They’re about a 2/3rds majority in the consumer and workstation market, and that’s not insignificant, but that’s also not a significant part of their revenue by this point, nor is it why their stock makes up a terrifying percentage of the S&P 500.

If their revenue returned to just being that, they’d basically cease to be a relevant company and their stock price would crater. It’s a decent business to be in, but, it’s not a infinite growth, line goes up forever, business to be in.

They have a near monopoly on cloud service genAI data center GPUs. They don’t make the semiconductors. They just hand the design for those chip to TSMC and then sell what TSMC makes for them. The vast majority of their revenue right now is coming from selling stuff to new genAI data centers, if those stop getting built, they loose 80% of their revenue. And their current valuation is based on an assumption of an order of magnitude of new such data centers being built year on year.

I think, that it’s very likely that demand for new such chips is liable to drop to 0 because the capacity of currently extant data center using their chips is already overbuilt for realistic demand. No one other than Nvidia is making money on these data centers, and there is no path to profitability.

I don’t think most corporations would be interested in buying a computer that doesn’t include a windows license. Unless they intend to use it for like… server stuff, but they’d be way better off buying like… actual server hardware… if only for the operating cost.

The trick is to play one thing inexplicably awful that the bartender won’t realize is so just by looking at the name.

Like Ram Ranch. Like, sure they’ll probably cancel it after about 20 seconds when they realize what the fuck is going on. But you still got everyone in the bar to hear about gay cowboys for 20 seconds.

It depends on the type of productivity TBH. Like, sure some productivity use cases need CUDA, but a lot of productivity use cases are just using the cards as graphics cards. The places where you need CUDA are real, but not ubiquitous.

And “this is my personal computer I play games on, but also the computer I do work on, and that work needs CUDA specifically” is very much an edge case.

I’d say in general, the advantages of Nvidia cards are fairly niche even on windows. Like, multi frame generation (fake frames) and upscaling are kind of questionable in terms of value add most of the time, and most people probably aren’t going to be doing any ML stuff on their computer.

AMD in general offers better performance for the money, and that’s doubly so with Nvidia’s lackluster Linux support. AMD has put the work in to get their hardware running well on Linux, both in terms of work from their own team and being collaborative with the open source community.

I can see why some people would choose Nvidia cards, but I think, even on windows, a lot of people who buy them probably would have been better off with AMD. And outside of some fringe edge cases, there is no good reason to choose them when building or buying a computer you intend to mainly run Linux on.

There’s also this level of like, still identifying as being primarily of the country they’re from, like a rejection of assimilation into the place they’ve moved to. I’m not saying that’s inherently good or bad, but, it’s an interesting dynamic, and an option that a lot of immigrants don’t have.

Cash liquidity =/= standard of living

A lot of people are in debt on things like cars and homes, that’s where a lot of the debt is. There is also credit card debt, but that’s a whole other thing. So long as people can make the payments on the loans, and those payments grow slower than their income, they can maintain a given standard of living.

Also a lot of the super rich make most of their money off of collateralized assets as a sort of tax dodge. Them being largely payed in assets that appreciate in value, they then take loans out against the value of the asset, and so long as the asset appreciates in value faster than the interest rate, they’re fine. Since the assets aren’t taxed until they are sold (unrealized gains) and they’re technically not selling the assets by using them as collateral against a loan, so they’re not taxed on that income. This situation also skews the numbers on “the average debt of Americans”.

Ultimately though, this is all a super fragile situation, and all it takes is for assets (like say a house or stock in a big tech company) to decrease in value for everything to explode.

There are also a lot of Americans who are not in such a situation and are limping along financially, trading debt for time, and live at a much lower standard of living.

“We’re sorry… we’ll definitely stop, definitely don’t look at anything else we might have done for them.”

“Hey guys our sales are falling through the floor faster than Tesla, maybe we should rework our pricing and reconsider our policies towards buyers to move more volume and improve our imagine.”

“ Uh… nah. How about instead, we put ads on the center console!”

