cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8624879 > https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs > > Archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20260528114303/https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs > > Why it matters: Companies that rushed to embrace AI are now confronting ballooning IT costs, uncertain productivity gains and growing employee skepticism. > > Driving the news: Microsoft canceled most of its Claude Code licenses, in part over costs, according to The Verge, and Uber's COO said AI costs are getting "harder to justify." > > An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees. > > Companies are citing AI's ability to automate jobs as a cause for layoffs, though Anuj Kapur, CEO of CloudBees, told Axios that workforce cuts may simply be "the only lever they can pull" to offset their AI bills. > > Consumer sentiment around AI is also nosediving, and employees are rebelling against the use of the technology at work. > > What they're saying: The enterprise is undergoing a "healthy swing" away from AI overuse — or "tokenmaxxing," the push to burn as many AI tokens as possible — Ali Ansari, CEO of model training firm Micro1, told Axios. > > Ansari hopes this correction will push companies toward more efficient AI use. > While the market views these tools as working equally well across the enterprise, Ansari says "the reality of AI right now is that it only works for coding." > That disconnect can drive up IT bills without leading to high return on investment in agents, he said. > > Friction point: Corporate AI adoption is running into four unique problems. > > Use cases: "Most people default to automating tasks they dislike rather than tasks most valuable to the company," Sophia Velastegui, CEO of Velastegui Ventures and former chief AI officer at Microsoft told Axios. Instead, they should focus on using AI to drive revenue. > > Costs: One CTO told Axios that employees were using AI models to check the weather. That gets expensive fast: Enterprise AI plans are not truly 'all you can eat,' and even simple chatbot queries can carry heavy token costs.

alternative video upload: [https://streamable.com/e/r2uuco](https://streamable.com/e/r2uuco)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47499598 > We’ll soon get a chance to see whether, frankly, our last hope, evil corp Google, can still distinguish content created by AI from Human one 🤖 > > Here’s how I would rank the detection difficulty: > 1️⃣ Text > 2️⃣ Code > 3️⃣ Images > 4️⃣ Gifs > 5️⃣ Videos > If they already fail at level 5, we have a SERIOUS problem.

There is no alternative to terrestrial silicon based chips. GaN over SiC can only make an overclocked pentium 1 (1993) chip. Even when using liquid oil mist cooling to prevent massive radiative cooling black panels, $55m total lauch costs for 3 NVL72 systems results in a 5 year payback period GPU rental rate of $6.66/hr. Over 50% higher than terrestrial rates, with bad latency. The entire proposition was BS from the start to justify rocket company merger with AI failure. But is now IPO BS to pretend SpaceX IPO is not garbage. An un-amortized 10% target cannot be sustained over 20 years if the data center's initial rates are forced down to match terrestrial market pricing [finance]. Forcing a strict 50% revenue drop every 5 years from these competitive baselines dramatically impacts the un-amortized annual Return on Investment (ROI) for the $55.5 million installation.The financial performance updates for both the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios highlight the impact of these changes # 1. The Optimistic Scenario (Capped at $4.08/Hour Peak) This layout assumes the space capsule launches at the top of the 2026 Ornn Index price spectrum ($4.08/hr), but fails to capture a premium from sovereign or defense clients. Over its 20-year lifespan, the 216-GPU cluster generates $71,700,445 in total lifetime revenue.The declining un-amortized ROI and hourly rates are structured as follows: * Years 1 to 5: $4.08 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $7.65M ──► Annual ROI: 13.78%Years * 6 to 10: $2.04 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $3.82M ──► Annual ROI: 6.89% * Years 11 to 15: $1.02 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $1.91M ──► Annual ROI: 3.45% * Years 16 to 20: $0.51 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $0.96M ──► Annual ROI: 1.72% # The Optimistic Financial Verdict 20-Year Average Annual ROI: 6.46% The Problem: The data center technically pays for itself, netting $16.2 million over its initial CapEx. However, a 6.46% average un-amortized return fails to compete with basic terrestrial indexes. For an infrastructure project carrying intense orbital launch risk, a venture capital firm would immediately reject these metrics. # 2. The Pessimistic Scenario (Constrained to $2.75/Hour Floor) This layout assumes hyper-aggressive terrestrial spot platforms like Nebius or similar cloud under-cutters force the space data center down to the absolute bottom of the market floor ($2.75/hr) from Day 1. Over its 20-year lifespan, the capsule brings in only $48,327,506 in total lifetime revenue.The collapsing financial yield is structured as follows: * Years 1 to 5: $2.75 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $5.15M ──► Annual ROI: 9.29% * Years 6 to 10: $1.38 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $2.58M ──► Annual ROI: 4.64% * Years 11 to 15: $0.69 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $1.29M ──► Annual ROI: 2.32% * Years 16 to 20: $0.34 / hour ──► Annual Revenue: $0.64M ──► Annual ROI: 1.16% The Pessimistic Financial Verdict 20-Year Average Annual ROI: 4.35% The Problem: This scenario represents financial bankruptcy. The entire 20-year lifetime revenue ($48.3M) falls short of the initial $55.5M build and launch cost. The system loses a raw $7.17 million over its lifespan, proving that matching terrestrial commodity price floors destroys the commercial viability of a space-based data center. # 3. How a 20-Year-Old Chip Distorts the Value Floor To understand why the final blocks ($0.51/hr and $0.34/hr) fail commercially, we look at what happens when you attempt to rent a 20-year-old chip.If you tried to sell time on a 2006 GeForce 8800 GTX (345 GFLOPS) today, you could not find a customer at any price point. A modern, cheap microcontroller found inside a common appliance processes telemetry faster and with less power. By Year 15 to 20, the space data center's 45-TFLOPS Blackwell chips are drastically outmatched by newer ground architectures. Even if you cut your price to 34 cents an hour, your compute-value per dollar is thousands of times worse than renting a sliver of a 2046 terrestrial chip. # Final Business Analysis If forced to compete head-to-head on pricing with Earth-bound data centers, the orbital data center is dead on arrival. The project only makes sense if you treat the $55.5 million CapEx as a non-commercial, sunk-cost defense asset—an un-hackable, un-cooled sovereign vault where the goal is data permanence, physical survivability, and continuous processing through a planetary crisis, entirely detached from standard market economics.

