The companies making TVs don’t want to sell simple displays, they want to expand their businesses beyond just one time sales of hardware. So they and the store fronts don’t offer the average consumer a simple display. People can still find them, but they need to be actually looking for a dumb TV and know what to look for.
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.
“We’re sorry… we’ll definitely stop, definitely don’t look at anything else we might have done for them.”
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.
Exactly, we don’t know how the brain would adapt to having electric impulses wired right in to it, and it could adapt in some seriously negative ways.
I don’t think the understanding of the human brain is really good enough to engineer a properly functional one.
And I suspect that any companies touting they have such a device are ether overstating how effective what they have is, or outright lying about the capabilities.
If we did have enough understanding to engineer a device, I suspect it would be possible to fix such issues without grafting in electronics.
Anything beyond publicly funded research smells of grift to me.
It’s a fundamental and inevitable outcome of how these businesses are structured and run. Were the decisions to chase larger more premium vehicles short sighted? absolutely. Was the pursuit of Financialization in car sales to make up for pricing out lower income buyers obviously a bad idea? Without a doubt. Could they have made any other decisions? Not without being replaced by shareholders.
The solution to this problem is not just to “kick the bums out”, these companies need to have their management and ownership restructured in a way that generates incentive structures to maintaining a stable long term market rather than quarterly revenue growth.
Some companies, like Nissan, didn’t pursue the big premium trend and they got burnt as well, largely because the trends of the rest of the market and surplus of used cars is undermining their new sales. To some extent their choice to so heavily pursue sales to fleets like rental companies didn’t help.
The interesting thing is, Tesla is perhaps the most obvious and extreme example, but they’re not the only auto manufacturer this is happening to right now. Nissan is in a bit of a tail spin as well.
There are so many problems slamming in to the auto industry right now. Even beyond the tariff instability.
In the US in particular, As cars have gotten more reliable and longer lasting, the market for new “budget” cars has dried up. Car buyers who might have once bought budget are now buying used cars that probably have a good many years left. The sales of new cars have been declining since 2016 but new car price have been skyrocketing, keeping up revenue growth for automakers.
This seemed ideal for automakers as it meant they could drop the lean margins of cheap cars and focus on higher margin markets, which looked much better to shareholders. Those companies that focused on this budget market have suffered, the best example being Nissan. The ideal for automakers is that people will buy “up” the value chain over time, buying higher end or “less used” vehicles when they trade in their old vehicle, going from a twice used, to a once used and eventually to a new car.
This kind of came to a head during the pandemic. Not only was the supply of lower end used vehicles dwindling as less and less entered the market due to less being made a few years back, there was also a shortage of new cars due to supply chain break downs and an increase in demand. Many people were taking out insane financing on massively over priced cars, both new and used. Now a lot of people are underwater on those auto loans from the pandemic because the trade-in/sales price is less way than what they have left on the loan. Many are also defaulting on those insane pandemic auto loans and their repossessed cars are ending up back on the market, increasing supply in the used market.
Many who are underwater on their auto loans but can still make payments can’t afford to make even larger payments, so rolling over the principle from the last loan into a new loan on another car is impractical. So they aren’t buying, let alone moving up the market to buy new or higher end. The demand being suppressed in the used market and the supply being bolstered by repos means used prices are massively depressed. This depressed used market carries over to the new market in turn, as most people buying new probably couldn’t afford to do so without trading in their old car, so a depressed used market hurts their purchasing power. Why would someone buy a new car when the only new one the could afford is probably worse than the existing car.
Tesla is getting a lot of focus because of the political entanglement of their high profile CEO, but the whole industry is under strain. Nissan is frantically looking for buyers to help them out of the debt hole they’re in, and groups like Stellantis (owners of Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, Ram and Dodge) are desperately chasing new revenue streams as absurd as ads in the central console.
I use librewolf just because it’s privacy focused.
But, there is also waterfox, floorp, and mercury, just off the top of my head.
Frankly they should probably split off the ad side from everything else.
Safari had its own web engine, WebKit, which chromium’s web engine, blink, is actually a fork of.
Opera Used to have it’s own web engine, presto, but they rebased to blink in 2013.
But yah, your options these days for the basis of your browser are basically WebKit(Apple), Gecko(Mozilla) and Blink(Google).
or even better, use librewolf.
You’re right, this article is in fact, clown shit.
Nonsense article. Low key agitprop to cover for trump failing spectacularly to broker a peace.
I’ve not had any issues with librewolf slowing down or crashing even when left open for prolonged times.
It’s a fork of fire fox, but with a lot of stuff pulled out and some ad blocking stuff built in. the devs have said they’re not gonna implement the upstream fire fox AI stuff.