#zitron

[absurdlakefront]

And I think there's a higher-level abstraction that applies to everything: growth never does maintenance. Growth does not see value in anything other than what propagates more growth. So layoffs are a natural choice. "Well, these people aren't performing at the level of this benchmark I set. What do they do? Oh, they run a class with some people? Fuck that, we don't need that shit." Because these people also don't interact with services, businesses, or customers.

They're one step above everything. Our economy is dominated by people who don’t do real work, who don’t understand real problems, and thus can’t solve them—and really don’t see why they would in the first place. Inherently selfish, but also inherently cancerous.

....

They go in there and say, "Well, we have too many people, and we need to save money. Delete, delete." That’s how that works. That’s how business works. They don’t care whether the government functions. They don’t know if Yellowstone has, like, three people full-time now. They don’t think about these things because they think everything in numbers.

They do not participate in reality. These people—Elon Musk included—are divorced from reality in so many ways.

....

But all of this is symbolic of a bigger problem: the economy is divorced from production entirely right now. The people running the economy do not do real work and do not face real problems. So generative AI seems magical to them. All they do is read emails, send emails, ignore emails, and go to lunch.

"Wow, a thing that can summarize the emails I don’t want to read? Holy shit. I bet this thing will become God in two years."

And it’s like… yeah, the only problem in the world is emails, and this thing can take care of some of your emails for you. Okay, great, that’s all we need.

....

Is it the future? No.

[stevensavage]

Genetic Rot And Controlled Demolition

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve's Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Watching the Tories flail in Britain has been a bizarre thing. The party, vaguely the “British Republicans” hasn’t been doing well, and PM Rishi Sunak is shockingly clueless. This is a man who’s bizarre “send immigrants to Rwanda no matter where they’re from” plan got torn apart on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. Sunak, who I must remind you, is the PM of Britan, left D-day events early I don’t always pay attention to British politics, but Sunak has made it hard to ignore, even if no one’s dragging out any lettuce.

As I was swept into the vortex of Sunak’s incompetence, it seems like nearly every policy he choses is some strange cravenly obvious pandering. He then does stupid things and makes weird excuses. The Tories impress me as being somehow poisoned, as if they as a party are damaged on what we might call a genetic level, organizationally. They can’t do things that, I dunno, are effective, and instead resort to “look at me I am so trying to pander to you, yoo-hoo!”

Which isn’t working as people discuss the future death-rebirth of the party.

As I watch Sunak spin down the toilet of his own mind (there’s a phrase I need to save), I also think about the rot-com economy, as Ed Zitron calls it.. You know the growth-at-any-cost approach that has infiltrated too much tech. It’s why people put “AI” into things that don’t need it and why so many new things don’t seem to be things we want.

Zitron is worth following, every post or podcast is a treasure. Listening to his thoughts has led me to wonder if if the tech world is terminally poisoned, if the bad policies and so forth are, again, “genetic.” There’s something wrong on a fundamental level and the tech world, like the Tories, will probably face a reckoning - something else Zitron predicts often (specifically that one of the Big Tech companies is going to hurt BADLY).

How many organizations, parties, businesses, are now just basic bullshit-slinging, pander-at-all cost structures that can’t do anything else because that’s what they are. It’s in their structural and cultural DNA and it’s not going to change without the organization dying out or “mutating” due to strong external pressures.

Which is a scary question to ask when you look at the state of the world, climate, banks, and . . . well most everything. People fear Hapsburg AI, but I’m wondering if we have Hapsburg social structures, too damaged and too inbred they can’t recover. Are we ready for them to collapse?

Well, probably not. I mean yes, it sounds like the Tories are going to get crushed, but I imagine they’ll try to go out with a bang and their fall may make room for something worse. Sure it seems any number of tech companies may be facing legal if not technical and financial failure - but imagine the economic shop of a Big Boy falling apart.

Yeah, it’s not pleasant.

I’ve come to realize that, despite my love of fixing organization and process, we need to be able to declare political parties, businesses, etc. nonviable. There’s a point where they’re brain-dead, too genetically damaged to function, and moreso a danger to others. We need a way to shut them down, a controlled demolition, or whatever metaphor you want to throw into the metaphor gumbo I’m making here.

