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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2025
  • My bad, I was reading the sibling comment to mine which was about nvidia specifically and replied to the parent one, which was not. RAM has indeed way more than tripled. A 5060ti is about 50% expensive, so nvidia’s consumer unit counts are up still, but my comment was aimed somewhat wrong lol.

  • User inputs aren’t automagically part of the model right away without training. Whether or not they respect the “don’t train your models on my shit” setting is of course unknown (let’s be honest, they probably don’t respect it), but in either case, they need to add it to the training dataset either manually or via some automated process. And either way, it’s going to be processed by at least an AI sentiment analysis and data categorization tool, or some underpaid contractor, or both.

    I suspect this is just yet another marketing move.

  • Sadly not. Their 2026 consumer revenue is the highest it’s ever been. 2020, they made 11 billion, of which 5.5 was consumer. FY 2026 was 215 billion, of which 16 was gaming.

    Their 2026 gaming revenue was bigger than their total revenue for 2020, and it’s also irrelevant to their bottom line.

    Prices have gone up too, but I don’t think the average gaming GPU has gone up significantly more than 3x and probably less, so unit count is either unchanged or increased.

  • I’d recommend openrouter or something over ollama cloud. Fuck giving meta money. Or a subscription, since those tend to give much more tokens per dollar if utilized properly, I’m going through so many GLM 5.3 flash tokens it’s not even funny, on the cheapest z.ai coding plan, nearly never running out of usage limits, and getting nearly as good results as Claude Opus just a few months ago (like 4.8 or 5, not some old version)

  • On an individual level: Yes. Even a thousand (median) retirees don’t own as much as one billionaire. But in total: All the old people together own an order of magnitude more assets than all the billionaires put together. Because there are so many old people. A large part of it will be their homes of course, but there’s still a metric fuckton of stock in there via retirement funds.

    Go look at Amazon for a particularly egregious example of a corporation that abuses its workers. One would think Jeff Bezos owns a huge part of it, but actually he owns about 8% of it, being the biggest individual shareholder. 75% of float and 68% of all shares are owned by institutions. Then look at the biggest institutional holders: They’re all companies providing ETFs and mutual funds. Most of that (obviously not all) is retail investors and retirement funds, as a lot of rich people find such fund investments boring (average ~10% annual growth long term is not enough when line must always go up). Thus a large proportion of the wage theft by Amazon benefits people investing for retirement, or that have already retired.

    Some economic systems fix this by giving every worker and every retiree an amount of money every month and not allowing anyone (retired OR working) to have any investments at all. This puts an upper limit on how much any individual person can own and spend. It affects retirees more than workers because retirees are the ones who have had time to amass wealth in their working years. There’s less inequality, but the downside is that no matter how hard you work, your retirement will be exactly the same as everyone else, including those who barely work.

    There’s no perfect answer. Under capitalism, workers will naturally feel that the ownership class (mostly old people who were smart and prosperous enough to invest, or lucked into a job with a real pension) own too much. Under communism, retirees are likely going to feel they aren’t being rewarded enough for the hard work they put in throughout the years. But crucially, neither extreme, nor really anything in between, addresses the fact that most countries’ populations are aging, and the lives we’ve gotten used to, have been based on there being fewer old people than working people. That’s why I see only two solutions: We all accept that we have much less (and yes, there should be a wealth cap too), or enough work gets automated that not many workers are needed anymore AND the economic system accounts for it (doesn’t have to be communism, but it can’t be unbridled capitalism)

  • This is a counter factual, I think it’d be really hard to prove what would have happened to current people over 55’s savings if wages had kept pace.

    Well they’d certainly own less, that’s for sure. Corporate profits would’ve gone down, and corporate profits are where most old people’s wealth comes from (401k, pensions, etc).

    Yes yes, make the old’s work again! WTF dude. You know this will happen to you if your lucky right? Personally i want my old age or my parents to not be plagued by want. I see it as part of my duty to support my parents, on account of them supporting me.

    The boomers had to support their parents. We have to support our parents and some of their childless friends. Our children will have to support more like 10-15 people each. Unless we raise our retirement ages enough that we aren’t a burden on our children. In general, if you’re under 40 and thinking of retiring one day, you’re selfish as fuck. Personally I at least acknowledge to myself that my desire to retire one day, is extremely selfish, as it requires me to accumulate resources that other people could use.

