You’re only thinking about the occupancy part of efficient use of available resources (and even then only partially) and forgetting all about the utility value part.

RAM used 100% of the time is not more efficiently used than RAM used 10% of the time if it’s being used for activities that deliver much lower utility, something made even worse because using RAM consumes additional resources in the form of power hence running it isn’t actually free and you if the utility of it’s use is lower you might actually be destroying value by using that power for a much lower utility use than it could otherwise be used for.

That’s the point others are making by pointing out that if that RAM is in data centers running AI 100% of the time it might actually be in use less efficiently than RAM used for multiple activities in people’s computers at home where it’s idle most of the time.

Yours is basically the same fallacy as the one about how people working more hours per day means they’re producing more.

“More use” is not the same as “more value created” because time is far from the only factor in determining how much value is created.

PS: If you really dig down into the utility value for Mankind of most modern day computing you’ll find that a large fraction if not most of it is basically entertainment, gambling or some for addition and thus doesn’t produce actual economic value. For example, how exactly does social networking such as Facebook produce economic value for Mankind - it’s basically a mix of entertainment and an addiction that directly creates or help create nothing, and instead it mainly wastes people’s time. At best it could indirectly deliver value by improving worker efficiency in activities that actually create value because people were happier with Facebook than without it, but by all indication that’s not even the case as it’s creating epidemics of psychological and social problems especially amongst young people. Those things are extracting value rather than creating value, so the computer RAM running Facebook software is probably a net negative in value creation overall - it creates little or no value overall (it extracts value from some to others but doesn’t actually create any) whilst consuming power to run, and all of those factors put together might mean that in overall value creation terms that RAM being idle or even in the refuse bin would actually be better than being used for Facebook software.

“The entire way people use computing in the whole World should change so that my business model has a small chance of being viable”

– Sam Altman

You’re right, I misread what you wrote.

Turns out we’re in full agreement!

Edit: My bad, misread what the previous poster wrote. The explanation is still valid, though.

If you look at their historical price chart, what you call a “minor fluctuation” this is one if not the largest price changes in both absolute and relative terms of at least the last 5 years.

Also the trading volume was the largest since 2016.

Basically you’re looking at an elephant and calling it a mouse.

It makes sense that a 12.6% stock price movement is a big thing for a company with that market cap and liquidity, since it has way less volatility that smaller companies because it takes way more money to move its price a mere 1%, plus the high liquidity means that the trading stack is far deeper and it’s way harder for there to be a crunch because you can always find people willing to buy if the price falls enough (or, on the other direction, willing to sell if the price rises enough).

This ain’t Joe’s Corner Shop Inc.

That said, the price is still above a year ago, though by a mere 0.83%, so whilst this is a big price movement, it’s far from having unwound the AI bubble stock price rise for Google - looking at its full historical price chart and roughly projecting the historical trend to present day, Alphabet stock price would have to fall around 50% more to return to historical trend and that’s assuming that without the AI bubble it would have continued to go up as before rather than reduce to the typical growth rates of mature companies.

It’s even more “funny” that just that: there are several bubbles going on right now, not just the AI, most notably a massive realestate bubble and also bubbles in things like car loans in the US.

Further, consumer indebness is again at record levels, worse even than 2007.

In other words, it’s like a mix of the dotcom bubble (this time around with a tech stack that delivers at best a lower return on investment than the Internet) AND the 2007 bubble of overvalued realestate and people deep in debt (with the personal finances of most people worst on this side of 2007 than they were on the other side so there’s a higher probability of defaults) AND a bunch of smaller unpopped bubbles all over the place.

I expect that when one of the big ones goes the resulting consumer retrenchment and pullback from both lenders and investors is going to cause the other bubbles to blow up (as loans are recalled, not rolled over or defaulted on, consumption falls and investors desperatelly try to exit their riskier positions) and the full result will be at least as bad as 2000 and 2008 combined, possibly worse.

Begun the AI Crash has.

Will there be actual jail sentences is it going to be the usual fines that companies treat as cost of doing businesses and can even declare as expenses in order to reduce the taxes they pay?

It’s like having to use steel from ships that sunk before the first atom bombs were exploded for certain uses because that made environment radiation higher and thus the steel produced afterwards is a bit more radioactive.

Once AI content was released into the Internet it started degrading any AIs trained with Internet content in a process known as Model Collapse.

From what I’ve seen in Startups both during the 90s and more recently, the spirit in them changed from “solve a cool problem” in the 90s to “find a way to make lots of money for founders” after the Net Crash and more often than not the chosen way to make money was sell the company to investors rather than actually selling anything to customers, so the tech just needed to look like “the next big money maker” in order to get said investor money and “tech” messaging became dominated by investor hype.

The almost pure-grifer incentives and spirit I saw become dominant in Startups from the 00s now seems to pervade the whole Tech industry.

From what I read, the point of Law in the countries were EULAs have already been deemed not enforceable by courts (such as Germany) is that one can’t hold something one has sold to a customer hostage to the customer accepting a NEW contract after the sale (the sale itself is considered an implicit contract with certain rights, such as the right to freely use what was sold) before they can use it, so even if people click “I Accept” on such a thing it’s does not form a legally binding contract.

