This totally feels like a signal or an inside joke.

Well, this is nightmare fuel.

They wouldn’t have their “no one else can afford this” moat if it was all made more affordable, tho.

In a functional capitalist society (yes, those can exist, even if Marx says they’re temporary), the point would be not to provide a computing service but appliances that can perform that service. There are AI hobbyists who run open source LLM engines and retain their own dataset and bunches of LORAs. Granted it’s only terrabytes of data rather than exabytes (zettabytes? yottabytes?) and sometimes they have to let their home system brew for hours instead of minutes or seconds on a given task.

But an example of this kind of model appears in the 1970s and the invention of the personal computer, itself, before which there were only mainframes that were held by large companies (and similarly, the first PCs were hobbyist DIY kits).

I see this as a sea change driven by the same motivation that has turned large companies (who have out competed all their peers) towards enshittification. Now that we’re into the rental economy, where even software is a service rather than an appliance, the AI companies don’t want to make AI machines that they can sell, but to provide an AI service that will force their consumer base customers to keep buying and keep paying.

I don’t think that model can scale up. What we need to do is the same thing we did when we upgraded our secretaries from a typewriter and a Rolodex to a PC with an office software suite. Right now we’re seeing that even when we replace or reduce the human workforce with AI tools, the cost is greater than the original workforce (though for now, that cost is borne by the AI companies at a loss, rather than their downstream clients).

Instead we should be developing AI computer systems at the mainframe and PC level as tools to facilitate workers, which would (we hope) increase their productivity.

But again, our conglomerate corporations are trying to shore up their dominant positions in the economy, and so, as Cory Doctorow observed, are trying to do a blanket replacement of their workforce, which is failing spectacularly.

RANT: And since our ownership class and C-suite management have demonstrated they refuse to engage in commerce in good faith, seeking to replace competitive production with rent, lobbying government and financial shenanigans, the public needs to recapture government – by force as if necessary – to go back to regulating commerce and protecting workers and consumers alike. History has shown that this can create an economic environment that is fecund for benevolent innovation, e.g. better stuff for everyone.

Of course it is. Everything I don’t like is woke.

To be fair, everything that is good about the United States of America is DEI. There are even expressions of it in the Declaration of Independence.

Granted, the DoI was written by slaveowners, but Jefferson was borrowing from enlightenment philosophy which really was about everyone having equal rights, equal relationship to law, equal liberties, etc. When Lincoln and the Republican postbellum Congress took power, they understood the enlightenment principles that guided the framers and extended them to all men (but not yet women).

France did more to balance the playing field with the Napoleonic code, though that was because Napoleon wanted to be emperor and understood the whole social contract thing. France would still have to wait until the 20th century before providing full freedom of religion. And now France is frightened of Islam.

This wouldn’t be the first bubble popping do to a failure to consider the vertical infrastructure build. Heck, some analysts blame the sinking of the Titanic on substandard bolts (that is, building a ship too big and too fragile for the technology available.)

This would be a great opportunity to pump a lot of money into renewable energy and maybe even fusion R&D. (Yes, fusion often looks like a dead end, but that’s been something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since pessimism has been slowing funding even to the best and brightest leads.)

They could have also started investing in developing cooler memory and processing units, or better systems to cool them. Instead, the data center companies just bribed officials to let them use up water (and fuck the supplies for their neighbors) thinking that the people were just going to roll over and die.

As we’ve seen with Donald Trump and George W. Bush, if you’re wealthy enough or in an aristocratic social group, you fail upwards.

And if you always fail upwards, it’s very easy to not gain the skills to succeed.

It is so incredibly embarrassing how the US is captured by fairies.

Twice.

Here we go. I found you an article by Karl Bode that explains the problems of why Starlink is not a strong valuation strut for SpaceX.

Tribalism makes people really stupid.

I was reading off the articles that talked about the SpaceX IPO and why it’s a bad investment. But a websearch seems to reveal a number of problems, from the collision risks caused by exponentially larger numbers of satellites to the environmental impact of the launches to get them into orbit. And then there’s the problem that Starlink satellites are falling from space by the hundreds (and not always fully burning up in the atmosphere).

