• 44 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025English
    4·
    1 day ago

    “I’d already been ChatGPT-ed into bed at least once. I didn’t want it to happen again.”

    According to a 2024 YouGov poll, for instance, around half of Americans aged 18-34 reported having been, like Holly, in a situationship (a term it defines as “a romantic connection that exists in a gray area, neither strictly platonic nor officially a committed relationship”).

    “Over the course of a week, I realised I was relying on it quite a lot,” she says. “And I was like, you know what, that’s fine – why not outsource my love life to ChatGPT?”

    She describes being on the receiving end of the kinds of techniques that Jamil uses – being drilled with questions, “like you’re answering an HR questionnaire”, then off the back of those answers “having conversations where it feels as if the other person has a tap on my phone because everything they say is so perfectly suited to me”.

  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025English
    10·
    2 days ago

    An investor runs the numbers of AI capex and is not impressed

    (n.b. I have no idea who this guy is or his track record (or even if he’s a dude) but I think the numbers check out and the parallells to railroads in the 19th century are interesting too)

    Global Crossing Is Reborn…

    Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.

    Of course, corporations will adopt AI as they see productivity improvements. Governments have unlimited capital—they love overpaying for stuff. Maybe you can ultimately jam $480 billion of this stuff down their throats. The problem is that $480 billion in revenue isn’t for all of the world’s future AI needs, it’s the revenue simply needed to cover the 2025 capex spend. What if they spend twice as much in 2026?? What if you need almost $1 trillion in revenue to cover the 2026 vintage of spend?? At some point, you outrun even the government’s capacity to waste money (shocking!!)

    An AI Addendum

    As a result, my blog post seems to have elicited a liberating realization that they weren’t alone in questioning the math—they’ve just been too shy to share their findings with their peers in the industry. I’ve elicited a gnosis, if you will. As this unveiling cascaded, and they forwarded my writings to their friends, an industry simultaneously nodded along. Personal self-doubts disappeared, and high-placed individuals reached out to share their epiphanies. “None of this makes sense!!” “We’ll never earn a return on capital!!” “We’ve been wondering the same thing as you!!”

    […]

    Remember, the industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue. The mismatch is astonishing, and this ignores that in 2026, hundreds of billions of additional datacenters will get built, all needing additional revenue to justify their existence. Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you’d need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend. Remember again, that revenue is currently running at around $15 to $20 billion today.

  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025English
    6·
    7 days ago

    By “openwashing” I mean the posts about AT protocol are running cover for Bluesky, the company. It’s basically reinforcing their narrative that if you don’t like what they’re doing, “just” start your own PDS. By focussing on the technical nitty-gritty, these posts ignore the structures in place keeping Bluesky in the dominant position.

    An analogy, Bitcoin code is also open, but 1% of coin owners own like 90% of the coins. I’m not making any excuses for BTC here, but I seem to remember a bunch of similar articles breathlessly explaining how BTC “solves the Byzantine generals problem” while totally ignoring the ownership profile.