It’s part of a family of attitudes which include “I don’t care about Politics”, as if pretty much everything involving humans living in society wasn’t in some way or other shaped by politics.

Don’t lots of countries have very strict rules about were medical information can be sent to and how it must be managed (I believe in the US it’s called the HIPA)?

Those things aren’t legally valid for consumer electronics or software in many countries (possibly most of the World) because they’re considered an attempt at forcing a change in the terms of the sale after the sale.

They would be totally valid if they’re presented to the buyer for confirming acceptance during the purchase BEFORE they pay which, “curiously”, they never are.

Samsung is the second Electronics maker I’ve started boycotted, after Sony.

Sony was all the way back since the Rootkit scandal, Samsung was about a decade ago when a small tablet I bough from them have filled with unremovable applications and after a few updates became pretty much unusable because it’s didn’t have enough memory (clearly planned obscolecence).

Patting myself on back (and a little gloating) aside, Samsung has been clearly abusive towards their customers for a while (it was maybe the second electronics make to enshittify, after Sony) and this is not at all surprising.

Oh, yeah, the Goldbug-Prepper ideation of Gold as a way to preserve one’s wealth when society collapses is ridiculous: when things get that bad what matters are the basics like food and water, which for anything more than a few months means growing your own food as you’ll deplete whatever stores you have sooner or later. Then beyond that come all the things needed to (re)build a society and it’s going to be a bartering society, not a “tokens of value” one. Wealth held in some abstract token of “value” only becomes useful much later and it might not even be precious metals.

As I see it, Gold is just a decent insurance for a certain range of systemic risks - think of it as a basket of currencies but simpler and with lower correlation to main currencies. It will insulate you from things like a run of the Dollar (a possible thing when the USD stops being a Reserve currency) or governments continuous devaluating their currency as a way to make up for economic mismanagement (like in India), not from societal collapse.

Each “bit” in the architecture is mainly related to how many different memory positions you can address with a CPU opcode (i.e. an assembly command) that needs to access memory or with a CPU register that holds an memory address (so an 8 bit register can only address 256 memory positions, a 16 bit one 65,538 memory positions, a 32 bit one 4,294,967,296 memory positions and so on) - basically every additional bit in the register size of a CPU that addresses memory roughly doubles the memory that CPU can access and thus use (not considering hacks to go around those limits, such as the Spectrum 128K had).

Meanwhile Moore’s Law predicts that “the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years” which for integrated circuits roughly means that every two years the amount of memory that can be in the same integrated circuit area doubles.

So if Moore’s Law kept working, each architecture bit roughly gives you two more years until the availability of memory catches up- This means that the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit architectures per Moore’s Law gave us 64 years until we have to move to an architecture with more bits because memory available is so big that CPUs are unable to use so much memory.

Were we are now, 64 bits is enough to address 8 Exabytes of memory.

That said, extrapolating from the current trend in growth of memory in PCs, we will reach the point when we will start hitting the constraints of that in … NEVER - thanks to the AI bubble the newer PCs are coming out with the same or less memory than the previous generation, so the trend of available memory is not upwards but downwards.

Check it with a 1y or 5y window.

Both Silver and Gold climbed massively in the last 3 years (though they’ve been steadily climbing since around 2020) and hit a huge peak early this year and then came back down. Now they’re both sitting at roughly were they were at the start of the year.

IMHO PMs are not really great speculative investments since they’re not all that volatile (though early this year volatility was unusually high) and they’re more mid and long term wealth holding mechanism in the face of Economic problems that hit major currencies making the value of those currencies (and hence all assets denominated in them) go down. It helps that actual physical metals (especially for Gold) are not managed by Governments or Central Banks - you cannot create new Gold beyond the roughly 2% mined per year hence there is no such thing as Gold interest rates so states can’t just make more of it or tweak its long-term returns - hence it cannot be mismanaged, unlike government issued currencies.

In a long-term perspective it’s not as much that you make money from PMs as it is that everybody else around you is getting poorer because their incomes, savings and assets are in a currency which is losing purchasing power, whilst you managed to retain the purchasing power of your savings.

From my own experience in the 2008 Crash, expect PMs to first go down as Markets plummet and traders are forced to sell in more stable and liquid assets (such as Gold) to cover margin calls in other areas, and then turn and start climbing fast as the crash hits the broader economy and hence the value of the main currencies (this time around, especially the USD) starts falling meaning that PM prices in those currencies go up.

Also keep in mind that Silver is very exposed to the status of the broader Economy since it’s mainly used as an industrial metal, so if the Economy slows down, fewer products containing it are made hence demand for it goes down - Gold tends to be more insulated from the broader Economy than Silver.

That is a good point.

It really depends if he’s trying to control the narrative (in which case he will want to control the bots) or to just keep people engaged with his products (in which case he doesn’t care).

Security services don’t base their personnel or their user-facing machines in commercial data-centers.

It’s as likely the C&C for Russian Government Propaganda ops is in Yandex data centers as it is that NSA personnel are working from Amazon data centers.