Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    An investor runs the numbers of AI capex and is not impressed

    (n.b. I have no idea who this guy is or his track record (or even if he’s a dude) but I think the numbers check out and the parallells to railroads in the 19th century are interesting too)

    Global Crossing Is Reborn…

    Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.

    Of course, corporations will adopt AI as they see productivity improvements. Governments have unlimited capital—they love overpaying for stuff. Maybe you can ultimately jam $480 billion of this stuff down their throats. The problem is that $480 billion in revenue isn’t for all of the world’s future AI needs, it’s the revenue simply needed to cover the 2025 capex spend. What if they spend twice as much in 2026?? What if you need almost $1 trillion in revenue to cover the 2026 vintage of spend?? At some point, you outrun even the government’s capacity to waste money (shocking!!)

    An AI Addendum

    As a result, my blog post seems to have elicited a liberating realization that they weren’t alone in questioning the math—they’ve just been too shy to share their findings with their peers in the industry. I’ve elicited a gnosis, if you will. As this unveiling cascaded, and they forwarded my writings to their friends, an industry simultaneously nodded along. Personal self-doubts disappeared, and high-placed individuals reached out to share their epiphanies. “None of this makes sense!!” “We’ll never earn a return on capital!!” “We’ve been wondering the same thing as you!!”

    […]

    Remember, the industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue. The mismatch is astonishing, and this ignores that in 2026, hundreds of billions of additional datacenters will get built, all needing additional revenue to justify their existence. Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you’d need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend. Remember again, that revenue is currently running at around $15 to $20 billion today.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      If you called me a boomer in my mentality, I wouldn’t really disagree. I still believe that things like cash flow and return on capital matter.

      Guess im part boomer as well. (Holy shit we are so fucked if this is a “boomer” thought in the stock market)

      E: I had hoped this part was a bit and he would reflect more on it later.

      I am not here to belittle AI, it’s the future, and I recognize that we’re just scratching the surface in terms of what it can do.

      But turns out it wasn’t. What if this is it? (And im talking about AI as it exists now not some magical other tech from the future), the gpt 5 release was meh, we reached the end of the S-curve (or hit our (local) maximum, if non-S curve curves are more your thing). He even admits the tech doesn’t work that well in his own article.