Instead of new SSNs, how about we maybe the number less risky in general?

It should never have served as a “secret”. Authenticating someone needs more than some account number. SSN should be more of a “username”, not a password.

When it’s based on a book/series and outruns the source material

Look at the feature list bragged about. It’s really simple stuff. I can absolutely believe they vibe coded that stuff.

The “hardest” one was to feed listener history to an LLM and have it generate a playlist based on the titles. That’s such an absurdly trivial thing to do.

It’s not rocket science. It’s a trivial streaming music player.

And even if you babysit it and carefully tell it all the mistakes, it will learn nothing and suggest the same stupid mistakes next tim. I did actually know a human just like AI and he kept his job for years before quitting to grift another company because management refused to believe he sucked. So I’m not optimistic about AI screwing up discouraging business leaders.

Or even to true believers, they can just vibe code up just as good of an app.

It basically declares point blank that the technology does not matter, it’s their marketing and music rights only that matter.

If their costs went up by 3%, they could hold prices level by taking the credit card fee out and making it an explicit surcharge.

In case no one caught your reference that indeed, Google issued a hundred year bond for this bubble build out. Which is of course crazy as either it pops and is a waste, or continues and they need to issue more debt with 97 years left on the bond they already issued…

I think O365 is a bigger lockin than anything else. But you are right that AD/Entra, for example, is pretty much only because they also have the desktop market locked up. To the extent anyone bothers with Windows Server, which is almost no one anyway, it’s only because the desktop market, so that slice is at risk.

So you have Excel/Powerpoint as the biggest lockins for them outside of Windows itself, but Azure is broadly considered an acceptable choice alongside AWS or GCE, and your cloud provider selection tends to be pretty vendor locked pretty much instantly.

Of course, the bigger threat to them on the “desktop” is not so much RedHat/Ubuntu/SUSE as much as it is Android/iOS.

Not about Windows 11, but another discussion where laptops are infeasibly expensive this year drove some people to report that their companies have begun moving technicians they formerly required to use a laptop to tablets and phones. Having a tablet-in-a-laptop form factor with Aluminium flavor of Android may be an attractive option between hardware costs and Windows 11 nonsense piling on top of long-term Windows desktop nonsense (companies pay microsoft and several security companies to try to wallpaper over security, and Android/iOS are very appealing for their more restrictive privilege model).

In this scenario, you have a number of these AI companies contributing to the hoarding having their equipment handled through ‘asset recovery’, which means that at least companies that can drive 15kw to a system and water cooling will probably get them on the cheap and run it on their premise, or in a colo. Maybe some of those parts will trickle down, but admittedly a good chunk of the stuff is hard to accommodate in a residential setting.

Longer term, the hardware becomes obtainable as supply chains re-calibrate back to identcal or more close solutions. Ten years ago, a datacenter GPU was likely to be same hardware as consumer, but with a different thermal solution, firmware, and the video ports unpopulated. The AI rush has made them shift to exotic packaging so they can have absurdly unreasonable wattage in small places that doesn’t work in home settings. I anticipate a swing back that way eventually.

True, though after Compaq broke the weak exclusivity, Microsoft took over stewardship of all these things like ACPI standards and such. Intel certainly contributed but Microsoft really had the force to make vendors have to honor those standards and norms.

And you get off my lawn…

All your base are belong to us…

Don’t you think?

Like how nVidia buys equity in a customer and in part promises expensive real product as part of it. So they may have so many billions worth of equity in a customer and might be able to leverage that to fund that production if needed, but if that equity evaporates, then they still are on the hook for the expensive product committment.

So maybe not yet straightforward debt, but a whole lot of expensive balls in the air that could manifest as a committed expense when there’s no actual money to execute…

Just seems like a lot of financial moves that are far from straightforward of a magnitude that could wipe a company out.

Strangely enough, we do have Microsoft to thank for it. They didn’t want to do the work to enable all that crap nor did they want to enable all the vendors to do their own thing, so they were adamant about standards and if you wanted Windows support, you had to follow standards.

Meanwhile on embedded every little vendor goes wild. In the server space. ARM has taken on a similar scope, but ARM embedded is a mess and ARM server chip makers keep changing as no one gets a foot hold.

In terms of why some of the “goto” brands aren’t the best, it’s generally because they were the best, got popular on merit, and then business folk come along to suck the life out of it, spending brand goodwill while gouging customers and cutting costs.

Some food product recipe changes to cheap, more shelf stable crap for mass production and easy logistics. Some device gets locked into a paid subscription. All the helpful service people get fired and replaced with chat bots and offshored/outsourced staff. Metal components replaced with cheap plastic that degrades. Shipping times increased so they can make everything an ocean away and give the boat time to travel. Also run big marketing pushes so it’s really hard to find the quality offerings.

There’s just so many ways you can have big margins on big revenue by screwing customers while going they haven’t noticed the decline in quality. Very hard for investor class to leave good product alone.

Retaining that much detail on tentacles takes some drive space

Linear density could also boost throughout. Multiple actuators also exist.

I am not sure. They have other businesses but not sure those other businesses are able to sustain the obligations that nVidia has committed to in this round. They are juggling more money than their pre-AI boom market cap by a wide margin, so if the bubble pops, unclear how big a bag nVidia will be left holding and if the rest of their business can survive it. Guess they might go bankrupt and come out of it eventually to continue business as usual after having financial obligations wiped away…

Also, they have somewhat tarnished their reputation with going all in on the dataenter equipment to, seemingly here, abandoning the consumer market to make more capacity for the datacenters. So if AMD ever had an opportunity to maybe cash in, well, here it might be… Except they also dream of being a big datacenter player, but weaker demand may leave them with leftover capacity…

Well, they are helping out with that one…