We are in a golden era for buying and selling digital LPs. While I’ll use Bandcamp, sleek alternatives like Ampwall, Subvert, and Mirlo are equally great options. These online markets inherently incentivize artists to avoid filler or risk losing a sale, while the subscription streaming model requires artists to pad their catalog for pay per play. Streaming has revived the worst trope of the old music industry: the album that is just "two hits and a bunch of crap." Spotify’s business model demands album filler because the platform pays out royalties based on "stream share" which trigger a payout the second a track hits the 30 second mark, incentivizing artists to maximize volume over value. This has fundamentally warped modern songwriting: albums are aggressively padded with short, two minute tracks and repetitive hooks designed specifically to feed the algorithm and inflate stream counts. On Spotify, a deep, cohesive artistic statement takes a back seat to sheer data output, turning what should be a focused LP into a bloated playlist of algorithmic bait. Accidental hits happen way more often than you’d think. As it turns out, artists are notoriously bad at predicting their own success. When you buy a digital LP on a platform like Bandcamp, you are investing in a complete and curated piece of art where even the tracks the artist never expected to blow up exist naturally as part of a cohesive story. On subscription services like Spotify, those same happy accidents are treated like lottery tickets while surrounded by cynical, algorithm optimized filler designed just to farm streams. Buying the album ensures you are experiencing those unexpected gems as genuine creative discoveries, rather than digging through algorithmic bloat to find them. Bandcamp serves the genre; streaming serves the algorithm. When producers target platforms like Spotify, artistic nuances like tempo variations and volume dynamics are sacrificed to strict LUFS loudness standards and predictable, club friendly danceability. This algorithmic pressure strips electronic and club music of its experimental edge, forcing tracks into a uniform, compressed sonic mold just to survive on a playlist. On Bandcamp, however, the music is freed from these rigid streaming constraints, allowing producers to prioritize raw genre authenticity and dynamic storytelling over sanitized, playlist ready optimization. Soundtrack and orchestral music have become major casualties of this shift, as their essential cinematic highs and quiet, emotional lows are flattened into a lifeless wall of sound just to meet streaming's volume requirements. Just so we're clear, I'm not here to sell you my album. Go ahead and enjoy the whole thing ad free on my website. https://thejoyo.com/#more

