Google's TPU Paradox

Why the massive Anthropic deal ($50-80 billion over six years) is a map to a thousand-customer problem.

The Future is NOT Self-Hosted

In a world where corporations have detached buying from owning, one man attempts to do something radical: build his own cloud.

Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse | The Walrus

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

Craigslist, Wikipedia, and the Abundance Economy

You’ve heard it before. Maybe you’ve even said it. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” “You can’t get something for nothing.” “Somebody has to pay.” People recite these sayings with confidence, as though they were quoting Newton’s Laws of Motion...

Big Tech’s A.I. Spending Is Accelerating (Again)

Despite the risk of a bubble, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon plan to spend billions more on artificial intelligence than they already do.

The Joy of Becoming Worthless…except to each other — Douglas Rushkoff

My last piece, The Intentional Collapse, seems to have agitated a few people. I know it came off a bit dark. I talked about how the Uber wealthy believe the world as we know it is ending and that there won’t be enough essential resources to go around, so they need to take control of as much money and stuff and land as possible in order to position themselves for the end of days.

The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

Six years, no deadlines, and one rule: write some code every day. That slow, stubborn routine turned a side project into a sustainable search company.

ai thought dump #1 - fridge cigarettes

hello blog. i was wondering if anyone was doing this, where they track their thoughts on ai as time goes by and the technology advances and the richer get riche...

Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):

Apocalypse Now and Then • EQUATOR

Artificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination

The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind

Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes.   Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason. In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973. With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.

Smoke-away on Twitter / X

Andrej Karpathy: "What you want is the inner thought monologue of your brain... The trajectories in your brain as you're doing problem solving, if we had a billion of that, AGI is here roughly speaking." pic.twitter.com/C0kBUITPBv— Smoke-away (@SmokeAwayyy) October 18, 2024

The AI Layoff Trap

If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In...

danmcquillan (@danmcquillan@kolektiva.social) on Twitter / X

Fisher/Jameson said "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". And yet, that act of imagining alternatives is urgent; if AI tells us nothing else, it tells us that capitalism is actively imagining the end of us.— danmcquillan (@danmcquillan@kolektiva.social) (@danmcquillan) August 30, 2026