I think there will be a “return on ai” eventually, just not with this race to the bottom with chatbots. It’ll come from machine learning applied to solving problems in medicine and sciences and other areas of complexity.

Admittedly machine learning and “ai” get lumped together these days but I think there is a difference.

Also, thanks for reading my (long) rant. 😆

shipments of PCs could shrink by up to 9% in 2026

I’ll be shocked if it’s not at least double that. Thing is, this is going to be like the covid-19-crypto-bro-GPU-pocalypse that drove up GPU prices so much we now just collectively accept paying double.

Except this time it’s not just GPUs. It’s now hitting RAM, SSDs, HDDs, CPUs, Laptops, probably next year’s smartphones, and who knows what’s next. Motherboards? Power supplies? Cases? Everything else?

It’s not just that these companies are all cannibalizing their consumer capacity for AI customers and it’s not just the hardware they’re buying. As consumer demand plummets because they can no longer afford PCs, companies will reduce consumer production even further because waning demand. It’s a feedback loop whose only killswitch is economic collapse.

Sure we might be able to seek refuge for a while in the secondhand market, but that won’t be our saviour either. As demand increases in the secondhand market, a market with a largely fixed (and likely dwindling) supply, expect sellers to increase their prices too. Whether they’re trying to recoup costs from the first-wave price increase they paid buying new hardware, or just because they know the market can bare inflated prices that are somewhat less inflate compared to new.

And what do we have to look forward to? Prices will “settle” to 2-3x what they were last year compared to 5-6x as today. That’s if there’s a manufacturer left who hasn’t abandoned the consumer segment by that point.

I’m just coming to terms with the fact that the computer I built 2 years ago is probably my last, and my ability to help my neighbours fix their computers probably has a near expiry date. This has been a hobby of mine for decades that the rich have always fought against. With the AI bubble, they may have finally found a way to kill it completely.

I hope I’m wrong but I’m genuinely worried about this. For now I’ll have to wait and see how things go, look to the secondhand market for my next build, and maybe, start learning to solder.

I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing or is about, even.

As someone who started their career as a volunteer at Mozilla and was fortunate enough to become an employee (although am no longer), I can say with a fair amount of confidence that this has been their standard operating mode for over a decade. Nothing I’ve seen from them since I was let go has shown me they’re operating any differently.

I still support Firefox because I oppose a browser monoculture owned by Google, and the advocacy work the Foundation is vitally important. The Corporation lost the plot ages ago though, and does more harm to Mozilla’s mission than any other player out there. No amount of re-orgs or pivots can fix this.

I hope, someday, for Firefox to be freed from the Corporation as a sustainable community run project (like Debian), with infrastructure sponsored by the Foundation and others who want to see it continue. Unfortunately the Corporation will never let Firefox go because its existential for them, and will be stuck in this panic cycle for as long as Google keeps them on life support.

Anyway, still using Firefox and pruning all the weeds from it each release, but it’s become exhausting.

Nice try, Officer, but I’m not falling for it.

Reading the “In Crime and Politics” section of the Calibri Wikipedia page, I can’t help but think the motivation here is so the State Department can release falsified documents predating 2006 without being found out.

Not going to downvote this because the source article is useful, but OP’s take is ludicrous. Have we really reached the point where ALL media is propaganda?

It might be time to unplug society and plug it back in again.

I spend most of my days working on healing myself with time in nature, and I’m developing a personal photography project connected to my natural surroundings. I also spend time working on my garden when weather permits and am learning to paint and draw when the weather is gloomy. All in all that keeps my days pretty packed and active, not even thinking about tech most days whereas before it was all consuming.

The majority of my career in tech was at Mozilla, followed by a relatively brief stint at Element. I’m lucky that I was able to spend my entire career working for companies whose missions and products I still champion. But even as good and well intentioned as they are, they cannot escape so-called “Silicon Valley” as they’re very much a part of it.

If you want to read about this on a website that isn’t full of ads and doesn’t just present as an ad for their own news app, here is the source material by Blind.com.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a link to the raw survey data and I generally don’t trust surveys that aren’t accompanied by raw data.

I went looking for the data because 1901 respondents across 32 of the largest companies globally doesn’t seem like it would be statistically representative of any one company. If you assume the same sample size per company, which it probably isn’t but again that’s unverifiable because I couldn’t find the raw data, you’re looking at, what, 60 employees for a company the size of Google?

Look, I’m a recovering tech worker who left the industry because of the toxic work culture, having spent a quarter of my life at one of the good ones. Even there I saw the value of unions. No matter the industry, workers deserve the right to collective bargaining and fair treatment. But I don’t think surveys with unverifiable data help move that conversation forward.

Now, if I’m mistaken and someone finds a source link to the data that we can all verify, I’ll happily take another look and reconsider my opinion on it’s validity.