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 found "Better Offline" through "Tech Won't Save Us" where Ed is occasionally a guest. It also has some critical takes on technology if you are looking for more of that content.
I found him in the same way, and thought he was interesting and insightful.
But I tried listening to some of his podcasts and read his articles, but just could not suffer them at all. Tech Wont Save Us is worth people's time though - great work there.
Interesting if he really is more convincing in speech than in writing. His writing is certainly flamboyant, but the aggression and expletives seem more targeted at hyping up people who already believe the things he writes, not for making people change their minds. He found a niche in anti-tech grift, and is now exploiting the niche for all he can.
But you might want to actually fact-check a few of the things he says that convince you, because at least for his written articles basically everything is made up or misrepresented. There's plenty of links to sources, sure, but if you follow them down to the primary source what they're saying is very different from what Zitron is implying. It seems hard to believe that he's better at this in spoken form where citing a source is even harder.
Yeah, I have no doubt that he's got some good insights, but its crystal clear that he's just hyping it all up as part of a grift. I get serious Alex Jones vibes from him
I've tried to listen to a few podcasts and read some articles, and its just unbearable. Moreover, I find the main point that he harps on about - that none of the AI stuff is financially sustainable - to be largely unimportant. Like, if they want to burn their money, go for it.
The real issues - intellectual property, implications for the future workforce, environmental costs, or even that the money really ought to be invested in something else, whether public funds are going towards it, if taxes are being avoided etc - seem to be, at best, tertiary concerns for him. He only seems to be "mad as hell" that they're wasting money and no one else is talking about it.
He's also just plainly wrong when he keeps saying things like there's been zero discernable benefit to AI, as if it is just a creepto scam.
What a co-incidence. In the USA the GDP goes up mainly from consumers spending, and business spending to a lesser extent. Otherwise not in relation to any wealth being created or value added by those people and enterprises.
If any.
Heavily weighted toward consumers, OTOH businesses have to spend a fortune before they can make a dent in GDP.
Over any one reporting period, don't worry those periods don't last forever.
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.
The key problem is that his economic analysis is absolute trash. I used to think he was just totally incompetent at it, but given the bias in the errors, it is pretty clearly intentional deception. But it's often pretty hard to address that, because every article he writes is a 10k word gish gallop. I've tried debunking key points a few times in HN comments for just one of the intentional mistakes he makes, and people complain about the reply being too long.
Yeah, his financial arguments are good. But I did listened a but to his podcast ... and good bulk of it is pure ranting. There are episodes with no economic analysis as far aw I can tell, but a stream of complains about Sammy Clammy being idiot and people whose names I dont remember being idiots.
Even his financial arguments are often weak. Of late he’s been constantly ranting about the use of ARR, like that hasn’t been a norm in SaaS businesses for almost two decades now. And that they’re using it to fool… who exactly? Wholesale investors on their current investor roadshow who deal with these things literally every day?
The episode with Shingy also really rubbed me the wrong way too. Just constantly “yeah, but it still hasn’t done anything useful” followed by Shingy relaying numerous examples over and over of how AI has transformed our he things he does, followed by “yeah, but when is it going to do something actually useful?” over and over.
He’s become some one note on the AI stuff it’s tiresome. Moreso given he’s unwilling to actually listen to any other perspective. I wish he’d go back to talking about literally anything else.
When he's making arguments and offering analysis, I think they're very often sound. That's why I (at least sporadically) continue to listen to episodes of his podcast, or read his pieces.
I'd love to read/listen to one that he worked on with a talented editor. I don't mind the swearing or the tone, and I enjoy a good rant here and there, but for me the amount of rambling and ranting obfuscates the good points he's making, just by sheer volume.
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).
The FT recently did a series on 'The AI race', which they described as 'A three-part series exploring the quest for AI capacity and the data centres at the heart of hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investment'
- ‘Absolutely immense’: the companies on the hook for the $3tn AI building boom [1][2]
- Inside the AI race: can data centres ever truly be green? [3][4]
I've said this many times but I'll say it again. The FT is not some single opinion org. It has many writers and many editors of various opinions. The FT itself does not take any angle, only it's writers and editors, who can have contradictory views and still publish articles in the same media org.
