jrs100000

That almost ever works. By the time a monopoly starts to crumble the rot is systemic. In this case, every single internal stakeholder at MS is going to sabotage the project as soon as someone tells them their baby cant use 3GB of ram and track every mouse click the user makes while it forces flashing ads onto the screen.

Hilarious. Nobody goes through the trouble of achieving multiple monopolies just to give people what they want.

There are parts of the world where the Facebook app basically is the Internet. Places where most people dont own a laptop, but everyone has a cell phone and phone service comes bundled with discounted Facebook data. Their hold goes way beyond social networking to, local businesses and even government services dont have webpages, they have Facebook pages only. Every game people play runs through Facebook, and all their saves are locked up with them. Every video people post or watch runs through Facebook and its hyper localized algorithm. It would take generations to displace them.

This is pretty much what everyone said immediately after Anthropic reached for the “too powerful for the public” excuse. Weve all seen this exact song and dance before. I suppose when you’ve just finished shoveling billions of dollars of speculative funding into a data center inferno its not acceptable to say that you rolled the dice and they came up snake eyes, but its still galling to be lied to so transparently.

Ive heard more convincing arguments for an economy based on monkey pictures.

I dont know. Maybe its not fixable. Maybe democracy as we know it cant withstand contact with social media and AI any more than absolute monarchy could survive the printing press. Maybe it will get better on its own, as kids growing up with AI start to spot it the way people today spot CGI.

Somehow I dont think a class is going to fix this.

My God. At least the US’s fascism sort of makes sense from an internally consistent perspective. Make it make sense!

He hasnt been CEO for decades, but he was on the board up until 2020 when MS’s current AI strategy was being developed and executed. His current big push is energy projects, all intended as AI power sources, along with actual AI companies.

Yea but its not end uses being targeted, its investors.

Some of you will be forced through a fine mesh screen for your country. They will be the luckiest of all.

Yes. He would really like you and the investors to know how good his fraud device is, but you have to promise not to use it to do crimes. Also, if you are afraid of his fraud device he would like to sell you fraud device protection.

But they do. Lots of crap has “AI powered” plastered on the investor prospectus with no real world application. The worst Ive seen has been targeted at audiences that wernt burned by .com, such as in China, but even in the US youll have a hard time finding a startup that doesnt incorporate AI in some way.

It would be pretty unusual for a company on the scale of Facebook or Microsoft to go under due to a bubble like this, although it is slightly possible they might slip down a tier in the shuffle. Its more likely well see lots of shitty little companies tacking AI onto things that dont need AI go under, and the speculative ventures burning investor money on market share or technologies that may never turn profitable will be thinned out greatly. Its also possible we could see some big names that dont have revenue outside the AI market suffer financial setbacks and be absorbed. Its also possible the bubble could continue to grow for years and we could see some really ridiculous investments and an even more devastating crash in the end.

Even technologies that totally transform society, like trains or the Internet, can overinvest and eventually pop. It doesnt mean the tech goes away, it just means investors take a bath and the dead weight gets burned off.

Thats less than 50 million GPT plus subscriptions, even fewer if you factor in the more expensive subscriptions. Thats alot of subscriptions, but not an implausible number.

How much joy and creativity do think there was in these places before?

Dont buy a project car if you dont want a project. Some people like that shit, but its not for everyone.

Dont use freaking Arch if your goal is to get everything to work out of the box?