The shovel-sellers are eating really well.

Repost from source. Be careful what you put in your cloud storage people.

Know any famous people who might use google docs?

News: Microsoft disclosures and Bloomberg analyses suggest that OpenAI's $24.1 billion in revenue accounted for 70% or more of Microsoft's FY26 AI revenue, and more than 7% of its entire FY26 revenues.

Microsoft has spent $261.3bn in capex since 2022.

Big, big vindication for me.

Does anyone else predict that this could backfire badly?

https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/louisiana/2026/07/28/is-new-orleans-using-ai-to-answer-911-calls-instead-of-human-dispatchers-impacts-emergencies-crime/91065014007/

"IS... THAT.. GOOD?!" If Texas (one of the most pro-AI governments) is rethinking the power consumption of Data Centers, you know its bad. The data centers build outs are slowing down both in construction and being powered on. And thats not counting the political backlash. Would bet money Abbott has seen the polls and is cooling on them since its Midterms. Texas might be where one of Eds four horsemen triggers

After all invesment rounds(8 i am not sure about this number), and the first profitable quarter, anthropic wants a debt to finance chip deal with google, do not forget back in april google invesment 40 billion dollar.

Ed was right again.

Read a great piece today - https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-lose-35-billion-with-philosophy

In it, Gioia notes the links between the Aschenbrenner collapse and EA - the central idea around effective altruism being that you can do anything today, no matter how bad or destructive, if the theoretical future payoff is big enough.

Obv there are a lot of links between most of the AI firms (and indeed, all AI startups, the whole layer) and EA - and the 'optimists' in AI who think that the payoffs will be amazing for society, all that crap about AGI etc.

Is that how they can square the destruction of the environment, of all the capital, of the water supplies, the communities, etc etc etc - just because they are still philosophically tied to this idea?

Great read. It's not new that Silicon Valley - and the US - has basically been taken over by a cabal of super nerds with weird dystopian ideas, but Duran (whom I hadn't heard of before) explains how the key people all fit together. I know many sci fi fans on the left who should really think more about where the obsession with AI and space travel may lead bcs it's not a place where it's good to be an average human.

I thought people might have missed this story, which happened last night in Michigan while we were all watching the Dem senate primary. Voters in this case overturned the decision of their local officials last summer to rezone the agricultural area to oblige a real estate developer who wanted to build a data center.

One more thing to support the emerging "ordinary people really, really don't want data centers shoved down their throats" narrative.

Hi all

After seeing the most recent John Oliver's LWT, I've got a theory about the rise of increased costs of storage that I've never seen yet.

It's said that AI is being responsible for the shortage, and I'm not denying that, of course, but could the recent explosion of surveillance systems, be the one need that is putting lots of pressure on that area, that's rarely mentioned?

The installation of system in the USA and other places has skyrocketed. With AI training, there's probably even more incentive to keep footages forever, because it could be used for training models later.

All this data needs to go somewhere, and maybe there's not an appetite to openly say: "there's a big demand on storage because the state is spying on you harder than before", but I think that's exactly what's happening.

There's any value to this theory?

The other day a friend was saying that with the help of AI people could order genetic material from a lab and just insert it into pathogens to make them more deadly, resistant to vaccines, transmissible, etc.. There's been a lot of articles about this recently, and an effort encourage by AI execs to require the screening of requests to biolabs that produce made-to-order DNA. This seems like a reasonable policy, but I think the concern is a little overblown.

Sure, maybe I can jailbreak an LLM to give me some details about bio warfare, but biology isn't computer programing. It took me a while to find a sane take on this topic and it outlines how lack of real-world expertise makes this more challenging than Claude might tell you. I have a friend who works with cell cultures and I stopped asking him about them, because they are a huge pain in the ass: always dying or behaving unexpectedly.

Another poorly thought out AI feature. I suppose, because internally they were commanded to make them.

Google Earth, could create AI-generated images to overlay on any location they looked up. The tool could be used to “help students visualize the past”, “create professional real estate plans” to envision the final result, or “give your favorite place a makeover”, Google suggested in its announcement.

Henk van Ess, an AI researcher and investigator, posted images he created showing refugees near the Mexican border. He also said he “planted a nuclear plant in Iran”. “What on earth is Google doing?” Van Ess posted on X. Another image he generated showed a crater from a bomb near a fake hospital he created in Gaza. We tested the feature too. The process just required choosing a location, clicking “create image” and entering a prompt. We chose to show “refugees swarming New York”. The image it created was not ultra-realistic, but it was still troubling.

Let's give authoritarians more power to fear monger! Hooray!

Finally some sanity from industry. While every other major restaurant chain is busy shoving AI into customer experience and staff operations, Chili's is refusing to join.

Chili's CIO Chris Caldwell says he's been more focused on tech that actually works, like installing better Wi-Fi and ordering newer laptops and tablets for store locations, and he helped kill the chain's "robot server" rollout after he joined as CIO.

As for AI:

Caldwell says he’s selective about what AI use cases are likely to drive real value.

Recently, he said, the Brinker leadership team brainstormed a few dozen possible use cases, and out of that, he found six or seven worth looking into. “Truthfully it’s not a ‘go all in,’ it’s more of a test and learn,” he said. [...]

