the company!! Oh no, don't come eat our shrimp!!"
Repeat in a few months, etc.
Yup. It was never the shrimp, it was the fact that the hedge fund was stripping the entire biz. They sold all the property to themselves and had each restaurant rent out the space. Hedge fund made a profit on their purchase just in time to close down all restaurants. There probably is something like that going on here.
I think RL also had to purchase the shrimp from the parent company for unfavorable prices.
I sure wish I didn't have to write my own emails
What you think you need: AI to write emails for you
What you actually need: a return to the slower pace and more literary style of the 19th century so you have more opportunities to express yourself creatively: "Dear Sir: It pains me to inform you that the instructions that you have provided for my calculating machine are producing erroneous projections. For my business to proceed as planned, I must have a remedy posthaste."
Nah what we actually need is to break away from established social conventions that do nothing but waste time. Emails, but see also resumes and cover letters.
Yea I'm starting to develop a rule of thumb where if AI can totally replace something, it probably wasn't that important to begin with
Emails still have some function unless the game plan is to just do everything through text messages.
I'll be first in line to drive a stake through the heart of the cover letter, though.
Specifically work emails where there's this weird standard of formality. My work started using Slack and while obviously it's still not great, it's viewed much more casually.
I don’t like Slack for pretty nitpicky reasons but getting rid of the weird email standard of formality is probably the biggest upside
$3.7B revenue
$5.0B expenses
Is This Loss
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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chapotraphouse
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