Pundits literally make you less aware of what is happening in the world. Their whole job is to fill the space between an event, and actual, verified information about that event, with wild guesses. Any truthful journalist will admit the limitations of what is known during that time.
It may be pedantic, but I distinguish between the tech development, and the crazy investment/speculation happening. The latter is a bubble, not because the tech is completely useless (it’s not!), but because there’s no business model where nearly a Trillion dollars of investments are going to pay off on something that is a convenient digital assistant and write mediocre code. When people start to realize that AGI isn’t coming to any of these companies, they will start pulling money, and at this point, that bubble bursting could wipe out a large fraction of the economy. It’s going to be messy.
Economists cant tell you what time-frame everything must be slightly inflationary. They act like an economic quarter of deflation would be the end of the world after years of extreme inflation. Their models don’t make any sense.
It’s gambling on who might stumble on AGI, not building anything.
The dot-com bubble didn’t build the internet. The internet still would have been built up if pension funds were not buying toiletpaper.com for millions of dollars. Bubbles, pretty much by definition, are specifically about the part of the economy where huge sums are invested into things that are not worth anything (i.e., full of air).
LLMs would still be developed without a trillion-dollar bubble. Slower, sure, but all the crazy investment isn’t about developing tech, it’s about speculating on who will stumble on AGI and suddenly be able to run companies with 1% of the workforce of traditional companies. It’s gambling. When the gamblers figure out that a casino doesn’t pay out, they all leave at once.
Absolutely not. AI tech will continue to be pushed by C-suites convinced they can surplus a fraction of their workforce eventually. The change will be that most of the investments in AI companies will disappear overnight and most will go belly-up. It will erase a significant fraction of everyone’s pension funds, and federal governments around the world will pour public funds into propping up the larger companies so that they don’t go under too. Heads they win, tails you lose.
Indeed. Owning your mail is a spectrum. I think it’s really best to transition from something like gmail to fully owning the stack in steps, over a significant amount of time. It will take a while to change over the address on everything a while anyway. No real need to go whole-hog right away and then burn out.
Precisely. I’d be more likely to switch to one of those pocket “hot spot” devices. Just a thing in my pocket that gives devices I control internet access and maybe has a shitty web interface I can log into for basic SMS when absolutely necessary. No microphone, no camera, no GPS, no access to my actual computing environment. Only 2 downsides are maintaining battery charge in multiple devices and the fact that those hotspots are generally hot garbage, and so unreliable.
Maybe, a flip phone if one existed that was 1) a full-time good quality internet hotspot (i.e., good battery), and 2) lacked a GPS and camera, and hardware disconnected the microphone when closed. Now that I think about it, that would be a fantastic device… if it existed.
They have a whole list of these in the linked Readme. Thanks for posting - I was considering setting up pinchflat but this might be a lot lighter on resources.
My use case: I would like to run something like this, but either directly on, or syncing to my laptop. I don’t watch much YouTube, but it would be nice to have stuff to watch offline, and cut google out of all the behavioural metadata.
Since wireguard only awks connections with matching keys, on a private lan, I bet you could just scan the network for all hosts and try the wireguard connection. A hack, but might work.
Glad someone else noticed this. I don’t care that the “small” web isn’t as extensive or as polished as the corporate web, but all the anti-scraper stuff and cookie pop-ups are the actual death. It’s horrible.
Off to gopher and Gemini I guess.
Then how would they email you?
Look at addy.io and similar.
Wow, my brain really failed me here! I ALSO listened to Picks and Shovels recently, which was narrated by Will Wheaton, and somehow the voices got switched in my memory. You are correct, Cory recorded this himself.
He has the first hour and a half (of 9) in his latest podcast, if you want a real preview: https://craphound.com/podcast/2025/08/28/enshittification-episode-500/
I decided to order the epub because no matter how I try, I can’t enjoy Wesley’s voice (sorry Will).
It’s always projection. They always assume the other side is doing what they do or plan to do. They tell on themselves years in advance.
I wonder how many of those 164k are people who are still being billed for a service they no longer use.
Ideally, the cellular modem just looks like a network device and usb sound card to the OS. Jail it as much as possible.
Cloudflare is a protection racket. They cover so many websites because it’s easier to pay the mafia.
Yeah, it’s just recovering a little of the energy spent in desalination, making it slightly less energy consuming.
The description is so vague, that a few ashes in the garbage and someone claiming they saw the note and it’s contents would fit it.