Hot modems, dinergorths, the platform bottleneck, and the SaaSpocalypse - Related to your interests, Monday

Also: sovereignty’s control plane, 81,000 people tell Anthropic what they want, Google sells its fiber, and oats for the sparrows, and cake

Auto-generated description: Text and graphics illustrate the drastic reduction in token economics and rising AI compute hardware spending, highlighting a more than 300x decrease in costs since GPT-3's launch.
Matt Eastwood, et. al., IDC.

The Kids These Days

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That’s why complacency is key to understanding this framing of downward mobility in 21st century America. The upper middle class needs to believe that the economic woes of others are due to a moral failing. That if the dinergoths really wanted to succeed in America, they could. To contemplate that maybe there are structural forces at play which prevent everyone from being upper middle class is to admit that maybe forces beyond your control could one day push you down that same slope. From 8ball.

Wastebook

  • “If you’re wondering how cold fusion produces pollution, let alone a lot of it, don’t worry, this is explained in a chapter by one teenaged prodigy tennis player to another, wherein the latter is wearing a blindfold to improve his other senses but can’t find a bathroom, so he asks the other player for help, but instead, the other player explains cold fusion in exhaustive detail over such a long period of time that the blindfolded player is nearly peeing in his pants, and it all turns out to be a ploy by the explainer to pressure the blindfolded player (who is a Muslim and drug-free) to give away his urine so the other player and his friends can pass a drug test. Stuff like this happens a lot in IJ.” Infinite Jest Extraction
  • Wow, the eye tracking AI thing in Descript actually works. Now we can all read scripts and pretend like we know how to memorize things!
  • “He made enough money to retire to a farm in Vermont in search of humility.” PE Farm.
  • “your half-zip won’t save you.” Here.
  • “If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows.” John Kenneth Galbraith on the dogma of ‘trickle-down economics.
  • “Walking means you can’t fast forward through anything” Getting around Japan.
  • “vibe porting” Saved $500K/Year
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Nicolas Biddy, 1983(?)

ICYMI

  • Securing AI - More “how do we secure this AI stuff” talk with David Zendzian on today’s live stream. He’s recently gone Claude Crazy so I wanted to get his CISO-supremo talk on thinking through the risk management for AI in enterprises.
  • Field Engineering is the YOLO team - Software Defined Talk #565 - “This week, we discuss big bets gone wrong, OpenAI buying the Python toolchain, and Claude’s favorite tools. Plus, how fast should AI agents ship bug fixes?”

Logoff

Last week was Mila’s sixth birthday, lots of birthday-fun and parties. To a six year old, every day is a chance for awesome, especially when you get presents, four hours to play with friends, and rainbow cakes.

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I think cutting over to micro.blog to post the newsletter is working…right?