For that matter we also need to ask how to found, maintain, and improve healthy government, business, and social structures. But that’s for a different column – a column to be written in the shadow of collapsing organizations.

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com

[river-taxbird]

AI hasn't improved in 18 months. It's likely that this is it. There is currently no evidence the capabilities of ChatGPT will ever improve. It's time for AI companies to put up or shut up.

I'm just re-iterating this excellent post from Ed Zitron, but it's not left my head since I read it and I want to share it. I'm also taking some talking points from Ed's other posts. So basically:

We keep hearing AI is going to get better and better, but these promises seem to be coming from a mix of companies engaging in wild speculation and lying.

Chatgpt, the industry leading large language model, has not materially improved in 18 months. For something that claims to be getting exponentially better, it sure is the same shit.

Hallucinations appear to be an inherent aspect of the technology. Since it's based on statistics and ai doesn't know anything, it can never know what is true. How could I possibly trust it to get any real work done if I can't rely on it's output? If I have to fact check everything it says I might as well do the work myself.

For "real" ai that does know what is true to exist, it would require us to discover new concepts in psychology, math, and computing, which open ai is not working on, and seemingly no other ai companies are either.

Open ai has already seemingly slurped up all the data from the open web already. Chatgpt 5 would take 5x more training data than chatgpt 4 to train. Where is this data coming from, exactly?

Since improvement appears to have ground to a halt, what if this is it? What if Chatgpt 4 is as good as LLMs can ever be? What use is it?

As Jim Covello, a leading semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs said (on page 10, and that's big finance so you know they only care about money): if tech companies are spending a trillion dollars to build up the infrastructure to support ai, what trillion dollar problem is it meant to solve? AI companies have a unique talent for burning venture capital and it's unclear if Open AI will be able to survive more than a few years unless everyone suddenly adopts it all at once. (Hey, didn't crypto and the metaverse also require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense?)

There is no problem that current ai is a solution to. Consumer tech is basically solved, normal people don't need more tech than a laptop and a smartphone. Big tech have run out of innovations, and they are desperately looking for the next thing to sell. It happened with the metaverse and it's happening again.

In summary:

Ai hasn't materially improved since the launch of Chatgpt4, which wasn't that big of an upgrade to 3.

There is currently no technological roadmap for ai to become better than it is. (As Jim Covello said on the Goldman Sachs report, the evolution of smartphones was openly planned years ahead of time.) The current problems are inherent to the current technology and nobody has indicated there is any way to solve them in the pipeline. We have likely reached the limits of what LLMs can do, and they still can't do much.

Don't believe AI companies when they say things are going to improve from where they are now before they provide evidence. It's time for the AI shills to put up, or shut up.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Digital tinnitus

It’s digital tinnitus. It’s the pop-up from a shopping app that you downloaded to make one purchase, or the deceptive notification from Instagram that you have “new views” that doesn’t actually lead anywhere. It is the autoplaying video advertisement on your film review website. It is the repeated request for you to log back into a newspaper website that you logged into yesterday because everyone must pay and nothing must get through. It is the hundredth Black Friday sale you got from a company that you swear you unsubscribed from eight times, and perhaps even did, but there’s no real way to keep track. It’s the third time this year you’ve had to make a new password because another data breach happened and the company didn’t bother to encrypt it.

-Ed Zitron, Never Forgive Them

[maykitz]

going to sleep but i already know i'll be up in 3 hours because i drank a litre of iced tea in the hour leading up to bedtime. fuck peeing

[alanshemper]

“I need you to stop trying to explain away how fucking offensive using the internet and technology has become. I need you to stop making excuses for the powerful and consider the sheer scale of the societal ratfucking happening on almost every single device in the world, and consider the ramifications of the difficulty that a human being using the internet has trying to live an honest, dignified and reasonable life.”

Another banger from EZ

[1000rh]

It’s digital tinnitus. It’s the pop-up from a shopping app that you downloaded to make one purchase, or the deceptive notification from Instagram that you have “new views” that doesn’t actually lead anywhere. It is the autoplaying video advertisement on your film review website. It is the repeated request for you to log back into a newspaper website that you logged into yesterday because everyone must pay and nothing must get through. It is the hundredth Black Friday sale you got from a company that you swear you unsubscribed from eight times, and perhaps even did, but there’s no real way to keep track. It’s the third time this year you’ve had to make a new password because another data breach happened and the company didn’t bother to encrypt it.

