cm277

Yes, this simplifies history a lot. The US chose to run a different kind of empire, based on international rules/norms/orgs that it more or less controlled, directly or indirectly: the World Bank, IMF, the UN (mostly), but also banking/USD payments and infra, telecom (AT&T and ARPAnet), oil (7 sisters) and the US Navy (and its bases and carriers) are all imperial infrastructure. I am probably forgetting a ton more.

The brilliant part of this is that they don't look like that and that they also need (some/a lot) the consent of the protectorates or allies --but so did previous empires.

The problem is the same: having an empire has responsibilities, not just benefits. And that's what we've forgotten (both in the US and the West in general).

I strongly suspect a big chunk of their revenue was enterprise where it was probably used as a CRUD app / Access replacement with proper controls. That's low hanging fruit for Claude and friends, so their renewals/ARR must have started dropping off and they sold while the selling was good.

Agreed that he has an extreme POV (or more accurately that he trolls for views/subscriptions). But his central argument is valid: if AI underdelivers financially, this bubble will burst and this bubble is magnitudes larger than what we've seen before, so there could be very rough seas ahead.

The question is: what does "underdeliver" mean here? the pro-AI arguments I am seeing in this thread are equating mass adoption to agentic coding. Er, I dont know of any trillion dollar cap companies that sell dev tools. The point is Zitron doesn't have to be 100% right for his central prediction to come true.

As a Euro/American, it's kind of shocking to me that the US is fast re-inventing communism (and fascism) from first principles: apparently, industries and technologies are 'good' or 'bad' based on their alignment with the ideology of a vocal 'elite'. Last time this happened (70s) we put nuclear energy on a shelf and ended up with global warming.

The West has invented a perfect mechanism for controlling the use of resources for the common good: money. If water is a scarce resource, charge a lot of money for it. If AI (or whomever) can pay for it, so be it, other sources of water (desalination perhaps?) will be invented.

I am saying this as a liberal and an AI-sceptic: Ideology should never outweigh outcomes.

Oh, you mean the declining economy with (checks notes) the largest startup ecosystem in Europe? :-)

The problem isn't that. The problem is that I can't go to a German bank with a non-German tax ID (and without German residency) and get a loan. I am limited to the handful of banks in my country (and Germans to theirs).

FICO doesn't just do aggregation, they also do integration: as an American, running away from credit card debt to a small credit union (a community bank in the States) is as bad as stiffing Citi or JPMorgan.

The American credit market is far more liquid than Europe, partly because it's much larger (one market as opposed to 27) but also because its graded and stratified: as a bank/fund you can choose the risk you want to take and take it accordingly. We're definitely missing that down to individual/SME scale.

You got it, FICO/Equifax/Transunion stop it. The $20k is basically raised on the founders' credit, not the LLCs; richer founders can get a lot more credit right up front. And yes, FICO is probably infeasible in the EU with current laws, that's the point. Fix that first, these businesses are just as critical as actual banks.

As an entrepreneur with businesses in both the US and EU, a federation is probably several steps too far from political will. Instead:

- Let banks operate and merge across borders, especially neobanks/fintechs. European banks are easily 10+ yrs ahead of the US in terms of tech and customer service but they lack scale and capital, especially in the credit side of things.

- Credit, again: we need the equivalent of D&B/Fico for Europe: a single credit bureau that can judge creditworthiness of people and organizations. Even the US has solved this through private companies, why can't Europe? Fellow Euros are shocked when I tell them that a 0-day LLC in the US can get $20k in credit card limits almost immediately.

The rest are easy, especially for web/internet companies. But if we have to raise credit/money based on the rules of the biggest (and slowest!) economies, then the EU is fucked.

Same background as you and I fully agree. Again and again you see market/economic takes from technologists. This is not a technology question (yes, LLMs work), it's an economics question: what do LLMs disrupt?

If your answer is "cost of developing code" (what TFA argues), please explain how previous waves of reducing cost of code (JVM, IDEs, post-Y2K Outsourcing) disrupted the ERP/b2b market. Oh wait, they didn't. The only real disruption in ERP in the last what 30 years, has been Cloud. Which is an economics disruption, not a technological one: cloud added complexity and points of failure and yet it still disrupted a ton of companies, because it enabled new business models (SaaS for one).

