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Cake day: July 14th, 2025

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  • Yeah and the biggest issue is covered well here: https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-house-of-ellison-is-on-the-brink

    Essentially: the profits are in the infrastructure end (AI companies paying for parts to build the data centres) not the consumer facing end (the actual models - customer paying AI companies). The money is coming from investors buying in to AI in the hope of winning the supposed arms race to be The One True AI. The whole thing depends on the revenues in the consumer facing end going up to show this is a growing market and make people believe they will eventually reach profit. But the revenues in the consumer facing end are fake and being inflated by circular movements of money including companies like Nvidia paying companies like OpenAI to buy product, or OpenAI paying for product in stock. The revenue inflation is very similar to how Enron inflated it’s books its revenue appear higher than it really was.

    The brutal reality is: there will not be One True AI to Rule Them All. Instead AI is looking increasingly like a commodity - people will just use the cheapest, simplest tool to do the task, rather than play inflated prices for a swiss army knife AI. And people can host those cheap, simple AIs aleady at home, or on servers in the cloud, or companies can also do the same. The whole US bubble is predicated on spending as much money as possible to stake a claim in a future Google, when it’s looking more like it’ll be like the fast food sector with razor thin margins. Some of these companies may end up profitable but this is going to be a hell of a lot more competitive and less profitable than the valuations assume.

    Expect a very nasty correction.





  • I would bet on painful collapse, because the whole model is “winner takes all”, which means there is an awful lot of duplication. Even if it ends up more like a commodity with multiple players (because why pay for super powered AI for a task if there is a cheaper low powered alternatives?), the constant scale up makes no sense at all economically. We’re already well into diminishing returns with each scale up, and the models continue to be fundamentally flawed.

    Lenovo are right that prices won’t go back to “normal” - I think there will be a huge crash in prices due to oversupply when the AI boom ends, and some of the big AI companies collapse.


  • Yeah, I had Office 2010 and used that for years - probably up to 2022. It allowed installs on 3 devices at a time, and included Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I only switched to Office 365 when my work made it freely available, and I have it set up inside a windows VM on my Linux desktop for the very rare times I need to use office at home. Work are paying for all the redundant tools no one at work uses - like copilot. Don’t see it as my problem.

    But I can’t recommend Office 2024 when it costs £120 for a license with online activation and install restrictions to one PC. Not when the alternative Libre Office is free, unlimited installs on all devices, and does everything a home user would ever need. Joplin is also a superb alternative to One Note.

    I personally would never buy another version of Office; I have libre office installed and use that for my personal documents (like my budget spreadsheet and occasional word processing) and Joplin for my notes. And while Libre office doesn’t have integrated cloud storage, all you need to do is add your preferred cloud storage system to your file manager in Linux or Windows.

    Office 2024 doesn’t really offer a good value proposition. And if you’re really in the market for Office, then ebay to get valid licenses for Office Professional Plus 2019 or 2021is better value; £40 for the full suite (inc Access, Outlook, Publisher) is far better value than a direct license from MS for 2024. But it’s just a product key card, so there is always the risk a license and access to downloads gets revoked eventually.




  • It’s a gold rush which will have consequences a few years down the line. The data centre market will get saturated, and with a probable collapse in the AI market thats driving this (particularly given the “winner takes all” approach all the players are following) and associated massive duplication of data centres running different AI models for different companies, it’s likely to be a collapse, not a soft landing.

    Hardware companies investing in expanding their output to service the data centres demand will be over producing once the market swings the other way. Expect prices to collapse and some of these memory producing companies to go bankrupt. This is another classic sign of a bubble: everyone thinks this will keep going and going, so they invest hard in having a chunk of it. But it will inevitably hit a wall - some AI companies will fail and their data centres become redundant, and the market overall will eventually swing away from endless expansion to consolidation. And thats best case scenario; more likely it a catastrophic collapse in which case the market is getting flooded with unneeded 2nd had product from data centres sold off during bankruptcy proceedings.

    It’s not a question of if the party will end, it’s just a question of when. Even if people don’t think the AI market will pop, the economics of building more and more data centres by unprofitable competitors in this market is unsustainable and has to end at some point. And the evidence is we’re already well beyond the point of diminishing returns with current AI models in terms of scaling up.

    So while times are hard right now for home PC users, I’d expect there to be period in the near future of oversupply and cheap components. This year? Next year? Hard to say exactly when but the writing is on the wall for the AI bubble imo.


  • I think their best option at present is to push the privacy, interoperability and independence side of their product and target European governments on the basis of digital sovereignty. Yes, it’s based in the US, but the product itself is open source and independent of the big tech giants, and that can be leveraged to get more support in Europe as the only viable alternative to Google’s Chrome ecosystem and Apple’s Safari ecosystem.

    It’s difficult for Mozilla, not because of what Firefox is, but because it is financially dependent on Google which makes it harder to be aggressive about calling out just how bad Google and Chrome are for users. Mozilla would ideally be lobbying the EU anti-trust apparatus to stop Google aggressively pushing Chrome, in much the same way Netscape did with Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

    Mozilla is stuck, because it’s main threat is also it’s main lifeline. So it really needs to try and diversify itself away from it’s financial dependence on Google. That has been near impossible but European governments may be the way forward. It won’t replace Google, but Trump has created an opportunity in Europe that Mozilla has to aggressively follow.



  • That’s not correct - the BBC announced iPlayer in 2003, tested 2004 onwards and finally launched in 2007 after being delayed by lobbying. The iPlayer was held back from full launch due to concerns from commercial competitors - in particular broadband providers lobbied against the iPlayer service because they feared the “pressure” it would put on the broadband infrastructure.

    Netflix launched their streaming service in 2007.

    Netflix did not originate the idea of streaming (nor did the BBC to be clear), much like Apple didn’t originate the smart phone. Netfiix did however do it better than it’s competitors, particularly the incumbents in the commercial sector.



  • This is a fluff article but about a well signposted issue in education: tech in schools may be pushing education backwards.

    Many countries have embraced tech in schools - such as laptops for students - and big tech companies in the US have been enthusiastic about getting their tech in front of young people as they will be the consumers of the future. But despite the billions spent it seems to actually be damaging education.

    There are educationalists pushing for tech to be taken out of schools and go back to methods that actually do produce consistently good results.


  • I have little sympathy to be honest.

    However what is interesting is this sounds like a company in it’s early death throes. They’re a social media company that’s core products are in decline to competitors like TikTok, and they’re desperately trying to diversify.

    The “metaverse” was an expensive flop. Now it’s pivoting to AI by sacking employees to save costs and redirecting large numbers of the rest away from it’s core product. But Meta is way behind in the AI race and seemingly throwing everything at this while ignoring it’s core product.

    Meta is becoming like IBM; it probably won’t disappear but it’ll just be another also-ran.



  • Yeah, Microsoft is gambling that the number of users who care enough to act are too small, or won’t bother, or won’t realise they can.

    This is how big corporations get away with this shit. It’s not “illegal” in the criminal sense, but it is a breach of contract between Microsoft and those affected; and they likely could win against Microsoft.

    The good news is the outrage over this is probably more damaging than any settlement or long drawn out legal case even would be. It’s at just the right time as Microsoft deals with major issues and unhappiness with Windows users over poor updates, crappy feature changes to Win 11 and of course force feeding of CoPilot down every users throat, while also decimating their own staff to save money for AI and polluting their own products codebases with shitty AI generated slop. Perfect storm has hit Microsoft, and they don’t even realise how bad it is yet.