– Edward Zitron, "Never Forgive Them" (2024) Link

[airandangels]

A week and a half ago, Goldman Sachs put out a 31-page-report (titled "Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) that includes some of the most damning literature on generative AI I've ever seen. And yes, that sound you hear is the slow deflation of the bubble I've been warning you about since March.  The report covers AI's productivity benefits (which Goldman remarks are likely limited), AI's returns (which are likely to be significantly more limited than anticipated), and AI's power demands (which are likely so significant that utility companies will have to spend nearly 40% more in the next three years to keep up with the demand from hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft). ... I feel a little crazy every time I write one of these pieces, because it's patently ridiculous. Generative AI is unprofitable, unsustainable, and fundamentally limited in what it can do thanks to the fact that it's probabilistically generating an answer. It's been eighteen months since this bubble inflated, and since then very little has actually happened involving technology doing new stuff, just an iterative exploration of the very clear limits of what an AI model that generates answers can produce, with the answer being "something that is, at times, sort of good." It's obvious. It's well-documented. Generative AI costs far too much, isn't getting cheaper, uses too much power, and doesn't do enough to justify its existence. There are no killer apps, and no killer apps on the horizon. And there are no answers. 

[epersonae]

I have a bunch of receng genAI-related links that I want to store somewhere other than browser tabs, so here, have some mostly depressing reading

As I said in chat, it's giving Star Trek TOS "The Ultimate Computer":

The report from MIT Technology Review is worth clicking through to:

Some musings from a college-level writing instructor:

Some thoughts on financialization and futurity from a guy writing a book on sort of the "history of the future" (iirc mostly by way of old Wired magazines)

A polemic on management, business culture, and genAI (and I mean polemic in the best way)

And then a little dark humor

[x-heesy]

Cheers, Friends 🍋

Keep It simple

"Water with lemon and nothing else is needed"

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[thatstormygeek]

The Rot Economy is neoliberalism’s true innovation: a kind of economic cancer that with few reasons to exist beyond “more” and few justifications beyond “if we don’t let it keep growing then everybody’s pensions blow up.”

I need you to stop trying to explain away how fucking offensive using the internet and technology has become. I need you to stop making excuses for the powerful and consider the sheer scale of the societal ratfucking happening on almost every single device in the world, and consider the ramifications of the difficulty that a human being using the internet has trying to live an honest, dignified and reasonable life. ... The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person’s experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they’re immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like “WorldTrending.com” with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it’s an ad. 

Now, what’s important to accept here is that absolutely none of this is done with any real consideration of the wider effects on the customer, as long as the customer continues doing the things that the company needs them to. We, as people, have been trained to accept a kind of digital transience — an inherent knowledge that things will change at random, that the changes may suck, and that we will just have to accept them because that’s how the computer works, and these companies work hard to suppress competition as a means of making sure they can do what they want. In other words, internet users are perpetually thrown into a tornado of different corporate incentives, and the less economically stable or technologically savvy you are, the more likely you are to be at the mercy of them. Every experience is different, wants something, wants you to do something, and the less people know about why the more likely they are to — with good intentions — follow the paths laid out in front of them with little regard for what might be happening, in the same way people happily watch the same TV shows or listen to the same radio stations.  Even if you’re technologically savvy, you’re still dealing with these problems — fresh installs of Windows on new laptops, avoiding certain websites because you’ve learned what the dodgy ones look like, not interacting with random people in your DMs because you know what a spam bot looks like, and so on. It’s not that you’re immune. It’s that you’re instinctually ducking and weaving around an internet and digital ecosystem that continually tries to interrupt you, batting away pop-ups and silencing notifications knowing that they want something from you — and I need you to realize that most people are not like you and are actively victimized by the tech ecosystem. 

