I mean, it’s built on chrome, like opera and edge, so if Google is on the war path they’re probably not safe long term.

I suppose they could hard fork the web engine, but, that means they gotta develop a web engine which is a whole other can of worms.

If Google is out for blood on this, only browsers built on WebKit or Gecko would be safe.

I think a lot of people will brush it off what ever happens with SpaceX because Xai is the weakest of the big model providers. I don’t think we’ll even get to the openAI IPO. I think the S1 or IPO from anthropic will be the real kicker, because they’re the darling at the moment. The one that seems to have the most momentum and business customers.

If their S1 turns out to be utter dog water and/or their IPO flops, that’s when the real panic comes. When people say “oh crap, these GPU data centers don’t have customers that can make money”, and that narrative will hit all the people building data center and all the people selling hardware to them. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, that’s like… what, 25% of the S&P 500? That seems like a big enough hit to catch a lot of other stuff in the blast radius.

i looked up the story I had read a while back, and sundar was not the head of ads, but had just become the ceo after having been on the board of directors, and the issue was kicked up to him when Ben Gomes refused implement changes that Prabhakar Raghavan of ads wanted. later Gomes left the company and was replaced by Raghavan as head of search.

This all coming from internal emails and memos that were released as part of the anti trust case summarized in this piece which does a very good job of sourcing individual claims by pointing to specific emails and memos, although, the author is very… passionate in their coverage.

Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary

Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Google intentionally made it worse around 2019 so that people would do multiple searches and scroll to second pages, thus increasing the amount of ad impressions and user time spent on the site. There were several email back and forth between the head of search and head of advertising, with the head of search adamantly refusing to implement the changes. Eventually he ended up leaving despite having been at the company from the beginning, due to this disagreement. The head of advertising during this? He’s the head of search now.

Replacing search altogether with AI summarization is just a continuation of that, instead of delaying customers going to other sites, prevent them from going to them all together.

To clarify why the S1s are so important here. There are a ton of laws that prevent companies that have their shares bought and sold on public stock markets from outright lying about the state of their business to the public. This is to ensure that companies can’t just lie to push up share prices.

Since the most important model providers are currently private, they have not been bound by these laws and have basically been allowed to say what ever they want. With them going public, and the release of the S1s, they need to publicly display accurate financials, not just vague and un verifiable numbers.

The question of “is this just a fad or is this a revolutionary technology that will reshape the economy” is easily answered if we have accurate accounting of the costs to run these business.

This stuff has been there. Just not much reporting or investigation has been done on it, instead a lot of news outlets focused on interviews with the heads of these companies and thoughtlessly reiterated press releases. Those who have criticized it have mainly just done so in ways that play in to the narrative convenient for the industry “but what if it’s TOO good?”.

The failure of tech journalism on this topic has been frankly catastrophic.

To break even on operating expenses, not even counting debt payments, depreciated capital value, or future recapitalization costs.

Just gotta configure and tweak until it gives outputs you find indistinguishable from correct. Just gotta train it to gaslight you properly. Come on don’t you want to be given and endless stream of stuff that looks correct?

The data center builders and operators are running behind on basically every data center project, massive amounts of Blackwell are just sitting in warehouses right now because they loose money the moment they’re plugged in. New IT load for the operators isn’t even a third of the capacity of the chips sold to these companies. Most of the companies that got switched over to token billing by the model providers are pulling back and freaking out over a yearly “AI budget” annihilated in a quarter. The model providers wouldn’t have swapped to token based billing for enterprise clients if they didn’t have to. They’ve been pumping demand with hype and by selling at a fraction of operational costs. Reporting non-gap EBITA to hide what a mess the financials are.

The SpaceX S1 alone shows how insanely cash incinerating it all is. Can’t wait to see Anthropic and OpeAIs S1s. It’s gonna be hilarious.

The fact that they tried to get the rules changed so they could get listed on index’s as soon as they IPOd means they’re out of willing creditors and out of cash. They were attempting to dump equity on to 401Ks to pay out the private bag-holders who have been funding them to sell model access at massively discounted rates.

Even if people host models them selves, the era of constant slop deluge is over simply because all the players giving away access for essentially free are about to go belly up or pivot away from it to other business models.

I don’t think these companies are worth the value of the paper that their charters are written on. I don’t think many of them are going to last much longer, but he might actually be on to something here in terms of diffusing a massive financial fraud that’s about to happen in broad daylight.

The common wisdom right now is to just “put your money in an index fund, it’s safer and outperforms actively managed portfolios.” Which is to say, a fund that just buys a little bit of everything from a given list, rather than trying to pick stocks that someone thinks will do well, it creates a very diversified portfolio that is protected from anyone company fucking up by having the value spread over as many things as possible. Because many people just put their money in index funds now, getting listed in an index kind of guarantees that lots of people will be buying the shares consistently and thus consistently causing the price to rise over time.

To get in to these lists, normally, a company has to have been public for a while, generally about a year, and show profitability for a prolonged time. These rules have recently been changed though.

A bunch of the AI companies are doing initial public offerings (IPO meaning putting their shares on the public markets for the first time) in the next few months. And stating absolutely insane valuations. Because of the rule changes, they’re basically all getting immediately listed in index funds. And since they’re all targeting insane valuations, they’re going to automatically suck up a bunch of retirement money by default.

