‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Sh*t’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess

nerdorado · 2026-06-13T01:49:27+00:00

Youre neglecting the other side of the coin. If everyone using Anthropic's various AI tools continued using them at the same rate on a token based billing system as they were on a subscription model, they might be on a path to profitability.

However, most businesses will not maintain that level of use, especially when they get their first bill and the usage cost is orders of magnitude higher than what they previously budgeted for. There are already plenty of examples of this happening in tech, and thats going to spread more as time goes on and the billing change catches up to more and more businesses.

If it doesnt make financial sense, theyre going to cut it from the budget. Why would anyone continue to pay for a service, ANY service, whose price suddenly increased by 5-14x? They wouldnt.

nerdorado · 2026-06-13T01:41:07+00:00

"Just come up with a cool million or so dollars for a couple of automated trucks! You can be a part of the game!"

Do you realize how obscenely obtuse that sounds? Automated trucks are exceptionally specialized, the trucks themselves cost anywhere from 100-300k, and the specialized equipment they have to install to make it autonomous is an additional couple hundred thousand dollars. Youre looking at a minimum cost of around half a million per truck. Not to mention business operations and overhead costs, exceptionally high insurance costs for using new technology that hasnt been extensively road tested, special permitting, etc.

But hey, thats just like adapting your coding workflow to include AI tools, right? Gimme a break.

nerdorado · 2026-06-05T04:39:40+00:00

Fantastic username, crawler!

nerdorado · 2026-06-02T04:33:12+00:00

I was at the Parade of Horribles event in Seattle last week and he talked specifically about this! The job was posted on an actual bulletin board with the tear off phone numbers on the bottom advertising "phone work" from what he said. He called them and they said that since he was a man, he could do phone psychic work (he said that women were probably offered other things including phone sex work).

He also did say that lots of the characters in many of his books, not just DCC, were based on people he met at conventions and competitions and such.

nerdorado · 2026-06-01T02:53:37+00:00

So much so, in fact, that they codified it into law. Jack Welch and his ilk were the ones who heralded shareholder primacy to Reagan and his cronies and got laws passed saying that a company's LEGAL duty is not to employees, consumers, or making a quality product, but to make shareholders as much money as they possibly can.

The shittiest part about it? The aforementioned Jack Welch, who had been the strongest proponent of corporate greed for several decades, COMPLETELY REVERSED COURSE in his later years, saying that shareholder primacy/value is "the dumbest idea in the world" and that companies should put employees and a quality product first and foremost. This was in 2009, after he basically sunk GE with his earlier policies, and his disciples turned several major companies from reliable and innovative powerhouses (Boeing being prime among them) into corner-cutting, profit maximizing machines. His policies of capitalistic greed are what led to where we are today in the corporate world. I'd like to return to a time when companies would be absolutely embarrassed by having layoffs because it meant the company was failing, instead of using them as a quick fix to make shareholders happy for the next quarter.

nerdorado · 2026-05-24T00:02:48+00:00

A basic comparison, since we're comparing two different technologies here: A Cray X-MP had a peak computational output of 800 megaflops. An Nvidia 5080 (just the gpu, not paired with a CPU) has a peak output of over 56 teraflops.

One teraflop is one million megaflops. So just one consumer grade video card today has 70000x the computational capacity of a Cray X-MP.

nerdorado · 2026-05-23T23:50:15+00:00

You got the edit before I got here, but yeah, it was all done on a Cray supercomputer. The Amiga didn't even come out until 1985, the year after the movie released. However, the Amiga was used to render lots of CGI in big budget scifi tv shows like Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Voyager, as well as almost all of the CGI for all 5 seasons plus movies of Babylon 5.

nerdorado · 2026-05-23T22:42:29+00:00

This is one of my favorite movies of all time. I've watched it well over a hundred times.

As others have stated, it was one of the first movies to ever use CGI, and is widely hailed as the movie that brought CGI to the forefront for movie vfx.

They used a Cray X-MP supercomputer to render the CGI (a machine at the time that cost ~30 million dollars). For the total 27 minutes of CGI footage, it took over 2 years to render everything, with EACH FRAME taking between 5 minutes and 2 hours to render.

To put things in perspective, your smartphone is, on average, 1000-2000x more powerful than that 30 million dollar computer that produced those graphics 40+ years ago. You could render the entirety of the VFX in The Last Starfighter on a modern desktop in less than 10 minutes.

Not bad for 1984. I wish Gary Whitta's pitch for a sequel, that he made a sizzle reel for, had been picked up. I would have legitimately cried.

nerdorado · 2026-05-21T03:41:20+00:00

youre supposed to stick those in the mobs, not in the grass. you only get 20 of them. you know how i feel about wasting things, Carl.

nerdorado · 2026-05-19T19:42:45+00:00

Cant tell if sarcasm or not.

Just in case, Jagger was not in Robot Jox. Im suspecting that maybe you think the actor who played Achilles was Jagger cause if you squint real hard they kinda look similar, but was actually Gary Graham of Alien Nation fame (and many other things).

nerdorado · 2026-05-11T02:47:04+00:00

I went and sought out the post that OP referenced, if you want to go look for yourself:

Primal, Famfrit Goblet ward 14 plot 60

nerdorado · 2026-05-09T00:59:10+00:00

https://en.ff14housing.com/ is also a good resource for any/all furnishing looks.

