I think this is precisely the Packt strategy though - to always overwhelm the search results, whether its O'reilly, Amazon, etc. They do this by their sheer volume of low quality titles. Everything about that company and their content is complete shit.
It's worth noting their enterprise support is a joke. As is their whole pivot to "AI." Their pitch is that they are an AI company now. Good riddance. I look forward to a good community fork.
This is incorrect. A lot of these companies are raising debt to pay for these datacenter build outs. And that debt has already been sold to pension funds. The risk has already been spread. See Blue Owl Capital and how Meta is financing its Hyperion datacenter. They raised 30 billion in debt. Main street is already exposed as those bonds are in funds offered by the usual players BlackRock, Invesco, Pimco etc.
I would say that state-run liquor stores and subsidized city-run grocery stores such as what Mamdani proposes are not at all comparable. The former is a giant cash cow - a profit center while the latter is an entitlement program i.e a mandatory budget expense. To give an idea of the amount of money involved in state-run liquor stores, consider the state of New Hampshire's report from last year:
>"In FY2024, total income before transfers was $144.7 million with the total net profit transfer of $140.0 million. Of the $140.0 million, the Liquor Commission transferred $122.0 million to the General Fund"[1]
Why does a government ran entity need to be a huge money maker?
NYC has a $6B cop budget. They even have subs. Yet nobody worries about that. A grocery store could be ran at a deficit. More than likely it will be neutral or will turn a slight profit.
>"More than likely it will be neutral or will turn a slight profit."
Based on what exactly, just your opinion? Obviously you know nothing about the grocery business which is a notoriously low-margin business, between 1-3%. The only way that large grocers like Krogers and Albertsons are profitable is purely based on volume. You also realize that groceries are perishable items right? You also realize these are labor and energy inensive operations right? And that there's tons of competition? And of course shrinkage. There is zero chance that it would operate at a profit or break even. By the way it's been tried before look up Baldwin, Florida or Erie, Kansas for examples of city-run grocery failures. There are others as well.
Lastly, nothing about any of this in any way comparable to NYPD as a budgetary item. Comparing retail food to public safety is just really bizarre.
Baldwin and Erie were both in small towns. I can't find any information on Erie, but Baldwin ultimately saw a $100->$200k yearly shortfall for a city of 1400.
If they wanted to accommodate that shortfall, then that translates to a $150 yearly tax burden per person. They instead chose to shutter the store.
The stores lost money in both cities, but in the process baldwin sold over $1M in produce breaking even at least once.
> There is zero chance that it would operate at a profit or break even.
The Baldwin example shows that breaking even is definitely possible. And for a city with the population density of NY, it's probably easier to pull off. It's certainly easier to support these stores if there's a shortfall.
> Lastly, nothing about any of this in any way comparable to NYPD as a budgetary item. Comparing retail food to public safety is just really bizarre.
But it is. The NYPD is simply overfunded. They can buy toys and tanks while paying the cops to catch people jumping turnstiles and play candy crush.
A pretty small fraction of the NYPD budget could cover shortfalls. That's why it's brought up. These grocery stores, even if they never turn a profit, won't be costing the city $100M, or $10M. They likely won't even shortfall to $1M. For a city with a budget of billions, adding 1M in is really just a drop in bucket.
And in the process, such a grocery store will help far more people than the average NYPD cop does.
>A pretty small fraction of the NYPD budget could cover shortfalls. That's why it's brought up. These grocery stores, even if they never turn a profit, won't be costing the city $100M, or $10M. They likely won't even shortfall to $1M. For a city with a budget of billions, adding 1M in is really just a drop in bucket.
This. A city with not just a budget of "billions" but of USD$116 billion[0].
Even if each of the five pilot stores required USD$1 million in subsidies, that's 0.0000431% of the city budget or USD$0.61 per NY resident. We're definitely going bankrupt over that right?
And if it results in the poorest NYers getting access to cheaper, healthier food, that's good for business (healthier people work more), education (healthier people learn better), healthcare (healthier people consume less healthcare), quality of life (reasonably priced healthy food allows folks to live better lives) and a host of other benefits.