The onslaught of AI-generated content — facilitated, in no small part, by Google and Microsoft — has polluted our information ecosystems. AI-generated images and machine-generated text is everywhere, and it’s impossible to avoid, as there is no reliable way to determine the provenance of a piece of content — with one exception, namely the considered scrutiny of a human. This has irreparably damaged the internet in ways I believe few fully understand. This stuff — websites that state falsehoods because an AI hallucinated, or fake pictures of mushrooms and dogs that now dominate Google Images — is not going away. Like microplastics or PFAS chemicals, they’re with us forever, constantly chipping away at our understanding of reality.  These companies unleashed generative AI on the world — or, in the case of Microsoft, facilitated its ascendency — without any consideration of what that would mean for the Internet as an ecosystem. Their concerns were purely short-term. Fiscal. The result? Over-leverage in an industry that has no real path to profitability, burning billions of dollars and the environment - both digital and otherwise - along with it.  ... Societal and cultural pressure is nothing new, but the ways we experience it are now elaborate and chaotic. Our relationships — professional, personal, and romantic — are processed through the funhouse mirror of the platforms, changing in ways both subtle and overt based on the signals we receive from the people we care about, each one twisted and processed through the lens of product managers and growth hackers. Changes to these platforms — even subtle ones — actively change the lives of billions of people, and it feels like we talk about it like being online is some hobbyist pursuit rather than something that many people do more than seeing real people in the real world. ... I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else. I realize it’s tough to conceptualize because it’s so ubiquitous, but how much do you fight with your computer or smartphone every day? How many times does something break? How many times have you downloaded an app and found it didn’t really do the thing you wanted it to? How many times have you wanted to do something simple and found that it’s actually really annoying?  How much of your life is dodging digital debris, avoiding scams, ads, apps that demand permissions, and endless menu options that bury the simple things that you’re actually trying to do?  You are the victim of a con. You have spent years of your life explaining to yourself and others that “this is just how things are,” accepting conditions that are inherently exploitative and abusive. You are more than likely not deficient, stupid, or “behind the times,” and even if you are, there shouldn’t be multi-billion dollar enterprises that monetize your ignorance.  And it’s time to start holding those responsible accountable.

[seriously-mike]

Where is the money that this supposedly revolutionary, world-changing industry is making, and will make? The answer is simple: I do not believe it exists. Generative AI lacks the basic unit economics, product-market fit, or market penetration associated with any meaningful software boom, and outside of OpenAI, the industry may be pathetically, hopelessly small, all while providing few meaningful business returns and constantly losing money.

Ed Zitron is at it again.

So, OpenAI lost five billion dollars last year, and the rest of the market is also in the red. Google already limits the number of heavily hardware-taxing voice summaries for NotebookLM to three per day unless you're a paid customer, something that's harder to bypass than the limitation of generating human characters by Gemini/Imagen.

There are many uncomfortable questions to ask here, starting with "why are they allowed to lose borderline unspendable amounts of money?" To put the five-billion figure into perspective: this is roughly as much as the European Union funding approved for Poland for the entirety of 2025. The kind of money a medium-sized European country can't afford to blow on bullshit. And it's by far not the biggest figure AI corporations are throwing around.

[theculturedmarxist]

As I’ve said before, I believe we’re at peak AI, and now that generative AI has been commoditized, the only thing that OpenAI and Anthropic have left is their ability to innovate, which I’m not sure they’re capable of doing.  And because we sit in the ruins of Silicon Valley, with our biggest “startups” all doing the same thing in the least-efficient way, living at the beck and call of public companies with multi-trillion-dollar market caps, everyone is trying to do the same thing in the same way based on the fantastical marketing nonsense of a succession of directionless rich guys that all want to create America’s Next Top Monopoly. It’s time to wake up and accept that there was never an “AI arms race,” and that the only reason that hyperscalers built so many data centers and bought so many GPUs because they’re run by people that don’t experience real problems and thus don’t know what problems real people face. Generative AI doesn’t solve any trillion-dollar problems, nor does it create outcomes that are profitable for any particular business.  DeepSeek’s models are cheaper to run, but the real magic trick they pulled is that they showed how utterly replaceable a company like OpenAI (and by extension any Large Language Model company) really is. There really isn’t anything special about any of these companies anymore — they have no moat, their infrastructural advantage is moot, and their hordes of talent irrelevant.  What DeepSeek has proven isn’t just technological, but philosophical. It shows that the scrappy spirit of Silicon Valley builders is dead, replaced by a series of different management consultants that lead teams of engineers to do things based on vibes. 

[magictavern]

going to pound my head against a desk repeatedly