that the company has to give it back because the company already has all that information

Do they?

Let’s use Nintendo as the example.

First and foremost, how much did they change the price of the switch 2 based upon tariffs? More specifically, how much can you prove they did? Should a company that chose to eat the costs of the tariffs themselves be penalized and forced to lose even more money over NOT raising the price every time fuckface did? What about the specific case of the Switch 2 where they intentionally waited a week or three to announce the price after revealing it to factor in expected tariffs?

Also, what about the units they had stockpiled ahead of Liberation Day? Do they now owe “the customers” money based on the date of sale rather than the date of import? Or does Baby Jane Doe get less because her gameboy’s serial number corresponds to a unit imported in March rather than May?

All of which ignore that Nintendo weren’t doing direct to consumer sales in the vast majority of cases. They went through intermediaries like Best buy and Amazon. Many of whom ALSO were playing the same math regarding stockpiled units and ordering more supply from Nintendo.

Because the company handled all the nonsense of importing on behalf of the end customer (also most intermediaries).

The youtube channel HowNot2 talked about this a bit since they somehow became a(n actually really good) climbing gear store. Because tariffs were changing so frequently (often multiple times a day), basically nobody could plan for them. So companies had to balance their in-country stock with anything they were going to buy in the next few months… or even days. And try to figure out what price they might be paying.

Some companies basically just charged the tariff rate on any given day… which is bullshit since they would have bulk purchased whatever they could while they were “low”. Others would eat the cost because they didn’t want to lose customers by increasing the price of a preordered item. And so forth.

And… people who got their aliexpress on can tell horror stories of getting a bill once things made it through customs.

So… it actually makes perfect sense for the companies that dealt with this bullshit to get reimbursed by the christofacists. I would hope they would “pass it on” to the customers as an act of good faith (even if it is just a free game or something) but… this is a case where the problem isn’t the corporations: it is the government.

Symfonium on my phone (so also android auto and just connecting to a bluetooth speaker while I cook) and Feishin on my desktop. Still need to verify that scrobbles are propagated correctly for discoverability purposes (so far it looks like ratings in Feishin aren’t propagated to the server).

I could probably have gotten away with just mpd but figured “why not?”.

And there have been a lot of discussions over the decades over artists/“aritists” who overly sampled a song and became orders of magnitude bigger than the original artist.

Its a balancing act. Most people aren’t going to get too annoyed if someone uses generative AI to help build a backing track or a beat to go with their song.

The issue is that so much of this slop is “make a song like this” from scratch. And while there is a lot to be said about manufactured acts and the role of major labels… one of the few good things about spotify et al destroying the music industry is that it has become so much easier for smaller independent artists to get a foothold.

And all this does is add more slop to push them back out. And the difficulties with detecting slop will mean people will be a lot less likely to ever check out a smaller band when they can instead listen to whatever the latest major act that beyonce et al vouched for is.

This (moreso for youtube music, since Deezer seems to not have a lot of East Asian labels signed) is a huge part of why I’ve been building out a selfhosted Navidrome.

Obviously there is the old school way of getting music. But Bandcamp is WAY more beneficial to the artists and ebay and Half Price Books are also awesome for grabbing music.

And combine all that with musicbrainz for scrobbling and discoverability of new bands.

Like… I am not going to say I am NOT surprised.

But it really does make sense if you look at history as a whole. Catholicism has largely always been characterized by a religious third party meddling in politics, economics, and the legal system. When they have a critical mass of Believers, they are a force to be feared. When they don’t? They are a nagging voice that world leaders are expected to kiss the ring of.

In this case? Somehow the catholic church is NOT the most evil voice in the room which… is a whole level of fucked.

But England broke with the pope centuries ago. And people forget that the US was “founded” by protestants. Or that the country is basically controlled by evangelical christofacists (another flavor of protestants). Like… it is STILL a big deal that JFK was openly catholic.

