It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.

That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.

Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I’ve never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he’s not particularly qualified on this subject.

The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he’s not an AI or finance expert and doesn’t specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.

The last one standing or the last one left holding the bag?

Kind of gross how this article seems to be trying at every turn to say, “no ai is actually good! It helped us catch the bad businessmen that happen to be in the AI industry!” By focusing on a tiny trading period on November 20th.

Because I remember casually watching Hank Green talk about this same thing more than a month earlier.

Hank Green isn’t a finance bro or an AI guy or even really a tech guy. He’s just a guy reacting to things that are trending, and I remember I had seen the main graphic he was talking about floating around the internet for a while before I watched the video. People have been calling AI a “bubble” for much longer.

I am old enough to remember the report that 95% of generative AI companies failed to see returns from using it. That was back in August.

I don’t like giving credit to “trading algorithms” for things that humans figured out a long time ago.

at a concert

There’s your problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re buying Dasani or Aquafina or Arizona Tea. Venues have captive audiences and jack up the prices because they can.

As of June 2025, Mike Cessario’s estimated net worth is around $80–100 million.

The CEO is wealthy, sure, but very far away from being a billionaire.

I’ve occasionally bought liquid death at my local beer distributor for parties, and it’s a bit expensive but not crazy. Pretty much every drink at a festival is incredibly overpriced - that markup is usually going to the vendors selling it and the venue, not the manufacturer.

I think the main hangup is going to be: how easy and simple is this thing for the average person?

The Steam Deck is, any way you slice it, a better value than the Switch or Switch 2. The Steam Deck has sold roughly 6 million units in 3 years. The Nintendo Switch 2 has sold close to 11 million units in about 5 months.

I hope you’re right and that Valve really shakes up the whole industry, but I’m not going to start expecting that until I see it.

Increase productivity?

Dimensia Donny seems like a nickname that could fit

Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It’s only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you’re in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.

The quotes about “breaking societal connections” or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.

Is there enough value in AI to justify burning down the planet for it?

I kept on checking throughout the day yesterday- Verizon’s website said no outages, but istheservicedown showed most of the east coast of the US was down.

I also heard from friends with business class Internet that they were fine.

Why is this story suddenly getting posted to dozens of communities that in seeing in my feed?

It’s one 73 year old tribal elder who complained that today’s youth don’t respect tradition. This same story has been pre-printed for thousands of years.

I’m not a copyright expert either, but I would think it goes one of two ways.

One is that the original rights holder of the IP could sue these binders for profiting off of it.

The other is that they can’t because the work is sufficiently transformative, in which case it would fall to he fanfic writer. From there, it probably depends on how they released their work. Some websites might claim ownership of anything published there as part of their ToS. Some authors might explicitly release their works under more open licenses to encourage community involvement. If it was just posted somewhere without addressing these questions (which I would guess is pretty common)… Sounds like a mess for the courts to sort out.

Perhaps one day humanity will look back and ask whether the lack of Internet in the thousands of years prior damaged the development of everyone who grew up without it

I do both. Jellyfin is way better if you put in the work of having a good folder structure and file names for metadata to scrape.

VLC is good for weird file types or non-video media. If you want to have a stash of reaction gifs in a playlist, I don’t know if JellyFin has any way to do that. Or if you want the tablet to display a random slideshow of pictures, like a diy digital picture frame. Also it’s easier to use if you don’t have good file names and metadata scraping.

This happens again and again and again. At every level, public and private.

The answer is not “filter these people out of these jobs” because very often they have no prior records. Or sometimes someone gets phished. The answer is to stop enabling this in the first place.

I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I’m a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn’t?

Then I remembered Starlink exists.

Queue all the people in the comments talking about ad blockers or alternative apps.

Those might be great (and ad blocking is important in general), but I’ve found I ultimately just watch YouTube less.

A good chunk of my favorite creators had been pushing Nebula for the past couple years, so I finally tried it out and it’s pretty decent. I’ve even found new channels there that would have been buried on YouTube. Still tons of room for improvement for the platform, but it’s functional now.

Other creators have their own websites with text content, or podcasts hosted elsewhere.

It’s only a small handful of channels I check for on YouTube anymore. It kind of sucks that it’s mostly small channels where video is a key component and they don’t fit with the edu-tainment vibe of Nebula, and I don’t know of another platform for them. Lots of DIY home improvement, self-sufficiency (not religious or conspiratorial lol), music videos, and channels dedicated to specific videogame franchises.

I know LTT has Floatplane too. I wonder if all of these other videos streaming options getting worse will start driving more people to smaller platforms.

Except it’s not private money. Private vehicles have been heavily subsidized for almost a century in the US. We’ve had decade after decades or tax credits, interest-free loans, and bailouts to the oil and automotive industries. Most local road maintenance is financed with debt, and that debt has started to bankrupt municipalities. Minimum parking requirements encourage sprawl and reduce the tax base by filling these municipalities with land that is economically unproductive.

This all applies to electric too. Tesla famously would not exist if not for years and years of government money propping them up and artificially lowering their prices. Plus all the incentives for building owners to add charging stations, and the billions of dollars going towards expanding EV charging infrastructure in general.

And if you want to optimize for efficiency, personal EV’s are still not even close to buses or trains. Personal vehicle ownership absolutely does NOT make economic sense for anyone except the owners and managers of the companies who profit from them.

American suburbs aren’t ever going to become walkable if everyone just keeps saying “well it’s just too hard to have nice things” and keeps throwing money at perpetuating the problem instead of using that money to get out of the hole.