You're not wrong, though I suspect the AI "bubble burst" begins to happen when companies like Anthropic stop giving us so much compute for 'free' the only hope is that as things get better their cheaper models get as good as their best models today and so it costs drastically less to use them.
Yeah, I think when they made the bet it genuinely made sense. But in coding workflows, once models got cheaper, people did not spend less. They just started packing way more LLM calls into a single turn to handle complex agentic coding steps. That is probably where the math started to break down.
I think it will pop but not in the way everyone thinks it will pop. There's plenty that's not going to go away / anywhere, but I'm sure lots of startups will fail and close their doors.
What way do you envision it popping? Nvidia has tons of investments on their books in smaller companies. If a couple of them start showing poor earnings, it could cause a death spiral for NVDA because 1) their investment just tanked, and 2) those companies are no longer buying chips from them therefore reducing revenue.
Nvidia also makes up ~7% of the S&P 500 so if their stock price falls substantially, that's a big chunk of capital just... gone for a lot of people.
I still have the screenshot somewhere. About four years ago, me and my wife were at her sister's home. As I talk to her husband about the paved driveway he fixed up the day before, in front of their Nest camera doorbell thingymajig, he says the words "yeah I saw I could buy like airport grade tar, and I thought to myself, why would I need that for a car?" the next day, I pop open Instagram. Lo and behold, something I never googled, an ad for airport grade tar shows up on Instagram. I'm told that "no they're not listening" and "they use your debit card info to make educated guesses" how in God's green earth would this have happened, I have never bought any level of tar for one, nor googled it, nor ever intended on it.
Idk man, I'm a skeptic that they're not listening in some weird way. Not to mention both of my wife restrict which apps get camera and microphone access. It's uncanny that things we talk about but never google / look up wind up as ads within a day if not hours.
Another fun one was the time a friend was telling me about a niche ramen, by brand name on Discord. I pop open Facebook, what do I see? The EXACT ramen brand is the very next ad. If they aren't watching us for ad revenue I'm going to go crazy with all these insane coincidences.
I would not at all be surprised if they are listening. But isn't a simpler explanation that your in-law was googling driveway options, clicked through a link to see what the heck airport grad tar even is, and then google saw you were in the same vicinity and guessed you'd have similar interests? I wonder how many other ads you had in common that week, or if he saw ads for the underwater basket weaving course you purchased, etc.
That still raises the question of HOW because I never used their Wi-Fi neither has my wife. So Nest uniquely identified my voice, captured the conversation and told Facebook I must want airport grade tar?
>Idk man, I'm a skeptic that they're not listening in some weird way. Not to mention both of my wife restrict which apps get camera and microphone access. It's uncanny that things we talk about but never google / look up wind up as ads within a day if not hours.
Surely this is easy to test? Come up with a list of 100 topics. Of those, randomly choose 50. Work them into your conversations, and collect all the ads you've seen. Note down how ads you get for the 50 topics you've chosen compared to the topics you haven't chosen. Better yet, give your phone to your friend and have him say the ads, so you don't get confirmation bias.
This is all very easy to do, and the conspiracy that facebook/google/whatever is secretly listening to you isn't exactly fringe either. Yet, I'm not of any rigorous testing that proves it's real. While absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, it's a good reason to be skeptical.
Let's also consider this theoretically from business point of view. If you were an ad network, and you could listen to what your customers talk about, would you use it or not?
If the implication is that ad networks would want to, and therefore it's happening, that's terrible logic. I'm sure the US government would love to convince everyone they landed on the moon and won the space race, without actually having to send a rocket to the moon, but that doesn't mean that means the moon landing was faked.
Part of the point of the space race was to flex on how technologically ahead we were with the implication that our weapons systems were also more advanced, so I suspect that given the choice to actually have more advanced technology vs. merely convincing everyone they did, they would prefer to have actually had that capability. Surveillance companies would presumably also prefer to actually have such capabilities while not broadcasting that fact lest people avoid them or demand they be regulated.
That's where the "randomly choose 50" comes in. Even if your initial list of 100 topics was biased, randomly picking from that list allows you to do a comparison between topics that got randomly picked vs ones that didn't. In other words, a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard in experiments. If the group that got randomly picked got a 40% hit rate (ie. that corresponded to ads), but group that didn't randomly get picked got 41%, then you can probably conclude they're not listening to you, even if a 40% hit rate seems spooky. On the other hand if there were significant differences (eg. 40% vs 20%), then there might be other stuff going on worth investigating.
