David Chico Pham writes on technology, sourdough, and current events.

Brian Merchant makes a convincing case the US has a AI bubble on it's hands and it is staggeringly massive. Quoting a WSJ column by Paul Kedrosky, Merchant sets up just how big this AI bubble is:

spending on AI infrastructure has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing… one explanation for the U.S. economy’s ongoing strength, despite tariffs, is that spending on IT infrastructure is so big that it’s acting as a sort of private-sector stimulus program.

Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, says Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Merchant, underlines just how jaw-dropping the size of the bubble is:

I’ll just repeat that. Over the last six months, capital expenditures on AI—counting just information processing equipment and software, by the way—added more to the growth of the US economy than all consumer spending combined. You can just pull any of those quotes out—spending on IT for AI is so big it might be making up for economic losses from the tariffs, serving as a private sector stimulus program.

The private sector is under going a government size stimulus program. These companies are so big that they in the aggregate outsize growth in consumer spending!

To me, this is just screaming bubble. I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact I know I’m not alone. I’m thinking especially of Ed Zitron’s impassioned and thorough guide to the AI bubble; a rundown of how much money is being poured into and spent on AI vs how much money these products are making, and surprise, the situation as it stands is not sustainable.

These companies, openAI, perplexity, anthropic, etc, are all unprofitable. They are burning billions in venture capital and have little to show for. There has not been one company out there, in the 3 years chatGPT released 3.0, that has been able to build a successful genAI product.

The reason is,"fundamentally, generative AI does not let companies build something new," argues Ed Zitron in his piece AI is a money trap

Meanwhile, Nilay Patel, Verge's hype-man for blogs -- golden age tech if I may say -- announced SB Nation is becoming a next gen social network, powered by ActivtyPub. Ghost also announced you will be able to publish to fediverse apps, including bluesky. Essentially, the future of media is the blog.

The main thesis of this site is blogging is back, baby.

I read some of How The World Really Works by Vaclav Smil. A basic premise he introduces in the book is that GDP or the prosperity of a country is deeply related to its energy consumption. There are only a handful of countries that can produce abundant cheap fossil fuels, the US as one of them. The United States in the 20th century witness unparalleled growth as a consequence of securing said cheap fossil fuels. Some have referred the 20th Century as the American Century because the US dominated in just about everything.

Trump Presidency marks the end of the American Century. With the recent law passed gutting clean energy production (solar and wind), we have ceded to China in the clean energy revolution. From cheap electric vehicles, batteries, PVs, and wind turbines, China is responsible for half of all global renewable deployment. Half. It is setting up the infrastructure necessary to build the next generation of technology and living standards. No longer are copying American IP, but instead truly innovating and creating a future, a Chinese future.

The Atlantic shares some astonishing pictures in the sheer scale of what China is doing. Ana Taylor writes:

As the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind and solar power, reportedly accounting for 74 percent of all projects now under construction worldwide.

These couple pictures are incredible:

I am glad the clean energy revolution is still speeding ahead, but we gave up this century when Trump signed said bill into law.

Thump the bass.

I just love album cover here. The exaggerated fists reminds me of Ludacris albums.

The energy in St. Louis circa 2000 was so electric. Nelly released his album Country Grammar when I was in high school. His album dropped in the backdrop of an ascended city. It reached echelons of bigger sports towns. The city saw Super Bowl Champs St. Louis Rams. The Cardinals' Mark McGwire shattered homerun records*. Wayne Gretzky, GOAT of NHL, for a couple of years played for the Blues. Then you had Nelly thumping beats, putting St. Louis on the map in mainstream radio.

* Allegedly on steroids.

Remember when they were mad about Little Mermaid being black? Well now, they are mad about Superman being nice. Parker Molloy gets right to it. The extreme nature of the right wing media means basic things like kindness is seen as a cultural attack.

But this isn't really about Superman. It's about how conservative media takes the most innocuous statements and transforms them into culture war ammunition. It's about how the right-wing ecosystem has become so reflexively oppositional that even "basic human kindness" reads as a partisan attack.

And perhaps most tellingly, it's about what happens when you've built an entire media apparatus that needs a constant supply of things to be mad about — even if that means getting upset that Superman, of all characters, stands for truth, justice, and helping people.

