As someone who belongs to “all of us”, i vote to not bail us out if shit hits the fan. No need to ask me when it happens, OK? No really, it’s nice of you but we really dont need to be bailed out. You are welcome :)
Iceland let it's banks default, and is now doing rather well.
In fact, bank failure and then having the government only guarantee ~$50k of funds per person is a good way to hand wealth to the people and take it from corporations and the super wealthy.
I was going to write a shitty reply to this, but the more research I did, the more it seems actually this went pretty well for them. UK and NL governments that lost deposits in the Icelandic banks mostly got their cash back (eventually), there was recession and unemployment but not that much worse than other countries, and the country is in good standing again with the markets.
I would note that this is much much easier to do if your investors are foreign, rather than domestic pension funds, so it doesn’t bring down the government, though.
> good way to hand wealth to the people and take it from corporations and the super wealthy
Hence the power that be try to prevent it best they can. In some cases, unsuccessfully (Iceland) and in others, a bit more successful (the US). But seemingly, they're only able to delay the inevitable, not completely prevent it.
Is everyone just glossing over the fact that the feds make a profit on bailing the banks out? Seems like a win win to take over ownership in the event of a bank failure.
Was this definitely not accounting trickery? Like even the way money is created is intentionally convoluted and approximately 1% of the population even attempts to understand it. Can we really trust the accounting of bank bailouts which stood to be unpopular when the accounting produced a convenient outcome? Has anyone plausible analyzed this to a convincing level of detail?
This was explained by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show ad neausum in 2008 and was common discourse for years after. No. It's not accounting trickery. Rather than allow the company aka the bank to go fully bankrupt the government simply forces a sale of the shares of the bank to the government. The original stock owners basically take a cap gains loss (potentially based on their cost basis). The bank then continues to operate as normal. This prevents a run on the bank and keeps it stable. Then 2-3 years later the stock recovers and the government sells its shares. Since they bought low this is highly profitable. Anyway yes and yes. The 2008 bailout ended up making a profit for tax payers. Thanks Obama.
If there was a reliable profit to be made, a third party would do it.
I suspect the real profit is made by also being in a position to adjust laws and rules to make sure your investment survives, as well as turning low rated bonds effectively into government bonds. All those things are at the expense of others in the bigger picture.
3rd parties don't have the capital to front the losses. That's the whole point for the government to do it. The feds get the advantage that they basically get to force the existing creditors to sell at a loss. Presumably that's what everyone here wants. The existing owners to pay a penalty on the failure and for everyone else to remain whole if possible. Well that's exactly how a bank "bail out" works. So what's the actual problem? The only one's "hurt" are the owners who miss managed the business.
We have similar FDIC insurance in the US. The solution is companies have many, many deposit accounts to still get the insurance, mostly for payroll purposes.
Could easily change the rules so real humans get government insurance, but companies do not.
And perhaps have the insurance pay out only once per year per person too, so that when multiple bank failures happen at once there is not much benefit to splitting funds.
But that defeats the purpose of depositor's insurance. The purpose isn't to make sure people get their money back; that's only a side effect. The point of depositors insurance is to avoid bank runs, which can be contagious.
The cause of the run isn't that important, and if you banking system collapses because companies pull out all their money you're not in a better position than if individuals do.
The issue is that major US banks are systematically important to the US and also everyone else. Practically nobody cares about Icelandic banks - not even their depositors if their deposits were protected by the state (which they were).
If a bank like JP Morgan were to fail, the event would be without exaggeration cataclysmic to everyone, even small local banks and credit unions. Even if ultimately the clients of JPM could be made whole, the weeks of uncertainty and frozen funds would single handedly obliterate the financial systems across the globe. It's the age old adage: "if you get margin called and get wiped out, it doesn't matter that you'd have recovered just 2 weeks later". The world as a whole is deeply leveraged. It's that leverage that affords us the ability to supercharge all the growth, from AI to drugs research, insurance, EV... everything. But that leverage comes at a cost, which is that systemically important institutions failing can have disastrous cascading de-leveraging effects.