Call me ignorant but isn't it drastically cheaper to run an internet radio station? Then let others, including other radio stations repeat your internet stream over radio. I'm genuinely curious.
A major reason for the enduring use of satellite in radio distribution is that, for live events like sports or (more common in NPR's case) political events, the satellite system provides appreciably lower latency than distribution over the internet. Reduced jitter also allows for generally higher reliability, you never hear the radio station buffering. There are options for low-latency land-based connectivity but at the scale of PRSS, the satellite system is cheaper to operate.
Most stations can also receive this programming over the internet, another reason for the satellite system is that it provides a completely redundant path for programming delivery. This is important for general reliability but especially so in an emergency.
Historically, radio networks distributed their programming over leased telephone lines. Satellite took over because it was cheaper. That gap has probably narrowed as terrestrial communications infrastructure continues to expand, but the internet struggles with low-latency real-time media, and an arrangement like leased fiber wavelengths to member stations would still be more expensive than the satellite system. There's a lot of member stations in a lot of places, satellite reaches all of them at once.
> the satellite system provides appreciably lower latency than distribution over the internet
Is that true? Round trip to/from geostationary satellites is about 240ms.
And, with most stations using HD encoding, which adds 8 seconds to the transmission delay, any network latency isn't going to be that important anyway.
The justification for many of these stations is emergency preparedness. They're maintained for the ability to receive and transmit emergency alerts despite power outages or transmission line cuts. The daily programming is mostly incidental beyond maintaining listenership
Same reason communities still maintain HAM radio clubs and rely on them for emergency communications in a grid down situation - it's an interesting (though expensive) hobby that has some merit for isolated communities.
People don't maintain HAM clubs for the potential use in an emergency, any more than people learn to fly in the hope of being able to rescue a commercial aircraft when both pilots are incapacitated.
They enjoy HAM radio as a hobby in and of it's self. It's doesn't come free to the government either, I'm sure some HFT organisation would pay handsomely for some of the bands currently used by HAM radio.
The cost is having the satellite systems in place, working, and available. You don't save money by not using the tiny amount of bandwidth when it isn't "an emergency"
The burden on taxpayers would be significantly less if the government simply paid to run the system rather than additionally funding two sets of attorneys to duke it out in court to make an out of control executive actually execute the law. It's getting harder and harder to believe that this fascist movement was ever earnestly about saving money.
The US is pretty large, and has large areas without reliable cellular or wired Internet connections. Public radio ensures accessibility in those areas.
I wonder if we should just pass a bill that requires Starlink or Amazon Leo to use 0.5% of their bandwidth for low quality (but higher than radio) free access to Inet Radio streams in some special way. Then start building out the infra in vehicles.
There are plenty of places in the US that don't have reliable satellite access either (not because of orbital coverage, but because of geographic features like mountains/deep valleys).
(And these aren't remote/unpopulated areas: you can find plenty of satellite dead zones 2-3 hours outside of NYC in the Catskills.)
> because of geographic features like mountains/deep valleys
I remember this being quite an issue trying to target geosync broadcast satellites like DirectTV/Dish. Even being in the shadow of a relatively small hill could block access if your location and local topology happened to create an unfortunate alignment. I've naively assumed Starlink's rotating constellation of thousands of LEO satellites reduces how often this is an issue - but maybe it doesn't?
Starlink has other issues. I have locations in London I can get to specific geostationary satellites, but can't use starlink there as there isn't much sky coverage
Honestly curious: how many of those satellite dead-zones have good radio coverage? In my various times driving places, I've often lost radio signal in a sufficiently remote place where I 100% would have had satellite coverage. Those same features that can block satellite will also block (some kinds of) radio, if you don't have a broadcast tower at the top of the ridge or something.
Yes, I agree that satellite coverage is not 100%. But neither is radio.
It's definitely a mixed bag, but the areas I'm thinking of have decent FM radio coverage (from local stations that affiliate with public radio). AM coverage tends to be good regardless.
I've had the same experience as you around remote places, but those places were generally the flat-and-desolate kind :-)
I think the idea is that the sats relay a signal to radio stations including remote ones.
