h2zizzle (u/h2zizzle)

h2zizzle commented on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes? english.elpais.com/techno... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

jlawson · 3 days ago

The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are.

The alternative is like feeding an animal instead of letting it live the lifestyle it's adapted for. That helps it in the moment but over time its capacities atrophy and it ends up weakened, twisted and harmed with nothing to spend its natural instincts on.

h2zizzle · 3 days ago

I would wager that more jobs accelerate psychological and physiological issues than, say, volunteering or unemployment with active community engagement do. At the very least, the psychological benefits of unemployment are objectively an incidental side-effect of its actual purpose, which is labor for a profitable enterprise. That is to say that employment is still "functional" if it generates that labor even while destroying someone's psychological health. If that health is paramount, the structure of employment probably needs to change in order to privilege health over productivity, even to productivity's detriment. Otherwise, the vast majority of people would be better off with some other institution.

h2zizzle commented on RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung pcworld.com/article/29989... · Posted by u/sethops1

sneak · 12 days ago

I don’t spend anywhere near that. It resells for 60-80% when I replace it a year or two later. That offsets the cost drastically.

Spending $700 per month on your work tools (where that represents 2-3% of revenue) is not unreasonable. My minuscule office space in the shitty part of town costs as much.

I think anyone running their small business that depends on high performance computers should have an annual budget of at least 1% of revenue for hardware.

h2zizzle · 11 days ago

It's still thousands in unnecessary spend. You've likely thrown away a few years of post-retirement funds, and at least a few months of runway in the case of a crisis or emegency. It doesn't matter if it seems like a reasonable expense as a percentage of revenue, because the marginal improvement in productivity, for the vast majority of people, is going to be insignificant.

You can justify it to yourself however you like, but outside of your bubble, it's a poor allocation of money.

h2zizzle commented on RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung pcworld.com/article/29989... · Posted by u/sethops1

jfindper · 14 days ago

>I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year

>I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy

Sick man! Awesome, you spend 1/3 of the median US salary on a laptop and desktop every year. That's super fucking cool! Love that for you.

Anyways, please go brag somewhere else. You're rich, you shouldn't need extra validation from an online forum.

h2zizzle · 12 days ago

It's worse. 1/3 median household, 1/2 median individul.

h2zizzle commented on RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung pcworld.com/article/29989... · Posted by u/sethops1

sneak · 13 days ago

The logistics of upgrading a Mac are:

1) rsync home directory over to new machine

2) generate new SE keys in secretive

3) push new authorized_keys out to all servers and test (scripted)

4) start using new machine

5) wipe old machine

It takes a few hours and most of it is waiting on 10GE rsync which only goes at like 3000Mbit and you can still use the source machine while it runs.

h2zizzle · 12 days ago

Disclosing that you spend half the median income on top-spec Apple hardware every year is a confession, dude. There's no justifying that spend, past, "I like having the newest toys." Happy for you and whatever sales rep whose performance review you're making a slam dunk. It's still not good advice for the vast majority of people who use their computers for work.

You're an economic elite living in what is commonly known as a "bubble"; consider the response to your initial post a momentary popping of it.

h2zizzle commented on AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power chrbutler.com/what-ai-is-... · Posted by u/delaugust

ben_w · 24 days ago

Pointing out a problem is one thing, I don't think anyone here would object to that especially given normal nerd dynamics, but you did also beg everyone to refrain from speaking of things they're most likely to actually know anything about.

h2zizzle · 13 days ago

Insisting on Eurocentrism wrt an Asian invention leaves the impression that you don't actually know what you're talking about. It's essentially misinformation.

You know exactly why this in particular hits a nerve.

h2zizzle commented on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas arstechnica.com/ai/2025/1... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

tech_ken · 14 days ago

> A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy.

Yeah that's a more accurate framing, basically just saying that in '08 we put out the fire and rehabbed the old growth rather than seeding the fresh ground.

> Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch

I disagree, I think they're artifacts of the rehab environment (the ZIRP policy sphere). I think in a world where we fully ate the loss of '08 and started in a new direction you might get Tesla, but definitely not TSLA, and the version we got is really (Tesla+TSLA) IMO. Bitcoin to me is even less of a break with the pre-08 world; blockchain is cool tech but Bitcoin looks very much "Financial Derivatives, Online". I think an honest correction to '08 would have been far more of a focus on "hard tech and value finance", rather than inventing new financial instruments even further distanced from the value-generation chain.

> Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist.