I'm sure we'd more or less all survive and the world would recover, but it would likely be a 2008 GFC style scenario most likely.
The collapse of Landsbanki was absolutely not a nothingburger. Risked triggering a 21st Century Cod Wars: the UK government was forced to use organised crime laws to freeze its UK assets to protect UK savers in Icesave, to whom the Icelandic government did not clearly intend to extend protection.
Big corporate borrowed the money already, so it will stay with some (other) big corporate in this scenario. The bankers who did it will see that coming and move their money elsewhere and keep their money as well.
What you suggest will hit normal persons.
What we really need is people going to jail that let stuff like that happen. Let them bear actual responsibility for their 1,000k+ salary.
Things have changed since 2009. It would be private credit which fails this time, not the banks.
Private credit is not supposed to be systemically important and it's not supposed to need bailing out. Maybe we'll find out how true that is in practice.
Why would you think that? You think pension funds and governments didn't invest this time? Because that's the problem, governments either investing everyone's money directly (to fund their own loans and expenditures, or should I say fund their own expenses using pension money without admitting that's what they're doing to pensioners) or indirectly force investments (you'll find pension funds worldwide are legally only allowed to invest in loans to the government and specific things the government allows (like politicians' charities). "For safety", of course, no other motivations there)
We can check if governments went back to their own tricks or not after 2008. What were the interest rates after 2008? Quick check ... yep, they went back to the old tricks.
When "shit hits the fan". Either governments really cut spending, leave pensioners without income and see their new loan interest spike to 10%+ (if they're lucky) ...
OR they do a massive cash injection saving the banks, and increase spending.
Which would you chose? It doesn't even matter. If you were the government and chose the first option, you would quickly find suddenly everyone across the political spectrum uniting to depose you. A decent chunk of people would literally not have any other choice but to do that.
(of course, as per usual governments aren't behaving "correctly" according to economic theory. If you take the old "government as spender of last resort" governments should have radically cut spending in the last 10 years, because there was no need for extra spending. If you take the new "government invests pensions", then of course government spending needs to be investment. In other words, governments only allowed to spend like a normal investor, expecting and demanding a return. Ie. no social spending increases. In practice governments increased spending at any cost, and so we're in trouble again)
Oh and should I mention that for any other entity investing pension money in loans to yourself is a very unique thing in law. It is THE ONLY financial crime where corporate structures do not protect management. You're the worldwide president of ExxonMobil? Doesn't matter. You do with employee pension money what government does with it? (ie. loan it to yourself, in this case ExxonMobil). You go to jail. Directly and long-term. In America. In Spain. In Japan. In fucking Vatican city.
Pensions will have exposure, probably through private credit, and probably in the range of 5% to 10% of assets. It's a lot, and it'll hurt people. But I'm not at all sure it is enough to require a bailout.
US government direct investment exposure is not likely to motivate a bailout in my view. The government might be motivated to bail people out for other reasons but not because they've lent too much.
Everyone else is literally everyone else. It doesn't matter what you have or what you do for a living, the collapse of the financial system is going to affect you negatively.
If a large private corporation is allowed to grow to the size of “the financial system”, regulators have failed their responsibilities, and need to unwind that immediately.
Wild that we all lived exactly the same way before AI
Really changed so little in my life. I just use chatgpt instead of Google search now
It's being marketed as some ground breaking revolutionary change when all it is is a better widget
Remove it and the worst that will happen is that I'll go back to writing my emails and my code by hand - something I've done for the last 20 years anyway
I think it's a real pity that of the "four boxes of liberty", Musk has interfered with the first three: soap, Twitter; ballot, the lawsuits about million dollar rewards for voting; jury, selecting his jurisdiction, dismantling enforcement institutions via DOGE.
On the plus side, it's only "interfered with" rather than "completely eliminated".
Still, glad I have an ocean between me and the USA.
Who wouldn't? In the real world, the top elected officials and the justice system are covering up sex trafficking of children among the US elites, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. The system is psychotic and what's strange is there haven't been more people like Luigi.
And the importance of the justice system working properly is that when it fails constantly and deliberately, many will come to the conclusion that the only option left is murder.
