Seems obvious to me that China would not want to give the AI market to US companies. You don't even need anything like an attempt to "sabotage the West". If I were them (the companies or the government) I'd be very hesitant to let US companies dominate this space. Especially companies that close to the current US administration.
I've always enjoyed using Clojure. Unfortunately, most of the things I do require interacting with the C world, so it has never been a real option as my primary language.
I also interact a ton with C and C++, but it's easy today to have Claude write a Project Panama wrapper and then put a nice Clojure veneer on top of the Java.
Based on what's in the article, it wouldn't take much to move these files to SQLite or any other database in the future.
Edit: I just submitted a link to Joe Armstrong's Minimum Viable Programs article from 2014. If the response to my comment is about the enterprise and imaginary scaling problems, realize that those situations don't apply to some programming problems.
You can avoid the overhead of working with the database. If you want to work with json data and prefer the advantages of text files, this solution will be better when you're starting out. I'm not going to argue in favor of a particular solution because that depends on what you're doing. One could turn the question around and ask what's special about SQLite.
If your language supports it, what is the overhead of working with SQLite?
What's special about SQLite is that it already solves most of the things you need for data persistence without adding the same kind of overhead or trade offs as Postgres or other persistence layers, and that it saves you from solving those problems yourself in your json text files...
Like by all means don't use SQLite in every project. I have projects where I just use files on the disk too. But it's kinda inane to pretend it's some kind of burdensome tool that adds so much overhead it's not worth it.
Battle-tested, extremely performant, easier to use than a homegrown alternative?
By all means, hack around and make your own pseudo-database file system. Sounds like a fun weekend project. It doesn't sound easier or better or less costly than using SQLite in a production app though.
I'd say having your house fall to a third of its value while your electricity bill triples is a perfectly rational argument for opposing a data center. If the data center is that valuable, pay the residents current market value for their property and give them a million dollars to uproot their life. Letting giant corporations impose massive costs on the folks that don't have the money to buy politicians is not an efficient outcome.
I honestly don't understand Microsoft's AI strategy. It seems to be built around automating the writing process. If you ask MS 365 Copilot (as opposed to the many other Copilots) what it can do, it's deeply disappointing:
"Can you edit the Word document so the format is in line with these requirements?"
"No, but I can help you draft an implementation consistent with the requirements."
"Can you add this section to the 35 individual copies of this document in this OneDrive folder?"
"No, but I can help you draft [something]."
This is NOT the AI revolution anyone was waiting for.
This is decidedly the result of a lack of strategy. Microsoft isn’t a single unified borg.
Instead, all the little individual teams got their hands on these capabilities and they figured out where to shove it. At “best” there would have been the head of Windows or Office or whatever saying to all their reports “go do AI!”
You can run all the Office apps in a browser, and update documents that are on SharePoint live in collaboration with someone else. Maybe that's not earth-shattering, but it's quite a big change from huge separate Office legacy apps. It must have been a big effort decreed from the top. Given Microsoft leadership is obsessed with AI, you'd think they'd be pushing hard.
Its shocking how they didnt. Imagine how shit the culture must be when employees arent bothering to consider how the user will use the feature, just focussing on getting it through
Here is a fun one. I had a column with around 200 entries and there were some duplicates in it. I just wanted to see which were duplicates and remove some of them.
I selected the cells and asked copilot to tell me which ones were duplicated. Copilot had to ask me to copy and paste the cell contents in its chat box. It couldn't even detect which cells were selected and read them
Why even have copilot inside excel when it can't even read a cell? This is what happens when all you care is about KPI metrics or what not
When implementing an AI feature in a product recently, I noticed a tendency of management to steer towards a limited, well-behaved feature set that straight jackets the underlying model. This resulted in similar experience to what you describe. Maybe this is control and accountability thing? If I were to do this, I'd just slap a bunch of product specific tools (MCP, CLIs, HTTP API wrappers, etc) and skills (how to use those, best practices) with an agent and call it a day - if it can do more but also can fail, that's fine by me. That's why I like the idea of WebMCP more than custom built, limited AI chat interfaces that pop up everywhere nowadays. Just let Claude access everything and dump knowledge into it.
Probably true. Also probably true: people have read enough of the things he listed and concluded that they wasted their time. I remember trying Linux in the RTFM days, and let me tell you, those were some terrible documents even when they did talk about the problem.
Without any insider knowledge on the economics of these companies, I suspect it's that the amount of infrastructure you have to build is determined by peak usage rather than average usage. If peak usage is much higher for a small part of one day a week (say on Monday morning as software developers across the US get back to work) the cost of fulfilling demand at all times can be insane. That's why companies are implementing batch/standard/priority pricing for the API.
It sounds like it's more of a profit maximization function (and not just demand) with GPU rental prices increasing 48% since Feb.
> Renting one of Nvidia’s most-advanced Blackwell generation of chips for one hour costs $4.08, up 48% from the $2.75 it cost two months ago, according to the Ornn Compute Price Index.
> It should be illegal to change the terms of the subscription mid-period
Unfortunately, at least for those of us in the US, there isn't legally much that can be done. It's simply not possible to make a contract that would obligate a company to fulfill its promises on this type of sale.
> Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever
If China is forced to choose between giving the entire AI market to the US or releasing free models, they'll be releasing free models as long as it's necessary.
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