    It seems like you’ve consumed too much zero sum game.

    While there are places in economic where zero sum game does not apply (e.g you get more out of education than the money invested into it), resources are largely a zero sum game, as is time (labour). Once an apple has been grown and harvested, only one person can eat it. Once a house is built, only one family can live in it at a time. Etc. When there are fewer people working, less work can get done, unless those people work more hours. To have enough resources for everyone, a big enough share of people has to work. As we have more old people, we need people working longer, unless we figure out a way to replace human labor. As you’re against AI, there’s little real way to do that.

    The whole retirement thing is predicated on growth. There’s enough growth that you can tax young people, either via corporations underpaying them (corporations owned by old people), or via direct taxation and a national pension (where the old people benefitting at least benefit a bit more evenly), without it weighing down on them too badly. This worked great for a while because the population kept growing, but that has pretty much stopped in the developed world.

    Which is why I keep telling people: If you don’t want retirement ages to rise, you better be making babies and tons of them.

  • It’s free though? Kagi the search engine is paid, Orion the browser is free. There’s still no paid browser that I’m aware of.

    The problem with YouTube isn’t that it has ads, it’s that it ran at a loss for well over a decade and THEN started putting ads everywhere, increasing the amount every few months. If your service is only profitable with a ton of ads, put those ads there right away. The enshittification once you have a captive audience through the network effect is what sucks. We could have competitors and that would improve the quality for everyone, but Google sank billions into making sure nobody is using anything but YouTube and THEN started bombarding us with ads. That’s quite literally billions of dollars spent on making the market worse.

  • Over 55 isn’t babyboomers anymore that’s gen x.

    And silent. But notice how little the percent goes up when you add both silent and much of gen x to it. Most of it is still baby boomers.

    I think this kind of data is exactly what you’d expect to see in a somewhat equal society: you work your whole life, saving, of course you’ve got more savings then people who haven’t been working their whole lives.

    Yes. So why are people whining that their paychecks aren’t rising, that they can’t afford property, etc? All that goes to old people who, via retirement funds mostly, own the companies that young people work for. The housing is owned by old people and companies belonging to old people. If the US suddenly had a 50 dollar an hour minimum wage, old people would be fucked and have to go back to work because their holdings would no longer be worth shit.

    Really I suspect averaging here is skewing your perception, that 70% can hide a few super wealthy and many more poor (which is what you’d expect given 1% of the population own more than the combined bottom 95% ).

    Median baby boomer is worth like 400k, average is near 2 mill, so of course it’s still skewed, 10% of baby boomers own 70% of their wealth. But what I’m trying to argue is that you can’t have both a great working life and a great retirement life at the same time unless the amount of retired people is small. Baby boomers enjoyed a great working life and now they’re enjoying a great retirement life, but they can only enjoy the latter because everyone else’s wages stagnated. No other generation has ever been as rich as the baby boomers, no other generation’s wealth outclassed the preceding generation as early as theirs. They’re enjoying more time at the top than anyone before them. Gen X and millennials on the other hand are getting there much later in life and I don’t know if Gen Z will ever be the wealthiest generation before most millennials are dead.

    People just aren’t having enough children for this whole retirement thing to work much longer. Millennials might never retire, Gen Z will definitely not retire (and this isn’t specific to the capitalist system). But we get to pay baby boomers to retire.

    Eventually we need to start talking about getting rid of retirement altogether. We can’t have 5 retirees living off the back of one working person, that’s absurd.

    Ironically the AI everyone’s fighting against, combined with a better economic system of course, is the only thing that can change things. When there are truly very few jobs that need a human, we can finally consider having so many non-working people for so few working people, without outright straddling all the working people with debt. Maybe not AI as it is now, but AI that can truly replace knowledge workers to the point that it can design automation for physical jobs on its own. As it is now, even supposedly “communist” countries need people working well into the 50s and 60s, and it’ll get worse when their demographics crises hit.

  • Fast charging is already expensive (often moreso than fuel unfortunately). The idea being proposed here is that if you make it slower, people get hungry and you can sell them more junk food. You lose that opportunity when charging is too fast, most people get their petrol and drive on instead of getting food each and every time. So it’s actually better to have slower charging, even if you can then charge less money for the energy itself, since you have a captive audience.