Yeah, but can they handle the collapse of going back to the company before the AI boom? They’ve increased in market cap 5000%, attracted a lot of stakeholders that never would have bothered with nVidia if not for the LLM boom. If LLM pops, then will nVidia survive with their new set of stakeholders that didn’t sign up for a ‘mere graphics company’?

They’ve reshaped their entire product strategy to be LLM focused. Who knows what the demand is for their current products without the LLM bump. Discrete GPUs were becoming increasingly niche since ‘good enough’ integrated GPUs kind of were denting their market.

They could survive a pop, but they may not have the right backers to do so anymore…

Nah, they already converted all their business clients to recurring revenue and are, relatively, not very exposed to the LLM thing. Sure they will have overspent a bit on datacenters and nVidia gear, but they continue to basically have most of global business solidly giving them money continuously to keep Office and Azure.

In terms of longer term tech companies that could be under existential threat, I’d put Supermicro in there. They are a long term fixture in the market that was generally pretty modest and had a bit of a boost from the hyperscalers as ‘cloud’ took off, but frankly a lot of industry folks were not sure exactly how Supermicro was getting the business results they reported while doing the things they were doing. Then AI bubble pulled them up hard and was a double edged sword as the extra scrutiny seemingly revealed the answer was dubious accounting all along. The finding would have been enough to just destroy their company, except they were ‘in’ on AI enough to be buoyed above the catastrophe.

A longer stretch, but nVidia might have some struggles. The AI boom has driven their market cap about 5000%. They’ve largely redefined most of their company to be LLM centric, with other use cases left having to make the most of whatever they do for LLM. How will their stakeholders react to a huge drop from the most important company on earth to a respectable but modest vendor of stuff for graphics? How strong is the appetite for GPU when the visual results aren’t really that much more striking than they were 3 generations of hardware back?

Broadly speaking, I’d say simulation theory is pretty much more akin to religion than science, since it’s not really testable. We can draw analogies based on what we see in our own works, but ultimately it’s not really evidence based, just ‘hey, it’s funny that things look like simulation artifacts…’

There’s a couple of ways one may consider it distinct from a typical theology:

• Generally theology fixates on a “divine” being or beings as superior entities that we may appeal to or somehow guess what they want of us and be rewarded for guessing correctly. Simulation theory would have the higher order beings likely being less elevated in status.
• One could consider the possibility as shaping our behavior to the extent we come anywhere close to making a lower order universe. Theology doesn’t generally present the possibility that we could serve that role relative to another.

But that sounds like disproving a scenario no one claimed to be the case: that everything we perceive is as substantial as we think it is and can be simulated at full scale in real time by our own universe.

Part of the whole reason people think of simulation theory as worth bothering to contemplate is because they find quantum physics and relativity to be unsatisyingly “weird”. They like to think of how things break down at relativistic velocities and quantum scale as the sorts of ways a simulation would be limited if we tried, so they like to imagine a higher order universe that doesn’t have those pesky “weird” behaviors and we are only stuck with those due to simulation limits within this hypothetical higher order universe.

Nothing about it is practical, but a lot of these science themed “why” exercises aren’t themselves practical or sciency.

Though passkeys are now commonly shared across devices. That was one of the changes they made. For example, chrome will gladly do all the passkey management in the Google password manager. Under Linux at least there’s isn’t even a whiff of trying to integrate with a hardware security device. First pass they demanded either a USB device or Bluetooth connection to a phone doing it credibly, or windows hello under windows, but now they decided to open it up.

Technically the truth, but an argument can be made that 2FA was mostly more secure by virtue of how bad password security is, and selling a switch to passkey as a convenience is a big security win.

Also with passkey, you’ll be commonly be forced to do some sort of device unlock making it generally the “thing you have” require either “thing you are” or “thing you know” so it becomes effectively 2fa.

If a service were going to passkeys for sake of law enforcement or works be so much easier for them to just comply with bypassing auth to access the user data altogether. Passkey implementations originally only supported very credible offline mechanisms and only relaxed those requirements when it became clear the vast majority of people couldn’t handle replacing their devices with passkeys.

For screen lock for the common person it was either that or nothing at all. So demanding a PIN only worked because most of the time the user didn’t have to deal with it owing to touching a fingerprint or face unlock.

People hate passwords and mitigate that aggravation by giving random Internet forum the same password as their bank account. I wouldn’t want to take user passwords because I know I have a much higher risk of a compromise somehow leading to compromise of actually important accounts elsewhere.

Yeah, this is one of those terrible ideas even if you thought that, in theory, you were onboard with ‘anti-DEI’.

Out of the blue the wrong person gets randomly pissed at you and invokes the highly subjective clause and suddenly you owe them $1.5M…

With many bearaucracies there’s plenty of practically valueless work going on.

Because some executive wants to brag about having over a hundred people under them. Because some proceas requires a sort of document be created that hasn’t been used in decades but no one has the time to validate what does or does not matter anymore. Because of a lot of little nonsense reasons where the path of least resistance is to keep plugging away. Because if you are 99 percent sure something is a waste of time and you optimize it, there’s a 1% chance you’ll catch hell for a mistake and almost no chance you get great recognition for the efficiency boost if it pans out.