As a NYC resident, I'm happy to give the poorest folks in the city $0.61 a year or even $2.00 a year. Isn't $0.61 a reasonable price to pay for making the lives of thousands of your neighbors demonstrably better?
Not at all. A big thrust of the article is about falling behind in AI adoption. See the first 3 paragraphs below the heading "Innovation and Adoption." Specifically:
>"Although the United States and China are very different and the latter’s approach has its limits, China is moving faster at scaling robots in society, and its AI Plus Initiative emphasizes achieving widespread industry-specific adoption by 2027. The government wants AI to essentially become a part of the country’s infrastructure by 2030. China is also investing in AGI, but Beijing’s emphasis is clearly on quickly scaling, integrating, and applying current and near-term AI capabilities."
China is facing a demographic cliff that is potentially catastrophic.
I remember Japan talking about replacing its similar demographic problems with robots.
Didn't happen. Now ai and robotics is apparently progressed... But I'm guessing this will be some grand vision in the CCP to save their country, while at the same time fulfill the CCPs great desire for a totally controlled and subservient workforce.
Much like the Cold war, there's a lot of scare that can be built into that. Which corporations can use to get a whole lot of sweet government and military money.
But almost everything that was held up as an existential threat to democracy in the USSR turned out to be overblown in the best case, an outright fraud or smokescreen frequently.
As we can see from the Ukraine invasion, corruption in the military and control structures follows these authoritarian regimes. China also has this problem.
China was functioning well under reduced Deng Xiaoping rulership, but Xi is a typical purge and control authoritarian, which implies bad things about China's long term economic health.
Between the authoritarianism, demographic cliff, and possibly a massive real estate/finance bomb, China will probably have to become expansionist.
But they have nuclear frenemies all on their borders: Japan (effectively), Russia, Pakistan, India. They can be blockaded from petroleum access with a single us carrier group, which will happen if they invade Taiwan and I don't think they can help themselves.
>They can be blockaded from petroleum access with a single us carrier group, which will happen if they invade Taiwan and I don't think they can help themselves.
I doubt it. This is just an armchair general's cope that's so faulty that I don't know where to start attacking it from.
Since Clinton's 1990s show of force in the Taiwan straits, China has built up a formidable navy, esp. their submarine forces. Within the straits, their AA/AD web, SOSUS, etc. guarantees they have freedom of action. Moving further, they have a strong submarine component that can seriously threaten any blockading forces.
They're also the world's sixth largest oil producer, and Naval War College [0] estimates suggest that they can stretch their emergency reserves to 8 years if they enforce, say, 45% rationing.
That's before you factor in that you'd be blockading up to 60% of the world's seaborne cargo volume, both from China, Japan, South Korea, etc. Unprecedented in the whole of human history.
Then there's their formidable 5th-gen. air force that can dominate South Korea, Japan, etc. easily, nuclear weapons that guarantee they won't lose any territory, and the massive economic whiplash the entire West will face as a result.
India might hate China, but it wants a multipolar world and won't help the West cut them down to size. So, they won't assist with the blockade.
The rest of Southeast Asia's economies are deeply interconnected with China, and they don't want to stir up their wrath, so they might condemn them, but won't even wave a stick at them.
I just hope the Pentagon's policymakers and war planners are less myopic. if you stumble in a confrontation with this overconfidence, and still lose Taiwan to China, Pax Americana is effectively over. The humiliation will be impossible to recover from.
A lot of that is predicated on the fact that a CS major in China (and other countries like India, Israel, the CEE) also studied CompArch, OS, and other "low level" disciplines which we in the US don't treat as CS anymore, which leads to a lack of understanding of how to integrate hardware with software.
The fact that DSP is a CSE major requirement abroad, but optional in much of the US aside from ECE programs (but even they have now gated DSP to those ECEs who want to specialize in EE) highlights this issue.
Can't reply so replying here:
> There are lots of young whippersnappers and “old timers” in the “west” who could easily do the Low level make it quick on small hardware stuff
Not to the same degree. The total number of CE graduates (from BS to PhD) is 19k per year in the US.