You can probably get a pirate hat online for a few bucks. And there are plenty of discoverability systems not based on integration with a subscription service.

Lawns are bad, yes, replacing lawn with hard impermeable surface, worse.

It’s as if someone turned their whole front yard in to a parking lot.

The current situation is a bubble based on an over hyped extension of the cloud compute boom. Nearly a trillion dollars of capital expenditure over the past 5 years from major tech companies chasing down this white whale and filling up new data centers with Nvidia GPUs. With revenue caping out at maybe 45 billion annually across all of them for “AI” products and services, and that’s before even talking about ongoing operation costs such as power for the data centers, wages for people working on them, or the wages of people working to develop services to run on them.

None of this is making any fucking profit, and every attempt to find new revenue ether increases their costs even more or falls flat on its face the moment it is actually shipped. No one wants to call it out at higher levels because NVIDIA is holding up the whole fucking stock market right now, and them crashing out because everyone stoped buying new GPUs will hurt everyone else’s growth narrative.

See that’s the kicker, windows has so many “are you sure” pop ups about stuff that most people just click through them without reading the fine print. People get desensitized to it and just ignore them, or maybe even they just assume microsoft is trying to sell them on a feature they don’t care about.

And in this case it didn’t save the files to the trash can, I imagine because it was synching local files with what was in one drive. Not the user deleting local files.

I had a colleague at work that had to redo several days of work because of the one drive thing.

The long and short of it is that they noticed that their connection was being super slow, opened up task manager to see if anything was eating bandwidth, saw one drive, went it it, correctly diagnosed that it was uploading files to it and eating up bandwidth, and then deleted all the files in one drive to stop it.

One drive decided that this meant they wanted all the local copies of the files deleted as well. Like, on the one hand, not the correct way to stop that behavior, but also like, the kind of thing a lot of people would try, and it then deleting all the local files in turn is an unintuitive outcome.

Because it’s something where the current government can claim they’re “doing something” or “addressing a real problem” but it also doesn’t threaten the rich and powerful.

Going after Facebook would threaten the rich and powerful, for who it is an important tool for manipulating people, who think they can use it to mold culture to what they want it to be my breaking the minds of children.

The current UK government is desperate to say to the public that they’re governing and fixing problems, but they also really don’t want to piss off the rich and powerful.

Which is an absurd thing to do! Getting it in front of more people just increases their costs by creating more load on their data centers. At best it juices investor confidence by pushing up user numbers. It’s not converting people to payed subscriptions at any significant rate, and even then people paying the subscriptions are losing them money because they’re creating way more load than their subscriptions pay for.

It’s unlikely any of this will ever be profitable, the only one making profit from this right now is NVIDIA. Everyone else’s costs dwarf revenue, even just operational costs, not even counting capital expenditure to set this stuff up. None of these companies have a path to profitability, and most of the little revenue is coming from services burning investor money built upon other services that are also burning investor money, or temporary shenanigans like Microsoft trading OpenAI free compute time at their data centers in exchange for IP, or coreweave using their GPUs as collateral against loans to buy more GPUs that get collateralized in turn.

At best the deregulation makes things less unprofitable and drags the bubble out a little longer.

I think it’s likely that Microsoft will start turning it on by default, and resetting it with updates for people who have opted out. Much like they did with edge and Cortana, intentionally making it harder to choose not to use it.

More programs actively blocking it will make that harder, but I wonder how many will stick to their guns when pressured by Microsoft.

I suspect that Microsoft will ratchet up the pressure to force it on people as the gen AI bubble pops, an attempt to keep the narrative alive to keep up demand for their overbuilt GPU data centers.

Generally yes, For me it depends on how significant the discomfort is and how broadly it impacts people, but also, how much doing the thing really matters a lot to someone.

Like, there’s a point at which “ok someone else’s discomfort about this thing is marginal compared to how much it matters to a large number of people” at which point I get annoyed at someone trying to force other people to stop doing something that matters to them, even if I’m not doing the thing.