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I mean once campfire is full featured free and easy to self host. Completely open source slack replacement.

I imagine it's also infinitely better than anything an in house team could vibe code.

You don't need AI for a cheap slack alternative.

That's why I don't buy any of this.

Companies are not bothering with the free/open alternatives.

Unless the real power of LLMs is making it easy for greg in HR to self host these existing alternatives. But, that a trillion dollar market does not make.


But, we do plan 5 years in advance. Cloud, VR, Crypto, and now AI. All glorious five year plans from the Silicon Valley Planning Bureau comrade.

> But we’ve hit the ceiling for SSE. That terrible Claude UI refresh gif is state of the art for SSE. And it sucks.

This is nothing to do with SSE. It's trivial to persist state over disconnects and refresh with SSE. You can do all the same pub sub tricks.

None of theses companies are even using brotli on their SSE connection for 40-400x compression.

It's just bad engineering and it's going to be much worse with web sockets. Because, you have to rebuild http from scratch, compression is nowhere near as good, bidirectional nukes your mobile battery because of the duplex antenna, etc, etc.


Just to add. The main value of websockets was faster up events pre http2. But, now with multiplexing in http2 that's no longer the case.

So the only thing you get from websockets is bidirectional events (at the cost of all the production challenges websockets bring). In practice most problems don't need that feature.


Thanks for that. I know very little about frontend and this definitely will help me make something better.

Because, a lot of money went into cloud marketing to convince us those are the only two options.

Tech is for all intents and purposes a planed economy (we are in the middle of the LLM five year plan comrade).


Have you tried? LLMs are really good at elisp, which is strange because elisp code is almost always GPL.

There's an option beyond lisp. Forth has even less syntax.


In my experience, they find counting parenthesis as difficult as counting the r's in strawberry if it was spelled srtrawrrrbrrerryrrrr.

Yeah for context the TOS outside the US has:

Non-commercial use only. You agree not to use our Services for any commercial or business purposes and we (and our Providers) have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.


Do they make enough to replace their GPUs in two years?

if 100% of the money they spend is in inference priced by tokens (they don't say about subscriptions so i asume they lost money), yes they make money, but their expenses are way higher than inference alone. so they can make the gpu cost if they sell tokens but in reality this isnt the case, becouse they have to constaly train new models, subscription marketing, R&D, And overhead. antropic in general lost way less money than their competitors i will take this number in particular the projected break even but googling say Gross margin in this case is how much money they do whit the GPU " Gross Margins: Projected to swing from negative 94% last year to as much as 50% this year, and 77% by 2028. Projected Break-even: The company expects to be cash flow positive by 2027 or 2028. "

i will not be as bullish to say they will no colapse (0 idear how much real debt and commitments they have, if after the bubble pop spending fall shraply, or a new deepseek moment) but this sound like good trajectory (all things considered) i heavily doubt the 380 billions in valuation

"this is how much is spendeed in developers between $659 billion and $737 billion. The United States is the largest driver of this spending, accounting for more than half of the global total ($368.5 billion in 2024)" so is like saying that a 2% of all salaries of developers in the world will be absorbed as profit whit the current 33.3 ratio, quite high giving the amount of risk of the company.


https://www.ismichaelburryright.com/

Is my goto reference for debt numbers etc.


Does a GPU doing inference server enough customers for long enough to bring in enough revenue to pay for a new replacement GPU in two years (and the power/running cost of the GPU + infrastructure). That's the question you need to be asking.

If the answer is not yes, then they are making money on inference. If the answer is no, the market is going to have a bad time.


Except all those GPUs running inference need to be replaced every 2 years.

Why?

They wear down being run at 100% all the time. Support slowly drops off, the architecture and even the rack format become deprecated.

GPUs do not wear down from being ran at 100%, unless they're pushed past their voltage limits, or gravely overheating.

You can buy a GPU that's been used to mine bitcoin for 5 years with zero downtime, and as long as it's been properly taken care of (or better, undervolted), that GPU functions the exact same as a 5 year old GPU in your PC. Probably even better.

GPUs are rated to do 100%, all the time. That's the point. Otherwise it'd be 115%.


Yeah that's not how it works in practice in a datacenter with the latest GPUs, they are basically perishable goods.

You don't run your gaming PC 24/7.


No, you're fundamentally wrong. There's the regular wear & tear of GPUs that all have varying levels of quality, you'll have blown capacitors (just as you do with any piece of hardware), but running in a datacenter does not damage them more. If anything, they're better taken care of and will last longer. However, since instead of having one 5090 in a computer somewhere, you have a million of them. A 1% failure rate quickly makes a big number. My example included mining bitcoin because, just like datacenters, they were running in massive farms of thousands of devices. We have the proof and the numbers, running at full load with proper cooling and no over voltage does not damage hardware.

The only reason they're "perishable" is because of the GPU arms race, where renewing them every 5 years is likely to be worth the investment for the gains you make in power efficiency.

Do you think Google has a pile of millions of older TPUs they threw out because they all failed, when chips are basically impossible to recycle ? No, they keep using them, they're serving your nanobanana prompts.


GPU bitcoin mining rigs had a high failure rate too. It was quite common to run at 80% power to keep them going longer. That's before taking into account that the more recent generations of GPUs seems to be a lot more fragile in general.

Mining rigs also used more milk cartons than datacenter racks; [hot/cold] aisles? No, piles! Not to mention the often questionable power delivery...

AI data centers are also incentivised to reduce costs as far as they can. They could absolutely be running them in questionable setups

Indeed, fair point. I'd hope the larger players would be better... but I know better

Yeah what's crazy is most of these companies are making accounting choices that obscure the true cost. By extending the stated useful life of their equipment, in some cases from 3 years to 6. Perfectly legal. And it has the effect of suppressing depreciation expenses and inflating reported earnings.

But don't they palpitate for thise sweet depreciation credits to decrease their tax on revenue?

Small sacrifice to not spook investors and the market.

You forgot make no mistakes at the end.

Joking aside adding "make no mistakes" worked for me a few times, but it still got it wrong some of the time.


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