This holds for most newspapers and makes that whole fake news argument so infuriating. As if journalists had even 15 minutes in a day to coordinate how to present an issue.
Journalists don't have to spend 15 minutes to coordinate how to present an issue. The phenomenon has been described as journalists writing for other journalists as their audience, rather than the general public. It's about sending a signal that you're part of the in-group.
Newspapers employ journalists that write only within certain range of opinions. I am not saying it is evil or something, but there is absolutely selection of which opinions can be show and which cant.
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."
> this is being driven entirely by spite not insight
Zitron is a PR dude who runs a PR company and has never had any experience, training, or meaningful contributions to technology. He found twitter success posting shittakes about AI, ran that into a podcast, and now he's in the FT. Zitron is a professional contrarian and PR man, saying "AI sucks" has found him fame and success.
Meanwhile, he's done deeper analysis than anyone else I've seen on financial statements and actual costs from AI for the large players and I absolutely don't think he's wrong.
Unfortunately, this seems to strike a chord for you.
Not unlike his blog posts and podcasts. Spiteful insult-laden rants (he even admits to this on occasion). If you're looking for a financial analysis on AI, I'd literally look anywhere else.
I started listening but got too reminded of the Rush Limbaugh Family Guy episode to continue more than a couple of times. It's all rage. 5 minutes of hate for our generation. Not constructive and not healthy.
Just for the record, I don’t love being outraged, and yet I frequently employ active effort to maintain my composure. Society is being looted from the top; in both scope and scale, it’s only getting worse. I can appreciate that many find Zitron’s angry energy grating, but I don’t think it’s disingenuous and he’s clearly tapping into a widely shared sense of a degraded society.
Anyone who sincerely believes they’re witnessing 2000’s-levels of greed, economic malfeasance, and oversight failures would be appropriate in behaving frantically. Zitron’s core arguments describe a deeply troubling scenario, and as this article mentions he is not terribly concise—his articles contain a great deal of details and explanations for his positions, and I have largely seen only ad-hoc complaints of his bedside manner, or else vague gestures towards as-yet unrealized prosperity, in response to them.
You will find that he vacillates between “this shit doesn't impress me even a little”; “everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous”; and “I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters”.
This is not an honest opinion. He considers his enemies both too strong and too weak, depending upon whether he wants to make you feel like they are pathetic or scary. He’s just saying whatever he thinks will make people angry at something he hates.
I feel obliged to say that this isn't true of Ed at all. He does a lot more "real journalism" than most of the journalists I've interacted, and grills the people he's interviewing on technical details more than anyone else I've seen in the field.
I had a stressful five minutes this morning talking about using floating point numbers being weird for some financial applications because he wouldn't accept a shoddy answer.
Objecting to his writing and tone is one thing, but Ed is not dishonest or sloppy.
(And I've seen hospitals do some horrible things that probably demonstrably killed people through funding misallocation and reporting mistakes, which were at least partially caused by the AI bubble. So I think it's fair to say that some AI applications can be unimpressive while the net effect is disastrous.)
> ... this shit doesn't impress me even a little. Wow, you created a superficially-impressive research project that's really long and that cites a bunch of shit it found online that it made little attempt to verify?
> ... everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous ... expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product... Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb ...
> I'm tired of reading stories about Sam Altman perpetually saying that we're a year away from "everything changing" that exist only to perpetuate the myth that Silicon Valley gives a shit about solving anyone's problems other than finding new growth markets for the tech industry. I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.
So he's saying it's a bubble, and yes it can be unimpressive (when pompous claims are examined), dangerous and stupid (because it's a bubble), and at the same time can not matter (because its inflated value is based on claiming it does matter).
The research is unimpressive, the bubble is dangerous, the product is stupid, and the tech doesn't matter as much as it is claimed to.
> The research is unimpressive, the bubble is dangerous, the product is stupid, and the tech doesn't matter as much as it is claimed to.
