People latch onto consistency and hypocrisy as their filters.
The problem is that anyone trying to actually be better is usually inconsistent and hypocritical at some level as in that "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" comic.
If you attempt to filter out all traces of hypocrisy from your trusted sources, you wind up listening to the absolute worst people.
The people trying to do better are usually the ones struggling with conflicts and inconsistencies.
1918 isn't very relevant to modern living. And nobody wants to go back to the stagflation of the 1970s. And that scale is logarithmic.
Graph it without the logarithmic scale and draw a curve through the 1982-2018 data and the recent spike will explain why people are complaining about it.
Indeed. Back then food and shelter comprised a much larger % of the average income, and so each percentage point of inflation was considerably more painful than it is now.
> the vast majority of the market prefers solid near glued together phones so that's what companies make.
the vast majority of companies only make solid near-glued together phones, so that is all anyone buys.
if apple made a phone with replaceable batteries with a bit more thickness and some compromises on water resistance vs. cost, you'd actually see the consumer preferences play out.
> The folds do add functionality and I think there's an impulse that leads people to say they don't see the point of something just because they're not interested in it personally.
you're going to have to go through some real mental contortions to support foldable phones as consumer choice while treating repairability/replaceability as inherently not worth it because you like slim designs.
> if apple made a phone with replaceable batteries with a bit more thickness and some compromises on water resistance vs. cost, you'd actually see the consumer preferences play out.
We already went through the period of offering both and people preferred the thin hard to repair slabs we have now. There were quite a few phones made during the transition to the current state and the overwhelming purchasing choice was eliminate replicable batteries.
I'd love it if we could make slightly thicker phones (I put cases on my phone still I'm not chasing absolute thinness contrary to your assumptions) with the same battery capacity and feel, but there's a lot more of a trade off than just a little thickness when you go back to the old replicable battery. You lose a lot of capacity vs volume when you make the battery removable because it needs it's own plastic shell and you have to have a water resistant cavity to insert it into. Both of those eat up probably 10-20% of the capacity you can place in the same area with a bare(ish) lithium polymer pack that goes into the current design.
It's nice to believe people would agree with you if only they had the choice companies have stripped away from them to make again but it's not like people didn't have a chance to buy repairable smartphones over the current version already.. Most people just don't really think about replacing their phone's battery ever until it's a problem.
If you were to treat all the hyperscalars as one company with one 10-K then Anthropic buying compute from SpaceX/xAI is an internal bookkeeping transfer between two departments. It isn't the same as top-line revenue into the AI companies. It is still mostly just financing money that Anthropic raised being transferred to SpaceX.
> If you were to treat all the hyperscalars as one company with one 10-K then Anthropic buying compute from SpaceX/xAI is an internal bookkeeping transfer between two departments
This is literally true for any revenue. Treat the buyer and seller as a single company and their transaction is internal.
Because it is hiding the fact that there's very little external revenue coming into the AI sector compared to the costs. AI companies doing business with each other isn't net revenue into the sector. Treating the whole sector as a single entity isn't arbitrary.
> it is hiding the fact that there's very little external revenue coming into the AI sector compared to the costs
There is a lot of revenue dumping into this sector. If there weren’t, you’d have a point about manufactured numbers. But I don’t think anyone seriously doubts Anthropic and Google are hauling in serious dough.
The question, as you point out, is how much they are keeping. But xAI selling compute doesn’t really hide any of that. If anything, given the prices Musk is getting, it adds to the cost line. (And xAI isn’t masking compute revenue as Grok’s.)
Hyperscalar capital spending for 2026 is going to be in the close neighborhood of $700B, which is over 2% of US GDP. That is about 3x the GDP spend of peak Apollo program in the 1960s, and about the same as the telecom/fiber buildout of the late 90s and the railroad buildout of the 19th century (both followed by a collapse). And there just isn't that much revenue coming into the system, and there aren't the productivity gains coming out of it. When 95% of corporate AI initiatives are still failing, the value proposition isn't there. And if you try to look at something like Microsoft's reported $37B in AI revenue a lot of that is really internal spend from leasing compute to OpenAI, which it partially owns. The real revenue coming into the AI industry is likely well under $100B this year, and the productivity gains to end consumers is likely much less. So if you think a few $10B/yr here or there is "serious dough", it just isn't enough to fill the gap. And OpenAI should burn through $14B this year, up by a factor of 3x over last year. Anthropic has a projected revenue for 2026 of $26B and is running around cash flow neutral, but that doesn't approach the $700B spending gap. And that is with accounting that depreciates GPUs on 5-6 year schedule instead of the more realistic 2-3 year schedule--so Anthropic may kick the can down the road a bit, but in 2-3 years they'll still be depreciating GPUs that they're throwing away and having to replace (of course this may be WHY Anthropic is leasing compute from xAI since then that accounting hit falls on xAI instead of Anthropic).
