ai
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Don’t wanna say told ‘ya, but told ‘ya
The City has a way of repeating its own history, usually while insisting this time is different because the underlying mathematics are silicon rather than subprime. We are currently watching that cycle play out in San Francisco with a predictability that would be amusing if the sums involved weren’t so gargantuan. The latest dispatches from Continue reading
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Valve’s Steam machine will run over Microsoft
For more than thirty years I’ve watched the personal-computing landscape shift under the feet of companies that once looked immovable. Monopolies rarely fall in dramatic battles; they erode quietly, grain by grain, usually because the incumbent stops paying attention to the constituency that mattered most. With Valve preparing to roll out its new generation of Continue reading
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Digital shovel sellers
Watching tech for a long amount of time teaches a humbling lesson: manias rhyme. Today’s AI trade smells like a circular economy of hype—vendors financing customers who finance vendors—while real, durable profits remain scarce. The one clear cash machine is Nvidia, the picks-and-shovels seller of compute. Its data-center juggernaut now throws off extraordinary revenue and Continue reading
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HAL is not for profit
Silicon Valley is selling artificial intelligence as an economy-wide cure-all. Strip away the theatrics and you find a familiar cycle: when genuine breakthroughs slow, the marketing gets louder. The last half-century’s growth rode semiconductors and microelectronics; that engine is sputtering. We hit the power wall when Dennard scaling broke down in the mid-2000s, ending the Continue reading
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It’s a long way to the top if your thing is databases
The market delivered a striking headline this month: Larry Ellison, at least briefly, was the richest person in the world. A vertiginous rally in Oracle shares on September 10 pushed his paper wealth toward the $390–$400 billion range, momentarily eclipsing Elon Musk on several real-time leaderboards before prices cooled. It was a reminder of how Continue reading
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