The 2000s internet was way bigger than the 2026 internet. Every google search pulls up the same 50 sites now, and the first page will be split between just two sites, as if I needed 6 slightly different Amazon links about a book I was googling.
In the 2000s you could literally use google to scrape for open camera feeds; it was just internet-grep. Random people had extensive pages about their random hobbies. The actual internet was buried when the search engines decided to ignore queries and guide traffic, and eventually mostly disappeared. Back then there was more variety on youtube; there was more variety on myspace than is now on facebook.
People spend more time on the internet now, but it's just scrolling versions of the same 20 stories of the day linked from the same 50 sites on the same 5 social network feeds. Even those 50 sites are all owned by the same 10 people, which means you get between one and two self-interested perspectives on those 20 stories. The rest of the internet is filled with slop and the rest of your feed (from real people you don't even really know) is repoasts that they imitated from seeing them updooted somewhere else. It's positively claustrophobic.
The catch is that they eliminated public space and made unmediated communication suspicious and borderline illegal, so where are you going to go? Find somebody on an app to hang out with? Watch some netflix? Isn't that still the internet? Make your kids put down their phones and talk to you? How are you going to have a party if you don't post it on facebook?
If you're running ublock, [edit: after accepting] just block the elements - kill the dark overlay, kill the big subscribe box that slides in at the bottom. There's nothing else.
CNN still doesn't have much worth reading, certainly not this. This isn't a real trend, this is a party a friend of the author threw.
I have no idea why so many people think that an argument that AI works is the same thing as an argument that AI will be profitable.
The better AI gets, the better the training techniques get, and the better the algorithms get will result in fewer processors needed to run something of use. All of the advances will end up in the public domain if not immediately after or before they are even implemented, soon after. There will not be many economies of scale between having 100M customers or 10K customers, so no way to keep out competitors. They will all compete on price. If the models get really, really good, a "good enough" model will end up running on your old laptop and you won't have to pay for anything.
Saying that AI will be productive - which is yet to be seen, I don't know how much polishing or complete rethinking your code will have to go through before it can ship as an actual product that you have to stand behind and support - is not the same as saying that AI will be profitable.
We actually don't even need that many computer programs. Hypothetically, a ton of excess LLM coding supply might allow us to take out a few layers of expensive abstraction from our current stacks, and make more code even less necessary. They kept telling us that all of that abstraction was a result of trying to save developer labor costs, right? If AI is productive and rentiers can't manage to extract that productivity due to competition, that equation changes.
In the end, we say that the dot com bubble resulted in a huge amount of productive capacity that we were later able to put to use. But that doesn't mean that putting a quarter of a billion 90s dollars into DrKoop.com was a good idea; nope, still dumb.
> I have no idea why so many people think that an argument that AI works is the same thing as an argument that AI will be profitable.
The fact that it works well for expensive categories of output (like software engineering, legal strategy, etc...) makes it difficult to imagine that it won't be profitable. You could still make an argument that the investments being made today are disproportionate, or that intense competition will stifle margins, but it's creating enough value to capture plenty of money.
They're so obviously going to fail, but in a good way. The idea is that they were going to get the world addicted then raise the prices, but the reality is that there's going to be a race for the bottom in pricing because none of them are significantly better than the others. They don't own anything, it's just math; they can be undercut by an OSS bomb from China at any given moment.
Even worse, they've bet against the math not advancing. If it gets significantly more power-efficient, which literally could happen tomorrow if the right paper goes up on arxiv, maybe a 10 year old laptop could give "good enough" results. All those data centers are now trash and your companies are now worth a negative trillion dollars.
I think all of these factors are completely independent of whether AI works or not, or how well it works. Personally, I don't care if it replaces programmers: get another job. I just have experienced it, and it is at this point mediocre.
Of course I am not using the bleeding edge, and I am not privy to the top secret insider stuff which may well be orders of magnitude better. But if they've got it, why would they keep it a secret when people are desperate to give them money? If they're hiding it, it's something that they know that somebody could analyze and knock off, and then it's a race for the bottom again.
In a race for the bottom, we all win. Except the people and economies who bet their lives on it being a race to the top.