Well, I really wish that anyone, no matter their income level or job description, is immune against murder; or are we just throwing out civilization now?
It's of topic but, what if our current civilization is failing them? Like, of the system is broken and an individual acts to protect themselves or their family, the individual is still blamed.
That's how revolution starts.
And there are many revolutions that we (in USA) claim are good! Our own, from Britain, the French one. Of course others are bad (depending on where your vantage)
It's just that, sometimes the murder is (retrospectively) justified. Like in a war, they're killing us so we kill them.
But class war isn't fought with uniformed combatants.
And, in USA at least, many of our politicians are bought quite blatantly. If they aren't serving the citizens perhaps they have thrown out civilization and the social contracts first?
It's all quite complicated.
In general though, murder bad and government should serve the poorest citizens forst, corporations last.
I wrote that comment entirely by myself, on my phone while waiting for a souvlaki. Perhaps the things that you consider AI tells are simply a use of language from someone in country with a different education system.
I can't really judge how I might personally benefit from the current direction because I am uncertain what that direction is, and indeed if it will be sustained.
If you are trying to allege that I have some personal affiliation to an organisation where I might benefit more than any average member of the public, then I must disappoint you. I work on my own projects, I sometimes make money from games that I make.
I do not wish for a hypercapitalist dystopia where a company could train a model on work for hire content and then forever churn out content that they assert ownership of. I don't want the suppression of ideas caused by others asserting that because they had an idea, they own it and can dictate who gets to use it.
I also do not wish for another reign of terror.
I don't think violence will make the world better, and I don't think disaffected chique will either. I advocate identifying problems, suggesting solutions to the problems and working with people to reach consensus to apply those solutions. I assume that humans are fundamentally good and in the absence of religion can generally be reasoned with. Even those who do things you disagree with probably are doing what they think is best.
I may be wrong about the goodness of humanity, but it does not matter, If it exists it's worth working with. If it does not exist, it is not worth saving. I choose to assume that it exists on the chance that it might.
believing in the inherent good of humanity does somewhat justify your perspective, may life allow you to continue believing this way and may your pursuits be productive. I would recommend not to marginalize yourself, this action is tantamount to painting targets on your back for bad actors to aim at. corporations and governments are currently acting violently against the populace, a correspondingly heavy handed response is required if the populace does not wish to become soylent green. note that I have not explicitly advocated violent behaviour - rather I suggest that if our intelligence is not used against this tide, it may as well be part of the wave. thanks for your thoughtful response
>I wrote that comment entirely by myself, on my phone while waiting for a souvlaki. Perhaps the things that you consider AI tells are simply a use of language from someone in country with a different education system.
Nah, your writing was perfectly fine and something a native speaker would write also. The poster is just seeing false tells.
I have noted the employment of a language technique that as per the wikipedia article "signs of AI writing" is commonly used by AI, you can attack facts all you like and that will indeed stop me from talking!
I think the distinction is that when an AI generates the phrase it chooses to use the negation and then fills in the terms. If it only has one thing to communicate at that point then it is essentially placing a redundant rephrasing on onr side of the negation.
My use of it took the form of
A statement on how a guillotine kills people when they are powerless.
The negation then, in the first part compares that to the connotation of the previous post of an underdog battling those in power, and rejects it as inconsistent and the negation provides an alternative framing that is consistent with the action of killing a person who can no longer harm you.
Both sides of the negation make a point.
This is obviously much more common in a dialogue than a monologue, because the first part is used to reference words of the other party. In a monologue, that other party is the past self of the speaker, it suggests a change in position. I think models end up using as a short hand for realisation.
Are there any good collections of negation usage in AI with the surrounding paragraphs? I'd be interested to see what percentage of them are an expression of self realisation.
language models are trained to maximise engagement and maximally convey meaning. binary contrast happens to achieve these goals by optimally translating the manifold. if I come across further research it would be interesting to continue our language related discussion.
>language models are trained to maximise engagement
I have seen no research to that effect.
