Not just once the crash comes, but this sort of thing will help cause the crash.

Cory Doctorow talked about some of it in a recent post that really helped me grok what I've been feeling about the inevitable AI bubble collapse.

AMD giving 10% of itself to OpenAI is almost entirely symbolic as OpenAI will turn around and "spend" that money on something like GPU hardware, probably AMD products. AMD is just paying itself via OpenAI and both companies will book it as revenue to try and obscure the colossal losses on AI spending.

It's all monopoly money laundering, and it's going to crash hard.

Some would argue that rewriting the entire browser - the company's crown jewel - from scratch was a suicidal move. At least in hindsight.

I used Netscape and was a total fanboy when version 6 came out. It was terrible and like many users, I stuck with version 4.x hoping they'd improve version 6, but eventually gave up and moved to IE 6, which itself was a vast improvement over IE 5.

Netscape's fate should be a warning to any dev teams arguing to throw it all out and redo everything from scratch (see also: Winamp 3). It can be done but the odds are not good.

What a horrific, and probably intentional, mischaracterization. Calling AI a "little angel" presupposes that it has the best interests of the affected humans guiding it, while the truth is that these systems are absolutely going to be designed to benefit their corporate overlords first, foremost, and always.

How long until Microsoft inks a deal with Delta so that its agents prioritize Delta when someone asks it for help booking a flight? Or directs inquiries about food nutrition and health towards companies that the packaged foods corporate lobbyists group promotes? Sends requests to watch a show to Hulu instead of Netflix?

Perhaps each request will trigger a real-time auction the same way Google does for ads, with the winner taking control over your agent. Every task you might request of an AI agent is going to be susceptible to subtle (or overt) manipulation, sponsored by undisclosed parties.

AI is not immune to enshittification. I'd argue it's going to take that path almost immediately because (1) it's a completely opaque system that nobody can peer into, (2) it's unbelievably expensive to operate and there will soon be a massive push to start recouping those costs, and (3) the tech bros are comfortably in with the Trump administration, which already tried to make it illegal to pass laws regulating AI.

This is comparing apples and applejacks. If you only care about cost per calorie, people may as just drink canola oil and take a daily vitamin pill. What we really need to do is look at the total cost of living when eating real foods vs packaged trash "food". If we were honest about adding up the related external costs of illness, healthcare, discontent, disability, etc and look at it more holistically, I believe the "cheaper" shit food starts to lose out fast. But nobody wants to do that. Hell, we can't even get people to agree that being a fatass is unhealthy.

And the idea that it costs a lot to eat healthy is a myth that needs to die. Some things are more expensive, sure, but you can make a healthy meal with cheaper options as well. The truth is that people are lazy and addicted to the results of 50 years engineering to create the mouth porn that line most store shelves.

Easy to say when you live in or near London (which as I recall, you do).

There's nothing wrong with local time, and there are good reasons humans have used it literally for as long as we've had clocks. You are trading one mental adjustment -- "what time is it where Bob lives?" -- with a different one -- "what time is it where I am when the sun is directly overhead?" Guess which one you need to worry about more often?

And if you think adjusting to time zones is annoying now when traveling, imagine needing readjust your entire mental model of the solar day - where sunrise, noon, and sunset are on the clock. But hey, I guess you didn't need to adjust your watch. Hurray?

Local time is a "human sized" solution to the problem of timekeeping while UTC is a planet-sized solution to it.

Nonsense. Every single business has a list of their operating hours posted. Some open at 6am, some at 10am. Some are open on Sunday, others closed. Some close for certain holidays, others for others (or none). Some receive deliveries earlier than customers, others don't.

Most people in the US may not be accustomed to the idea of summer hours, but it's not a complicated idea and people would catch on pretty quickly.

You can't really use a wok on any home cooking appliances, regadless of heat source. The only exception are the specialized wok-specific ones some others mentioned, and even those kind of suck because they limit how much you can move the pan around.

I had a gas stovetop for years and a wok (both round and flat-bottom) was pitiful. There's a reason that restaurants basically use a 100K BTU jet engine to cook with a wok. Can you cook food in a wok on a standard stove? Sure. Will it ever be on par with asian restaurants? No. You're better off just using a griddle or flat frying pan on home stoves.

Todd Howard loved that.

I think even the idea of dropping $250 for a video game is absolutely bonkers, and calling Skyrim "ground-breaking" is being vastly too generous. The only reason Skyrim has had the staying power it has is (1) modders and (2) Bethesda's inability to release more than 1 game every 5-6 years, leading to 10-12 years between each franchise game.

