Lucas has never seen a technology he wasn’t willing to shoehorn and abuse in one of his films.

He’s like the polar opposite of James Cameron.

I mean, I saw 32GB ram sticks going for $1k the other day.

But you can get a Ryzen 9 9950X for under $700. The chips going up into the four and five figures are for very high end video rendering and machine learning.

Electorally of course, you psychos.

Or not, if push really comes to shove.

But you do have to recognize that you can’t just break the fascade of the machine to get it to stop working.

whens the last time you priced a “high end pc”?

👉👈 Maybe five years ago. Even then, I’ll admit “high end” is generous.

$800 is still a ton of money for an ugly pair of glasses with a gimmick nobody has implemented.

I’ve just had so many random bullshit issues with syncing my phone while using a VPN. I’m very reluctant to go to a new OS entirely. Maybe I can dig out an old phone and experiment. But I haven’t even set up a proper Arr suite yet. So I’m not in a rush to add another task to the queue.

I dunno if it’s a pin or belt buckle or earpiece or what

I’ve heard demos on all of these. Bad connectivity, poor interfaces, prone to overheating, very limited use cases… All these gadgets fucking suck.

imagine such a thing with its camera always on, its microphone always recording and ready to talk back, plus whatever other sensors and data streams it has for “awareness.”

Your cellphone ALREADY DOES ALL THIS!

But because it’s a portable touchscreen online TV, it’s still got a few useful functions attached. None of these other widgets offer anything a cell phone can’t do better and cheaper.

I remember this media cycle from the GoogleGlass era. And while the initial reporting was “People are viciously attacking anyone seen wearing them!”, the business post-mortem was more that nobody was buying them to begin with.

These glasses are oversized, heavy, ugly, and pretty much useless for anyone who isn’t a pervert. The sticker price for this largely pointless gadget can go north of $800 retail. That’s a high-end PC or fully loaded PS5 for a small camera that sits on your face and some lenses that give you a Virtual Boy tier of AR overlay.

Who has time for this shit? There’s no use-case.

Unfortunately, this has a habit of becoming a self-reinforcing need for authoritarian policing.

“Flock camera destruction” becomes the rationale for more cameras and more cops and more draconian punishments. And this cycle continues so long as the public continues to send up corporate shills and industry hacks to fill the municipal offices.

Jesus, that’s a form of psychological abuse.

There’s a certain merit to posts with high interactions getting a higher priority to posts that were sent more recently. I didn’t enjoy the Facebook spam that started popping up as people gamed the system. 10,000 “Your friend is playing Fart Hospital! Your friend just pooped himself in Fart Hospital! Your friend has made an Epic Fart at Fart Hospital!” posts because someone didn’t realize the game they were playing was posting to their feed.

But they got the Reddit disease, where engagement was everything. And then you started losing sight of media you cared about under a pile of Shrimp Jesus clickbait.

I think, at the end of the day, the Facebook internal metrics changed from “Are our users happy?” to “Are our users meth addicts?”

There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story about Zuckerberg originally being very resistant to turning Facebook into another Yahoo or MySpace or similar ad-swamped interface, on the grounds that it would scare people away and create a drag on growth. It even got a send-up in The Social Network movie.

Whether this was an intentional business strategy or a second order effect, Facebook was originally one of the cleanest Web 2.0 sites. They did a genuinely pretty good job of focusing on media you were flagged as caring about and showing you activity of friends and family who you wanted to follow. More savvy early users even commented on how creepy Facebook could get, precisely because it could find your friends better than you could and bait you with interactions that drew people together.

The modern iteration of the company is so far away from what it was originally designed to be. The Shrimp Jesus clickbait era Facebook might as well make it a different website. I cannot imagine anyone seeing this site coming into college Freshman year and finding anything that makes it appealing.

Regardless, it should be fairly obvious that giving a company you hate money will not cause them to fail faster.