I’m not sure about anthropic and openAI on this next part, but SpaceX (which just “bought” Xai), is only going public with about 5% of it’s shares, so theoretically they can just trickle more shares on to the market to get bought up by index funds, and because supply of actual shares is artificially constrained, it will lead to massive overvaluation of those shares, taking up a disproportionate amount of money going in to index funds.

It’s actually fucking criminal that this is being allowed to happen, but because the rules for index funds and IPOs are set by financial institutions and stock exchanges, with very limited oversight by the government, they can just do this.

If the government were to take these 50% shares, it would kind of throw a wrench in the plans, since it would give the government the ability to sell those shares on to the market and stop the over valuation that allows them to take disproportionately from the index funds.

They’re all moving to tokens based billing to stop the bleeding. The markets aren’t as willing to let them burn infinite cash on operating expenses anymore. A lot of the private investors see the writing on the walls, that these AI companies are not worth anywhere near the valuations, and propping them up to ensure further datacenter build out to keep Nvidia shares high is costing more than it’s worth.

A lot of the model providers are lining up for ipos to cash out their initial investors and dump the responsibility of the mess on the public markets. They have to jack their prices to pretty up their books if they want to cash out with an IPO though. The unlimited access for a flat monthly cost shtick was obviously never a viable business model. They’ve all been spending massively more on inference than they’ve been taking in subscriptions, and even with the changes to token based billing, they still will be.

Anthropic is claiming that they will have their first “profitable” month soon, but that’s actually just a magic trick of book keeping. They’re deferring some cost of compute for a few months, and accepting a bunch of pre payments from customersr. Basically pretending to have high revenue and lower cost by shifting when the payments are made. And then on top of that they’re jacking up prices and thus decreasing their demand with the shift to tokens.

Everyone is running around rearranging deck chairs on the datacenter titanic hoping they can keep their feet dry a little longer.

… shut!

the leadership at a lot of companies have a very poor read on public sentiment, kind of strange given how much data they collect and how much they like to talk about how good they are at using that data.

And a lot of high level leadership at collages run in the same circles are executives at big companies. These speech events are sort of a benefit for both sides, the leadership at the collage gets to advertise what a good job they’re doing that they were able to get someone so influential to speak, and the speaker gets a sudo-academic platform to state their ideas and an ego boost from the huge in person captive audience.

A lot of them just kind of write off the discontent they see as “a vocal minority”, so when mass confronted with actual public sentiment, i do think it kind of blind sides them.

I mean, Microsoft’s biggest mistake was shoving it in front of everyone’s faces. The real reason that all the other “agentic BS” is received well is because the people who use them have an actual use case, or, are very enthusiastic about the technology and enjoy messing with it. Thus the discussion is mostly from that small group of people who will have something positive to say.

The truth is, that all the models and harnesses suck for most use cases that most people have. When you shove it in front of a general audience and make them interact with it, then the discussion will be about how bad it is.

… I kind of like that actually.

So, CD-Rs in particular are very bad with regards to stability because the thing you are writing too is a layer of dye. Some are better than others, but basically all will have that dye brake down and fade over time. The type of plastic in the disk as well, a few Japanese disc producers were notorious for using plastic that had a tendency to absorb moisture form the air that would rapidly cause the disks to degrade.

There are other methods of writing though. CD-RWs for instance are much more stable as instead of burning away a bit of volatile dye layer, they are writing to a layer of metal alloy by melting it a little to change it’s crystal structure.

The same is true with recordable blue rays, with Low to High disks using the same sort of dye burning as CD-Rs, High to Low disks use a variety of different mechanisms to write, but some use a similar melty metal as CD-RWs.

The amount of pick ups that get stuck on beaches will never not be funny.

Like, yah, cool, you got it lifted, you put big off road tires on it. It’s still got shit ground pressure, it’s too fucking heavy for that kind of terrain, especially with such comparatively small wheels. There are pickups that can be modified to handle beaches and sand, but they’re the smaller ones that aren’t starting with a massive handicap from weight.

There is a reason dune buggies are small and light, there is a reason tanks have tracks.

But doing it with a cyber truck is an extra level of stupid.

They do have their own App Store, it’s just only got like… 14 apps in it. Mostly just the stuff they’ve made them selves that they’re super confident in the security of, as well as a couple of other app stores like Accrescent

To start allowing submissions of any third party app to it would ether require them to do a ton of vetting to ensure it meets their standards, or for them to drop the standards for security and privacy for it. If you want more than that handful of defaults, Accrescent and the google play mirror are there ready to be installed

so, Linux does work, a lot of stuff works. There is nothing fundamentally different about phones other than them basically all running on ARM instead of x86, which is more common for PCs. More development of stuff for X86 Linux than ARM Linux, although less of a difference than there use to be.

Really the issue is proprietary stuff built on top of android and IOS. Stuff that a lot of useful apps rely on for security and functionality. For instance banking apps are super locked down for obvious reasons, but the standards that have been adopted by the industry for mobile banking are all entangled with proprietary close source stuff.