If they are mad at Superman for being nice, wait until they learn about Jesus.

tarltontarlton of the Bulwark writes a really spicy take on stupid people and their relationship to President Trump. Essentially Trump is one of them who has made it. That mountaintop feels too damn good to give up. But what is stupid anyways? Emphasis is mine:

(Because “stupid” is a pretty stupid term, I should probably take a minute here to describe what I mean. It’s not really a matter of raw IQ, and educational achievement only partially captures it. Stupid people are those who don’t understand what is happening around them and have no interest in actually finding out. Active ignorance would be another way of putting it, but “stupid” just sounds better. Despite being very well informed about electrons and such, a competent chemical engineer with a master’s degree could be very stupid indeed if he/she still believes that trickle down economics is a real thing.)

I know plenty educated people who lack any curiosity to understanding what is happening around them. I hesitant to think they are stupid people. But a key characteristic is having no interest in finding out why things are happening to them.

I recently discussed AI in the workplace with my manager. I had a growing sense that he's feeling the pressured to get on the AI train or be left behind. I prodded him with question about education but it didn't go anywhere. He interpreted my question was about AI in school. But I was more interested learning as a means of growing as a software engineer. I think the struggle, confusion and frustration to not knowing how something works really does matters in learning and building craft. Its when I actually engage with code in this way that I build a mental model of an architecture.

AI presents itself as a shortcut by leapfrogging to a solution -- all without you understanding how any of the pieces of code works in relation to the rest of the codebase. It reminds me of a parent who is so very afraid of their child failing, that they will rescue any time their child is frustrated. In this instance, the developer is reaching for co-pilot as soon frustration sinks in. I think, this produces a weaker mind, a more ignorant knowledge worker, and a less resilient person. When they have to defend their decisions when things fail, they can't simply point to "ChatGPT sounded right".

Learning requires one to struggle. There's no shortcuts to be had. An essay by James of Agentultra, on why he won't use AI deeply resonated with me. James on the joy of the struggle:

It is during the struggle that I learn the most and improve the most as a programmer. It is this struggle I crave. It is what I enjoy about programming.

Especially the boring parts. Working on the boring, rote code is where you learn patterns and understand when and how to refactor.

Ezra Klein on How I Write shares the same belief:

You can only make connections through grappling and struggling with text. Curiosity is the driver in expanding one's mind, even done poorly it's worth the pain of frustration and dissatisfaction. In engaging in a codebase, or subject for hours, it changes you. You grow. You learn. You struggle.

AI advocates usually gesture to technological improvement displacing the jobs of old such as the horse shit collector with new jobs, like factory car worker. What's interesting is that whoever is originally saying this is usually the wealthy man who owned the factory. In this case, though, it's the ravenous information thieves in Silicon Valley, promising turbo charge your programming game. It's a lie. AI is a theft of the mind. Again here's James view on labor and the promise of new jobs:

The Luddite movement is an interesting piece of history. People often remember the part about breaking machines in factories. Today, people refer to those who refuse to use new productivity-enhancing technology as, Luddites. But the movement was not about sabotage. At least, it had a purpose and sabotage was only one strategy used by people to try and enact change and gain bargaining power.

You see, there were no social policies or reforms in place to protect the rights of labourers during the industrial revolution in which the Luddite movement had formed. The people involved in the movement were skilled workers who used the machines they were destroying. They weren’t destroying the machines because they wanted everyone to make textiles by hand: they were protesting the fact that capital owners were extracting the wealth from their labour with this new technology and weren’t reinvesting it to protect the labourers displaced by it.

Today, AI technology is being used to replace labour power with capital. The knowledge work we do is being replaced with machines and algorithms by capital holders who want to own and rent out access to that knowledge. It’s cheaper, produces more value, and that new wealth is not turning into shorter working hours or supplementing any labourer’s income. That wealth is going into the hands of the ultra wealthy.

And there's the rub. Let's say the co-pilot tools do actually increase productivity. It isn't like workers see shorter hours or bigger paychecks. Folks like Mr. Bezos get richer with a smaller workforce doing more. What do we as workers get in return? Lesser benefits and 2% raise and another year maybe of employment.

