Backwash Economics feat. Ed Zitron
Friend of the show Ed Zitron returns to discuss some of the recent developments in AI "profitability," or rather the fact that, while the economy doesn't hinge on AI in any meaningful way, the capital markets....have gotten themselves into a position where they do. And it's their own fault!
Get more analysis from Ed here!
NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes is about to release their debut album, and you can stream / preview / preorder it on Bandcamp here!
MILO ALERT Check out Milo’s tour dates here:
https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows
Comments (58)
maserati being an apt comparison as they’re poorly built overvalued junk that degrades and loses value far ahead of their supposed useful life cycle
Wait you're telling me that saying Hello to this data processing entity will be considered a waste of processing cycle and thus a hostile act?? I wonder if there's a widely celebrated Science Fiction novel exploring that very idea
November made a point on an episode that we should be wasting compute on generating slop for the purpose of degrading the systems
never been more here for anything than Drunk Lady Magic™️ - can we make it a publicly traded commodity asap? plz n thx
my boosh is mightily amoozed
I just listened to the new Kill The Computer/Worst Of All Possible Worlds collab called "The Smile Merchant" and while I liked it I was a little bit dissapointed to realize it wasn't a reference to The Smiling Man and Ed was not in it...
The amuse bouche song made me lose it...get Johannes Vonk on the phone for that gold
The thing about dating a British sub captain is, you need two people to turn the keys on his chastity cage and one of them has to be American
I wasn't expecting the comment section giving me more psychic damage than the episode itself
𖤐𖤐𖤐Boris Balkan from The Ninth Gate mentioned 𖤐𖤐𖤐
Listening from South Dakota with my lights turned off, doing my part.
Ok so I understand they can't: Afford the LNG, Build the turbines, Transmit the electricity, Build the data center, Install the racks, or Least of all get Nvidia to deliver the cards. How do I convince people (who think they can), that it still won't bring prices down enough for these companies to suddenly be profitable. Let alone have enough demand/revenue to pay off all the cards. I feel like I'm trying to nail Jello to the wall.
Explain the way LLMs work to them. As an algorithm that compares every piece of text ever written by a human being to figure out what the likeliest response is, for every single word it generates. That really made me realize "oh even if you desloppified the code this shit is *expensive*".
Ohio delenda est!
People should talk more seriously about lawyers getting caught using AI when it makes up cases, etc. These aren't just funny stories and are a great example of how limited LLMs are. The entire relevant universe of material for U.S. law can be held in open stacks in maybe a floor of a single building. This is not a lot of material in the grand scheme of things. And it's a very closed universe. And yet LLMs make obvious, very serious errors. In law, they're at least relatively easy to check and catch; not so in a lot of other fields.
Ed’s Biden is fantastic
If I was the CEO of an evil company creating AI coding agents my plan would be: 1. Free tokens until the software companies code base was fully AI generated and could only be navigated with agents. 2. Increasing the prices a lot, as the customers need my product to create new features. 3. Sweeten the deal by only selling licenses to companies and letting them own all the code that their employees create. Thereby giving back the power of the means of production to the capital. Did you know that the workers on the feodal land did quiet quitting just before the industrial revolution? I hope Ed is right and that it is just a bubble.
Yeah they're trying to do this but the code doesn't work and you still need people lol. It's easy to "think like an evil person" if you assume that you're all-powerful, but real evil needs some kind of concession to reality, eventually. The US leadership in every sector refusing to see and do that is what's going to destroy them.
Grinted and ready to party
My encounters with AI-rotted brains have basically always left me wanting to _never_ touch that shit.
people who claim they're getting 200% more done by using it for everything sound like guys who found out they can work way harder and make more money by simply smoking meth on the clock
the missile is embarrassed and also a sleebjy little guy
@52:54 ‘An investment company called CAS(s) End is all I heard… …Riley, You fool; The C is silent’
It's so cool to listen to each of Ed's appearences-- each time you can tell he's reaearched more, and has refined both his critique and his understanding of the speculative bubble around AI and the economy it's rooted in. Last year he was comparing AI to the Dot Com Bubble or the Crisis of 2008, but now he's able to point out the extent to which the comparison is apt and the extent to which the current craze is different. Now he's talking about the yen trade, repos, and the ones and twos of industrial construction. It's great to see.
I like that it's powered by rage and "eat shit and die motherfucker" Like ai is the the perfect Cell to eds gohan
At least we know Milo hasn't been Trotsky'd since he's mentioned in the episode description :) Hopefully he stops "doing his actual job" being a joker, clown, entertainer or whatever so he can come back to his talking into microphone job
If you want a Milo so badly, make a Chinatown with a Chinese museum and a Tea Room. He'll be doing a one-man show in it this week, so if you got your own he might fly back and forth between them like a homing pigeon
The only reason the chatbot seems kind of useful for programmers is because the entire industry is already sloppified in so many different ways. An industry that accepts the "just one more `cargo install` bro!!" philosophy of development naturally will accept the "Make Programming Faster with the Power of String Concatenation" shite. The AI centrist software developers who insist it's quite useful are still being stupid in a different way
People who don't understand programming vs filling in the blanks of an API are the bane of the craft.
