And I've even heard rumors of software engineers that don't even write apps or write code that runs on the internet at all. They say some of them don't even use javascript or python! The horror.
"AI-insiders" are trying to market their tools to you. See Anthropic's continuous lithany of "all programmers will be replaced in 6 months" while they struggle to make their TUI API wrapper consume less than 2-4 GB of RAM (they brought it down from 68 GB[1]), or have a decent uptime.
I have heard many replace their phones due to dropping them and becoming unusable. But everyone uses a case now and the build quality is generally better that one mishap does trash the phone. Most people I know getting new phones now did so bc their old phone "got too slow to be usable." I believe that's a matter of new OS versions really are much heavier. Both my last 2 phones I had upgraded bc I went one version too far and had a nearly bricked phone.
I'm not sure I agree with you about the debt. If you don't manage the debt, eventually you'll loose investors, which means you'll loose the funds to do anything. Including fix the climate. We now spend more on interest (14%) than we do on national defense (13%).
There’s also no indication that it’s not right around the corner. But it’s true, no one really knows where that threshold is. But it’s also the kind of thing that you really don’t want to know the “right” answer to, because by then it will be too late.
I'm not an expert but I can tell you why I think it's an issue.
The national debt has to be continually refinanced as parts of it become due. That works when investors are willing to give you money. But if investors think you are no longer a good investment they will continually ask for higher interest rates and then eventually they will stop giving you their money altogether. And if that happens then we're going to be in be trouble because we will have no means to pay what is due and we'll default.
The problem is the interest payment on the debt is starting to become a large fraction of the income of America and we are starting to look like an increasingly bad investment. And that shows in the rates we have to pay. I don't think we're in any immediate danger but spending goes up every year which means we need to borrow more and we move more toward that risky place.
And if history is to be any guide, when you hit the bad spot, everything falls apart fast in a very uncontrolled way.
So IMHO, we should ramp down spending slowly, in a controlled way to avoid having it ramped down for us in a rapid uncontrolled way. Either way, I suspect eventually spending is going to come down whether we like it or not.
Those are the prices for just buying equipment, which at least retain some kind of value. 3 million+ American kids are enrolled in competitive soccer with annual clubs dues between $1K and $5K, and that money is just gone at the end of the year. Basically none of those kids are going to have a career in soccer, so it's clearly a hobby, and everyone knows it. And soccer isn't even the most popular sport!
It's probably more correct to say that there are some people who project that 240GW of additional power will be required by data centers in the near future.
Yes, that number is absurd, and data centers will certainly need to make do with less, regardless of actual requirements.
That also fails to take efficiency and cost optimization into account.
Just parsing out salutations and please/thank you from AI requests reduces utilization and that’s not really even intense optimization.
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