Intel’s Q1 2025 earnings press release talked up their new AI-enabled chips. But these are not selling. [Intel] In the earnings call, CFO Dave Zinsner mentioned they had “capacity constraints in In…
The hype around this shit is astounding. That people who make decisions about products from huge brands keep buying in is shocking to me. How can something so useless (to most people) capture the imagination of educated and intelligent people? It’s a sign of how broken capitalism is. Rational thought is replaced by fear of missing out.
Most of the concrete value that can be delivered by connecting things to the Internet and simple algorithms has been extracted by silicon valley. The only capital extraction mechanisms left are difficult things that only a government has the capital access to make real progress on (e.g., AGI, advanced robotics, self-driving vehicles, space exploration, etc.) and hyped up garbage that big investment firms think they can extract value out of either the public (through scams like cryptocurrency) or other investors (through LLMs and AI hype) and sell before people figure out that it’s smoke and mirrors.
We made real progress on the backs of mostly government-funded research projects like DARPA and GPS. The industry was able to optimize and innovate the shit out of the earliest computing breakthroughs where now you have a device in your pocket that can hold several libraries of Congress and beats anything put out in desktop form 20 years ago. But since the tech companies that matter are all giant, there just aren’t ways for them to grow market share (everyone’s their customer) or get many more dollars out of their existing customers. All that is left are scams and bad business practices. That’s why we’re in the golden age of enshittification.
Not educated and intelligent people, wealthy investors.
We’re sighing at having to build all these features the boss wants and we know they are stupid and we see the lost oppertunity cost that could have been used to improve other things instead. I’m tired and the job market is so ass right now.
The hype around this shit is astounding. That people who make decisions about products from huge brands keep buying in is shocking to me. How can something so useless (to most people) capture the imagination of educated and intelligent people? It’s a sign of how broken capitalism is. Rational thought is replaced by fear of missing out.
Most of the concrete value that can be delivered by connecting things to the Internet and simple algorithms has been extracted by silicon valley. The only capital extraction mechanisms left are difficult things that only a government has the capital access to make real progress on (e.g., AGI, advanced robotics, self-driving vehicles, space exploration, etc.) and hyped up garbage that big investment firms think they can extract value out of either the public (through scams like cryptocurrency) or other investors (through LLMs and AI hype) and sell before people figure out that it’s smoke and mirrors.
We made real progress on the backs of mostly government-funded research projects like DARPA and GPS. The industry was able to optimize and innovate the shit out of the earliest computing breakthroughs where now you have a device in your pocket that can hold several libraries of Congress and beats anything put out in desktop form 20 years ago. But since the tech companies that matter are all giant, there just aren’t ways for them to grow market share (everyone’s their customer) or get many more dollars out of their existing customers. All that is left are scams and bad business practices. That’s why we’re in the golden age of enshittification.
Not educated and intelligent people, wealthy investors.
We’re sighing at having to build all these features the boss wants and we know they are stupid and we see the lost oppertunity cost that could have been used to improve other things instead. I’m tired and the job market is so ass right now.