Note on the bubble
The problem with predicting the imminent pop of the AI Bubble by pointing out how incredibly bad its business fundamentals are, is that tech investors – the crowd that needs to panic for the bubble to pop – have an extremely high tolerance for falsehoods and unrealistic promises. Otherwise they wouldn’t be investing in tech.
The temptation to commit fraud – fake the numbers to make AI look successful – is going to be really strong. Those who believe in “AI” believe it’s inevitable and that it will transform every aspect of society. A little bit of criminal falsifying in order to buy time for the revolution to truly kick in won’t cause many of them to even blink.
And no this isn’t about Ed Zitron’s posts specifically. His analysis is sound and he usually holds off from making timeline predictions. However, his pointing out that it’s all a house of cards causes dozens of other people to write posts of their own predicting that it’s all about to fall apart and, barring something unforeseen, I simply don’t think that’s about to happen any time soon.
The Links
- “Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse?". “A similar result can be seen with Microsoft. The firm reported its official data center-related emissions for 2022 as 280,782 metric tons CO2 equivalent. Under a location-based accounting method, that number jumps to 6.1m metric tons CO2 equivalent. That’s a nearly 22 times increase.”
- “Google Asks On Social If You Will Use Gemini AI For SEO”
- “Begun, the open source AI wars have”
- “Don’t Sleep on AbortController - kettanaito.com”. I probably overuse abort controllers in my code.
- “David Bushell”. “Deno is forcing JSR at the cost of a packaging system that is objectively worse than Node’s package.json & NPM.”
- “Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs is a Bad Idea « bunnie’s blog”. “Thus, one could conceivably create a supply chain attack to put exploding batteries into everyday devices that is undetectable: the main control board is entirely unmodified; only a firmware change is needed to incorporate the trigger. It would pass every visual and electrical inspection.”
- “Cache Me Not, Cache Me, Cache Me Not | Hazel Weakly”. “But seriously, caching is hard, it’s really hard, but you can make life WAY easier for yourselves when building an SPA if you do this super simple thing.”
- “wordfreq/SUNSET.md at master · rspeer/wordfreq · GitHub”. “So I don’t want to work on anything that could be confused with generative AI, or that could benefit generative AI.” Extremely relateable.
- “Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs — Ludicity”. Reading this reminded me of a bad job I once had and made me sad. But the advice contained in the latter half is sound. Also, the books published by Basecamp are, for the most part, thinly veiled rehashes of what modern management theory recommends. The problem with the books is that, judging both by their actions and what they say they do, Basecamp doesn’t seem to have ever followed its own advice.
- “LI + AI = GIGO – Hi, I’m Heather Burns”. “The fact that LinkedIn is not rolling out this generative AI model in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland – places which unconditionally require opt-in consent, while also giving users the right to call out incorrect information that companies hold about them – is a bit of a confession to me.” Come for the righteous anger at Linkedin. Stay for the sharp guess as to why Linkedin seems to be holding off on this rollout in Europe.
- “AI is revitalizing the fossil fuels industry, and big tech has nothing to say for itself”. “Now analysts and agencies are quietly revising their decarbonization goals downward, gas and coal plants that were slated for retirement are being kept online, and now utilities are building more gas plants in the first half of 2024 than were built in all of 2020 combined.”
- “Improving rendering performance with CSS content-visibility | Read the Tea Leaves”
- “Arbitrarily Adapting”. “All third-party developers spend tons of time every year adapting their apps to fit whatever Apple decided on doing that year. Instead of using that time to build the app they want, they build the app that the new hardware expects of it.”
- “The continuing tragedy of emoji on the web | Read the Tea Leaves”
- “Open Source Needs to be Financially Symbiotic—zachleat.com”. “The further your job is from the direct bottom line and business needs of the company that you work for, the more expendable you are.” Most OSS are cost centres for companies and those are the first to go whenever something happens. It’s an extremely risky position to be in when layoffs are popular among management.
- “Clever Polypane Debugging Features I’m Loving | CSS-Tricks”. I keep meaning to try out Polypane. Maybe I’ll have a go at using it on my current project.
- “Challenging The Myths of Generative AI | TechPolicy.Press”
- “Your AI code generators are your new net-negative developers”. I’m really glad I’m freelance these days. The last boss I had is now well into “AI” so it’s likely I would quickly argue myself out of a job if I were still working for him.
- “Making the Web more Awesome — for everyone • Lea Verou”. Font awesome has been making some very smart hires lately. It’s going to be very interesting to see what they do.
Photos
I really enjoyed this first picture. Had to go to that spot three times on three separate walks before I captured a picture I feel sort of works.
Spotted this hardy fellow in the Hveragerði town flower garden. Good going considering it’s already getting colder here in Iceland
A couple of recent photos of the local mouser queen.
