Trying to sell consumers on “scaling solves everything” is going to be a hard sell.

If we look at general purpose computation, which had decades of actual scaling-solves-everything growth, you had two influences that made the message resonate with customers:

• Clear existing applications where more power made the experience straightforward better. Your spreadsheet took an hour to recalculate at 8MHz and 20 minutes at 25MHz. A lot of the “bigger model” stuff is plateauing with marginal or spotty gains. If I feed another 5 Internets of data to ChatGPT, will that summarized email be that much better?

• New applications that could be demoed on specialised low capacity hardware and scaled down to consumers as more power became available. Think of early CGI on hardware costing tens of millions, and now you can run Blender on a $149 laptop. Since most commercial AI plays are hosted services, there’s not much opportunity to tease that way anymore.

The difference was that Amazon knew how to make a profit, but was reinvesting into infrastructure plays and bigger fish.

If they had to, they could have been a modestly profitable bookshop in 2002. AWS and monster logistics might not have developed to put them in the 13-digit club though.

Does any AI-centric play have that fundamental fallback? The services that seem to be most effective at direct monetization, the coding tools, are typically running at huge losses. If they raised costs to cover, precious few firms will pay basically the salary of a senior dev for an emulation of an enthusiastic junior dev with an affinity for footguns.

The less enterprise-focused products-- parasocial toys, image and video gen, will likely try to dip into consumer subs and advertising, but can that generate the cash volumes these platforms demand?

There’s also an execution problem.

Truly knowing your customer might produce very different outcomes than the current compliance checkbox approach.

“I know Fred just sold his old car. The idea he suddenly has $12k in cash is not suspicious” or “Jane’s been talking about going to Montreal for momths. We should not block her card when it lights up there.”. That’s real KYC, but it requires human connection and human judgement, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide the right paperwork for demonstrating compliance with arbitrary mandates.

Minotaurs have some potential for badass imagery. Reverse Centaur sounds intentionally clunky.

It smells more like Facebook than Steam to me. they can print money for now because they have established scale and customer base, but it feels a bit slimy to where it might not be that appealing to new users. Dating services in general have a bad vibe-- bot problems, low quality matches, dark patterns, so authenticity is a big selling point, something AI drives a huge stake into.

I’d expect that thr gay community, after decades of being a target for abuse, tends to be a bit more sensitive of red flags and looking for truly safe spaces. The Facebook comparison breaks down there, as it has 700 million Aunt Martha users whose most politically sensitive post is in defence of Miracle Whip on salads.

I wonder if the next generation of memory will only have a SO-DIMM pinout so they don’t have to split limited supply. Maybe larger “desktop or highend laptop” modules will be physically longer like 2230/2280/22110 SSDs

Microsoft was probably the only firm with the resources to keep a Chromium fork current while uneinding Google’s enshittifications. But their incentives are too similar for that.

Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.

From what I understand, some modern drives effectively encrypt everything at rest, but have the key on file internally so it decrypts transparently. This allows for a fast “wipe” where it just destroys the key instead of having to overwrite terabytes.

I want to see the camera that will stop white-collar crime.

I’m surprised there isn’t more of a crowdsourced solution-- community maintained block/allow lists and pluggable tools.

Part of the reason filters suck right now is that they’re sold to turboprudes and people pushing compliance solutions that will placate litigious turboprudes. So you get blocking all of Wikipedia and .edu/.gov because three pages have an anatomical diagram of a breast. The kids are frustrated, normal parents have to keep unblocking legit stuff, and nobody wins.

If you could pick from easily managed lists sponsored by groups you personally trusted, with responsive appeals systems, people might be more willing to use them.

The ad-blocker ecosystem has a lot of precedent for how to work this stuff.

We need to reframe the discussion from “it’s for the children” to “it’s for lazy parents”.

People are keen to scapegoat parents, and here it’s the truth. They don’t want to use existing opt-in controls, or put the damn computer where they can keep an eye on Little Timmy while he uses it. Make the entirery of the legal system do it for you!

IMO, the real use case for PayPal was really on the seller side.

When it was 2002 and you weren’t a major business but just wanted to sell three old CDs on eBay or offer dog haberdashery online, it was by far the simplest way to accept a credit-card funded transaction.

We’re still not a lot better there in 2025. Even with more modern platforms, you can’t really get from zero to accepting cards directly in 15 minutes.

It’s a remarkable entitlement.

Let’s say I’ve never dealt with your restaurant before. Why would I start my relationship with you by installing your lowest-bid spyware on my personal device? You have yet to even convince me I’ll ever want a Quesachalupa Wrap Crunch Bellgrande (the same as “taco, add tomatoes”, but $3.72 more) again.

At the current rate, within 6 months, the average stint for a high-level federal officer will be measured in seconds. Eventually, the entire American populace will be shuffled through these roles, being sacked before the welcome email can even escape the spam filter.

I’m going to ask if I can get my shot as the director of the Federal Railroad Administration.

I’d suspect the low “density” of context makes it prone to hallucinations. You need to load in 3000 lines to express what Python does in 3, so there’s a lot of chances to guess the next token wtong.

The other satellite players (Hughesnet, Viasat), the fixed 5G boxes (although places sufficiently rural to seriously consider dialup may not have 5G), probably some smaller boutique dialup ISPs.

Now I want to see a fully Hexbearified LLM.

Instead of racist conspiracy theories it will divert every topic to beans. And the saucy images will be mostly of cuties from Soviet posters.

In 2006, it was the least hot garbage choice though.

If your software supports authorize.net, you can often use some other gateways with a drop-in compatible API by changing the endpoint.