It's the radio stations who are in charge of situating their reception equipment where it can see the sat, and also for figuring out how to best broadcast to their served area (e.g. AM and/or FM? Tower height, power, setting up some translator stations on a different frequency to serve outlying areas, giving the feed to local cable systems to be sent with TV service, etc.)
What happens when a major CDN goes out? Or, god forbid, a major datacenter region has a DNS blip that apparently 1/3 of the internet depends on?
Or, what if a hurricane or ice storm knocks out some internet connectivity? That would be a time when you really want to broadcast a message to anyone with a cheap fm/am radio.
Is affected by? No idea, but I'm sure there's some cloudflare rep convincing you that you need cloudflare to make sure your high-availability stream stays highly available when just yesterday azure got a ddos measured with Tbs. Just not today... today those cloudflare reps happen to be busy.
Point is, radio comms serve a public utility that often is a Plan-B if internet links go down. Multicast it onto your podcatcher of choice, sure, but don't make that your backbone.
The stations that rely on CPB funding as a main source of income are the "others" who repeat the NPR content over the radio. They're tiny stations (typically 1-2 full-time employees) that mainly serve communities where internet streaming is not a viable option due to spotty cell coverage.
Also, receiving internet service requires some kind of paid monthly plan. The cheapest plans have very low data caps. Streaming audio over them is much less practical for the end users than having a simple radio receiver. Radio waves also propagate further than cell broadcasts.
The OP here, in their defense, wasn't talking about just operating an internet radio to replace public broadcasting and telling listeners to just get a data planpay for Internet and go online to listen. They were suggesting TCP/IP backhaul to get the signals to the remote radio stations, and rebroadcasting on the radio.
Presumably this would be feasible for most populated areas, but broadband availability is so crap outside of urban/suburban, I bet half of those really remote stations are already getting their Internet over Starlink or Hughesnet.
Now, I think there are plenty of reasons that the satellites (which are already in the sky, presumably) are probably more robust in the face of emergencies than the entire Internet infrastructure.
If I may steelman a good counterargument: "The Internet itself is supposed to be resilient to nuclear war!"
True, but that doesn't mean outages of critical pinch points like AWS, Azure and Cloudflare don't constantly affect even services like GitHub that have huge budgets. A fully robust Internet solution with a ton of high-uptime redundancy in many POPs nationwide would likely cost more than maintaining the satellite systems.
I'm curious too. As a complete outsider to that problem space, it seems like a lot of the tech was designed/created in an era before wide-spread broadband and internet-based content distribution. I'm sure a lot of it is simply that new hardware from that vendor is largely a drop-in replacement for each station, so there's no need to re-engineer their broadcast booth.
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I guess HN is the new Reddit. Downvotes, not a single response. You can do better, HN.
Some equipment is drop in - hooking up an audio output to a keyed radio is only occasionally difficult. You see a lot of these solutions in the HAM radio space.
The actual radio equipment is a tad more sophisticated - and in poor areas (where it's barely hanging on) is held together with spit, glue, and prayers (exaggeration, joke, but aspects of it are true).
Believe it or not, the RF cables are (in many cases) more expensive than the radios themselves.
Background: Computer systems, radio systems, General class HAM, but certainly not an expert.
I'm pretty sure in every webhost terms of service I've ever read they leave language in to kick you out if you are degrading the service for others. Turns out a prolonged DDoS attack is degrading the service for others. The bigger cloud providers are drastically less likely to drop you but now you're paying a premium on hosting.
I mean I'm not worried about it either, but I've been on the internet long enough that I know some of the people I used to know will probably do it just to do it. Gamers can be quite toxic.
I just have zero faith in Google. How long until we hear that someone mysteriously got banned by Google (as we see on HN every few months? it feels like it anyway) and hear about how now they have no AI tooling etc etc etc because its all married to their Google Account.
Additionally... Google Code was shut down in 2016? I have zero confidence in such a user hostile company. They gave you a Linux phone, they extended it, and made it proprietary. They gave you a good email account, extended it and made it proprietary. They took away office software from you via Google Docs, so now you don't even own the software they do.
We got around this by keeping the same number but swapping the months out. Started dating in August, actually got legally married same month, but the ceremony was in October all of the same day. I used the cheat code of familiarity to never forget.
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