SirEDCaLot

You nailed it. look at their more recent announcements about execs not taking bonuses--- they're giving up bonuses for the coming year. I expect most of them to 'pursue other interests' but they'll keep their bonuses, whatever team gets brought in to right the ship will then get screwed.

Might also be ass covering- with a pre-emptive promise of no bonuses it may be harder to replace them...

the end of Moores law

It's been talked about a lot. Lots of people have predicted it.
It does eventually have to end though. And I think even if this isn't the end, we're close to the end. At the very least, we're close to the point of diminishing returns.

Look at the road to here-- We got to the smallest features the wavelength of light could produce (and people said Moore's Law was dead), so we used funky multilayer masks to make things smaller and Moore lived on. Then we hit the limits of masking and again people said Moore's Law was dead, so ASML created a whole new kind of light with a narrower wavelength (EUV) and Moore lived on.

But there is a very hard limit that we won't work around without a serious rethink of how we build chips- the width of the silicon atom. Today's chips have pathways that are in many cases well under 100 atoms wide. Companies like ASML and TSMC are pulling out all the stops to make things smaller, but we're getting close to the limit of what's possible with the current concepts of chip production (using photolithography to etch transistors onto silicon wafers). Not possible like can we do it, but possible like what the laws of physics will let us do.

That's going to be an interesting change for the industry, it will mean slower growth in processing power. That won't be a problem for the desktop market as most people only use a fraction of their CPU's power. It will mean the end of the 'more efficient chip every year' improvement for cell phones and mobile devices though.

There will be of course customers calling for more bigger better, and I think that will be served by more and bigger. Chiplets will become more common, complete with higher TDP. That'll help squeeze more yield out of an expensive wafer as the discarded parts will contain fewer mm^2. Wouldn't be surprised to see watercooling become more common in high performance workstations, and I expect we'll start to see more interest in centralized watercooling in the server markets. The most efficient setup I've seen so far basically hangs server mainboards on hooks and dunks them in a pool of non-conductive liquid. That might even lead to a rethink of the typical vertical rack setup to something horizontal.

It's gonna be an interesting next few years...

Absolutely 100% this. Or at the very least, have all schematics and software source code and other such things placed in escrow so if the company refuses to support them there is some kind of option. This goes double for anything implanted.

So you're left with departments full of clock punchers who don't have vision or leadership. If you want to kill your Golden Goose, that's a good way to do it. The remaining departments full of drone followers aren't going to be making you the exciting groundbreaking products that make you money.

Of course then again I personally see value in employees, maybe business leadership does not or thinks they are all generic replaceable.

No, but it will bring into question the process by which they were acquired to begin with. Somebody will ask, why did you spend x billion on real estate when it was obvious that remote work was the future? Or if they are locked into a long-term lease, eventually the question will come up why are we spending all this money for office space we aren't using? Shouldn't we have thought of this earlier? Not having workers in the office makes it obvious that real estate was a bad investment, and many of these companies are pretty heavily invested in real estate. Easier to screw the workers with what can be explained away as a management strategy than admit a wasted a whole bunch of money buying and building and renovating space you don't need.

That and executive ass covering, a way to avoid admitting to shareholders that they wasted their money on useless commercial real estate.

It's also shooting themselves in the foot. The first people to leave aren't going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.

That's the appropriate reaction to many of these so-called threats to society. Internet chat rooms, generative AI, drugs, opioids, guns, pornography, trashy TV, you name it. I think it's been pretty well demonstrated throughout history that the majority of the time some 'threat to public safety' comes out and a well-meaning group tries to get the government to shove the genie back in the bottle, the cure ends up being worse than the disease. And it's a lot easier to set up bureaucracy then to dismantle it.

The sad thing is, whatever regulation they set up will be pointless. Someone will download an open source model and run it locally with the watermark code removed. Or some other nation will realize that hobbling their AI industry with stupid regulations won't help them get ahead in the world and they will become a source for non-watermarked output and watermark free models.

So we hobble ourselves with some ridiculous AI enforcement bureaucracy, and it will do precisely zero good because the people who would do bad things will just do them on offshore servers or in their basement.