As it is, congestion, especially in cities, is critical, and Starlink is now charging extreme congestion fees. For now Starlink is being promoted as a rural option, since the US is disinterested in running fiber, or even copper. (We had programs that were so budgeted but now they’ve been shut down, and Musk has a lot of access to the White House.) But satellite internet doesn’t work well for activities that require high bandwidth, such as gaming or high-resolution streaming.

Also revealed by my websearch, Starlink customers are desperate for better customer service, and instead are having to rely on online user groups.

Robert Baratheon: What about Aerys Targaryen? What did the Mad King say when you stabbed him in the back? I never asked. Did he call you a traitor? Did he plead for a reprieve?

Jaime Lannister: He said the same thing he’d been saying for hours… Burn them all!

Well the ownership class of the US is a bunch of Karens. We know this.

And we know FIFA is corrupt AF, even more than the NFL.

What’s vulgar about it now is that it’s done without a lick of subtlety or tact. The corruption is out in the open. They’re doing the Qu’ils mangent de la brioche more plainly and more often than was ever done in France.

( Technical history fact: Marie Antoinette never said it, but the rumor was viciously spread and sped her way to the guillotine. The historic queen was classically trained and actually had tact. The French aristocracy, however, did not.)

It’s a known phenomenon. When surrounded by sycophants, when on the top of a severe power imbalance you forget how to adult and how to empathize.

Heh. Ghost printers.

Taking a page from the Fourth International–Posadists, I suspect we’re going to have to develop a working socialist / communist society before we will be able to develop a space program robust enough for asteroid mining and offworld colonization.

With the climate-crisis fast approaching critical, we may not make it at all, or may have to wait tens of thousands of years (homo-erectus went through a long stint where there was less than ten-thousand of them), but I don’t think there is a capitalist path.

I have faith that the independent 3D printing community will continue to hack its way around printer DRM.

I also have faith that printers that can be modified to print guns (or anything else too spicy for government) will sell better than printers that cannot.

The point of manned missions and colonies now is proof of concept for the expansion of human civilization to other worlds, but yes, that’s not a private for profit endeavor but a public interest one.

That said, the research and development done for the Apollo moon shots returned to the economy $14 for every one dollar spent, so it was absolutely a sound investment. Also, those patents were sold to the US government for a dollar each (at most), and so the technology gained like microcircuitry and memory foam, are public domain.

( RANT: The public domain, the creation of a robust one is – according to the Constitution of the United States – the very purpose of the whole temporary monopoly system that is the foundation of intellectual property law.)

Another sign that billionaires and Zuckerberg especially, have completely become out of touch with the rest of humanity.

We are merely consumers to them.

When companies try to build new ones, industry analysts say they frequently do so clandestinely without revealing which tech firm would use the facilities. Researchers found that among 31 Virginia localities with existing, approved or proposed datacenters, 80% had non-disclosure agreements with the companies behind the projects, the Virginia Mercury reports

There’s an old adage from the 1980s:

California passes new laws regulating the pollutant output of motor vehicles in order to protect the Los Angeles valley. (The smog there routinely posed a dangerous health risk, and probably still does. Cars have since been required to pass smog checks.)

The automotive industry of Japan responded by hiring 30,000 scientists to develop less pollutant cars.

The automotive industry of the United States responded by hiring 30,000 lawyers to contest the new regulation.

(It’s a simplification, but the gist of it is based on fact. Eventually the US automotive industry would switch over to Non-Passenger Work Vehicles, id est, SUVs which were not regulated by the California laws. In 2026, 90% of active personal vehicles in the US qualify as NPWVs.)

The worst of the worst, they said. Rapists and murderers they said.

I suspect it will be decades before there’s any chance of a tribunal going after every last officer, policymaker and custodian involved, if ever.

And the United States voted for this to happen, fully informed of the nature of the beast it was freeing to run amok.