>and maximally convey meaning
Nobody knows how to measure that
They are trained to complete sequences, then they are trained to engage in conversations, produce what people prefer (with a fairly crude measure of preference, hence the sycophancy). Reasoning models are trained to produce what an observer model think will give you the right answer, the observer model simultaneously learns the likelihood of producing the right answer.
All these things train to improve a property that can be measured at training time. You could build a model to estimate engagement, but I have not seen any evidence that shipping LLMs have used a measure like this.
I can't even imagine how you could tell if a measure of meaning was accurate or not, let alone how you could produce such a measure. You could try to measure information density, but that would also include noise.
It is the overuse of such tells. Please, let's not ban uses of not X, but Y completely. It's a rhetoric technique that is completely fine, with moderation. But real human will use them with moderation.
Also, there is the issue of human language taking some 'tells' because they are exposed to LLM output a lot.
I'm still grumpy that LLMs made it nearly impossible to use the words 'delve' or em-dashes without getting called out as an LLM.
I don't know how to respond to your comment with decorum so I'm going to say goodbye, and pray that you mentor your juniors better than the way you treated me today mr senor dev
> “As someone who belongs to “all of us”, i vote to not bail us out if shit hits the fan.”
You have alighted onto an interesting topic: “bail out”. I believe a closely related word on the semiotic chain is “retreat”.
I don’t feel that our culture would wish to “retreat” from AI. I know quite a few managers and programmers who absolutely delight in the fruits of the industry.
No doubt the titans of the AI industry, who stand to lose their shirts, would also like a bailout. As would the workers under their leadership. Finally, if the governments of the world are taking “AI” technologies as seriously as I think they are, then I should expect a bailout in the event of bubble go boom is inevitable.
> No doubt the titans of the AI industry, who stand to lose their shirts
No they don't.
They stand to lose points on their dollar-denominated high scores. If every one of the AI companies went belly-up, their execs would all live very, very comfortably for the rest of their lives even if they never got another job.
Let's call it a "figurative expression" then. You could say it would be a "retreat" to not bailout AI. A turn away. Run. For example if the investment in data centers using borrowed money is not paid back on-time, and the investments fail, and there is no bailout, resulting in a cascade of business failures, then the I would say we "retreated" from AI. Retreat from the Technology. Retreat from the Economics of AI services. Hoo-Haa!
For example, if crypto failed there might be a "retreat" as far as crypto is not a bedrock of the banking industry. But I'm probably wrong in my characterization of crypto. Whatever. Not like Crypto can be compared to Tulip Mania. Now there's a retreat.
Unfortunately, the votes for a regime of permanent bailouts were already in when Ben Barnacke made his famous speech proposing helicopters over cities if deflation reached a crisis level (though the Internet says Milton Friedman thought of this first). Some later observed "the helicopters only seem to go to Wall Street", which isn't surprising.
Obvious ones are those who can extract value from this companies now ( high salaries/bonus etc ), swapping worthless paper for real assets, Nvidia and their share holders etc. Investors who hold short positions etc.
If you loan me 10 pounds and I simply keep it or spend it but refuse to pay you back - aren't I the winner and you the loser?
Claiming that the market is a positive sum system, because I use that 10 pounds to invent something that changes world productivity is missing the fact that there is a constant stream of huge energy inputs from the sun - that's ultimately what allows the local entropy to decrease - not that you lent me 10 pounds.
I borrow you 10 money i use to buy my chair-making tools. I make the chair, sell it 20 money, then pay you 12 money back for the service rendered. Basically money is supposed to be a tool that help us creating capital by exchanging goods.
But aren't you confusing the means of exchange with the creation of value.
The creation of value is me taking energy from the sun and converting that into a chair.
You lending me money is you extracting value from artificially being a middleman.
It would have been more efficient to write an IOU to the tool maker, make the chair and pay back the tool maker directly.
Now sure that IOU isn't that fungible - however that highlights one of the absurdities ( if I understand it correctly ) of the current banking system where private banks are able to in effect issue IOU's on their own basis but put mine and your name on it as a guarantor - resulting in the public having to bail out banks when they over extend.