It applies everywhere else too. I'm all for ending the opioid crisis, but the current attempt to end opioids entirely is not the solution. A good friend of mine takes a lot of opioids, prescribed by a doctor, for a serious pain condition resulting from a car accident. This person's back and neck are full of metal pins and screws and plates and whatnot.
For this person, opioids like oxycontin are the difference between being in constant pain and being able to do things like workout at the gym and enjoy life.
But because of the well-meaning war on opioids, this person and their doctor are persecuted. Pharmacies don't want to deal with oxycontin, and the doctor is getting constant flack from insurance and DEA for prescribing too much of it.
I mean really, a pain management doctor prescribes a lot of pain medication. That's definitely something fishy that we should turn the screws on him for...

It's really infuriating. In my opinion, the only two people who should decide what drugs get taken are a person and their doctor. For anyone else to try and intrude on that is a violation of that person's rights.

I agree it's hypocritical, but for different reasons.

I think a nude/sex scene can be important to the plot and add a lot to the story- in some situations. Yeah it's often thrown in as eye candy to get more viewers, but sometimes it counts for a lot. Look at Season 1 of Game of Thrones for example- there's a couple sex scenes with Dany and Khal Drogo, and IMHO that does a lot more to further the story than to show T&A-- the first one Dany's basically being raped, but as the season goes on you see her start to fall in love with Drogo and it becomes more making love. Hard to get the same effect without sex scenes.
Same thing anytime you have two people in bed- crappy unrealistic TV sex where the girl never takes her shirt off and then cut to half a second later they're both wrapped tightly but conveniently in sheets can break suspended disbelief.
So I can sympathize with an actor who agrees to artistic nude scenes or sex scenes because they're important to the plot, but then has that specific 20 seconds of video taken out of context and circulated on porn sites.

At the same time, an actor doesn't get to order the audience to experience the film in any certain way. Just as you say about 'the piano', it depends on how you watch it. It's not illegal to buy the film, fast forward to the nude scenes, and stop watching when they're done. So to think you get any sort of control over that is hypocritical, it's like ordering a reader to read the entire book and not share passages with a friend.

I'm not fine with that, as it will have wide-ranging repercussions on society at large that aren't all good.

But I fully accept it as the cold hard reality that WILL happen now that the genie's out of the bottle, and the reality that any ham-fisted legal attempt to rebottle the genie will be far worse for society and only delay the inevitable acceptance that photographs are no longer proof.

And as such, I (and most other adults mature enough to accept a less-than-preferred reality as reality) stand with you and give the statists the middle finger, along with everyone else who thinks you can legislate any genie back into its bottle. In the 1990s it was the 'protect kids from Internet porn' people, in the 2000s it was the 'protect kids from violent video games' and 'stop Internet piracy' people, I guess today it's the 'stop generative AI' people. They are all children who think crying to Daddy will remake the ways of the world. It won't.

Probably the best idea yet. It's definitely not foolproof though. Best you could do is put a security chip in the camera that digitally signs the pictures, but that is imperfect because eventually someone will extract the key or figure out how to get the camera to sign pictures of their choosing that weren't taken by the camera.

A creator level key is more likely, so you choose who you trust.

But most of the pictures that would be taken as proof of anything probably won't be signed by one of those.

I'm not talking about the copyright violation of sharing parts of a copyrighted movie. That is obviously infringement. I am talking about generated nude images.

If the pencil drawing is not harming anybody, is the photo realistic but completely hand-done painting somehow more harmful? Does it become even more harmful if you use AI to help with the painting?

If the pencil drawing is legal, and the AI generated deep fake is illegal, I am asking where exactly the line is. Because there is a whole spectrum between the two, so at what point does it become illegal?

Actually I was thinking about this some more and I think there is a much deeper issue.

With the advent of generative AI, photographs can no longer be relied upon as documentary evidence.

There's the old saying, 'pics or it didn't happen', which flipped around means sharing pics means it did happen.

But if anyone can generate a photo realistic image from a few lines of text, then pictures don't actually prove anything unless you have some bulletproof way to tell which pictures are real and which are generated by AI.

And that's the real point of a lot of these laws, to try and shove the genie back in the bottle. You can ban deep fake porn and order anyone who makes it to be drawn in quartered, you can an AI watermark it's output but at the end of the day the genie is out of the bottle because someone somewhere will write an AI that ignores the watermark and pass the photos off as real.

I'm open to any possible solution, but I'm not sure there is one. I think this genie may be out of the bottle for good, or at least I'm not seeing any way that it isn't. And if that's the case, perhaps the only response that doesn't shred civil liberties is to preemptively declare defeat, acknowledge that photographs are no longer proof of anything, and deal with that as a society.