TechTakes

found a great sneer in the wild

(mobile atm so just link)

I suspect we all knew it already, but Bruno Dias offers some receipts: the bluesky crackdown on people suggesting that charlie kirk should rest in piss came several days before the government leaned on social media firms.

September 12th: bluesky mourns kirk: https://aftermath.site/bluesky-charlie-kirk-dead-rest-in-piss

September 15th: whitehouse nastygram : https://bsky.app/profile/chipnick.com/post/3m2k6va63222m

(also, bitter lol at “gentlemen”, because running a tech company is a mans job, don’t you know)

They complied well in advance, because it’s what they wanted to do anyway.

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.

haven't finished reading this so no sneers yet, but others may also be interested in this piece on the history of thiel's antichrist obsession

the opener probably won't surprise you

Mercifully image-free article from rolling stone on how easy it is becoming to get grok to generate porn, including deepfakes of real people and bestiality.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-grok-hardcore-porn-1235442715

Includes a relevant quote from musk back in august:

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1954791048934244394

I still remember 6th/7th grade debates with classmates about VHS vs Betamax!

VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉

I guess that’s a product “moat” of sorts.

Found a nice and lengthy sneer of Bluesky's dogshit moderation in the wild, focusing on how its repeatedly fucked over marginalised users.

Is it just me or does it feel there's a concerted effort to boost the AT protocol in tech venues? Maybe I'm paranoid but it does feel like a bit of openwashing going on.

Found a pretty good sneer against vibe coding: The Programmer Identity Crisis

AI-faked videos of journalist arrests have started cropping up online, to the surprise of nobody except those creating AI video extruders.

Mildly interesting thread about the progress of blacksky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3m2n62lzbeu2p

They’re aiming for full independence from bluesky, which is a laudable goal though not one they’ve achieved yet. They’re currently getting a reasonable amount of user funding rather than being a typical vc furnace (https://opencollective.com/blacksky) but I’m not sure what their plan is for moderation which is what will carry the project in the long term. I’d like to say it can’t be worse than bluesky, but moderation at scale is a nightmare.

after playing silksong and hades ii, i am now pretty confident that game devs sniff their farts more than any other artists

"the player can't pause during the boss because he controls time" fuck offfffff

(hades ii is mostly excellent, though, and silksong is a diamond encased in dogshit

there is a wonderful game in there, if you can find it)

An linkedin fesses up:

Claude Code has made me a dumber engineer.

https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:osg2vzhifd2tjfsvfwua7scy/post/3m2nhmlv3fk2r