Guess it’s a matter of degree, that was the sort of stuff I was alluding to in the first part, that you have all this convoluted instrumentation that you can dig into, and as you say perhaps even more maddening because at some times it’s needlessly over complicating something simple, and then at just the wrong time it tries to simplify something and ends up sealing off just the flexibility you might need.

The things is you really can’t be that good with windows.

Sure you can get good with registry and group policy and other stuff that is needlessly complicated to do relatively simple stuff. You can know your way around WMI and .net and powershell…

But at some point, the software actively hides the specifics of what is wrong. You can’t crack open something to see why it’s showing some ambigious hexadecimal code or a plain screen. You can’t add tracing to step through their code to see what unexpected condition they hit that they didn’t prepare to handle. On Linux you are likely to be able to plainly see a stack trace, download the source code, maybe trace it, modify the source code.

Windows is like welding the hood shut and wondering why mechanics have a hard time with the car.

Yes. Musk’s net worth including his stock is a bit shy of 500 billion, and Tesla market cap is about 1500 billion. His net worth includes all his assets that he could possibly leverage.

Actually he doesn’t. Most of his ‘wealth’ is Tesla shares already. Even if he could toss everything he has just toward controlling more of Tesla, and if the shareholders accepted it at current market value, he’d only have a third of the company.

Tesla is crazy over valued for a company that has only been able to be a car company that is in 14th place, yet assessed as being more valuable than all the 13 more successful car companies combined…

Yeah, the PayPal one is so spot on.

He had a company that I guess was like CitySearch that no one ever heard of and managed to win a lottery of selling it to Compaq who thought they had to do something in this whole dotcom thing.

Then he founded ‘x.com’, a failure of an online bank while Paypal took off. Then, somehow, in the wake of being merged in he talked the company into letting him be in charge, despite his company pretty much the relative failure in that relationship, and he nearly tanked it before being kicked out. Despite this for a long time he got credit as ‘the paypal guy’, despite his only contribution being almost tanking it after losing to it initiallly in the market. Again, won the lottery because he had such a share and eBay tossed so much money at it.

He’s supremely successful at taking credit from others when things work out.

I’d research Chilipad harder if I were in the market again. At very cursory glance it seems like less of an uphill battle. I could be wrong and they could be douchey, or their engineering somehow sucks, but maybe they are good too.

FreeSleep is what I would do if they try to force the subscription on me, but I probably wouldn’t buy the product hoping that I can change their firmware against their will. I don’t want to give money to a vendor I would just be antagonistic with.

If they announced they formally endorsed use of FreeSleep as an ‘advanced alternative’, ok, but that isn’t going to happen.

This is spot on. Note these asshats eventually caved and added local controls when customers kept saying how horrible it was to use the phone. The local controls are explicitly disabled unless the cloud service has recently approved the bed to allow the local controls to work. You have to use the phone to enable the local controls. The phone can’t do anything locally except tell it how to connect to wifi. If you don’t have the subscription or grandfathered in before the subscription, the local controls do nothing.

Well, unless you jailbreak your cover with FreeSleep.

So in my case (I didn’t want to, but not my choice, but at least it was cheap and without subscription at the time), it was about the water cooling/warming. It’s really nice and essentially inaudible.

I think Chilipad is a brand that does it without the online bullshit, though I didn’t get to try that.

None of this should ever require an internet connection, and it’s abundantly clear that’s an anti-consumer hostile forced behavior Eight Sleep did.

The designers were thinking “we want to force users to a monthly subscription”.

So against my preference, we bought one of these. Years ago and it wasn’t so crazy expensive and the basic ‘cloud’ functionality was free. Over the course of the years of the initially decent warranty, the covers sprang leaks and so we got free upgrades carrying us all the way to a generation of the product where they replaced the crappy molded leak prone water mat with decent tubes that seem to be more resilient, all without needing to get in the subscription. As a consequence, I know about their evolution.

From the onset, they were hammered with “phone over the internet control is bogus, add a remote or buttons on the base or something”, and they kept responding with vague “we are working a solution”. Well, they ultimately did, they added earbud-style 'tap N number of times on the side to adjust things or dismiss alarms". Ok, super awkward and still no buttons, but at least it has local controls, right? Well, I go to try it and it just gives the long-buzz error indication. Turns out the app has to be used to activate the bed or schedule a start time before the local controls will let you control it. When they explicitly added a local control loop, they blocked it from working unless the cloud service said it was ok.

This is not “crappy developer stupidly doesn’t know how to make local control work”. This is “developer going out of their way to screw over a customer to force them to keep paying for every single month they want the product to keep working”.

A shame, aversion to buttons aside, the hardware design is really quite good, quiet and effective and seemingly more leak resistant.

Problem is that as a provider, if you are sure you are confident you’ll get hit by an outage at some point anyway, it’s actually better for you if a bunch of other big names are brought down at the same time.

Instead of “that one service sucked”, the story is “aws sucked”. If it happens too much people will more widely say “ok they suck for using aws”, but for now the transparency gets them treated more like being affected by an unavoidable external condition.

I’m grateful a lot of sites I like didn’t use aws, but I’m not exactly a common demographic and even I won’t know if she is the services even move or not until another such outage.

I remember one time going in for a physical in the mid 2000s. I happen to have a pretty typical winter cough going on and he just casually wrote out a prescription for opioid cough syrup.