> more than a fifth of the entire S&P 500 market cap is now just three companies — Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple — two of which are basically big bets on AI.
These 3 companies have been heavyweights since long before AI. Before AI, you couldn't get Nvidia cards due to crypto, or gaming. Apple is barely investing in AI. Microsoft has been the most important enterprise tech company for my entire lifetime.
Nvidia market cap has increased about 10x since the crypto-shortage years. It wasn't small before, but there's a big difference between ~1% of the market and ~10% of the market in terms of systemic risk.
Also, as of last year about 80% of their revenues were from data center GPUs designed specifically for "AI", and that's undoubtedly continuing to grow as a share of their revenues.
You’re missing the point. Whether one buys it or not to one side, the author is saying those companies, whatever their history have pushed a significant amount of their … chips into a bet on AI.
I agree that his position is right wing, but is it far right? Most nations explicitly exist for the people native to the place. Very few nations allow foreign immigration on the scale that the US, UK, Canada, do. And European countries make it pretty difficult to migrate normally- unless you’re a Muslim “refugee”. Being anti-immigrant is a default position in the world.
I think the average person on the left likes to believe they have the position that “all immigration is good”. In reality, they mean all migration by nonwhite people is good (see how they talk about white or near-white people in the US, Canada, Israel). It’s this hypocrisy and obviously racist stance that bugs me.
What makes Muslim migration to Europe “good” but Jewish migration to the stateless land of Israel from 1890-1948 bad? What makes Muslims moving to the US “good” but makes all white people in the US colonizers? Either everybody gets the colonizer notation (foolish imo) or migration is a human right (like it was for the million years before the modern nation-state) and everybody needs to fucking deal with it, stop killing each other and stop condemning people for moving or for the past crimes of people who may be barely related. And if you’re going to migrate: don’t be an asshole to the people there first.
Completely absurd projection not supported by any serious sources. That would mean 1 in 3 Gazans dead, and 10 deaths per reported death, which would be completely out of line with other conflicts.
> at least two in every 10,000 people die each day from starvation, or from malnutrition and disease.
Gaza population is 2 million * 2/10000 = 400 people dying per day in order for it to be a famine.
> After more than 700 days of war, 455 Palestinians have died of malnutrition or starvation, including 151 children, the health ministry in Gaza reported on October 1. One hundred and seventy-seven of the total number have died of malnutrition or starvation since the IPC confirmed famine on August 15, it said.
Is 455 in 700 days more than 400 per day? I don’t know, I’m having trouble doing math. Perhaps the people of HN can tell me the IPC standard is being met as the CNN article states?
Media and general literacy is apparently impossible even for journalists.
In August, the IPC found about 514,000 Gazans are Phase 5 (famine / humanitarian catastrophe) [1][2]. It projected by September that was around 641,000. So the threshold you're looking for is a crude death rate (CDR) between 100 and 120 per day.
CRD "needs to be directly attributable to outright starvation or to the interaction of food consumption deficits and disease" and does not include trauma [3]. So it will be more than just confirmed deaths from malnutrition or starvation (which is, in practice, impossible to procure for anywhere on even the brink of famine).
The mortality exceeding the rate I mentioned is a prerequisite for declaring stage 5. It has not been met. You don’t declare stage 5 until it has according to their own standards.
The rate of death in Gaza from those causes is nowhere near that CDR. The total death rate from all causes is substantially below that number (by a factor of 4).
> The mortality exceeding the rate I mentioned is a prerequisite for declaring stage 5
Source?
> The total death rate from all causes is substantially below that number (by a factor of 4)
You're still making the mistake of taking statistics from across Gaza and pretending that's relevant. Based on your method, there has never been a crime wave anywhere in the world because the global crime rate tends to be somewhat stable across time and countries.
> The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.
So the software can't work with arbitrary drones. The article also talks about the high cost of some of the drones.
