Thinking now of the old SNL sketch where John Candy has a repair shop for fixing things most people throw away. Two women come in with a piece of toast they dropped that landed butter-side down on the rug. He decides to freeze it down in some liquid nitrogen and take off the fuzzy side with a belt-sander. Missin’ you, Johnny boy!

Ok here’s my billion dollar idea: vapes that already are web servers!

Okay I’m just gonna call somebody out - Imperious_melange just deleted a thread with over 200 upvotes where a thriving discussion was underway. It was about whether people perceived a pro-China and anti-west sentiment on Lemmy. I tried to post a reply and the site said “deleted by creator”. The thread was just gone. They also seem to have deleted their account, so I can’t even PM them. That’s all just a huge dick move.

Ok, point by point: First, government corruption isn’t a function of capitalism. Officials in every system find ways to sell favors. I personally knew Russians who bribed their way out of the USSR, which was almost laughably corrupt. Secondly, the AI industry can’t “position” its own value - it is what it is, and as an industry it simply isn’t “too big to fail.” Thirdly, Google (founded in 1998) was still a startup during the dotcom bubble, not a “large player”. We have no “huge players” in AI yet - as I mentioned, the biggest AI company only has 8000 employees.

Based on all this I assume the prediction that the government will use retirement account stock market exposure as an excuse to bail out AI companies is something you heard or read - if you gave a link to that I’d be happy to look at the reasoning.

Youtube what? Ohhh, that annoying popup I always decline. Apparently the price only matters if you buy it.

LOL do ya really think customers who still put up with overpriced shitty food are going to balk at the AI? Remember the “backlash” when inflated COVID prices never went back down? And yet here we are. I’ll believe this one when I read about empty McD’s closing.

Well it’s not a ban but I guess not trying to lure them with more gifts is a baby step, kinda.

Yeah, it looks like they first turned a profit in 2024, like $25 million and last year it was half a bil. Maybe what I saw was that they lost money for 17 years before that, I dunno.

Don’t you worry about Wall Street, let ME worry about blank!

Wat? Capitalism knows exactly how to deal with this situation. People who still have faith in the companies will keep loaning them money or buying their stock or investing in them in other ways, and people who don’t have that faith will stop doing those things. Eventually each company will either succeed or run out of believers and die. It’s a very common scenario.

edit: answering the people who mentioned bailouts and government loans, as if to invalidate what I’m saying here.

1. Bailouts are infrequent special cases where governments intercede when there’s fear that corporate failures might cause widespread unemployment or other economic consequences. The entire AI industry isn’t even in that leage - it currently employs around 25-30,000 people. The largest one (OpenAI) only has about 8000. The largest of them could fail without disrupting their industry. This is nothing like a situation that would spur an industry-wide bailout.

2. Same goes for large government loans or loan guarantees. These aren’t handed out like candy whenever anyone asks. The scale of the consequences from company failures simply wouldn’t justify it.

The overwhelmingly likely scenario if AI companies fail is mergers and acquisitions. There’s even a class of investors known as “corporate raiders” who specialize in buying desperate companies and selling off the assets. None of this is new, it’s normal business activity that happens all the time, just part of the ecosystem. Believing AI companies are bulletproof because the government will simply hand them money simply isn’t supported by history. For a counterexample read up on the dotcom bubble of the late 90s, when tens of thousands of web startups went under without getting bailed out.

Somebody mentioned today that reddit has been losing money for 17 years.

edit: my bad, apparently they lost money for 17 years before finally turning a profit about a year and a half ago. Anyway the point is that it can take a long time.

Amazing. Fusion has been 20 years away since I was in school 50 years ago. I know this isn’t the actual reactor but it’s a big step - so maybe 10 years now?

Bingpot! Features trump objections, which is how any industry knows it doesn’t really have to listen to users all that much. Deep down, addicts really don’t care if their heroin is ethically sourced from sustainably managed small-lot producers.

Boomer here, been driving an EV since 2013. Ageism = ignorance.

I think a better way to say it is that change takes time, and large-scale changing of long-established ways takes longer.

BREAKING - Release 0.1 of DON’T is now available - DON’T does absolutely nothing when you start it, except to present an enormous Consent List of everything it can do if you let it. Outraged digital freedom advocates are criticizing what they call excessive download times, sluggish support, and that the app takes up memory space without doing anything.

deleted by creator

Authorities: “You’re reporting wut?”

By relying on most people being law abiding citizens who only act like badass rebels online.

Like homeless camps but for servers.