A large number of those were not introduced to table stakes CS classes like programming language design or theory of computation.
Conversely, for CS major, they are not introduced to intro circuits, digital logic design, DSP, comp arch, and in some cases even OS development because there was a pivot in how CS curricula for undergrads was designed over the past 10 years.
> in the context of adoption as opposed to frontier development.
For real world applications like military applications or dual use technology, frontier development is not relevant. It's important but it's not what wins wars or defines industries.
Being able to develop frontier models but being unable to productionize foundational models from scratch for sub-$2M like Deepseek did despite paying US level salaries highlights a major problem.
And this is the crux of the issue. The best engineers are those who recognize what is "good enough".
Americans who did their undergrad here over the past 10 years act more like "artists" who want to build to perfection irrespective of whether it actually meets tangible needs or is scalable.
> We aren’t actually engineers, we didn’t get to take classes in the engineering college, maybe we should have
Which is the crux of my argument.
CS is an engineering discipline, and some of the best CS undergrad programs in the US like Stanford, Cal, MIT, and UCLA make sure to enforce Engineering requirements for CS majors.
The shift of CS from being a department within a "College of Engineering" to being offered as a BA/BS in the "College of Arts and Sciences" sans engineering requirements is a recentish change from what I've seen.
> Incidentally a lot of AI movers are EEs, not even CSE or CEE.
Yep! Gotta love Information Theory and Optimization Theory. And a major reason I feel requiring a dual-use course like DSP for CS/CE majors is critical.
There are lots of young whippersnappers and “old timers” in the “west” who could easily do the Low level make it quick on small hardware stuff, the US companies just aren’t asking us to?
Computer science doesn’t have the EE pre-requisites to do DSP while computer engineering does. We aren’t actually engineers, we didn’t get to take classes in the engineering college, maybe we should have.
Incidentally a lot of AI movers are EEs, not even CSE or CEE.
ECE is a compromise track that limits how far one can progress on hard systems design problems. An ECE’s principal strength is that they tend to manage long term software projects better than EEs.
EEs lead in anything that is limited by physics because that is how the discipline is oriented. The bleeding edge of compute has been like this since the first microprocessors were created, at the very latest.
I am not disputing or arguing the the reasons for it. I was simply pointing out that the "falling behind" part in the article was more in the context of adoption as opposed to pure development.
You can rent a partial rack space from almost any colocation provider, and they come in units all the way from 1U to 42U. When I did my first startup it was done out of two 1U servers that I rented the space for at about $150 a month including power and bandwidth. My partner and I got access badges, walked in and racked and cabled them ourselves.
Is Capital one just really bad customer service or do they other questionable things like add charges and fees that are not legitimate? I was interested in them since the seem to be the only provider offers virtual credit cards for security but if they are that bad I will consider them.
As I pointed out elsewhere the 200 person company is not accurate. The OP is quoting something listed as "peak" on Linkedin without even providing a reference. And for some reason everyone is running with that figure. Nearly every tech company had a peak headcount during the height of Covid. Techcrunch generally also has inaccurate tech company numbers in their profiles. Also you can't sell yourself as a 200 person company if you don't actually have 200 people as that would come out immediately in any due diligence an acquiring company would would do on you.
>"According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company"
Where in the linkedin post does the CEO state that?
My understanding is that they reduced headcount greatly over the last couple of years and were well below a 100 people. The source of this was a then current employee that my company interviewed in November.
>"Twitter isn't focused on being a microblogging platform anymore, and X has a branding problem worse than that papa John's guy, John Schnatter."
It is amusing that accessing "X formerly known as Twitter" by typing "x.com" in a browser still resolves to twitter.com. Is there a reason that a CEO who is unbothered by abrupt and radical changes can't or won't retire the twitter.com domain?
Is there a practical reason for this? Certainly "tiwtter.com" being hardcoded everywhere would not rise to the level of an intractable problem.
Obviously there is a ton of technical debt involved and the devs convinced Musk not to deal with it yet. If they had hardcoded data center names , you can imagine what goes on with the domain.