> The creation of value is me taking energy from the sun and converting that into a chair.
Which requires money to do. If you borrow that money to enable using solar to make furniture, then you can repay that money with interest and keep a profit for yourself. Both the borrower and lender come out with more money than they had when they started.
That's not a zero-sum game.
Now, it's 100% true that borrowing and lending can (and often is) done in a way to make it a zero-sum game, but that's just because the world (including the big-time corporate world, and especially including major IT companies) is full of scammers.
>> The creation of value is me taking energy from the sun and converting that into a chair.
> Which requires money to do.
No it doesn't require money. It requires energy. Money is often involved as a means of exchange, but it's not required.
If what you said is true it would be impossible to live off grid and make a chair.
By focusing on the money you are focusing on the means of exchange rather than the fundamentals - which is energy, knowledge and collaboration.
Let's take a concrete example - the development of Linux - did that require some large VC backed funding models or was it simply people sharing spare cycles for shared benefit?
Here the underlying resources required was people's time [1] - not money per se.
[1] Sure some value was exchanged using the medium of money ( Red Hat existed, large companies shared larger cycles by explicitly paying employees etc ) - but that's not lending and interest with money somehow being the time limiting resource. Again don't confuse the means of exchange with the thing being exchanged.
Originally, money is a IOU and basically a tool to trade between communities. The individualization of capital (capitalism basically) made place for private loan and artificial middlemen like i wrote in the previous comment. And yes, you can work without it, but this is the way things works in the west since the 18th century, 17th century in GB.
------------
To be clear about how banks work: they don't loan money, they create it via accounting. You go to a bank and ask for 20 money at 10% interest, they will write in their asset column "20 money" and in their liability "20 money", give you the newly created 20 money and create a "coupon" of 2 money (sorry that's the french word, i don't know how englo people call that). If needed (like a liquidity crunch), they can sell the coupon worth 2 money at 1 money, or even your loan worth 20 money 18 to another bank, but they will keep the liability in their own books. If the liability become higher than the assets, bankruptcy. Notice that the money you put in the bank isn't touched.
The money you put in bank, they invest in low risk assets like government bonds, through their investment funds. Since those are locked assets, if too many people want their money back at the same time, the bank enter a liquidity crunch, have to sell the locked assets at a discount, and put the losses on their own funds, in the "liability" column.
Wether it's caused by a credit crunch or because loans aren't being repaid, if a bank "liability" column has a higher value than its "assets" column, they enter bankruptcy. The state auctions customer-linked investment off (i think that's more complex and depends on the local laws, in my country you have a transfer provision where the customer and the bonds linked to some of his bank accounts are transfered to a new bank) where those are slowly sold at a higher value than the failing bank would have gotten, slowly reimbursing the customers. It is _very_ rare that bank customers loose any money in the long run (they do suffer opportunity cost though, their assets are locked and don't earn any interests, so in a way, they loose a little). in the 2007-2008 crisis, the issue is that banks split loans weirdly and did a lot of accounting shenaningans tying each international bank to each others.
True but the opportunity cost is truly lost. Entropy comes for everyone. If we spend a lot of money digging holes in the ground then filling them again, maybe no money was lost.
Sure - but that's a meta question of whether the current economic/political systems are delivering good allocation of resources for whatever target function you favour.
And that's complex - even in your simple example you can argue that people have likely improved their capability to dig and fill holes - and the latter skill is particularly valuable in the UK right now.
A laptop hooked to an external monitor and keyboard is basically almost the same experience IMO. And it gives me the optionality of taking it the few times I travel (tho i can see how some people would decide not do that)
See the reply up above. You can't just expect LLMs to give you good answers if you're not providing lots of context to it. Also, make sure you give it guardrails. Like say you can't only infer it from the JS scripts on their website, external AJAX calls, job postings posted directly on their website, their Github profile, and engineering blog... Otherwise you're gonna get lots of made up stuff :)
I am building Bloomberry (https://bloomberry.com), an alternative to tools like BuiltWith/Wappalyzer to provide sales signals when companies subscribe or churn from over 1600 B2B tech products. Think backend/backoffice tools like Hubspot CRM, or Netsuite, or Microsoft 365, rather than frontend technologies like Wordpress or React.