I think it's a symptom of streaming services. They want to offer a massively wide variety of shows to try and capture as much of the market as possible, which means a large number of titles. But money and human resources (writers, actors, directors, etc) are still finite, so now they spread those resources across twice or three times as many shows as they used to back in the 24/26 episode seasons. Then multiply this across a dozen different "platforms". So now we get 8 or 10 episodes per "season".

Add to that their desire to keep people hooked and subscribed. If they drip-feed seasons, people will be more likely to stick around because several shows they have started are still unfinished (some kind of combination of inertia and FOMO). So now we wait 2-4 years between seasons (which, to be honest, bothers me a *lot* more than the shorter seasons).

It really sucks in a bunch of ways. Aside from just making everyone spend 10 years to watch a 4 season show, huge breaks make for problems with the availability and visual appearance of aging actors. Writers and showrunners come and go more frequently, making seasons inconsistent and lacking a coherent plan, and the small number of episodes means every episode must be SUPER EXCITING AND IMPORTANT or people feel like it's a waste of precious screentime (which it kind of is). This means there should be fewer "filler" episodes (even though there are still a lot of them) and a lot less episodes that focus more on character development vs plot movement.

Oh, and episodic storytelling has completely died as an art, so every season has to be part of one HUGE IMPORTANT series arc which is almost always disappointing because none of these shows are planned more than one season ahead. Companies want to be able to cut any show at any time, so nobody is willing to commit to 3 or 4 seasons with a planned story. And it turns out JIT storytelling mostly sucks.

Streaming kinda ruined dramatic TV.

I agree with your larger point, but it's not entirely fair to lump covid response in with the tax breaks. From a quick look, it appears that something like $5-6T of that $17T can be attributed to tax breaks and spending related to the first couple years of the pandemic.

But $11-12 trillion in 8 years is still absolutely bonkers.

Remember when if you didn't want a shitty "upgrade", you could choose to just not install the new version of the software? When such "updates" weren't forced down your throat because, even on Windows, because you owned your computer? When drastic changes to operating systems that affect how people use them was limited to major releases?

Microsoft remembers, and they hated it. They are so close to customers being fully accustomed to forced updates that they don't want. The next step is to convince users that these constant (forced, unwanted, unnecessary) necessary updates are just so expensive for Microsoft to produce, and so obviously people need to pay a monthly fee for Windows. I'm a little surprised that didn't come along already with the "Windows 11" moniker, but I guarantee it's coming.

What do you want it to do with memory when there are no programs running and the system is idle? Windows is pretty aggressive at using memory for the file system cache, for example, and it will prefetch programs and files that you use often into memory so they're available instantly when you try to access them.

This is a good thing, not bad. All of this memory can be instantly dumped if a program suddenly requests a bunch of memory for private use. Memory that is not being used for something is wasted memory. It doesn't go bad by being used.

But obviously memory demand bloat is a growing problem. A few Electron apps and a dozen browser tabs will set you back more memory than most computers had 10 years ago, which really is pretty bonkers. I wouldn't be surprised if some Windows components had followed a similar trajectory.

Agreed. For kicks I asked ChatGPT:

Apparently the reports of the horrible casualties are all wrong and fake news! I love the idea of getting a text summary of bloated, ad-infested YouTube videos, but Jesus....

Yup. It's past comical how much bullshit nonsense (no doubt most of it AI slop these days) gets put before a recipe on most sites. I've started going to AllRecipes by default most of the time, just because it doesn't do that.

The Firefox extension Jump to Recipe automatically clicks a "Jump to Recipe" link on the page if one exists. It works pretty well for me.

Agree and disagree. While I share an affection for the simpler hardware and instruction set and do see value in being able to fully understand the whole thing end to end, the simplicity and limitation also gives rise to complexity in the search for performance and capability.

You can "understand" the assembly code (or even machine code), but when a program is using esoteric or questionable techniques to eek every last clock cycle of performance out of these chips, you can end up with code that requires a larger breadth of knowledge - everything from binary math hacks (fast inverse square root) to processor quirks (16-bit loads in four clocks vs 8-bit in one) to undocumented ISA "features" like abusing obcodes with flag side effects that end up being faster than the operation you're really interested in.

Some people enjoy this kind of hacking (using the word in the best possible way) but it definitely requires an additional, different, and sometimes very broad mastery of the systems. I think this is both good and bad (but mostly bad once longjmp gets involved...).