As a regular trashfuture listener, I confess I'm a github copilot regular user as software developer. I use it a lot of parallelizing tasks like dispatching something to a background while dealing with something else in the foreground, while I review and revise in background. Since you're wondering what people are really doing XD It's... mostly beneficial for when I can't enjoy reliable focus time but still need something in the background which I can verify in a reasonable amount of time. (Code reviews are generally faster than authorship)
You've heard of consumption smoothing, now get ready for production smoothing. I'm not gonna berate you for using it because I'm not a fucking tool and it's software's fault for being such a nightmare industry that you can't get any peace, but I do hope your company's security testing is robust lol.
My Diet Coke boy is back
OKAY SO the leaked Claude Code frontend has apparently revealed it to, shockingly, be a gargantuan pile of utter festering vibe-coded diarrhoeaic shit! (h/t Pivot to AI) https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930 LITERALLY ALL THIS THING DOES IS CONCATENATE A BUNCH OF STRINGS TOGETHER CONTAINING INSTRUCTION TO 'DO THING GOOD PLS!!!!!' TO THE CLAUDE SERVER WITH A BUNCH OF EXTRA BULLSHIT TO REINFORCE THE PARLOUR TRICK!!!!! FOR EXAMPLE to output JSON (common data format) it asks claude to produce correct json and FEEDS IT INTO A VERIFIER OVER AND OVER UNTIL IT EITHER WORKS OR TIMES OUT to make it seem like it makes less mistakes! It has EXTREMELY OBVIOUS PROMPT INJECTION SECURITY FLAWS! All the prompts are just begging Claude to not add security flaws to the code! They have a regex to detect if the chatbot is being sworn at by the user for some reason??? Also the program feeds AI-generated code back to other claude instances to verify it???? Literally AI prion disease Programmers NOT beating the "dumbest cunts in the entire fucking universe" allegations with their "oh its actually useful for programming!!!!!!!! 🤪🤪🤪🤪🤡🤡🤡🤡" shite
THIS THING IS BEING USED TO CODE WINDOWS 11 FOR FUCKS SAKE!!!! IM GOING TO BLAST MY BRAIN OUT WITH A BLUNDERBUSS
Salesforce is trying to push its AI on its customers and they don’t want it. My husband is a high-tech patent attorney and his clients are Apple, Google, Meta, and Open AI. I have a front row seat for this circus. When they crash and burn he’ll still have plenty of clients. I’ve been a TF supporter for years because they cut through the bullshit. The sooner it crashes the better. Less traffic on the Peninsula.
I miss moviepass so fucking bad
show us the cat, Ed
SHOW US THE CAT
I'm starting to worry our Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks will have their return to greatness cut short by their parent company's amazing investment portfolio.
“I fucking love Garry Tan!” CLIP THAT
Oh shit all those nineties cyberpunk movies were right the Japanese economy is ruining the world
I forget who said it first, but Japan has been living in 2008 since 1978 The joke is twofold about how they were seemingly living in the future for a while but are now noticeably behind technologically in terms of how people live their lives, and how they have massively screwed up their political economy through dodgy finances and a completely captured political party system. All of which prizes stability and seniority over results, even if the results are increasingly terrible
Serious question, how do you not become a complete doomer about everything that’s going on all the time
Keeping faith that if we have the capacity to fuck shit up this irrationally badly, we must have the capacity to make things better.
My company banned ai note taking because we got sued and it made up a whole bunch of meetings and conversations that didn't happen and made the court case go really badly
Surprisingly not a very appealing technology to people who have personal responsibility for records, privacy, things of that nature.
Still no Milo...
You can get authentic Chinese food in any reasonably sized city in the UK these days
We love a girl boss' official portrait in the trash bin.
look, submariner funk is limburger stinkkäse for raunch aficionados
🎶amusing bouche🎶 is my new vocal stim
I am worried that the closing of the strait of Hormuz will affect my ability to purchase a "Walking Taco" from Fat Bastard Burrito since it is served in the bag of Doritos used to make it, and that bag is made from plastic which requires the use of petroleum products. Of course this should be taken in consideration with all the war crimes being committed and genocides occurring.
Austan Goolsbee wrote that about sub prime mortgages? The current head of the Chicago Fed? Oh Jesus.
My favorite professional hater is back
Aww yeah! I’m so grintful Ed is a TF regular!
Oh yeah baby inject that Ed Zitron anti AI hype directly into my veins!
Yes! The most American British man is back!
are you suggesting that he's some sort of mirror world Andrew Tate?