No. Why are you sane-washing him? That’s not what he said.
> everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous
> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.
He is very clearly saying two mutually exclusive things in the same article. He wants you to believe that AI is pathetic and useless, and he wants you to believe it’s unfathomably dangerous.
This is not the writing of somebody who has taken a cold, hard look at the facts and is trying to inform people. This is the writing of somebody who wants to make as many people despise AI as possible and is stringing together as many anti-AI positions as he can even though they cannot form a coherent, rational position together.
https://archive.ph/A6XXp
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 found "Better Offline" through "Tech Won't Save Us" where Ed is occasionally a guest. It also has some critical takes on technology if you are looking for more of that content.
I found him in the same way, and thought he was interesting and insightful.
But I tried listening to some of his podcasts and read his articles, but just could not suffer them at all. Tech Wont Save Us is worth people's time though - great work there.
Interesting if he really is more convincing in speech than in writing. His writing is certainly flamboyant, but the aggression and expletives seem more targeted at hyping up people who already believe the things he writes, not for making people change their minds. He found a niche in anti-tech grift, and is now exploiting the niche for all he can.
But you might want to actually fact-check a few of the things he says that convince you, because at least for his written articles basically everything is made up or misrepresented. There's plenty of links to sources, sure, but if you follow them down to the primary source what they're saying is very different from what Zitron is implying. It seems hard to believe that he's better at this in spoken form where citing a source is even harder.
This is exactly on point. Also, his day job is shilling AI companies.
Yeah, I have no doubt that he's got some good insights, but its crystal clear that he's just hyping it all up as part of a grift. I get serious Alex Jones vibes from him
I've tried to listen to a few podcasts and read some articles, and its just unbearable. Moreover, I find the main point that he harps on about - that none of the AI stuff is financially sustainable - to be largely unimportant. Like, if they want to burn their money, go for it.
The real issues - intellectual property, implications for the future workforce, environmental costs, or even that the money really ought to be invested in something else, whether public funds are going towards it, if taxes are being avoided etc - seem to be, at best, tertiary concerns for him. He only seems to be "mad as hell" that they're wasting money and no one else is talking about it.
He's also just plainly wrong when he keeps saying things like there's been zero discernable benefit to AI, as if it is just a creepto scam.
> funky economics of excessive AI investments and data center investments vs. any real payoffs for society.
This is why I'm convinced Sam makes his money from when OpenAI spends rather than when OpenAI earns.
What a co-incidence. In the USA the GDP goes up mainly from consumers spending, and business spending to a lesser extent. Otherwise not in relation to any wealth being created or value added by those people and enterprises.
If any.
Heavily weighted toward consumers, OTOH businesses have to spend a fortune before they can make a dent in GDP.
Over any one reporting period, don't worry those periods don't last forever.
Ed Zitron was famous for writing “The Man Who Killed Google Search” [0] (see also its HN thread [1]).
[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
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.
The key problem is that his economic analysis is absolute trash. I used to think he was just totally incompetent at it, but given the bias in the errors, it is pretty clearly intentional deception. But it's often pretty hard to address that, because every article he writes is a 10k word gish gallop. I've tried debunking key points a few times in HN comments for just one of the intentional mistakes he makes, and people complain about the reply being too long.
Yeah, his financial arguments are good. But I did listened a but to his podcast ... and good bulk of it is pure ranting. There are episodes with no economic analysis as far aw I can tell, but a stream of complains about Sammy Clammy being idiot and people whose names I dont remember being idiots.
He has literally hours and hours of that.
Even his financial arguments are often weak. Of late he’s been constantly ranting about the use of ARR, like that hasn’t been a norm in SaaS businesses for almost two decades now. And that they’re using it to fool… who exactly? Wholesale investors on their current investor roadshow who deal with these things literally every day?
The episode with Shingy also really rubbed me the wrong way too. Just constantly “yeah, but it still hasn’t done anything useful” followed by Shingy relaying numerous examples over and over of how AI has transformed our he things he does, followed by “yeah, but when is it going to do something actually useful?” over and over.
