I was picking some experts' brains about how to reduce some costs involving a ton of raw data and they suggested that I "just feed it all to AI"

I was like, "do you mean... send it all up, terabytes a day... to a third party cloud AI provider?"

And they said "yes". When I asked if that would be prohibitively expensive, they were like "well, we could install a bunch of GPUs and you could use ollama on it."

Neither of these things is even conceptually viable at the scales I'm talking about, nor does it make any sense. I literally did not know what to do when someone I trust tells me something so patently absurd.

Am I missing something, or are people scoring political points at work by answering things like "how could we cut costs in the restaurant?" with answers like "we could light the whole kitchen on fire, then we wouldn't need to pay for gas for the stoves"?

How today felt for people who were all-in on tech stocks.

#finance

I have had seven calls from different vendors today, all being annoyingly persistent.

I have to answer my phone because of family and work stuff, so I can't just avoid it.

Is everyone getting hammered today, or just me?

I'm trying to prevent a loved one from becoming homeless by diverting her from criminal justice and an eviction into the mental health system, and there are basically no options. The system would rather throw a mentally disabled person into the streets and homeless encampments than put them in some sort of monitored housing with rules.

The whole system is predicated on the idea that you're either a 'good person' who will go work and pay your bills, or a 'bad person' who will suffer until they magically 'become good' or freeze to death grasping a bottle of vodka in an alleyway.

When I ask for help, what I get are resources to treat *my emotional well-being* instead of preventing the disabled person from dying.

I don't need a fucking 'support group', I need the government to recognize that some people are actually crazy enough to need daily support to live a dignified life.

Something I've had a lot of difficulty trying to understand and express in modern America is how I find the typical "upper middle class" norms pretty unfulfilling and gross.

Like, I don't want to 'yuck' anyone's 'yum', but I'm not terribly interested in having a big single family home with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops, a perfect lawn, an SUV, and an army of wage slaves to tend to it all while I spend my time at restaurants and soft white-person leisure activities. I honestly prefer spending a fair portion of my time living inside 'the real world', doing 'real work', and witnessing all the joys and horrors I can in my short time on this earth.

I spent most of my life learning how computers work, to the point where I can often intuitively feel out things that are sub-optimal. I spent uncountable Saturday nights alone with a screen, understanding the work of the greatest minds of the world. I dedicated my career to bringing my skill-set to the non-profit sector instead of exploiting it for raw dollars.

I know the LLMs can 'make code', but I do not want my work to take the form of "arguing with a junior over chat" so I can attend more meetings.

I'll gladly use AI. There are places the tools we have fit nicely, but I do not believe that "natural language" is the ultimate interface; it's a step down for a lot of us.

If there's so much demand for AI, then why is every hosting vendor BEGGING us to rent their GPUs, and why can I get GPUs shipped quickly at MSRP?

Those aren't indicators of high demand, they're indicators of insufficient demand.