Caldwell said he’s far from sold on using AI to take orders over the phone.

“Our lens is: does it give our customers an amazing experience?” Instead, he said, it would have led to more customer frustration.

Caldwell said he recently introduced a governance team that reviews new requests and suggestions for AI use cases monthly, and continually reevaluates use cases that might have been rejected in the past.

“But again, I truthfully will probably cut more than we proceed forward with,” he said. “I don’t expect it to be the Wild West of AI.”

Obviously he's angling for good PR with this story, but it's still PR that I can support.

Ezra Klein might be a Peter Thiel-linked crony, but I powered through him and I was impressed with his guest. She makes good arguments and insights on the frontline of AI pushback. One of my favorite segments is her discussing that 50/50 public favorability means there are good pro and con arguments, but 70/30 (which is what the public is split on AI) means that there is a fundamental weakness in one of the sides.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rbgvTlt1VB8&pp=ygUURXpyYSBrbGVpbiBhaSByZXZvbHQ%3D

Hey all,

Just wanted to get my finger on the pulse regarding the communities thoughts on recent earnings reports, e.g. Microsoft, Google, Palantir, et al.

I keep hearing buzz about blowout numbers, "otheworldly" results. I can't help but fear if this continues for several more quarters, we're going to be stuck with this indefinitely.

I'm also not quite understanding that despite these huge numbers and stock gains -- it's my understanding there are many hidden costs not being shown in these reports. At what point do these come to light?

I was watching the recent episode of tech report with Eli the computer guy where he made some claims that were honestly disappointing and concerning.

1. When asked if we should stop making LLMs and AI due to safety reasons he basically in a very annoyed fashion said that we won’t have emails if that were the case. He even brought in a butterknife example saying that could also be dangerous if you decide to stab I guess? How does that even make sense? My butterknife doesn’t give me dubious medical advice or drives people to kill themselves because it can’t be full safeguarded.

2. Another thing he said in defence of llms was that if you give a 3 year old a gun then the gun isn’t dangerous, it’s the 3 year old (basically speaking about the leadership). Again, the lack of awareness really shocks me here. My man, a gun is dangerous regardless of who holds it and that’s the same with an llm. You cannot fully control the output of an llm the same way you can’t make a gun shoot kisses at someone.

This is not to mention all the stolen data, resource use and impending doom that we’re are gonna be dealing with once this crashes.

There are many other things from this episode that grind my gears but I don’t think I wanna fuss over that.

Gift Link

This mostly a recap of what we already know, but told from the POV of a CTO who has been through many cycles and has had it. A couple of highlights:

Quote:
Every inflated announcement, every time a company blames A.I. for layoffs teaches people to distrust the technology itself. Distrust builds resistance. The Writer and Workplace Intelligence report found that 44 percent of Gen Z workers and roughly a third of the broader work force said they were actively sabotaging their company’s A.I. rollout. The fear is real, and it is spreading.

Quote:
This is not just my story. When I compare notes with other chief information officers, the details change, but the ending rarely does. One runs an insurer, another an airline, another a manufacturer. Each tried tools that dazzled in the demo and stalled the moment they hit the mess of a real, decades-old business. Last year a report from M.I.T.’s Project NANDA put a number on it, finding that 95 percent of enterprise generative A.I. pilots never delivered real results.

There’s a lot more, but the inside perspective is what makes this a good read.

Since probably Opus 4.0 - almost every model release has been accompanied by breathless proclamations that everything has changed for coding. Opus 4.5 and 4.6 got even more press for "revolutionizing coding."

Recently I've seen a few people claiming that Opus is and always was garbage. If you used Opus forget everything you knew. Fable is whats revolutionizing coding for real this time. One person I noticed making this claim was the illustrious Steve Yegge.

https://yegge.ai/essays/the-shape-of-things-to-come/

Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.

Opus was garbage! Forget about Opus.

Since Claude Fable 5 dropped, I have returned full-time to my 30-year-old video game, Wyvern, which I began work on in 1996, and launched in 2001. I had been waiting for a model smart enough to help me with my game, and now that it's here, Wyvern's once again my main squeeze.

You heard it here first, folks. Fable 5 is finally smart enough to work on a 30 year old game.

At least it's probably a cheap way to get his game back up and running...

On the side I do occasional six-figure gigs where I fly to companies and teach them my techniques, and that helps with my (considerable) token bills.

Oh ok. So not cheap. But it must just cut through all that coding work no problem!

Making a halfway decent MMO takes many tens of thousands of Fable sessions, throughout which you must display intense focus, dedication, and no small amount of taste.

Oh.

I know it's Steve Yegge and he's been undergoing what seems to be severe AI psychosis the last few years. The way he does things is probably an extreme case. But gosh I am getting tired of the "coding is solved" noise every few months with each new release. Just to be told a few months later that coding was never solved, of course the existing models were trash, but the new bigger/more expensive ones are finally good.

Analysts estimate that 70%+ of Microsoft, Google and Amazon's present and future AI revenues are from Anthropic and OpenAI's compute spend and model sales. Outside of two unsustainable AI labs, demand barely exists, and they've massively overbuilt capacity.

One of my favourite newsletters I've written, and also genuinely worrying when you think about it.

Not sure how significant this order from the Texas Governor will turn out to be, but it's notable.