I did a similar study but analyzing actual API subdomains, and ignoring those fronted by Cloudflare, Akamai, etc and the conclusion was the opposite: European companied are more likely to be using OVH and Hetzner than AWS/Azure
AWS / GCP can invoice with EU reverse charge so I don’t even pay VAT. With Hetzner I have to claim it back at the end of the year.
Hetzner is just way cheaper and pricing is more predictable. I don’t need any advanced cloud offerings. And yes, being outside the US is another advantage rn.
It's not "the company" that makes such decisions, but some senior managers or directors who do. They don't see a penny extra in their paycheck for savings money, but they are on the hook if anything goes wrong with less mainstream tech choices.
I'm amazed any company pays AWS for servers. I can get if you're paying for a service like media transcoding, but to put it in perspective, AWS normal prices are now about on par with Hetzner's 5x-increased-due-to-the-crisis new price for new servers
Given current prices I doubt anyone is itching at the bone to spec out hardware.
Idk where you would even buy registered DDR5 dims right now. Newegg shows $Request a quote money and that its built to order ... for a 64 GB stick lol.
-most companies's are not global, and so most of their customers are going to be in the same country or nearby so makes sense to keep near the serves close.
This doesn't say anything about which providers are the majority in Europe, which is what OP's study is about. Your findings (non-US companies are "more likely") and OPs findings (US companies are the majority) are both compatible.
Here is a hint: quite many companies need a certificated provider who not only is certified but also has - 99,999% overlook this fact because of ignorance - enough insurance and can theoretically be held responsible financially for services being not reachable.
EU regulation requires such settings.
While I highly value Hetzner and Strato, they don't want to deal with such companies, which is reasonable.
Also what you see is just the visible part, not the internal APIs or due to failure safety different APIs serving in a failover scenario.
Internal networks are huge. And masked or hidden behind quite some intrusion detection as well as layers of protection exactly for this reason.
In other words: you did an interesting posting however it is meaningless without knowing why these what you called churn occurs.
Usually you don't simply migrate from one cloud to another.
Accenture for example had a partnership with Amazon, and use their services. So maybe during the development phase or whatever there appears to be a spike.
In other words: it was a planend. Times series need to be observed for many years.
But nevertheless a nice posting.
It is just that sometimes "facts" from the outside lead to speculations, an insider can only chuckle about.
Before I joined a huge global bank, I thought any startup would eat them alive, think N24. Remember N24? No? Well...
I was part of the senior management, dbCORE as a hint.
Maybe repeat the study, make it run over years, or even better: observe something you know for a fact and see how things change, not the other way around. You would have needed to conduct interviews etc.
By design there is a paradigm called security through obscurity. That's why torture for example seldomly helpful. Is the poor soul lying or not? You need to verify first, in any case.
Outside observation is just that: Platon's allegory of the cave. Useful or not, you never know. That's why I laughed a bit about your disclaimer ("Limitations").
Mommy bloggers was probably the most ludicrous niche back then. Tons of consumer companies wanted to pay them to promote their product or have a “giveaway”
AI can help you write code, but it still can't help you get customers, or attention. In fact, it makes it worse. AI helps with introducing more noise, more content, and more people clamoring for attention. It's a lemon market.
Mainly am asking why those with attention (or VCs who can get it) are not introducing more noise, more content, and more clamoring - as you put it.
I thought that was the whole idea?
Lemon market - maybe - but it remains to be seen IMO. The market seems almost entirely unrealized. There are only a few major AI companies in the media, and it seems like innovation is largely directionless or stalled.
I haven't really seen any "startup boom" for AI yet. It's all the same kind of AI wrapper startup still. The most innovative thing in San Francisco right now is AI complaince.... Compliance... I'll leave you with that.
'those with attention' is a unicorn. Look at Facebook + Google - they own attention. Yet a huge % of products they make are duds. It is much much harder than you think to get lots of people to use your product.
Would I bet that other humans would believe that? Nope.
reply