We might trading something more than our time and efficiency. Our minds might get weaker as we rely on these AI tools to do the heavy lifting of thinking.

The No Kings Protests coincide with Trump's sad military parade. An estimated 5 million people (according to organizers) showed up and protested. G. Elliot Morris estimates 2.6 million attendees, representing 1.2 - 1.8% of the U.S. population.

Moreover, these weren't just progressive liberals or left wing people of the Coastal Elite variety showing up. Even in crimson red states saw people showing up. Look at Boise Idaho! The important thing is to recognize the extent to which Trump's public support has deteriorated.

Why does public support matter? It matters in so far how much resistance Trump sees. In a world where, like he imagines, people are non-playable characters (NPC), without agency, free will and opinions. This is a view of a sociopath, but this world view expects no resistance for only from a few pesky left wingers. This is not the world we live in. People are responding in horror and are outraged by plain cruelty of Trump's Gestapo, kidnapping people off the streets, courthouse, and schools.

Protests matter in proportion to an unpopular weak president. Even Putin, a man who has rigged every election and thrown every popular dissenter off the balcony of a hotel, needs public support. There is a reason why the use of the military is the last thing an autocrat does. They require a public that is not terribly too resistant to their policies and would-be popular leaders stay silent. It's why places like China crack skulls early on before protest reach critical mass or develop a charismatic popular leader. By the time you need the military to suppress protests, its often too late.

Strength as autocrat requires shutting down dissent, like from a popular young charismatic leader saying you're bad, wrong, and dumb. You as a autocrat look weak and have no ability to control the populace or sway popular opinion. One could argue, Trump sending the National Guard and Marines to LA was a sign of weakness and Governor Newsom looked strong standing up to a pretend king. In WWE parlance, an organic popular leader draws heat from the public. They are energized in a way that saps strength from the Heel.

Much of the power of tyrants comes from people anticipating what is expected of them and doing so before they are targeted. Mass protests demonstrate people dissenting at scale, despite the fear they may have of being singled-out themselves.

For now, Trump and his ghoul, Stephen Miller, are doubling down on state kidnappings and workplace site raids. They believe they can get away with it and not have people notice. Jamelle Bouie gets at their fundamental miscalculation:

Here we see Trump’s fundamental problem. He and his White House seem to think that the cost of their policies — the fallout from their effort to mold the country to fit their nativist and mercantilist obsessions — are indirect. Who cares about a few thousand protesters in Los Angeles, or even a few million undocumented immigrants, out of the more than 340 million people in the United States? But the reality is that to harden the border and more tightly police immigration — to remove as many unauthorized people as possible — is to necessarily subject American citizens to the scrutiny and violence of the state. External control requires internal suppression
...
Both Trump and Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the administration’s immigration policies, may have imagined that their crackdown would isolate a relatively small group of people and be met with indifference by most Americans, giving Trump and Miller free rein to do as they pleased.

No doubt they will continue to dig in their position and continue to cry out for public to join them in their cruelty. If these massive protests are any indication, its a matter of time when normal conservatives who don't like radical rapid change join in these protests in large numbers.

Even in authoritarian regimes don't set the military this early in squashing dissent. It's a too high of risk in losing public support. Trump's move to send 1700 national guard and now the marines to handle peaceful protests is a sign of a weak tyrant on the verge of an early collapse in public support.

I think writing is suppose to be somewhat uncomfortable, confusing and painful. But I did not considered it might be unnatural thing to do. I suppose it can be argued that written word as a recent invention to our existence means that reading and writing is not a built-in human instinct but rather a deliberately taught thing. Adam Mastroianni shares 28 slightly rude notes on writing Number 10 is one that resonates with me:

Maybe it’s because writing is inherently lonely, or maybe it’s because the only people who would try to make a living from writing are messed up in the head.

Personally, I think the reason is far more sinister: making art is painful because it forces the mind to do something it’s not meant to do. If you really want to get that sentence right, if you want that perfect brush stroke or that exquisite shot, then you have to squeeze your neurons until they scream. That level of precision is simply unnatural.