So… in a lot of ways? This is one fallen empire that pissed away its soft power getting mocked by the figurehead of a falling empire that pissed away its soft power.

Pointing out that the US spends massive amounts of money on military spending is just a fact. https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/finance/def-exp-2025-en.pdf is the official NATO write up of this from last year and the only countries that outspend the US (as a percentage of their GDP) tend to be the countries that are where The War will kick off Poland) or… countries with other things going on

And keep in mind that is in terms of GDP percentages and how massive the US’s economy was for most of that period.

The “conservative” talking point is not: “The US spends money on war while the EU spends money on healthcare and actually giving a shit about its population”. It is “The US spends money on war so you should do whatever we want”. Its also worth understanding that The EU did not spend that money anywhere near that altruistically but it doesn’t change the situation that the EU/NATO finds itself in.

Because when that military is increasingly likely to be the aggressor? You need to rapidly start making guns and revisiting what is required of your populace. People have exploded over Germany recently more or less codifying a standing policy but… there is a reason politicians are looking at their conscription laws.

Look. We all live in a content bubble. But if you actually want to understand the world, rather than just get angry in ways that are convenient to influencers and politicians, actually look at statistics and respond to facts. Rather than getting pissy and screaming “fake news” because you don’t’ like what you saw.

Because, to be clear, I REALLY don’t fucking like how broken the US is because of how much it spends on the military.

Yes… I said that the US was the military might of NATO. I did not say that was the only reason we have a truly massive military.

If all you are able to do is build tangential strawmen then… do yourself a favor and just go post on chatgpt.

You talk about GDP percentage, as if every country had a similar GDP per capita, and could this afford to spend similarly

Where did I ever say this?

The reality is that the US had more then enough money to both fund its military and fund its social programs, but it chose to instead fund the military and the already wealthy.

Which changes absolutely nothing from the perspective of NATO

Not a one sided deal to the disadvantage of the US as Americans seem to be made believe by Trump and his oligarchy.

Where did I ever say this was a one sided deal?

If you think we ‘happened’ to keep a large standing army just because we were defending Europe.

Where did I ever say that?

Because, for decades prior, the US was the military of NATO. The US pumped massive percentages of its GDP into maintaining a standing military while most of NATO focused more on social programs with comparatively minimal military spending.

And threats like russia wouldn’t attack out of fear of having to fight said militarized nation. Whereas now there is a very clear window where the nations that might stand up against them are rebuilding. “Fortunately” russia is stretched pretty far by a failed invasion of Ukraine but… go read the wikipedia article on how their previous invasions of Ukraine went.

Ehhhh.

Yes, there are some fairly revolutionary(-ish) chips. Those are few and far between because they tend to be hyper specialized. Inference but not training or only optimized for a very small input matrix (common for edge computing like cameras).

By and large? They really ARE “traditional” GPGPUs that are optimized to hell and back for vector operations and linear algebra. And a lot of the gains there come from multiplying their floating point performance by 2-4 (depending on if half or quarter precision). They aren’t as good for double precision as something optimized for it but basically only a very small subset of users need that. There will be no issues repurposing the hardware in these data centers.

And the rest is data movement which has always been the real problem.

It collapsed into… 4 or 5 of the most powerful companies in human history.

And that is the thing to understand. These bubbles are less about widespread collapse and more about consolidation. And it tends to be the smaller companies that suffer, not the biggies who were driving much of it to begin with.

“aren’t making a profit” gets into the mess that is book keeping and is a giant rabbit hole people actively avoid because it is just easier to get angry at stupidity rather than complex malfeasance.

But what makes something an “AI data center” outside of the branding?

The reality is that it is a shit ton of computers connected to a really fast internet connection. Preferably through a properly managed set of switches but you do you. And the reason that we still mostly use GPUs for “AI” rather than highly specialized hardware (although, nvidia DID just buy groq a few months back…) is for that reason. They might do linear algebra of quarter precision floats REALLY well but they also do linear algebra of single and double precision floats pretty well too. And the CPUs and mobos (that are mostly optimized for data movement to offload to said GPUs) are no slouches either.