He’s become some one note on the AI stuff it’s tiresome. Moreso given he’s unwilling to actually listen to any other perspective. I wish he’d go back to talking about literally anything else.
When he's making arguments and offering analysis, I think they're very often sound. That's why I (at least sporadically) continue to listen to episodes of his podcast, or read his pieces.
I'd love to read/listen to one that he worked on with a talented editor. I don't mind the swearing or the tone, and I enjoy a good rant here and there, but for me the amount of rambling and ranting obfuscates the good points he's making, just by sheer volume.
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).
Yeah, he's a lunatic and/or grifter for that and many other reasons
Serious question – what’s the grift?
It's concerning that FT don't take more of an econs-of-AI-investment angle, explored here
https://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
The FT recently did a series on 'The AI race', which they described as 'A three-part series exploring the quest for AI capacity and the data centres at the heart of hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investment'
- ‘Absolutely immense’: the companies on the hook for the $3tn AI building boom [1][2]
- Inside the AI race: can data centres ever truly be green? [3][4]
- Inside the relentless race for AI capacity [5]
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/efe1e350-62c6-4aa0-a833-f6da01265...
[2] https://archive.ph/sn3lT
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/0f6111a8-0249-4a28-aef4-1854fc8b4...
[4] https://archive.ph/10tca
[5] https://ig.ft.com/ai-data-centres/
I've said this many times but I'll say it again. The FT is not some single opinion org. It has many writers and many editors of various opinions. The FT itself does not take any angle, only it's writers and editors, who can have contradictory views and still publish articles in the same media org.
To add color to your opinion: this piece was written by one of the financial editors
https://www.ft.com/tabby-kinder
No "unified opinion" but an editorial stance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Times#Editorial_stan...
you want to open a wikipedia debate on that :)?
If I were you I'd point to the FT [Weekend] Magazine marquee instead
What are the chances of reading an FT article stating that the financial sector, and financialization, are creating some of society’s core problems?
They do occasionally, with reservation. Though obviously pro-finance they also don’t want total financial collapse.
> FT is not one single opinion
This holds for most newspapers and makes that whole fake news argument so infuriating. As if journalists had even 15 minutes in a day to coordinate how to present an issue.
Journalists don't have to spend 15 minutes to coordinate how to present an issue. The phenomenon has been described as journalists writing for other journalists as their audience, rather than the general public. It's about sending a signal that you're part of the in-group.
Newspapers employ journalists that write only within certain range of opinions. I am not saying it is evil or something, but there is absolutely selection of which opinions can be show and which cant.
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".
* 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...
Satya is not an idiot. He's just doing the things that make the investor class idiots ecstatic.
I don't know. If it's an act it is very convincing.
But is he not gonna take it?
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> this is being driven entirely by spite not insight
Zitron is a PR dude who runs a PR company and has never had any experience, training, or meaningful contributions to technology. He found twitter success posting shittakes about AI, ran that into a podcast, and now he's in the FT. Zitron is a professional contrarian and PR man, saying "AI sucks" has found him fame and success.
Meanwhile, he's done deeper analysis than anyone else I've seen on financial statements and actual costs from AI for the large players and I absolutely don't think he's wrong.
Unfortunately, this seems to strike a chord for you.
When confronted with an actual analysis from a technical person, he immediately resorts to insults and hand-waving: https://old.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1n2c12q/arti...
Not unlike his blog posts and podcasts. Spiteful insult-laden rants (he even admits to this on occasion). If you're looking for a financial analysis on AI, I'd literally look anywhere else.
To be fair that actual analysis had a lot of assumptions and zitron was pointing out the hand waviness of those assumptions.
Super weird to say that someone is hand waving when what they are doing is pointing out that an argument is hand wavy.
Martin Alderson didn't comment on anyone's "asshole" or cite tabloid-level hearsay as an accurate source of information.
And yet, he’s mostly right about the current AI landscape.
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One of the few tech journalists that does actual journalism and speaks to the problems with the tech industry instead of just glazing oligarchs.
Viralized lukewarm hot takes expanded to tl;dr pseudointellectual drivel that makes readers feel sophisticated for powering through.
