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America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

washingtonpost.com

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Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#731

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #714
Knork-and-Fife wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your assessment on the high end of China's development and the lack of awareness of that from people in the US. But I think the story on the low end /lower class is more interesting and I think there is lack of awareness there too. Even within the US a lot of upper class people don't know what it's like for lower class people here. It's so easy to slip into homelessness because there aren't reasonable op…

As someone living in a city with a significant homelessness problem I think this comment misses the point. The vast majority of homelessness in the US is not people falling on hard times and needing a boost to get back into a home. They are drug addicts or the mentally ill. A completely different problem that also needs to be addressed. Few other nations that I can see allow blatantly mentally ill to roam their stree…

Wow. Sounds like Mega-City One.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#732

Post by nathan_douglas »

dunham wrote: post #415
minkeymaniac wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes.. try moving that 36 inch Sony Trinitron from the car inside the house.. weighs 200 pounds+ IIRC....you need at least 2 strong people

I remember the Sun monitors (21" I think) were about 80 lbs. I've read that part of that was a metal frame to hold all of the wires in front of the screen. They were fun monitors - we had a lab full of them, they would degauss on startup, and the degausser would induct into the monitor next to it (and a little bit into the monitor after that).

BWAAAA

I wish I still had one around, just to degauss it occasionally.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#733

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

postflopclarity wrote: post #618
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>clean streets, no homeless, practically zero crime The US regressed on this heavily in the last generation.

no it didn't. crime rates have been steadily declining for over 30 years

Nope, sorry I don't believe this. I lived in Seattle for 15-years and while the city was never exactly hard on crime, I watched the post-2016 descent into madness and then the post-covid sprint into being actively pro-crime.

I watched it start in the downtown area and then spread into residential neighborhoods, and the homeless/criminal element become more physically aggressive too. "Public Intoxication" also increased except instead of drunks it was fentanyl users.

Car crimes similarly went from simple opening of unlocked doors, to smashing of windows to grab bags or cutting out catalytic converters.

Public transit went from bearable to unusable (though this might be better now, I don't have firsthand knowledge anymore since I stopped using it during the decline).

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#734

Post by danlugo92 »

ryandrake wrote: post #108
mullingitover wrote: post #44

The US spent decades transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, deliberately. Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services . Yes, there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term strategy because services were a superior investment. Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're planning to g…

I don't know why people romanticize 1950-style manufacturing jobs so much, like they are some kind of objectively ideal job. These jobs really weren't great. Bunch of dudes standing at an assembly line all day physically busting their asses and sweating it out. Sometimes in a physically hazardous environment. Sometimes breathing stinky and/or harmful chemicals. Sometimes surrounded by ear-damaging loud noises. Someti…

> Why on earth are we trying to bring it back?

A house was 2 years salary.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#735

Post by vonneumannstan »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #731
vonneumannstan wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone living in a city with a significant homelessness problem I think this comment misses the point. The vast majority of homelessness in the US is not people falling on hard times and needing a boost to get back into a home. They are drug addicts or the mentally ill. A completely different problem that also needs to be addressed. Few other nations that I can see allow blatantly mentally ill to roam their stree…

Wow. Sounds like Mega-City One.

Scenes like this are ubiquitous. It has gotten better since a recent camping ban but it only moved the problem into wooded areas.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/south-austin-homeless-camp-drawin...

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#736

Post by danlugo92 »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #492
shawn_w wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then a couple could buy a house and raise a few kids on the paycheck that factory job of the husband's earned. These days even someone with a 6 figure tech job has trouble with that goal, but I think a lot of people think they can go back to the good old days.

What's missed in that nostalgia: the house was crap; the appliances, if any, were crap; the car(if you had one, and only one), was crap. On and on.

Holy shit you have eaten it all up even licked your fingers just wow.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#737

Post by danlugo92 »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #644
F35Machinist wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That crap house hasn't been updated and is worth 200x currently in California. Houses that sold for 10k in the mid 70s are selling for 2 million or more in 2025. Cars, appliances and everything else is just a rounding error by comparison.

That's a condemnation of zoning laws artificially restricting the market for housing, which ironically only came about after that period of relative abundance

"Things are not shitty because of X you mentioned but because Y, therefore things are not shitty"

Does not compile.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#738

Post by fair_enough »

profsummergig wrote: post #152
fair_enough wrote: post #84

Just a friendly reminder: The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Of course he doesn't want people to think that tariffs can bring back middle class manufacturing jobs, and naturally he would want to publish propaganda intended to demoralize pro-labor causes like import tariffs and worker protection laws. I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing…

It's intriguing to me how people assumed that Bezos would never interfere with WaPo and then he did. "We superior Westerners with our moral billionaires would never... Hey! What're you doing!"

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people being billionaires "in theory". If someone makes billions of dollars doing something that adds $10 of value to my life, then God bless!

The problem lies in practice- when they start bribing government officials to cheat regulations, and when they engage in all manner of anti-competitive malfeasance against their workers and their customers.

In general, I'm skeptical of claims that only way to attain that kind of wealth is by screwing people, considering Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan built their wealth by being the best in the world at something hundreds of millions of people enjoy. I'm not convinced the mere act of being a billionaire makes someone an asshole, considering how much those two gave, especially to Chicago's South Side.

However, I would support just enough of a wealth tax to prevent people from using their wealth to stifle the American dream.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#739

Post by gregw2 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #429
gregw2 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk apparently stood up a brand new raw to finished goods manufacturing for Starlink kits in 2-3 years in America/Texas. Non trivial, but doable in niches at least, per a factory engineer: "The main function of this site is to produce our standard Starlink kits. Right now, we’re producing 15,000 a day straight out of the factory. Raw plastic palettes come in, raw aluminum comes in and we make those into the Starlink…

This certainly is not a "raw to finished goods" plant, it's a typical Musk exaggeration. The housing, maybe. Makes sense to produce that domestically at the volume SpaceX requires, less shipping costs because the dishes do take up volume. But the PCB? Almost certainly not. With any luck they're making and assembling the PCB in house, but the components originate from a lot of suppliers and there are a lot of componen…

Thanks for the links and call out on the PCBs!

Regarding components, it's not like they are making chips in the same plant as a laptop plant in China either, are they?

I guess the question is which components function or cost benefit the most from tighter coupling, and which components (eg antenna) do you isolate to keep your secret sauce internally controlled.

Re: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

#740

Post by rhubarbtree »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #658
rhubarbtree wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, but why would an AGI be better at improving itself compared to an AI researcher doing it? AGI is not super intelligence.

Every frontier lab has maybe 100 top tier researchers, all of whom have limited short-term memory, need to sleep, eat, have biases, and can't rigorously parallelize themselves and run thousands of simultaneous experiments, while also modifying their own internal thought processes to a quantifiable degree. An AGI merely on the level of a mediocre AI researcher would be able to trivially leverage all these benefits, wh…

> An AGI merely on the level of a mediocre AI researcher

Perhaps it's semantics, but I'd say AGI is around the average human intelligence, not extreme outliers like mediocre AI researchers.

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