I’ll concede that trying to soak Altman for $14k/mo when he’s already hemorrhaging billions is a bit like pissing in the river.

I might ask what you plan to do with the $14k in tokens you’re burning. If you’ve got a material use case for them, and Altman wants to sell you $20 for a nickel, go wild.

But half the joke of AI is that you’re burning tokens to do nothing. That’s why businesses recoil as soon as they’re asked to justify at-cost AI spend.

Despite the popular fantasy, the rich and powerful are not stupid.

Uh… famously untrue. Mental illness has plagued monarchs, pharaohs, and caesers for millennia. That’s long before you get to all the quirked up white boys and trad rad girl bosses currently running things.

You don’t know more about a company or market from passively consuming headlines than the leadership of that company.

Okay, but you can review their balance sheets and their primary lines of credit. Case in point, Sam Altman is heavily reliant on three big financial partners - Softbank, Oracle, and NVIDIA. Two of these are - themselves - hemorrhaging money thanks to large capital outlays that have failed to produce substantive returns.

There are finance journalists who get out ahead of this and report their own analysis. And you can find that in a thousand different private journals, substacks, and podcasts. But you can also go do the grunt work yourself if you’re ambitious.

OpenAI’s financials have been disclosed already (although the official SEC filing is still upcoming). So… just read them if you doubt what you’re reading in the news. But it’s not some kind of secret that the business is operating at a loss, with a fixation on debt-fueled growth. The argument is over future projected revenue, which isn’t something business leadership can be any more certain of than a passive media consumer.

I definitely get the knee-jerk impulse to announce “business professionals know more about business than internet idiots”. Because, sure. True. But the idea that business professionals don’t routinely make bad decisions has some pretty historic well-established counterpoints.

“The business people know more” line is akin to saying “This used car dealer must know more about the vehicles on his lot than I do, so I can trust him”.

The fine troy ounce is the traditional unit of appraisal.

Famously, in 1974

There’s a ton of pictures from that visit, as well.

How many kwh/year does one paycheck cover?

I don’t doubt the congestion is real, as consumption - especially data consumption - rapidly expands to fill its container.

I might suggest that some of the early adopters and insiders are receiving subsidy rates in order to goose Elon’s investor briefs on adoption. And the folks on the back end who are eating the exploding prices exist to pad Musk’s proposed future revenue estimates.

“We added 10,000 people a day for the last 30 days, even as we raised rates from $10/day to $100/day!” tells a very attractive story to investors without tipping your hand and revealing what the next 30 days will look like. But it also becomes a kind-of self-fulfilling prophecy, when it results in banks giving you another hundred billion dollars in low-interest credit to expand your network.

It’s sort of the problem akin to robbing Ft. Knox. Most people just don’t have a bag big enough to carry it all away. The Chinese economy is one of the few big enough to support the kind of multi-billion dollar data centers that can accumulate and process data at scale.

But even beyond that, a lot of the modern underlying technology for AI is in the process of relating the data and inferring the resulting answer. Where Altman’s whiners want to claim theft is in the raw data they’ve (illegally) scraped and compiled. Where Chinese firms have innovated is in the speed and accuracy of aggregating the data and returning useful results.

One reason why Altman keeps saying he needs another trillion dollars for hardware and electricity is that his models are shit and his approach is largely brute-force. His overseas rivals - DeepSeek, Moonshot, Stepfun, etc - have invested far more in the actual logical design of their systems. The end result is the kind of video rendering that rendered Sora obsolete almost as soon as it was released. And the kind of advanced coding that’s scaring the shit out of the engineers at Claude and Gemini.

That’s why dense urban communities prefer using ground fiber and big routing stations to cellar satellite, sure.

But now we’re talking about the real bandwidth capacities, not the pricing for connectivity.

You all acting like green energy has to be mutually exclusive to one another.

I certainly don’t. But I agree, there’s a lot of ideas that die on the cutting room floor because they don’t pander to a specific lobbying interest.