jakke

From the investor calls I've listened to (and I highly recommend that everyone listen to Big Tech investor calls) a big part of what's going on is that the average tech executive sees the future editorial voice of their platform as a helpful friend who's scrolling through all these pictures and videos with you and is recommending you buy things along the way. Like, the idea is that you and a chatty pal are browsing the Internet together, and that chatty pal is actually a puppet with an advertisement algorithm inside of it, but as much as possible you should feel like it's someone you're chatting with as opposed to the Web 2.0 ideal of social media as a platform that lets people post things and gives other people tools to share or react to those posts, and so you should basically never see buttons and should always be reading (or hearing!) a friendly voice whenever you're in the app. And I'm very skeptical that users will ever learn to love this new mode of interaction, because it adds yet another layer of mediation on the already heavily mediated social media interactions, but I'm certain that it's absolutely terrible for security in a way that can't be mitigated.

From the investor calls I've listened to (and I highly recommend that everyone listen to Big Tech investor calls) a big part of what's going on is that the average tech executive sees the future editorial voice of their platform as a helpful friend who's scrolling through all these pictures and videos with you and is recommending you buy things along the way. Like, the idea is that you and a chatty pal are browsing the Internet together, and that chatty pal is actually a puppet with an advertisement algorithm inside of it, but as much as possible you should feel like it's someone you're chatting with as opposed to the Web 2.0 ideal of social media as a platform that lets people post things and gives other people tools to share or react to those posts, and so you should basically never see buttons and should always be reading (or hearing!) a friendly voice whenever you're in the app. And I'm very skeptical that users will ever learn to love this new mode of interaction, because it adds yet another layer of mediation on the already heavily mediated social media interactions, but I'm certain that it's absolutely terrible for security in a way that can't be mitigated.

I think there's room for at least one or two reliably profitable companies somewhere in there, and those companies will become industry standards, and universities will scramble to reorient their coursework so that graduates have the correct proficiencies in LLM interaction for the labour market. All of this will consume only a tiny fraction of the planned data centre buildout, and most of that capacity will get cancelled and never built, and a bunch of stocks with massively overinflated values are going to crash, and that's probably going to trigger a stock market correction. Most of the losses of this adjustment from "AI will do everything and we will live as immortal trillionaire god-kings" to "LLMs are a useful tool for automating menial software engineering tasks" are ultimately going to be borne by giant tech companies though, and the tech giants could each endure a $100 billion writeoff and be basically fine, so I think the impact on the overall economy will be minimal.

So if their CEOs see this and say "oh okay yeah this looks reasonable" then the current status quo of high expectations could keep on going multiple additional quarters because there's still that really low probability of really massive labour reduction that makes it possible to rationalize these really high valuations. Conversely if those same CEOs see this and say "oh okay wow we can't justify spending $1000 per employee per month on a coding tool" and start rationing out licenses or exhorting employees to keep using LLMs but in less costly ways or ditching Copliot for other services that are still in that magical subsidy phase, I think that means the end is high for this bubble. Fortunately, CEOs in 2026 love showing up on video podcasts to talk about this kind of thing for eight hours straight, so we'll find out soon enough.

Like at its core the idea is just "I'm a cis person looking for a relationship with a cis person on the other side of the gender binary, and I'd like to get married and have children with them on a short timescale, but I don't want all the baggage that comes from heterosexuality, and I would like both of us to have a lightly counterculture and possibly also androgynous vibe". And I don't think there's anything wrong with any of that, and it makes sense to develop terminology and descriptors for people who feel this way, because there are a lot of them. But unfortunately none of our identities or goals or values are still embedded in a broader social context, and so you end up having to nod very understandingly through conversations about how the AFAB partner can't out-earn the AMAB partner in a relationship or else their parents won't approve lest you be accused of being a bad gatekeeping close-minded homosexual.

@threeninesfine So I think in 2026 ~*~identifying as queer~*~ doesn't really have much to do with sexuality or gender anymore to a lot of people, and is more about a specific aesthetic and political affiliation. And I realize that's kind of grating to those of us from a generation where the term did have a lot to do with sexuality and gender, but language and usage evolves, and now people identify things like tattoos and astrology and using terminology from drag culture as queer, because the kind of people we used to identify as "queer" (specifically, the most marginalized members of that former community) adopted these things, and then counterculture saw marginalized people adopting things and adopted them too so they could present themselves as more transgressive (which is a pretty standard cycle of appropriation since at least the Elvis era), and those activities and practices and consumption decisions retained the "queer" label even as they spread through broader mainstream culture, and now those activities and practices and consumption decisions signify "queer", rather than anything related to sexuality or gender. And so I don't begrudge anyone the "queer for queer" label, because they really are just using the word in the sense it's commonly used in these days, but it's still very funny when all of this gets wrapped up in very traditional patriarchal norms like who earns more money or who needs to be taller or who needs to drive when you're in a car together.

(That being said, I still push back on the increasingly common descriptor "gay but not queer", because that usually gets thrown around to conflate "they are fussy and dowdy and unstylish" with "we are suspicious that they have bad politics", and that seems thoughtless and dangerous. Gays should be allowed to be just as frumpy and swagless as anyone else without falling into a suspect class.)

Like at its core the idea is just "I'm a cis person looking for a relationship with a cis person on the other side of the gender binary, and I'd like to get married and have children with them on a short timescale, but I don't want all the baggage that comes from heterosexuality, and I would like both of us to have a lightly counterculture and possibly also androgynous vibe". And I don't think there's anything wrong with any of that, and it makes sense to develop terminology and descriptors for people who feel this way, because there are a lot of them. But unfortunately none of our identities or goals or values are still embedded in a broader social context, and so you end up having to nod very understandingly through conversations about how the AFAB partner can't out-earn the AMAB partner in a relationship or else their parents won't approve lest you be accused of being a bad gatekeeping close-minded homosexual.

@threeninesfine So I think in 2026 ~*~identifying as queer~*~ doesn't really have much to do with sexuality or gender anymore to a lot of people, and is more about a specific aesthetic and political affiliation. And I realize that's kind of grating to those of us from a generation where the term did have a lot to do with sexuality and gender, but language and usage evolves, and now people identify things like tattoos and astrology and using terminology from drag culture as queer, because the kind of people we used to identify as "queer" (specifically, the most marginalized members of that former community) adopted these things, and then counterculture saw marginalized people adopting things and adopted them too so they could present themselves as more transgressive (which is a pretty standard cycle of appropriation since at least the Elvis era), and those activities and practices and consumption decisions retained the "queer" label even as they spread through broader mainstream culture, and now those activities and practices and consumption decisions signify "queer", rather than anything related to sexuality or gender. And so I don't begrudge anyone the "queer for queer" label, because they really are just using the word in the sense it's commonly used in these days, but it's still very funny when all of this gets wrapped up in very traditional patriarchal norms like who earns more money or who needs to be taller or who needs to drive when you're in a car together.