Which is what most of these companies are planning for. openai is, arguably, really fucking stupid. Whereas anthropic have shown decent signs of “diversifying” as it were. And nvidia… if we lived in a world where they could get enough RAM I think they would be fine. As it stands… Jensen (and a LOT of people) are kinda fucked and I expect to see a hard pivot over the next 12 months.

Because if we banned ALL generative AI tomorrow? The people who think you can’t use a computer without installing litellm first are gonna be fucked. But everyone else will just put other workloads on there and be… “fine” is a strong word but they won’t go bankrupt. And the data centers themselves will still be incredibly valuable.

Think about the dotcom bubble. We went from having all of these businesses that shot to the moon for valuation… and then it collapsed.

Amazon and Google and basically all of FAANG/MAMA beg to differ.

And basically every company still has a website and ecommerce in general is still massive.

The Dot Com bubble was brutal. But it was not a collapse of the industry. It was much more of a correction after so many companies blew up to sell services like “rate my dog” and many of the smaller ecommerce sites were absorbed by larger ones.

And that is likely what will happen with generative AI. I expect a MUCH bigger bloodbath for openai but anthropic seem to have scaled a lot better (although they also are going into their IPO with a massive data breach…). But expect most of the smaller companies to similarly get gutted.

But

Makes sense. It takes years to complete construction projects and budgets always overrun. AI is a fad for most companies trying to get into it.

Data Centers exploding… honestly have little to do with AI. No… not the way they explode in the UAE… metaphorical exploding. The reality is that data centers are GOOD money. Basically every company needs data hosting and offloading internal infrastructure is… honestly a really smart play. Same with the massive push for streaming of basically everything so that nobody owns anything and subscribe to everything. You want regional data centers and… this is how you get them.

Ooooh. Cloudflare Pages definitely looks like what I want.

Thanks

For no apparent reason:

Are there any good alternatives for gh-pages dor a super lazy/simple website? I’ve been meaning to actually use one of my domains for a personal website and pointing at which project is on which code repo site would be a good idea. But… I need that page to be hosted by one of them.

I mean… supply chain hardening has been a concern for most of the three letter agencies (and governments around the world) for years. There are very serious concerns over how basically every NIC comes out of a factory in China and what the implications of that are.

If DoD actually do have a list of vetted and hardened products, that WOULD be a very good baseline for if you care about security at all. Less so from the US government, but that can then be compared against similar lists from other countries.

And considering that basically every TLA has the same concerns, if those orgs are willing to spend their budget? DoE and the like ain’t gonna complain.

I mean… if you take into account fair price of utilities (water and electric) and skyrocketing costs of RAM… I don’t fully disagree.

Ballparking, but 50% of an engineer’s job being “boilerplate” and “charlie work” sounds reasonable to me. Maybe even 75%. That IS what generative AI is really good at. It is the kind of work that you can have a particularly ambitious student intern do.

What makes a good engineer is the ability to verify that work. In software this is “code review”. And the other aspect is actual innovation. Solving particularly complex problems or breaking a problem down into manageable and verifiable tasks.

And… guess how you maintain your skills to be able to do that? That’s right. Charlie Work.

Which is the problem. Managers (and wannabe managers) just see short term gains. So they want EVERYTHING to be done with “AI” because they want to bulk fire people and reduce operating costs. And they don’t at all care that they are causing a massive brain drain because that is next quarter’s problem.

But yeah. Use generative AI to accelerate your workflow. But also understand when it is very much worth taking your time. Either to keep those skills fresh or just because you can do it in a “fun” way. And if you feel that ALL of your workload can be done by chatgpt… maybe think about how much cheaper a claude subscription is compared to your salary and benefits.