So far, the only disruption I can see coming from LLMs is middleware/integration where it could possibly simplify complexity and reduce overall costs, which if anything will help SaaS (reduction of cost of complements, classic Christensen).

After years with a mini, I jumped to an Air just so I could finally get a proper 'netbook' experience. Don't like Chromebooks, Windows is too complex; there is room for a simplified laptop that is easy to use and update but let's you use proper apps without going all the way to a full laptop with pro tools.

I've started to see this as a generational challenge. I am Gen X, I used to run FreeBSD and Linux, I don't mind the complexity and upkeep of a Windows laptop with all the trimmings (I do mind the complexity of the unixes, sorry). But what about Gen Z who are used to simple, powerful technology with simplified apps and UIs? why would they/should they put up with legacy UX and ways of working?

My guess is that where Microsoft is going with the new Office apps which are just web apps with thicker clients. Simplify, simplify until we can all work with iPads, Windows/ARM or whatever. Makes sense to be honest, although I'll probably keep a Thinkpad around the way old mechanics keep a set of tools in the garage although they will probably never use them again.

Yes, this. Microsoft has other businesses that can make a lot of money (regular Azure) and tons of cash flow. The fact that they are pulling back from the market leader (OpenAI) whom they mostly owned should be all the negative signal people need: AGI is not close and there is no real moat even for OpenAI.

This reminds me of the old XKCD about inventing new standards... fine, you get an EU Inc corporate model. What's the labor law applied for employees? what is the tax regime, and which countries will take in taxes? what about oh, I don't know liability, insurance, debt and bankruptcy, etc, etc.?

A company is a legal person within a jurisdiction --of which all of the laws apply to every person. You can't have an EU Inc without a federal EU. Heck even the US doesnt have a US Inc. This is naive at best.

UI is fashion-driven like clothing or furniture or car design. That's not new, it's just hard to admit for us techies that such a thing exists in our world. And just like with fashion, some changes are not for 'better' but for 'cooler' or 'more interesting'. The question is how far on the 'worse' scale you're willing to go to get up on the 'cool' scale. Otherwise, we'd all still be running Windows Server 2000...

Agreed. Text is used for a lot of things. A fantastic text parser/generator that doesn't need regex and can extract /meaning/ would have been a sci-fi fever dream even a decade ago. So, LLMs will definitely have their use and will probably disrupt several industries.

But this hype-storm just reminds me of the fever-dream blogs about the brave new world of the Internet back when hypertext became widely used in '93 or so (direct democracy, infinite commerce, etc, etc). Yes, of course, the brave new world came along, but it needed 3G and multi-touch screens as well and that was 15 years later and a whole different set of companies made money and ruled the world than those that bet on hypertext.

I havent coded in years, so I'll take your word for the potential of AI in SWE. But, software development has guardrailed against bad code with unit testing, CI/CD, etc. Also, productivity / output can be measured more-or-less well. Partly for that reason, it's also used to efficiency shifts (say from C++ to Java; or Perl to anything...) and those are not usually massive, all-or-nothing changes.

Where's the equivalent in customer support? or document creation? or any of these other mythical AI use cases? genuinely asking.

The article makes a good case that the SaaS bubble is deflating and needs a new hype cycle to keep investment up. AI makes sense for that, so at least that's one good use case :-)

So, serious question: if OpenAI is "a few thousand days from AGI" and about to dominate the GenAI space, why can they not hold on to execs? why is there no amount of options/money they can use to retain them with?

I mostly agree with

Agreed; I dont remember the source but I much prefer the Marines → Navy → Police continuum. Some circumstances require a highly capable team with high communication, aligned goals and motives, who can take decisions individually or at a low enough level. Some circumstances require bureaucracy, process, external and internal controls.