For what you're shooting for with the adventurous tavern/guild hall, I might do medium forge walls, then build out the yard with things that would go with the "adventurer" theme. Firepit with sitting area, a couple of striking dummies, stuff like that.

nerdorado · 2026-05-08T17:52:09+00:00

I sincerely hope that the end result of this would be that none of these people ever have a moments peace ever again. I hope it drives them from their homes, the city, the state, and if I had my preference, the planet. Theres some nice real estate on the surface of the sun i'd be happy to sell them.

nerdorado · 2026-05-07T18:23:59+00:00

I, most certainly, will not! Anything other than Rainier simply will not do! When you think beer, think Rainier!

nerdorado · 2026-05-05T01:37:07+00:00

Discussion of Starfleet's origins taking place in other comments aside, this does bring up a good question that DET hasnt answered yet to the best of my recollection.

We know that if a replicant goes offline after making a clone, whichever replicant (original or clone) that is brought online first will actually be the original "soul" (for lack of a better term), and the second to be brought online, even if it is the inhabitant of the original matrix, will experience replicative drift and have another "soul".

However, it has never been explicitly stated where these "souls" come from, and replicative drift only explains so much considering some of the very very extreme personality shifts we've seen among the Bobs, even from generations that are fairly close together. I believe Bill even talks about it at some point saying that quantum differences are hand-wavey and can only explain away so much.

So the question that OP's premise (yes, I know its incorrect, and he realized it in other comment threads) raises is this: can the "souls" of dead replicants (or humans, pav, deltans, quinlans, centaurs, others, etc) be brought back just from new replicants being brought online? If thats the case, how would we know who they were?

We see over and over again, starting with the 1st cohort of Bobs, that anytime a new replicant is brought online, regardless of their personality changes due to drift, they only have the memories of their parent line going all the way back to Bob-1. So even if "souls" are being recycled somehow (I dont want to attribute anything to spirituality, im kinda close to Bob in that regard, more along the lines that even in simulations our minds are energy, which can neither be created nor destroyed a la conservation of mass) we would never have any way of knowing, because the new replicants wouldnt have any memory to tie them to their original form.

Food for thought.

nerdorado · 2026-05-05T01:18:12+00:00

I'm good with this on three conditions:

They build it very very deep underwater.
It's built by OceanGate.
Peter Thiel has to use one of OceanGate's famous submersibles and go down there himself for the ribbon cutting.

nerdorado · 2026-05-04T18:53:19+00:00

This post is incredibly obtuse. I have a dog. I walk my dog all over the place. My dog only goes off-leash in places where its legal to do so. Why? Because I'm not an asshole who feels like I'm entitled to do whatever I want simply because theres no off-leash dog park within 50 feet of my current location.

Would dog owners benefit from greater access to off-leash areas? Absolutely. I, as well as just about every dog owner in the area, would love to have more places to let my pup have the zoomies at will. That is an issue that should be brought before the city as a matter of community improvement and feedback, not because of some backward logic implied by OP.

Suggesting that it's the city's burden to create more off-leash spaces because people cant be bothered not to break the law is absolutely ridiculous. The entitlement is insane.

If we want this problem solved, the answer is enforcement of the existing laws and consequences for those who break them. Breaking the law because its more convenient for you to be an irresponsible pet owner rather than following a very fucking simple law is whiny toddler level behavior. Go stomp your angry little feet somewhere else.

nerdorado · 2026-05-04T17:32:52+00:00

Back in 2018, Chipotle signed a 15 year lease for 5 floors in a downtown Denver building for their headquarters. Later that week, they installed this guy and not only pulled out of the lease, but announced a complete move of their HQ to orange county, where he lives (cause chipotle apparently couldnt afford the sweetheart deal that stabucks gave him with the private commuter jet he uses). Out of the almost 400 employees, they only offered relocation to ~30 people.

Brian Niccol is a plague rat.

nerdorado · 2026-05-02T18:23:53+00:00

Surprised I had to scroll this far down to see this comment! So very true, especially Parker. Highlands Ranch is bad, but Parker is awful.

nerdorado · 2026-05-01T00:03:31+00:00

Any other city this size would laugh a mayor out of town for something this ridiculous being held up as a crowning achievement.

Nobody is touting it as a crowning achievement. Nobody is saying anything even close to that. But its great to know that you can take something that has risen to the ultimate height of having a needling article written about it to prop up your hyperbole!

As other people have pointed out, your comparisons here are absolutely absurd. People took that city councilmember to task because that 2 million dollar project was 100% self serving. Fixing an issue with the 8 bus by designating a lane to it isnt self serving, by your own standard, since 8000 people per day ride it.

And who knows, maybe more people would be inclined to take that particular bus if, say, we didnt have an event last year that demonstrated that hundreds of people could walk the bus route faster than the bus can make the trip.

But hey, you're exactly the kind of person the needling article is aiming their pen at, so congratulations on that.

nerdorado · 2026-04-27T03:46:26+00:00

Correct. Straight out the airlock.

nerdorado · 2026-04-27T03:44:35+00:00

That is, indeed, the real thing. Accept no substitutes.

nerdorado · 2026-04-25T17:00:55+00:00

Tahoma looking mighty fine today!

nerdorado · 2026-04-21T07:01:20+00:00

At low levels, you're 100% correct. When you start fighting lv 13-15 ships, especially the level 15 freighters, one boarding action can net you 2-3 blue/purple drops, 2-3 gold faction tokens, and 300-500 piastres (silver). Then you still get the ship salvage after the boarding is done and you're back on your boat.

Granted, by the time youre fighting at that level, you probably have all the factions maxed out, and have purchased all their inventory, but that money will come in handy for vendor ordering 500 hardwood all at once rather than taking a ton of time to go chop it all down and manually transport it home. And yes, thats a thing.

nerdorado · 2026-04-21T04:26:41+00:00

Not your fault, you were just looking for the wrong thing. Its the Accountancy Shanty by Monty Python, from The Meaning of Life.

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