For these large businesses, I imagine they get favorable deals, and all the executives probably know each other and scratch each-other’s backs. For smaller businesses, AWS can decrease time-to-market, it’s easy to find people who are already familiar with it, and is seen as less risky than going with some smaller provider. Though, I hate the “cloud” with a passion, and whenever I’m given the choice, I avoid it. It’s quite a bit cheaper in the long run to avoid cloud providers too. On one long project I worked on, we hadn’t had downtime on any of our VPSs longer than a couple minutes over the course of 8 years.

Excessive use of em-dashes, emojis, and other characters that aren’t on standard keyboards. I think these companies purposely have the models generate this stuff so it is easily detectable (so they avoid training on their own slop).

I only found that out within the last year. I’ve been pronouncing it like in-jinx for about a decade.

Firefox and derivatives (e.g. Librewolf) have private built-in, on-device translation.

Idk about ente, but stuff like Google Photos and Immich have photo-specific features, like allowing you to search photos for specific people, semantic keywords, places, etc. Immich and Google Photos use “AI” to create embeddings of the photos (and read EXIF metadata) to allow this. In the case of Google Photos, it’s a privacy nightmare.

I was curious about an LLM-powered terminal, so downloaded it to check it out. The first thing I did was ask it to do something like “open my resume file,” and instead doing something like “ls | grep -i resume” in the current directory, it ran the find command on root and started hitting all my NFS mounts as well.

Nicotine+ is an open source client for the Soulseek network. Soulseek/Nicotine+ does not use i2p or do any type of anonymization; it’ uses direct connections. Guessing you meant “p2p.” The network has a lot of music I can’t find through torrents, and I can almost always find the music I’m looking for as FLAC files.

Options and margin day-traders/gamblers. Single day declines like that on index funds are pretty rare (or used to be), so some people may bet against it thinking it’s a “sure thing,” that they wouldn’t lose too much money if it’s a more normal 0.5% decline. Some trades could cause people to lose all their money (and more) on such declines.

I don’t know the answer, but during 2008 onwards (seems like the economy didn’t fully recover until the end of Obama’s presidency), every industry slowed down. Was hard for me to get a fast food job or consistent minimum wage assembly line work through temp agencies. Things can go into vicious positive feedback loops during downturns (investors afraid to invest due to bad economic outlook -> factories and such don’t get built or expanded -> unemployment rises -> people spend less -> companies start laying off -> economic outlook worsens -> investors selling and moving to "safer’ assets -> …). The entire banking system pretty much imploded during 2008; I don’t know how much exposure banks have to AI (commercial real estate is another thing to worry about though). With any luck the AI crash would be more like the dot-com crash, which mostly just hurt one industry (but I remember my father talking about factory layoffs during that too).

The capitalist class loves the idea and rewards companies with investment money. They think it could be the ultimate tool to snuff out any power the working class still has; making many employees optional, total surveillance of the population, etc. I think it will be a long time until it can do many jobs, but the surveillance tech seems to be coming along pretty well (with “AI” cameras recording license plates and biometric identifiers being put up everywhere).