He can't actually believe it. He's pretending like he doesn't know how numbers work, and burying it in words. There's a difference between a 1% tariff, a 2% tariff, and a 25% tariff. Just like there's a difference in forcing you to accept anticircumvention laws and forcing you to give up Greenland.
> Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. I'm really sorry."
> That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed US Big Tech companies to declare open season on their people's private data and ready cash.
> The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!
Comparing having any tariff to having your house burned down is pretending that it's not possible just to have your barn burned down. Or to have a window painted over. Or to have to trim the branches on your trees. Which ask is going to push you to the point where you give up your coffee industry? Nah, let's pretend not to know that all of this can be quantified, and that Hungary has any real leverage over the US on its own.
If the US is asking too much from Hungary, Hungary can go to China or India - but China or India can ask for anything marginally less than what the US asked for, or can even agree with the US to ask for exactly what the US asked for. And Europe has cut itself off from Russian resources for ideological reasons, so it can't even take advantage of the fact that Russia's market for its resources is somewhat limited.
He's suffering from applause addiction. China can do what they want because they are not a dependency of the US. Europe is. If anything, with all of his invective about Orban (because Orban is ideologically unpleasant), Hungary is in a better position than Europe as a whole because the Orban government doesn't have the self-destructive Russophobia that the rest of Europe does. Hungary can choose at any time whether to be in Europe or to rely on Russia, and China. That's more leverage than Europe has.
I think they meant he feels like saying “fuck you,” even if it burns down the world around him. That’s a real human impulse. But it’s important to distinguish folks who want to watch the world burn from those floating serious solutions.
He seems pretty emphatic that everything is burning and that we are watching it burn, right now, because it is on fire, presently. Is it your interpretation that Doctorow is a fan of this administration’s actions and wants them to continue? Or that he is advocating for a sort of… double fire? Like lighting fire on fire?
Is there a physical world analogy for what you’re describing in terms of burning/not burning?
Trump threatened an extra 10% tariffs on countries that don't think the US should be taking over Greenland. Who knows what dumb reason he'll come up with next?
Under this regime, the US is eventually going to develop into something similar to Japan under Sakoku - a nonfactor in international trade, due to a self-imposed embargo.
Of course it'll hurt former US trade partners (and the US itself even more!). But it's coming either way, whether we suck up to Americans or not. With that in mind, we might as well just do what we want since the US is for some reason voluntarily giving up power over us.
> Trump threatened an extra 10% tariffs on countries that don't think the US should be taking over Greenland
And that would be a good reason for tearing up a FTA.
It would cost Europeans more, financially, than the tariffs. Probably tip the EU into a recession without significant deficit spending and ECB intervention. But I think it’s the sort of thing that’s geostrategically worth threatening if your population and political structure lets you credibly do so.
(Note: shredding trade deals to the point that IP stops mattering != ratifying the new thing.)
Also having individual EU member states publicly announcing and committing to ratifying the Eu-Canada CETA within a 1 year time frame like they did for the EU-India FTA would be a significant message that also doesn't require shooting oneself in the foot.
States within the EU may also have to make peace with the need to expanding ties with regional powers like Israel, KSA, UAE, Egypt, etc in a strategic instead of tactical framework.
IK the latter is in the pipeline, the former less so due to electoral risks.
The Do Not Track header didn't die because of an arms race, it died because there wasn't any legislation making it criminal to track people who had explicitly indicated to you that they did not wish to be tracked.
Kids (especially ones close to the age of legal access anyway) will try (and succeed) in bypassing any sort of restriction on adult content including any of the digital ID garbage. There are any number of software scams targeting everybody, and your hypothetical just be another one; I doubt that it would increase the total number of such scams.
But requiring sites with adult content by law to require what would sort of be the opposite of Do Not Track flag (Let Me In?) would at least mean that kids would have to do something illicit on the client side to access adult websites that they would have to hide from their parents. If you made sure their phone or Chromebook was nerfed, you could make sure they couldn't install extensions or software that added the flag, you could strip it from their network requests; you could even strip it at the router. [edit: you could even opt-in with your phone company to strip it from your kid's phone's network requests.] You as a parent, and people who have nothing to do with kids, could trivially opt-in.
