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The only reason that AI has any presence in our economy is that Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are intent on spending more than $765 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 and a trillion more in 2027 because they have no other hypergrowth ideas, even though generative AI has yet to show any real potential as something that can drive meaningful revenues (let alone profits), as evidenced by the fact that none of these companies break out their actual AI revenues, a point I made on CNBC late last week.  Google does not have the next Google Search, Microsoft does not have the next Microsoft Office, Meta does not have the next Facebook, and Amazon does not have the new AWS. That’s why they need you to believe that AI is a big deal without them ever having to prove why outside of capital expenditures. They want you to assume that all this money can’t be wrong, even though when you remove OpenAI and Anthropic (who represent 89% of the revenues of the largest AI companies) the AI industry is, at best, pulling in $20 billion in annual revenue.

Ai evangelists like to frame Ed Zitron as inflammatory and biased against Ai. But he’s got the numbers.

what is this genre of photos called

the idea that monogamous marriage is something that can be reformed into a means for healthy, mutual, and truly free relationships between free people in spite of its looooooooong history (and present in many places!) of being explicitly a patriarchal institution in which wives and daughters are treated as property, but that polygamy is just inherently evilyuckybad, is just straight up xenophobia btw. its entirely arbitrary.

shoutout to the person in my building that left their halloween skeleton on their balcony and proceeded to dress it up for other holidays

reminders i need to like, tattoo on my brain:

Stranger Things season 1: beneath the superficial image of “peace and prosperity” in 1980s small-town America, there was the painful legacy of countless atrocities committed by the American government in the name of ‘freedom.’

There’s probably a term that already exists for this but if there isn’t I’m gonna call it ‘Rambofication’ in honor of its probably most well known instance: Rambo First Blood was about a soldier, John Rambo (that’s his actual name I’m not doing a bit), returning home from the Vietnam war, so traumatized by war that he brought the war home with him to a small town, unable to adapt to life without strict military discipline and hierarchy. Subsequent Rambo movies were about how John Rambo was the only supersoldier tough enough and patriotic enough to kill faceless hordes of dastardly foreign commies.