To be clear, uh… the butt plug chess thing is a meme.

Like, it was never substantiated, it comes from one high level player basically insisting that the other guy who he had just rage quit a match with must have been getting outside signals and when asked how he said “a vibrating butt plug.”

And thus it became a joke because it was such an absurd suggestion.

Tim “steam is a monopoly and must be destroyed because of it”

Also Tim “windows being a monopoly is fine actually and we should do nothing to support alternatives”

yah, a giant financial crisis when no one can afford to pay the loans back, oh wait, that’s already happening.

Lot of small grocery co-ops have systems where you can buy spices and the like by weight.

Right now, prices and availability are being kept semi stable by draw downs on strategic reserves, but that won’t last forever.

Damn, I sure hope there aren’t any important documents in there that area that congress might want to see if the midterms were to flip control of the house and senate.

I mean, it’s built on chrome, like opera and edge, so if Google is on the war path they’re probably not safe long term.

I suppose they could hard fork the web engine, but, that means they gotta develop a web engine which is a whole other can of worms.

If Google is out for blood on this, only browsers built on WebKit or Gecko would be safe.

And tax the shit out of assets to decrease the relative value of investments to actually generating value through work. Rebalance the economic incentives away from maximizing margins towards maximizing volume.

I mean. I’d argue that the group that more frequently questions its positions and beliefs based on new evidence without killing a significant portion of a country, is a safer source for interpreting the world than the group that killed 40% of Germany when one assumption, regarding the authority of the bishop of Rome, was in dispute for the first time in several centuries.

Backrooms (the movie) is based on the backrooms(a collection of of internet fiction written by a lot of people in a shared setting with a shared premise), which was inspired by a lot of things because the concepts behind it were built up by a lot of people. House of Leaves probably had an influence because it’s decently well known but there is no direct relation. I’m sure if you dug through some forums, boards and subreddits you could find someone talking about a direct inspiration for a piece or two, but it’s not really a formalized set of works

I think a lot of people will brush it off what ever happens with SpaceX because Xai is the weakest of the big model providers. I don’t think we’ll even get to the openAI IPO. I think the S1 or IPO from anthropic will be the real kicker, because they’re the darling at the moment. The one that seems to have the most momentum and business customers.

If their S1 turns out to be utter dog water and/or their IPO flops, that’s when the real panic comes. When people say “oh crap, these GPU data centers don’t have customers that can make money”, and that narrative will hit all the people building data center and all the people selling hardware to them. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, that’s like… what, 25% of the S&P 500? That seems like a big enough hit to catch a lot of other stuff in the blast radius.

i looked up the story I had read a while back, and sundar was not the head of ads, but had just become the ceo after having been on the board of directors, and the issue was kicked up to him when Ben Gomes refused implement changes that Prabhakar Raghavan of ads wanted. later Gomes left the company and was replaced by Raghavan as head of search.

This all coming from internal emails and memos that were released as part of the anti trust case summarized in this piece which does a very good job of sourcing individual claims by pointing to specific emails and memos, although, the author is very… passionate in their coverage.

Part of me feels like google is comfortable allowing their traditional search experience to languish because it makes ai more necessary

Oh, it’s so much worse than that, Google intentionally made it worse around 2019 so that people would do multiple searches and scroll to second pages, thus increasing the amount of ad impressions and user time spent on the site. There were several email back and forth between the head of search and head of advertising, with the head of search adamantly refusing to implement the changes. Eventually he ended up leaving despite having been at the company from the beginning, due to this disagreement. The head of advertising during this? He’s the head of search now.

Replacing search altogether with AI summarization is just a continuation of that, instead of delaying customers going to other sites, prevent them from going to them all together.

To clarify why the S1s are so important here. There are a ton of laws that prevent companies that have their shares bought and sold on public stock markets from outright lying about the state of their business to the public. This is to ensure that companies can’t just lie to push up share prices.

Since the most important model providers are currently private, they have not been bound by these laws and have basically been allowed to say what ever they want. With them going public, and the release of the S1s, they need to publicly display accurate financials, not just vague and un verifiable numbers.

The question of “is this just a fad or is this a revolutionary technology that will reshape the economy” is easily answered if we have accurate accounting of the costs to run these business.

This stuff has been there. Just not much reporting or investigation has been done on it, instead a lot of news outlets focused on interviews with the heads of these companies and thoughtlessly reiterated press releases. Those who have criticized it have mainly just done so in ways that play in to the narrative convenient for the industry “but what if it’s TOO good?”.

The failure of tech journalism on this topic has been frankly catastrophic.

To break even on operating expenses, not even counting debt payments, depreciated capital value, or future recapitalization costs.

Just gotta configure and tweak until it gives outputs you find indistinguishable from correct. Just gotta train it to gaslight you properly. Come on don’t you want to be given and endless stream of stuff that looks correct?

The data center builders and operators are running behind on basically every data center project, massive amounts of Blackwell are just sitting in warehouses right now because they loose money the moment they’re plugged in. New IT load for the operators isn’t even a third of the capacity of the chips sold to these companies. Most of the companies that got switched over to token billing by the model providers are pulling back and freaking out over a yearly “AI budget” annihilated in a quarter. The model providers wouldn’t have swapped to token based billing for enterprise clients if they didn’t have to. They’ve been pumping demand with hype and by selling at a fraction of operational costs. Reporting non-gap EBITA to hide what a mess the financials are.

The SpaceX S1 alone shows how insanely cash incinerating it all is. Can’t wait to see Anthropic and OpeAIs S1s. It’s gonna be hilarious.

The fact that they tried to get the rules changed so they could get listed on index’s as soon as they IPOd means they’re out of willing creditors and out of cash. They were attempting to dump equity on to 401Ks to pay out the private bag-holders who have been funding them to sell model access at massively discounted rates.

Even if people host models them selves, the era of constant slop deluge is over simply because all the players giving away access for essentially free are about to go belly up or pivot away from it to other business models.

Oh, you didn’t want to be disoriented by all the apps flying apart in every direction when ever you wanted to use the task bar? Oh you wanted a system tray not hidden behind a menu?

Oh, well you can just use a plug in … just pray we don’t update and break all the plug ins anytime soon.