istewart
It could also be swapped out for nothing. The people in charge could figure out that this stuff is costing more than it’s making, turn the servers off, and deactivate the user-facing features or leave them as vestigial stubs.
There’s more evidence right now for that scenario, and it would generate an awful lot of e-waste. Tell me, are you up to date on process improvements for recycling or repurposing that much e-waste?
Atlantic writer: “better dubble down on Twitter huhuhuhhuh”
Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully “deplatform” speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.
This is your periodic reminder that Steve Jobs’ widow owns that toilet-paper factory. And that they still pump out hot new singles from hitmakers like David Frum and, occasionally, my personal favorite, Eliot “GW Bush Did Nothing Wrong” Cohen.
This causes me to reflect on contrasting currents in tech culture. I remember growing up with the Apple/Mac rumor culture around the time Steve Jobs came back, and how people had conditioned themselves to get hyped for any little tiny leak about upcoming products. A culture which obviously persists now, albeit in streamlined, advertiser-friendly blog spaces. By contrast, MacWeek magazine had a columnist calling himself Mac the Knife who claimed to have clandestine rendezvous with shady trenchcoat-clad characters in the back alleys of Cupertino… And somehow the new product reveals were almost always somewhat less whelming than the rumormill had built them up to be. Part of the Jobs idolatry that still dominates Silicon Valley is the clear strategy among empty-suit grifters like Altman that such hype is vital but Apple didn’t do enough with it; that you should always be marketing what’s around the corner rather than keeping it hidden away under lock, key, and NDA.
Contrast this with open-source culture, warts and all. What’s in the repository is the basis of what comes next. You think superintelligence is imminent? OK, where’s the code stubs that will serve as the foundation? Make a pull request for your mega-brain’s medulla, let’s review it. It’s also a big reason why the current round of AI doesn’t fit with open-source culture, no matter how many people are trying to force it. It is inherently an obfuscatory technology. Not just due to the sheer size of the data sets and weights involved, but also through the weird non-deterministic practice of configuring software through natural-language prompts. GIGO at scale, but you can keep the hype going by promising a lower percentage of garbage in the future.
Dragon Ball A16Z: We have replaced interminable screaming powerup sequences and planet-destroying energy blasts with long panning shots of the characters using their abilities to light giant mountains of cash on fire. If you give us a series C at a valuation of $420 million, we may be able to determine why test audience surveys have thus far come back unfavorable