Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something
Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something
Odes & Satires, and other matters of stuff & things.
this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:
Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.
I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.
The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.
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
exploitableimpoverished 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~
AWS is only tolerated because product managers ask for it, not because engineers like it; AWS is shit.
Yes, but the competition is hardly much better. Well, maybe Google is, I didn't touch it much back when I still did public cloud stuff. Azure leads with "look, our VPS offering is called 'Virtual Machines' instead of 'EC2', isn't that simple?" and then proceeds to make everything even clunkier and more complicated than AWS. And don't get me started on the difference in technical and customer support from the two.
There is no moat.
You keep reiterating this, but I still need you to explain the implications. Ok sure, you can run a model on a home computer. Nonwithstanding that those models still amount to overhyped novelty toys, home computers are also capable of running servers, databases, APIs, office suites, you name it. Still, corporations and even consumers are renting these as SaaS and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.
The AI fad is highly hype driven, so there's still incentive to be the one who trains the latest, biggest and shiniest model, and that still takes datacenters' worth of specialized compute and training data. LLM-based AI is an industry built on FOMO. How long until that shiny new LLM torrent you got from 4chan is so last season?
And the OP is correct. Llama is not open source. "The neighbors" only took it from Meta in the same sense warez sites have taken software forever. Only in this case the developer was the one committing the copyright infringement.
I hear you. You're largely right, and I think it's a perspective shift.
… explain the implications.
I need to write a longer post about the justification (basically, what is a moat anyway?) but without a moat, a computation vendor can't profit from their capital investment. This kills the OpenAI.
One of said engineers here, and YMMV.
- All software sucks, all hardware sucks and all clouds suck
- AWS works well enough
- There is basically no such thing as multicloud in the real world, I look for it every year and don't find it
I would probably pick AWS over the others for most practical things as long as I had a reasonable support contract.
Fully agreed, but also I was doing multicloud in 2017. Managed k8s is not just a meme; I was able to use the same YAML on four different providers (Azure, Bluemix, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud) to get my N+2. Indeed, YMMV.
Bonus sneer: Zuck is obsessed with the Roman Empire and Latin culture. I have a Facebook challenge coin with a Latin inscription surrounding an Earth criss-crossed with circular paths. Here's my [implied] translation: "[Stretching] our reach around the world, we are the connection [between people]." Do the pieces fit yet?
I wasn't aware that the big four were buying the transport infra too
They got tired of all the "SV keeps re-inventing trains and buses à la carcinisation"* memes and decided to remove them from public consciousness altogether
*Yes, I did initially misread "transport" as "public transport" and not "internet transport" even after skimming the article. No, I will not change this joke. Yes, I look like a fool now, but when silicon valley vertically integrates away your precious commute I'll look like the best damn prediction marketeer out there.
I autocorrected it to transit in my head (because that's the term of art and unfortunately I am cursed with that tier of networking exposure) but it also threw me for a moment
and then I groaned because, as you remarked, it's also true in the respect of these dipshits trying to take cars and buses and trains
Well I was aware of Google Fiber for years now, but the other three are indeed a surprise.
Especially Facebook? Like what the fuck do you need that for? Your business is entirely Instagram ads?
years ago facebook got extremely into owning the channel in multiple ways (for the reasons outlined in that post). the FreeBasics program, Libra, etc. all kinds of shit
because if you own the channel, you can charge others any amount you want for access, while giving yourself
special treatment"having different internal cost structures between business units" (cf. amazon, as doctorow's written in recent years)
It’s not indistinguishable. People are choosing not to learn or understand how anything works. It more convenient to not know.
you could argue it was done to them on purpose. Russian demoralization propaganda has been completed for decades now.
