AI Economics for Dummies - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

1. Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape. Alex asks for the full $12 billion up front and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit this month; his ARR is $120 billion, and his profits are trending up at an infinite rate. The Wall Street Journal’s business editor moves into Alex’s house, having accepted a part-time position as Alex’s human footstool. He never asks to see the books.

This is the best explanation of how the AI bubble works that I've read.

Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott:

One approach, proposed by Google Research, is what you might call a “token auction.” In this model, advertisers don’t buy ad slots on a page. Instead, they bid, token by token, on the actual text the model generates. Each advertiser brings their own LLM, and an auction mechanism decides whose model gets to influence the next word. The output is a weighted blend of competing interests, shaped by who’s willing to pay more.

Another approach – also from Google researchers – fits the new “Search” much more precisely. It’s called “prominence allocation.” Here, when a user submits a query with commercial intent, the system runs an auction that doesn’t just decide which ads appear, but how prominently the LLM writes about each one. The auction outputs a prominence score for each advertiser, essentially telling the model: give this product 35 words, that one 20, and this one zero. The ad isn’t next to the answer. The ad is the answer. Or rather, it shapes how much space and enthusiasm each product gets within the answer.

This is terrible. I’m glad I signed up for Kagi a while back.

It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly | The New Yorker:

In a world where a tool like TikTok can, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly convince untold thousands of users that maybe Osama bin Laden wasn’t so bad, or in which new A.I. models can, in the span of only a year, introduce a distressingly human-like intelligence into the daily lives of millions, we have no other reasonable choice but to reassert autonomy over the role of technology in shaping our shared story. This requires a shift in thinking. Decades of living in a technopoly have taught us to feel shame in ever proposing to step back from the cutting edge. But, as in nature, productive evolution here depends as much on subtraction as addition.

It's difficult to understand the influence of technology on your own mind. I think I keep looking for the straw that breaks the camel's back, and I'm strongly suspecting AI is it for me.

How to reverse AI brain rot — A note to myself:

Keep skills alive that a machine could easily replace, even if it's inefficient. Cooking, writing, repairing, designing etc. Automate everything else if you don't see value in it. But don't just over-automate for the sake of it.

Examples include:
— Try to fix things when they break, sewing, wrenching, have fun with it
— Write long form articles just for the sake of it, it helps you think better
— Edit photos yourself instead of using presets, train your eye and mind
— Write code or design by hand even if AI could do it for you. If you find a task that you actually enjoy, do it manually even if it takes longer.

It’s good to see reminders that what we actually need more of are ways to remain human, and practice human skills. I’m increasingly of the mind that sitting at a computer for 8+ hours a day is decidedly not human.

How to usher in an era of abundant donuts • Buttondown:

What would you say to someone who proclaims, “I want to be a donut maker,” but has never actually made a single donut in their life?

You say “That’s awesome. What can I do to help?”

This is a beautiful essay.

Team Mirai and Democracy - Schneier on Security:

Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics.
In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations.

This is fascinating. I don't know enough about it yet, or have thought through it enough yet to say if it's good, but it is fascinating.

I’m OK being left behind, thanks! – Terence Eden’s Blog:

There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero? No. That's obviously nonsense. It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful.

Seconded.

How to do the work • Buttondown:

The cruelest thing the tech industry ever did was to tell you that they cared about you. They built you nice campuses, they called you family, they gave you clothes with their name on it. They fed you, they washed your clothes, they got you to ride in their Pride floats. They made you feel like you had not just a job, but a community. And yes, they paid you well. The stupidest thing we ever did—and I say this with nothing but love for you in my heart—but the stupidest thing we ever did was to believe it. IT was neither true, nor never-ending.
The same industry that once called you family is now using the fruits of your labor to commit war crimes. The same industry whose leaders once posted front-page missives to their sites about doing a better job in terms of diversity and inclusion are now selling their technology to fascists who use it to bomb schools.
The industry has decided what it wants to be.

Why I Love FreeBSD - IT Notes:

Which is one of the reasons why every time I attend a BSD conference, I come home even more in love with the project: the vibe of the community, the dedication of the developers, the presence of a Foundation that is strong and effective without being domineering or self-important - which, compared to the foundations of other major Open Source projects, makes it genuinely remarkable. Faces that have been part of this project for over twenty years, and still light up the moment they find their friends and start talking about what they've been working on. That positivity is contagious - and it flows directly into the code, the project, the vision for what comes next. Because that's the heart of it. FreeBSD has always been an operating system written by humans, for humans: built to serve and to be useful, with a consistency, documentation, pragmatism, and craftsmanship that most other projects - particularly mainstream Linux distributions - simply don't have.

I too have been a fan of FreeBSD, and its cousin OpenBSD, for a long time. When I got my start in the tech industry back in the very early 2000's (after a few years working in radio communications and encryption in the Navy), one of the first things we did was start building web servers, firewalls, and proxies out of OpenBSD and FreeBSD. It was far more difficult to do back then, and we used to beg our boss, the Senior Chief, to let us use Linux. He wisely refused and insisted we learn the system from the ground up. I owe my career to those early decisions and the obsession it sparked in me to know the machine as much as I could from the inside out.

Unfortunately, Linux won the popularity contest, so it's Linux that runs every major cloud provider and service in the world. Linux is amazing, don't get me wrong, but it'll never hold the place in my heart that FreeBSD does.

In fact, one of the things that drew me to the Mac was knowing that underneath that beautiful and functional UI was a FreeBSD Unix core. So… maybe BSD did win the popularity contest after all.

I still day dream about leaving the cloud and running a datacenter again, with the host OS of every server is FreeBSD, and the guests are all running either in bhyve or hosted in jails. It'd be reliable, functional, and secure. Beautiful.

New ways to learn math and science in ChatGPT | OpenAI:

Shot:

In early testing, college and high school age students said the interactive experience helped them better understand how variables relate to one another. Parents said it gave them a more dynamic way to walk through problems alongside their children. Educators said tools like this could help students understand how concepts work, instead of simply memorizing formulas.

Chaser:

Altman said, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,”

Sam Altman Says Intelligence Will Be a Utility, and He’s Just the Man to Collect the Bills

Putting computers in schools to begin with wasn't a great idea. Putting computers with AI into our schools is a disaster.