The dumb "Founder mode" discourse hides away two things: a) scale forces you to climb that ladder towards bureaucracy and controls anyway, b) it's scope-specific. You don't want to go "Founder mode" on phone support. Or accounts payable, or probably HR. There are specific objectives, projects and also circumstances that need a more hands-on approach. And honestly a "Marines" analogy where the team is tight and authorized to make decisions, is better than some micro-managing, coke-fueled "Founder mode".

The cry to "break up the monopolies" bugs me. Maybe because I am old enough to remember the failed Microsoft case or to have lived the re-unification of AT&T into, well, AT&T.

If you really do believe that the tech giants need to be reigned in, breaking them up is NOT the way to do it. It's a red herring, a quixotical quest that will eat up time, money and opportunity costs for newer, better companies. Break-ups will be litigated endlessly, we'll end up talking about who benefits from what and at the end either nothing will happen or some business unit(s) will be spun out as sacrificial lambs so that the main behemoths can keep printing cash.

The correct answer IMHO is "tax and regulate". Recognize that big tech are now infrastructure companies, massive railways on which international commerce happens and that they need to be taxed as such and regulated. As in regulated for minimum service levels, for liability on what happens on their rails (see Crowdstrike), for access to their platforms to others, for competing against their own customers. Regulate them, tax them, squeeze their margins down to something reasonable, turn them into, well, AT&T.

No, that won't kill them and it would be much less dramatic than a breakup (and would feel less satisfactory, for sure). But it could actually happen relatively quickly and would push them to their natural place, i.e. platforms and utilities on top of which younger, hungrier companies can build.

Google can be more easily understood as a bunch of businesses that funnel traffic into an ad marketplace. Search, Android, GMail, Maps, Chrome, everything is just about having enough traffic and enough behavioral data to make them the biggest ad seller ever. But they are also the broker and price-setter. That's how they make money, not on the quality of their services --which OK, they have to maintain to a competitive standard: easy to do when you are printing money.

So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.

Genuinely curious as I've been looking into starting a coding camp for my city: what are the unforeseen risks you saw in your experience? or delights?

After being initially dazzled, I've drifted firmly into the camp of "this hype cycle is nonsense". I get why VCs/Startups/investors/legislators want (or even need) a hype cycle in a post-ZIRP economy, in an election year, with geo instability. But there's nothing, neither data/evidence that LLM === AGI or even a path that points towards LLM → AGI.

AFAICT, LLMs are stochastic predictors of words within a large context. If you transfer (pun intended) that behavior over to humans, you would call a person like that a bullshitter, or at best a salesguy :-) A bullshitter as a person or team member is useful, but not scalable in the singularity sense: you can scale its output in terms of quantity, but not quality: the stochastic parrot may move prospects through the funnel (necessarily to a higher-IQ actual salesperson) but it will not create a patent from scratch (and probably will not close a deal).

So, we're not getting AGI. Given that the stochastic approach has hit scalability limits (there's no more data to feed), we need a new approach. Are there approaches that can bring AGI outside of LLMs? (AlphaZero?) Or is our industry just a bunch of stochastic parrots that complete every sentence with "eventually we'll have AGI and everything will be either great or destroyed" (which is exactly what an LLM would say at this point)?

I don't know... I have fond memories of SUN (younguns: it stands for Stanford University Network, not our neighboring star), but they screwed up commercially a few too many times and tried too long to hang on to workstations when it was clear they were going away --ironic for a company whose motto was "the Network is the Computer" (definitely best motto of a computer company ever). And SunOS >> Solaris

We need regulation, laws and enforcement, enough with ethics.

Stallman basically preached a Communist manifesto where the tech workers should own the means of production/compute. Communism became popular in the early 20th century because people were scared of a feudal-capitalist future that didn't come to pass --yes, partly because of Communism. However, Big Tech has managed to build exactly that kind of feudal/rentier capitalism without regulation, without oversight and with full market control.

