manxu

xAI business model: hype  
SpaceX business model: government contracts  

The contracts stay when the hype dies. By merging the two companies, Musk avoids the collapse of one. To make this work, he needs more government contracts - I see a lot of groveling and boot licking in his immediate future.

You are not wrong. Methinks a lot of Europe’s lack of digital infrastructure is related to the mountains of red tape every person and company in the EU has to face. It’s really discouraging.

I forgot about those! Enter birth day: pops up monthly calendar of January 2026, and you cry trying to figure out how to scroll back in time.

I am pretty sure spin dials constitute torture according to the Geneva convention and Cruel and Unusual Punishment according to the US Constitution.

I am particularly salty at the stupid spinners for year when you have to enter birth year. I am old enough that it takes a minute to scroll to my birth year, and every second of it I hate the person that decided spinners are a great UI. Entering a date by keyboard takes 10 seconds, and the spinners multiply that time without providing any advantage.

Ha! Enjoy your off button while they still make them. Once our AI Overlords have won the War, you can only politely ask your laptop to please temporarily quiet itself, please and thank you if it’s not too much asking.

Dell is the first Windows OEM to openly admit that the AI PC push has failed. Customers seem uninterested in buying a laptop because of its AI capabilities, likely prioritizing other aspects such as battery life, performance, and display above AI.

Silicon Valley always had the annoying habit of pushing technology-first products without even much consideration of how they would solve real world problems. It always had it, but it’s becoming increasingly bad. When Zuck unveiled the Metaverse it was already starting to be ludicrous, but with the AI laptop wave it turned into Onion territory.

It all kind of makes sense if you look at it from an investors’ perspective, which is the only one that really matters to CEOs. You can do whatever you want, but unless a company is an AI company, you can’t reach a stratospheric PE ratio and your stock stays “low.” You convince investors that you are an AI-first company, and your stock can break free of its shackles and reach its full potential!

All for the relatively cheap price of slapping two letters on everything, AI.

Now you can go to Crumbl and pay $5 for one cookie! Progress is awesome.

Amen to that! On the other hand, they know they are pushing uphill and they know there are plenty people that disapprove of what they are doing. Hence the masked faces of shame.

If it went from $40 to $80 it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But it’s going from studio rent territory to house mortgage!

Don’t forget that the impetus for this came from Trump being mad at Colorado for not accepting his pardon of state crimes.

So many Trumpists are beating off to it, it’s been classified as pr0n and we can’t have that on a family-friendly MAGA network!

It certainly has not gone unnoticed in Moscow that the only way for Ukrainian drones to hit targets off the coast of Libya is to fly over NATO territory. If NATO countries let Ukrainians drones fly overhead unhindered, then Ukraine can take the shadow fleet down one vessel at a time, without NATO or Europe having committed any act of war.

The economic noose is tightening. The biggest risk to this operation is that the price of oil shoots up again because of the “situation” in Venezuela.

You are absolutely right in the overarching logic, but I believe we have interacted with the current iteration of AI long enough to know that consumer demand is underwhelming, and ROI for enterprise investment is near zero.

In your Olympics analogy, it would be like every four years a city spending tons of money on Olympic games that attract a lot fewer visitors than predicted, just because the other cities did in the past.

Honestly, I am reminded of the early days of the Internet, when all VCs were funding “generic sales startup” because they had said No to Bezos and Amazon had exploded. It wasn’t about making a good investment, it was about being able to say they hadn’t slept on the biggest opportunity they in fact missed.

That’s not entirely fair, though. The key part of the statement is, “to service a demand that doesn’t exist.” The problem with AI is that there is little user demand for it, so all the capacity being aggressively built is going to eventually hit a brick wall.

I shouldn’t say there is little user demand. There is little paying user demand, but that’s the thing that makes and breaks investments the size of these. Enshittification is built-in, and for a change the cost of the data centers is a visible reminder that someone is going to pay, eventually.

Given the size of the players involved and their political connections, I assume the chump is going to be the tax payer in the end. That is going to be fun to watch: billionaires getting a massive bailout while you are getting kicked out of health insurance.

If I were an Onion article writer, I’d probably have a mental breakdown. Who can come up with anything more Oniony than this??? (Wait until tomorrow for the answer, I guess.)

During the process, the expert witnesses mentioned he might suffer from split personality. One personality is well-adjusted, the other capable of the worst. And the worst it did.

Akshully I think it’s either “less beer” or “fewer beers” (plural).