I can’t read the linked FT article but I wanted to mention that Ed Zitron’s podcast Better Offline is interesting for me because he has a contrarian view of tech that is often different from my own. Some of his recent podcasts on the funky economics of excessive AI investments and data center investments vs. any real payoffs for society. I feel my own views slightly shifting when I listen to him.
I value material that makes me re-visit my own assumptions about the world.
I tried listening to a few episodes of his podcast a while back. I stopped because he was spending more time on how mad he is about some problem with big tech than he was on the problem itself.
I'd like to hear stories about big tech abuses, but I don't care much about some random podcaster's anger.
I started reading and listening to Ed after "The Man Who Killed Google Search" but grew tired of him ranting on and on about a technology that "brings no value to the world" while I use it to great effect many times every single day (LLMs).
Most HN criticism of Zitron appears to fall into one of two categories:
1) He uses expletives and is “too angry”
2) He runs a PR firm and has no experience working with LLMs
Which I think says a lot more about his detractors than it does about him. Time will tell all, and I think he will be remembered as a prescient individual. It’s undeniable that these financial games that OpenAI, Oracle, and now Nvidia are playing are unsustainable and indicative of a large upcoming crash.
Is the "mad as hell" an allusion to the movie Network?
> In one impassioned diatribe, Beale galvanizes the nation, persuading viewers to shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" from their windows. He is soon hosting a new program called The Howard Beale Show, top-billed as "the mad prophet of the airwaves".
> It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 25.6 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399893
(Maybe Doctorow has too much of a Guardian vibe, compared to Zitron?)
The Economist would argue that the investor is always right, so maybe that's too hard of a line for FT to press
[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
I value material that makes me re-visit my own assumptions about the world.
I'd like to hear stories about big tech abuses, but I don't care much about some random podcaster's anger.
1) He uses expletives and is “too angry” 2) He runs a PR firm and has no experience working with LLMs
Which I think says a lot more about his detractors than it does about him. Time will tell all, and I think he will be remembered as a prescient individual. It’s undeniable that these financial games that OpenAI, Oracle, and now Nvidia are playing are unsustainable and indicative of a large upcoming crash.
> In one impassioned diatribe, Beale galvanizes the nation, persuading viewers to shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" from their windows. He is soon hosting a new program called The Howard Beale Show, top-billed as "the mad prophet of the airwaves".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)
Scene:
> It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
> Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
> I want you to get mad!
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RujOFCHsxo
* Transcript: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechne...