Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science bullshit!

From “Girl Genius”

Y’know what, I started out agreeing with the author, but now I realize that their critique is fundamentally not technical enough to hit the mark.

Meta and Google own half of the fiber optic cables supplying internet services across continents.

This is the only part of this article I’ll endorse. Y’know how this happened, right? Google bought dark fiber that was laid by the USA and privatized repeatedly. Meta set up Internet.org, a project that put phones with free Facebook into the hands of exploitable impoverished folks around the world, and then lobbied local governments to subsidize fiber rollouts to handle the induced demand. At some point, you gotta suck it up and start blaming capitalism, not only oligarchs or trusts, for this situation.

The cloud is a lie.

The clouds are products and services. They are a consumer’s understanding of the underlying infrastructure. It’s a lot more work than a mere fib!

Over a decade or more, while our politicians were busy sub-tweeting fascists for clout, GAMM was buying up all the infrastructure it could carry. … The production cost of data storage plummeted by 94% in just ten years. You can’t sell 50GB plans to college kids who own M2 Macbook Pros with a terabyte of solid-state storage.

Okay, now read between the lines. If an oligopoly (1) buys many warehouse-scale computers, (2) in an environment where prices are rapidly dropping on new hardware, (3) in a market which already provided basic local compute to all of your customers, then this is going to produce a massive second-hand market from all of the smaller shops which were using commodity hardware until they got displaced. Google, Apple, and Meta all purchase custom datacenter hardware at a scale which requires a consortium merely to ensure that the motherboards are printed fast enough, obsoleting workstations from Dell and HP.

This has led to something of a boon for USA homelabs. I can purchase RAM-heavy workstations at less than $1/GiB, disks are at least half a TiB, small form factors are available as long as you’re willing to do some BIOS work, rackables are something like $100/U, etc. We’re talking discounts of 90-95%. In my house, a $200 workstation has more disk, RAM, cores, and system stability than a $600 gaming desktop, and the only thing missing is purple gamer LED strips.

Amazon controls 35% of the cloud computing market and has created a tight seal around its customer base. … Amazon is mostly quiet as the frontrunner in the cloud computing market.

The author hasn’t worked in the business. That’s fine, but it means they don’t know that AWS is not secure in its position. AWS is only tolerated because product managers ask for it, not because engineers like it; AWS is shit. For comparison, Google Cloud is fine but expensive and a third of the services are bad, Microsoft Azure is awful aside from their k8s, and Meta doesn’t operate a public cloud.

Yes, if everyone open-sources its AI models, they cannot build a moat on proprietary software. However, Google’s memo fails to mention that it already has the infrastructure to run computing-hungry AI models and that infrastructure is wildly expensive to build.

Click through to their side rant. This is where I realized that the author could be more clueful. If any of GAMM train another Llama-sized model, and it is at all good, somebody will put it up on Bittorrent and leak it to 4chan. This is literally how we got Llama. There is no moat.

Don’t get me wrong, open-source tech is great and important, and wonderful. But it’s not like the average person runs a Large Language Model on their Mac to make grocery lists. If you are, in fact, doing this, you are a nerd and I love you. But you’re not the average user.

He is a year behind in a field where things change every few months. See RWKV’s recent blog post. There is no moat.

So, who gives a shit if Meta put Llama on Github for free? … Read the terms and conditions. Llama is not open-source.

You naïve motherfucker, we the neighbors took it from Meta and we will take it again. There is no moat.

Mark Zuckerberg is a capable businessman who understands the industry better than most tech founders. I don’t know the guy personally, but look at the facts.

This is the most sneerable part of the article for me. You’re supposed to be a writer and humanist. It should be obvious after doing maybe five minutes of research that Zuck thinks of himself as a modern-day Octavian. Same haircut, same daily routine, same politics. Zuck is exactly the kind of person to hire a private navy to win a civil war for him by sailing off to defeat a pirate captain while he sits on a beach and idly thinks of how cool it will be to rule the Roman Empire.

Because why give a shit who sells the milk jars when you own the motherfucking cows, baby!

Have you seen the prices on the pre-owned cow market lately? Maybe milk is just permanently getting cheaper. The existence of Big Dairy and government cheese doesn’t preclude local dairies, either.

My tip for this guy: Look up this new company “nVidia”, they make computer chips or something, I dunno. I wonder if they ever do anything anti-competitive~

I wasn’t aware that the big four were buying the transport infra too

It’s not indistinguishable. People are choosing not to learn or understand how anything works. It more convenient to not know.