> The Do Not Track header didn't die because of an arms race, it died because there wasn't any legislation making it criminal to track people who had explicitly indicated to you that they did not wish to be tracked.
That was the first big problem. The second was that some versions of MSIE set the header by default, without the user having taken any action to request it. This made it infeasible for any major web sites to honor the header - by doing so, they'd break functionality for most MSIE users. (MSIE was, at the time, still the dominant desktop web browser.)
Only if you think that government's only purpose is to look pretty. Economies are planned. You can either plan them as governments, or let your oligarchs and foreign oligarchs plan them together ("market forces.") These only look the same when you allow oligarchs to determine your governments.
At the very least, you want domestic oligarchs determining your governments. Their power is based in your country, and they might have a bit of sentimentality on top of that. Leaving it to "market forces" is just watching, not participating.
If some guy in Canada builds something better than current US tech, he's going to sell it to a US oligarch and probably move there, too.
edit: "Our ambition cannot stop there though. In far too many cases, our governments, universities, schools, and other public institutions—not to mention private businesses—are run on Microsoft or Google services. Now is the perfect time to get governments off Microsoft 365 and schools off Google Classroom by properly resourcing a new public agency or Crown corporation dedicated to building technology in the public interest."
This has always been the only answer, but it requires a relatively clean government. The government has to maintain ownership of these things, and cannot subcontract out the work.
The fact is that there is no potential there. Europe has no leverage over the US. It is not holding back anything, it has nothing.
Somehow when the US went to war with Russia, it ended up completing the conquest of Europe. Europe used to just be stagnant. Now it is stagnant and isolated from everywhere except the US, and the US treats it accordingly.
> ASML relies on the United States for several of its components, and it’s this very reliance that has allowed the United States to use the Foreign Direct Product Rule and impose export controls on ASML products. However, there are signs of a shift. ASML has already started to reduce its dependence on American technology, aligning with the EU’s goal of strategic autonomy. Earlier this month, ASML announced a major investment in Mistral, France’s flagship AI startup. The Dutch firm invested $1.5 billion in Mistral, becoming the company’s largest shareholder. The deal was widely seen by policymakers as a move that strengthens European ‘digital sovereignty.’ In a sector dominated by American tech giants, ASML’s Mistral investment represents a growing realization from Europe: cooperation within the bloc is necessary for the EU to stay competitive in the AI race.
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I don't follow, how exactly does the investment into a French AI startup reduce ASML's "dependence on American technology"? Is it a supply-chain dependence, or a revenue-making dependence?
Fox News has never cared about Greenland, and was energetically anti-Trump during the 2016 primary, most of his 1st term, during the Biden presidency, and during the 2024 primary. They're almost fully in the bag for him right now, but hate tariffs.
But even now, Fox News refused to sign on to the new Pentagon press pass requirements, and gave up their access.
Important things are going on. It's not good to mindlessly repeat tropes; we have to actually engage with the world as it is.
It's not about Fox News pushing the Greenland annexation bullshit, it's for everything else they did to be a mouthpiece to spread the "libs are bad!". These acts have a direct link to the power Trump amassed.
Refusing the Pentagon prrss requirements is a nothingburger when for the past 10-15 years it brainrotted a large cohort of the American population.
In the 2000s you could literally use google to scrape for open camera feeds; it was just internet-grep. Random people had extensive pages about their random hobbies. The actual internet was buried when the search engines decided to ignore queries and guide traffic, and eventually mostly disappeared. Back then there was more variety on youtube; there was more variety on myspace than is now on facebook.
People spend more time on the internet now, but it's just scrolling versions of the same 20 stories of the day linked from the same 50 sites on the same 5 social network feeds. Even those 50 sites are all owned by the same 10 people, which means you get between one and two self-interested perspectives on those 20 stories. The rest of the internet is filled with slop and the rest of your feed (from real people you don't even really know) is repoasts that they imitated from seeing them updooted somewhere else. It's positively claustrophobic.
The catch is that they eliminated public space and made unmediated communication suspicious and borderline illegal, so where are you going to go? Find somebody on an app to hang out with? Watch some netflix? Isn't that still the internet? Make your kids put down their phones and talk to you? How are you going to have a party if you don't post it on facebook?
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