> Of the dozen or so autonomous systems acquired for Replicator, three were unfinished or existed only as a concept at the time they were selected, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Among Replicator’s shortcomings, officials said, is that the Defense Innovation Unit was directed to buy drones that had older technology, and it didn’t rigorously test platforms and software before acquiring them, other people familiar with the matter said.
So the military bought promises and basically funded some research. That's fine imo, they do that all the time, but their expectations did not align with results in these cases. And they didn't set good requirements for the platforms.
I expect the hopes for AI-driven drones with the ability to target individual humans by identity is probably not quite here yet. You have to get around jamming, fit any tech on a small platform, and it has to be cheap and disposable. And you don't actually want "AI", because you don't want it to mistakenly kill civilians, you want highly accurate computer vision.
In Russia and Ukraine, they are manually piloting drones that are attached by fiberoptic cable. It's cheap and effective, but requires a human pilot. At least for now, I would guess this is a much more effective (in results and cost) way to go. A human can pilot dozens of disposable drones in a day that drop their payload and are then discarded.
This played out much like many coffee shops that I’ve seen in my city and others [0]. Basically some leftist with a little money and little to no business acumen opens a low margin business and hires far-left employees. Those employees, dissatisfied with their low wages - they are, after all, baristas at coffee shops that are barely profitable, if at all - form a union. When the owner tells them they can’t pay more and offer benefits because they are literally losing money, the employees then take to social media, destroying what little customer base the business had. The business closes, and the employees are now unemployed, having destroyed their own livelihood and a place they actually liked working, because they had this absurd idea that their queer/trans owner that was scraping by was some maniacal oligarch that deserved to be crushed by the workers.
The real lesson is that if you’re opening a small coffee shop or bookshop or similar small business, you have to work full time and not hire people unless absolutely necessary. And if you do hire others, avoid the communists.
If I’m a barista at an indie shop shitting on my small business employer for not giving me more money, then I’m sort of by definition not much of a communist. The handful of sincere communists I know would absolutely label those people (correctly) as ignorant dipshits larping as communists (or at the very least, deploying convenient tropes as cudgels for their own narrow self-interests). No one who’s serious in their communist ideals would seek validation from their capitalist employers in the first place, and anyone who does should take the opportunity for some self-reflection.
The best people I’ve known from all over the political spectrum shared a capacity to bring me into their corner, for a few select issues anyway.
They could only get to the point in the conversation where my mind is changed because they were sincere, humble, informed, curious, empathetic, and open to having the discussions.
I feel like so much of contemporary public discourse is shaped by the worst, most transparently dishonest idiots in society. This perspective of mine is also probably bent by the fact that I left Facebook around 2012, and haven’t really spent much time on social media since. I logged onto Instagram not long ago, and it all feels really weird from a naive point of view.
> This war that European Jews started in 1948 when they decided to attack and invade Palestine spans 2 continents, and more if you include the various attacks elsewhere.
This is extremely ignorant. Jews have lived in Israel continuously for 3000 years. The modern Zionist migration, which started in the late 19th century (far from the first such movement for the Jews, and far from the last we've seen globally for all peoples), was met with violence by the Arabs with pogroms and organized violence starting in the 1920s. It was the Arab nations who attacked the Jews in 1948, not the other way around, and both Jews and Arabs were displaced in the war. Prior to then, there was no land "stolen" by Jews, just land legally purchased from Arab landowners. We'll ignore the fact that the Muslim caliphates and Ottomans stole the land in the first place and focus on the modern conflict. We can also ignore the repeated mass-murders / pogroms of Jews throughout Israel and the rest of the Arab/Muslim world in the 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th, and prior centuries, since acknowledging that Jews were repeatedly killed in Safed and elsewhere would require you to acknowledge they existed there and were oppressed by the people and dhimmi laws of the Muslim empires.
The Arabs were and are the equivalent of the xenophobic Trump supporters in the US - they didn't want Jews coming in, buying land, working and thriving, etc. Do you also support violence against non-white migrants in the west?