In 10 years, we probably will have $700B/yr in productivity gains and revenue from LLMs, but we're not going to be able to sustain $700B/yr in capital spending until we get there. And the problem is much worse than the fiber buildout of the late 90s. Fiber built out in 1998 was still usable 10 years later. The GPUs that are being built out today are going to be obsolete trash in 3 years.
For GH issues you can always navigate back to the PR discussion (which should have linked issues and other pointers in it) from the commit.
Of course when we switched to GH issues, we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted. Now all those JIRA tags are entirely useless.
IMO that actually argues for tight coupling between your issue tracker and your git repo. And what you really want is portability (which I don't see how you get other than with tight coupling). Ideally there would be open standardized formats, but as it is, github is the 800# gorilla that defines the format and as long as gitlab and other clones can slurp in github project metadata (or at least PRs) then that effectively gets you closer.
But any way... Fixed, immutable pointers to an Atlassian product that you might not be using in 5 years is not a good policy. I'd sooner accept the policy that the git commits needed to stand entirely on their own and all the information about the "why" of the change needed to be baked into the git commit or the comments in the source (I think that fails, though, since everyone is overly terse in git commits and summarizes issues and loses information--and the back-and-forth dialog in a PR discussion is useful because it contains more than just one person's voice summarizing the reason for the change).
> Of course when we switched to GH issues, we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted. Now all those JIRA tags are entirely useless.
We did Bugzilla -> FogBugz -> Jira. Almost all the data was lost every time, no one bothered with migration except for the maintenance project. Worse, even on Jira we lose cases as teams end and hand off the code, and the Jira project is closed so no one else can access it.
We've also done cvs -> svn -> git. All the commits have survived migration.
I do keep including cases in the commits messages, if nothing else it'll help link things together in the future, but never rely on them for context a future maintainer might need.
> Of course when we switched to GH issues, we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted. Now all those JIRA tags are entirely useless.
I agree that this is a problem but at the same time associating commits with a ticket number is useful, especially if I have dozens of commits on a single ticket and am doing trunk-based development (so not all commits are on the same short-lived branch). Maybe the lesson here is that, once completed, tickets should be exported and stored in the Git repository.
> we largely abandoned JIRA and years later the instance got turned off and deleted
Sorry to be nitpicky, but why did you abandon a tool that contained a lot of valuable knowledge? That's not the fault of GH nor JIRA, that's your fault. At least you'd back up descriptions + comments from these JIRA sources.
I didn't abandon it, it was run by a different team, and we were one consumer of it. When the organization switched from Jira to GH issues the Jira was kept running for years, but nobody got the information into GH issues. Eventually the Jira was shut down, certainly by the time the company got acquired.
That isn't true though. It's very easy to export your data from JIRA. From your board, go to the List tab, filter the items to whatever you want, and then click ... and you can export the data in various different formats. Exporting as XML dumps everything.
You can trivially export your data from JIRA. If the parent experienced a situation where valuable information was lost because the instance was deactivated, that's not JIRA's fault.
xAI is burning through a tremendous amount of money.
it is getting propped up right now through leasing compute to Anthropic, which isn't really AI sector profitability. even if the AI bubble doesn't collapse, Anthropic is unlikely to want to keep shovelling money at its competitor.
and right now the xAI+x business segment is getting propped up by a couple billion a year in sustainable revenue from social media, making it look better than it should.
the core SpaceX/Starlink business itself looks pretty amazing and could probably justify $600B-$1T valuations, having roughly comparable financials to something like Visa, particularly if you removed the Starship development costs. but to say xAI is a boat anchor is probably being overly charitable... like if your boat anchor was a supertanker that was sinking into the abyss.
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