Hard agree here

h2zizzle · 13 days ago

I would say yes and no on Tesla. Entities that survived becaue of the rehab environment actually expected it to fail, and shorted it heavily. TSLA as it currently exists is a result of the short squeeze on the stock that ensued when it became clear that the company was likely to become profitable. Its current, ridiculous valuation isn't a product of its projected earnings, but recoil from those large shorts blowing up.

In our hypothetical alternate timeline, I imagine that there would have still been capital eager to fill the hole left by GM, and possibly Ford. Perhaps Tesla would have thrived in that vacuum, alongside the likes of Fisker, Mullen, and others, who instead faced incumbent headwinds that sunk their ventures.

Bitcoin, likewise, was warped by the survival of incumbents. IIUC, those interests influenced governance in the early 2010s, resulting in a fork of the project's original intent from a transactional medium that would scale as its use grew, to a store of value, as controlled by them as traditional currencies. In our hypothetical, traditional banks collapsed, and even survivors lost all trust. The trustless nature of Bitcoin, or some other cryptocurrency, maybe would have allowed it to supercede them. Deprived of both retail and institutional deposits, they simply did not have the capital to warp the crypto space as they did in the actual 2010s.

I call them "ghosts" because, yes, whatever they might have been, they're clearly now just further extensions of that pre-2008 world, enabled by the our post-2008 environment (including ZIRP).

h2zizzle commented on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas arstechnica.com/ai/2025/1... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

LeifCarrotson · 13 days ago

Agreed! I recently listened to a podcast (video) from the "How Money Works" channel on this topic:

"How Short Term Thinking Won" - https://youtu.be/qGwU2dOoHiY

The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines.

If those are the causes, then simple regulatory changes to make stock buybacks illegal again, limit the kinds of executive compensation contracts that are valid, and incentivize higher dividend yields/penalize sales yields should return the market to the previous long-term-optimized behavior.

I doubt that you could convince the politicians and financiers who are currently pulling value out of a fragile and inefficient economy under the current system to make those changes, and if the changes were made I doubt they could last or be enforced given the massive incentives to revert to our broken system. I think you're right that it will take a huge disaster that the wealthy and powerful are unable to dodge and unable to blame on anything but their own actions, I just don't know what that event might look like.

h2zizzle · 13 days ago

I disagree. Those place the problem at the corporate level, when it's clearly extended through to being a monetary issue. The first thing I would like to see is the various Fed and banking liquidity and credit facilities go away. They don't facilitate stability, but a fiscal shell game that has allowed numerous zombie companies to live far past their solvency. This in turn encourages widespread fiscal recklessness.

We're headed for a crunch anyway. My observation is that a controlled demolition has been attempted several times over the past few years, but in every instance, someone has stepped up to cry about the disaster that would occur if incumbents weren't shored up. Of course, that just makes the next occurrence all the more dire.

h2zizzle commented on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas arstechnica.com/ai/2025/1... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

bluefirebrand · 13 days ago

> you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade.

I'm not hoping for a market correction personally, I'm hoping that mobs reinvent the guillotine

They deserve nothing less by now. If they get away with nothing worse than "a correction" then they have still made out like bandits

h2zizzle · 13 days ago

I tend to agree, but there's something to be said for a retribution focus taking time and energy away from problem-solving. When market turmoil hits, stand up facilities to guarantee food and healthcare access, institute a nationwide eviction moratorium, and then let what remains of the free market play out. Maybe we pursue justice by actually prosecuting corporate malfeasance this time. The opposite of 2008.

h2zizzle commented on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas arstechnica.com/ai/2025/1... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

tech_ken · 14 days ago

> correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade

You need to also have a robust alternative that grows quickly in the cleared space. In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents, but the ensuing decade of policy choices basically just allowed the thing to re-grow in a new form.

h2zizzle · 14 days ago

I thought we pretty explicitly bailed out most of the incumbents. A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. 2008's "correction" should have seen the end of most of our investment banks and auto manufacturers. Say what you want to about them (and I have no particular love for either), but Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch. There should have been more, and Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist.

h2zizzle commented on Microsoft drops AI sales targets in half after salespeople miss their quotas arstechnica.com/ai/2025/1... · Posted by u/OptionOfT

jqpabc123 · 14 days ago

AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising.

It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this.

So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted?

I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made selling the fantasy is simply too good to ignore.

In other words --- pure greed. Over the longer term, this is a weakness, not a strength.

h2zizzle · 14 days ago

It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade.

It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - the same as how they've gotten to choose the winners and losers for the past two decades.