No, it isn't ignorant, it's history, and pointing to other historical examples of colonialism and imperialism doesn't make modern colonialist states legitimate. Romans lived in the UK over a thousand years ago, but that wouldn't give their descendants in modern Italians the right to occupy the UK, and us native Brits would be well within our right to fight back any invading and occupying force whether the invading and occupying force likes it or not. Muslims, Jews and Christians lived in relative peace in Palestine for almost a thousand years before the British put Israel there.
The British not only didn't put Israel there, they actually fought against the Jews and supported the Arab armies in 1948, after previously restricting Jewish migration during the Holocaust (contributing to many Jewish deaths). Modern Zionism began 30 years before the Brits took control.
Thank you. Although I have no personal interest in the outcomes of this conflict, it is astounding to see how these basic historical facts are not only unknown to so many people who hold strong opinions on the Israel-Gaza conflict, but also outright denied. I guess this must also be how Holocaust denialism was ever a thing.
This is not true and is nonsensical. The Iranian regime is explicitly anti-American, and it was American inaction that allowed them to rise to power. If America had intervened during the revolution, they could have eliminated the regime in its infancy and saved half a century of headaches and many lives lost due to Iranian wars and terror proxies.
The US also did not create political Islam, which predates the US by over 1000 years. Blaming the US for the problems of this region which has always had these problems is counter-factual. The problems of this part of the world - poverty, violence, religious oppression and dictatorships - predate western civilization as a whole, and in fact the oppressive empires from the Middle East / North Africa spread earlier and wider than western empires.
Well they did intervene during the 1952 revolution. The secular democratic government wasn't very convenient so they basically undid the revolution and reinstalled the Shah in power. Then the second time the Shah was overthrown, it was done by Islamists, not by the secular elected parliament.
H1Bs are much less of a problem than the offshoring and outsourcing. I’d rather lure top talent to live in the US than ship jobs off to exploited contractors who work for nothing.
I'd rather have neither. I'd rather not import foreign labor to compete with Americans for housing, jobs, wages, healthcare, political power etc. This is a zero-sum game, the nation and its economy exists for the benefit of its citizens not to provide prosperity to people who don't live here.
I think the assumption of it being a zero-sum game is wrong. Almost half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children [0]. The source is still the American Immigration Council, but even just looking at a specific example can illustrate that it might not be a zero sum game.
Jensen Huang, the co-founder and now CEO of NVIDIA, was an immigrant. NVIDIA is one of the most valuable companies today and has generated thousand of jobs and has helped create the AI revolution happening right now. You can argue that some other American born citizen would have created NVIDIA or found the same success, but that is difficult to prove.
I fundamentally disagree that this is a zero sum game. Many immigrants add to the American experience and many become citizens themselves. The country loses out in ignoring foreign labor, especially if it’s foreigners who are taught in our schools and want to come and work here.
People just wanted cheap goods while not caring how the sausage was made. People didn't care to understand the long term damage just that today's needs should be served. Then companies learned that they can/need recruit 10x cheaper in other countries to make it cheaper that is what they did.
Now the apathy shoe is on the other foot. This government's action have ensured there cannot be any study to show impact of these rules in an impartial manner. Everything has to be for or against these rules. That means people don't care to understand the long term damage just that today's needs should be served.
A discord server with 150k people whose identity or nation of origin are not verified, where only 8000 people voted. This is as illegitimate an election as they come. Come literally just have been elected by Russian (or any other) bots.
You'd be surprised, but there are numerous governments that claim to be democratic - while having a much weaker claim to democracy than "the current acting prime minister was elected by 8000 unverified randos in a snap election online".
Outside the comfy first world, the bar for government sanity can get extremely low.
It wasn’t an election. One of the more prominent youth groups involved in the protests used Discord to organize and decide internally which leader they should endorse and suggest to the president and army leadership. No one was directly elected on Discord.
These 3 companies have been heavyweights since long before AI. Before AI, you couldn't get Nvidia cards due to crypto, or gaming. Apple is barely investing in AI. Microsoft has been the most important enterprise tech company for my entire lifetime.