## Google's reCAPTCHA Now Requires Play Services on Android Google has [tied its next-generation reCAPTCHA system to Google Play Services](https://reclaimthenet.org/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-googled-android-users), meaning users running GrapheneOS or any custom ROM without Google's software automatically fail verification challenges, per Reclaim The Net. When reCAPTCHA flags suspicious activity, it skips the old image puzzles and instead demands a QR code scan. That scan requires Play Services version 25.41.30 or higher running in the background. No Play Services, no access. Google announced the broader system, called Google Cloud Fraud Defense, at Cloud Next on April 23, framing it as a platform to handle AI agents and bots. The Play Services dependency was not highlighted. An Internet Archive snapshot from October 2025 shows the [same requirement](https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/16609652?hl=en) was already listed at version 25.39.30, meaning Google built this in quietly at least seven months before a Reddit user on r/degoogle flagged it, with [PiunikaWeb](https://piunikaweb.com/2026/05/07/google-recaptcha-play-services-requirement/) and Android Authority picking it up. The iOS comparison is telling: Apple devices on iOS 16.4 or later pass the same verification without any additional software. Only Android users without Play Services are locked out.  *Image: [Reclaim The Net - Google Broke reCAPTCHA for De-Googled Android Users](https://reclaimthenet.org/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-googled-android-users)* An Ars Technica forum user [noted the practical problem](https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-googled-android-users-so-this-seems-pretty-bad.1512971/) bluntly: "I'm betting some sites or services that do use it are unavoidable." Commenters on LinkedIn have suggested hCaptcha as an alternative for web developers who don't want to exclude privacy-conscious users. Sources: [Reclaim The Net](https://reclaimthenet.org/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-googled-android-users), [Ars Technica OpenForum](https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-googled-android-users-so-this-seems-pretty-bad.1512971/), [PiunikaWeb](https://piunikaweb.com/2026/05/07/google-recaptcha-play-services-requirement/)

Researchers demonstrated a photonic processor doing matrix multiplications 100x faster than silicon with less power. This could transform AI inference at the edge. Unlike quantum computing, photonic chips work at room temperature. What is the biggest barrier to optical computing adoption?

I use Calibre with special plugins to strip DRM from ebooks I've purchased . . . hoping this will still work after the changeover (and yes, I know, Anna's Archive will still be there . . . Hopefully . . . )

https://archive.ph/ReAtU

Despite mounting scrutiny over Palantir’s alleged links to human rights abuses and Israeli war crimes, several major media organisations have still partnered with the company – including German publishing giant Axel Springer, the new owner of the British newspaper The Telegraph. Axel Springer – which also owns Politico, Business Insider, Bild, and Welt – uses Palantir’s Foundry software across its media operations. Palantir has said that Axel Springer used Foundry to integrate data from its various publications and revenue streams, helping to build what the company described as "a more agile, data-driven publishing organisation" capable of responding more effectively to shifts in consumer behaviour and audience interests.

## LoRa Communication  *Image: [en.wikipedia.org - LoRa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa)* **LoRa** (long range) is a proprietary radio modulation technique based on [Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa), which encodes data on radio waves using frequency-sweeping chirp pulses. It operates on license-free sub-gigahertz bands: 868 MHz in Europe, 915 MHz in North America and Australia, 433 MHz globally. The core tradeoff is range vs. data rate. Spreading factors (SF5–SF12) let you tune this: higher SF means longer range and better sensitivity, but slower throughput and more battery drain. Data rates run from 0.3 to 27 kbit/s, per [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa). Typical range is 2–5 km urban, 5–15 km rural, and beyond 15 km line-of-sight, according to [readthedocs.io](https://lora.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). LoRa is the physical radio layer only. **LoRaWAN** sits on top as the network protocol (MAC layer), defining how devices connect to gateways and the internet. The [Things Network](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/what-is-lorawan/) describes LoRaWAN devices as capable of running up to 10 years on a single coin cell battery. [Semtech](https://www.semtech.com/lora/what-is-lora) owns the LoRa IP and makes the chipsets. The LoRa Alliance, a 500-member non-profit, maintains the LoRaWAN standard, which the ITU formally recognized in December 2021. Common applications include smart agriculture, asset tracking, water leak detection, cold chain monitoring, and mesh networks like Meshtastic. For a thorough technical grounding, [The Things Network's LoRaWAN guide](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/what-is-lorawan/) is the most practical starting point. Sources: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa), [The Things Network](https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/lorawan/what-is-lorawan/), [Semtech](https://www.semtech.com/lora/what-is-lora), [readthedocs.io](https://lora.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)