In the end, I don't think Stallman was right wrt the tools needed to stop that future; the GPL was embraced (and then undermined) by Big Tech and became irrelevant. By actually commoditizing the base platform layers, OSS probably enabled the massive cloud/application behemoths on top. More importantly, OSS was useful as a pseudo-competitor to the monopolists --remember when in them midst of the Microsoft-DOJ fracas, MS kept bringing up Linux as its nemesis? how did that turn out? what percentage of Azure are Linux machines? what Big Tech behemoth does NOT run on OSS these days?

But, to his credit, the future that Stallman warned us about did come to pass; his diagnosis was correct, but not the cure he prescribed. The internet is now run by feudal lords that extract rents from anyone trying to work or live on it.

Agreed; this criticism comes from the POV of "the US is richer, so let's do what the US does". Instead, we should see that the US is struggling across many, many dimensions and the inordinate success of American Big Tech / Big Business has a lot to do with it. It's like looking at Dubai and saying "oh they are doing great, let's start drilling".

Instead Europe should focus on what's stopping EU companies from scaling and leveraging their strengths: lower costs, better infrastructure, more diverse customers and employees.

As a founder on both sides of the Atlantic, I would keep it simple:

1. The EU needs a common credit rating system, similar to Duns & Bradstreet in the US (which is a private company mind you, so very possible) and more competition between banks that should be allowed to do business anywhere in the EU. The EU banking system is much better than the US one, but the above stop it from scaling across the continent.

2. EU needs to give higher incentives to EU companies to do business with EU startups. The fragmented EU market means that most valuable European companies end up being very conservative in how they spend their money (because competition is weak / settled). Therefore they are much less likely to do business with startups for normal business risk reasons. That's a chilling effect for B2B companies who are more likely to get traction in the US rather than the EU. A simple insurance or tax credit scheme would go a long way to reduce risk --and would help the EU get their money back from many startup / VC programs they are subsidizing anyway.

Screw voting, they need to run for office. I am Gen X and one of the things that bug me is that we (GenX) haven't had a President from our cohort. Bill Clinton right now is younger than both candidates and he was first president 32 years ago... Our generation has been missing from politics and it may be too late for us: Millennials should step up and run for office.

Ah, I remember reading more or less the same exact thing on /. in 1992, the first (among many) Year of the Linux Desktop. The intervening, holy crap, 32 years have shown that open source is awesome when it scratches a developer/sysadmin itch and your primary customer base are devs/sysadmins. As soon as you want to sell to average Joe users, you need PMs, and UX people, and testers, etc, and the OSS business models have in fact never achieved to get those in the picture: not once in 32 years, an entire generation.

In fact, 32 years later I would go as far as to say that Microsoft has been deviously clever in promoting Open Source as its Great Enemy, the Nemesis that will bring it down. And while we were all busy promoting Libre Office and what have you, Lotus died, Ami Pro died, Word Perfect died. I.e. commercial companies with half a chance to be actual, true, competition. Open Source will not kill Microsoft. Better commercial software is the only thing that can.

Agreed and I dont believe "no warranty" can last that much longer, or in fact should. It was encouraged back in the day when all this computer stuff was new and either walled-off in unis or enterprises or in hobbyist's basements. But the real risk now is in the interconnections; the potential impact is order of magnitudes larger.

The closest metaphor is cars I think. And yes you can argue that innovation in cars has slowed down but also a 'minimum floor' of safety and efficiency forced by governments and insurers has made new entrants more likely. I.e. you shouldn't need to only trust Oracle, SAP with your business because then, erm, you'd have exactly the current situation in enterprise software...

We are not talking about all of open source here; there are crucial bits of code and less crucial bits of code. LZ/OpenSSH was obviously in the first category. How do you determine which ones are more critical? same as you would for a bridge or a plane: by risk, impact, etc. That's basically liability.

And obviously a non-insured piece of code that assumes no liability whatsoever can still be free and maintained via IRC, same as it ever was. I dont see how this "kills all open source".

I actually meant quite the opposite: that contribution should be paid. Yes, it would have to be ring-fenced so that society and the ecosystem would know who contributes what. That would also mean though that someone assumes liability for a piece of code; when you do that, you add value (economic not just source-code) and thus you should / have to be paid --by whom? the hundreds of commercial companies that use your code and whose liability you are reducing.