I started listening but got too reminded of the Rush Limbaugh Family Guy episode to continue more than a couple of times. It's all rage. 5 minutes of hate for our generation. Not constructive and not healthy.
"our generation" - what? which of his targets do you identify with?
People love being outraged. And no easier target than useless, overpaid, digital analphabet CEOs, AI slop and techbros.
Just for the record, I don’t love being outraged, and yet I frequently employ active effort to maintain my composure. Society is being looted from the top; in both scope and scale, it’s only getting worse. I can appreciate that many find Zitron’s angry energy grating, but I don’t think it’s disingenuous and he’s clearly tapping into a widely shared sense of a degraded society.
Anyone who sincerely believes they’re witnessing 2000’s-levels of greed, economic malfeasance, and oversight failures would be appropriate in behaving frantically. Zitron’s core arguments describe a deeply troubling scenario, and as this article mentions he is not terribly concise—his articles contain a great deal of details and explanations for his positions, and I have largely seen only ad-hoc complaints of his bedside manner, or else vague gestures towards as-yet unrealized prosperity, in response to them.
> I can appreciate that many find Zitron’s angry energy grating, but I don’t think it’s disingenuous
I think it is. If you read this article, for instance:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/longcon/
You will find that he vacillates between “this shit doesn't impress me even a little”; “everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous”; and “I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters”.
This is not an honest opinion. He considers his enemies both too strong and too weak, depending upon whether he wants to make you feel like they are pathetic or scary. He’s just saying whatever he thinks will make people angry at something he hates.
I feel obliged to say that this isn't true of Ed at all. He does a lot more "real journalism" than most of the journalists I've interacted, and grills the people he's interviewing on technical details more than anyone else I've seen in the field.
I had a stressful five minutes this morning talking about using floating point numbers being weird for some financial applications because he wouldn't accept a shoddy answer.
Objecting to his writing and tone is one thing, but Ed is not dishonest or sloppy.
(And I've seen hospitals do some horrible things that probably demonstrably killed people through funding misallocation and reporting mistakes, which were at least partially caused by the AI bubble. So I think it's fair to say that some AI applications can be unimpressive while the net effect is disastrous.)
> Objecting to his writing and tone is one thing, but Ed is not dishonest or sloppy.
Do you think somebody can honestly hold all of these opinions at the same time?
> this shit doesn't impress me even a little
> everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous
> expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product
> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.
So it’s simultaneously unimpressive, unfathomably dangerous, stupid, quasi-useless, and it doesn’t matter?
In context:
> ... this shit doesn't impress me even a little. Wow, you created a superficially-impressive research project that's really long and that cites a bunch of shit it found online that it made little attempt to verify?
> ... everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous ... expensive, stupid, irksome, quasi-useless new product... Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb ...
> I'm tired of reading stories about Sam Altman perpetually saying that we're a year away from "everything changing" that exist only to perpetuate the myth that Silicon Valley gives a shit about solving anyone's problems other than finding new growth markets for the tech industry. I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.
So he's saying it's a bubble, and yes it can be unimpressive (when pompous claims are examined), dangerous and stupid (because it's a bubble), and at the same time can not matter (because its inflated value is based on claiming it does matter).
The research is unimpressive, the bubble is dangerous, the product is stupid, and the tech doesn't matter as much as it is claimed to.
> The research is unimpressive, the bubble is dangerous, the product is stupid, and the tech doesn't matter as much as it is claimed to.
No. Why are you sane-washing him? That’s not what he said.
> everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous
> I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters.
He is very clearly saying two mutually exclusive things in the same article. He wants you to believe that AI is pathetic and useless, and he wants you to believe it’s unfathomably dangerous.
This is not the writing of somebody who has taken a cold, hard look at the facts and is trying to inform people. This is the writing of somebody who wants to make as many people despise AI as possible and is stringing together as many anti-AI positions as he can even though they cannot form a coherent, rational position together.
A lot of pessimistic and angry predictions about IA that never materialise. That's his shtick.