Ask anyone over fifty how far away 2035 is and they will tell you something like it's not long after Christmas.

I am fully willing to stipulate that Naomi believes it earnestly (rather than being like Musk just kicking things down the road) but those are very, very optimistic scenarios.

In my head there are corrections that are rude that I don't do, because I genuinely think authentic writing matters more and more, and because I am absolutely not above reproach where grammar and spelling is concerned.

Then there are things I think people would want to know, that are either in the intellectual-you-have-a-little-bit-of-pinach-in-your-teeth territory or in the "cool fact" territory, or somewhere hazy in between.

I figured if one is going to correctly use an expressive phrase like "bury the lede" that they've perhaps only ever heard someone say, they would absolutely want to know about the spelling quirk, because it fully makes it better.

Other people obviously read it differently and the downvote was a useful signal.

What gets buried is the "lede". It is a really unusual thing — a deliberate, engineered misspelling of "lead" that leaked into broader use:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/bury-the-lede-versu...

(Not meant as a nit-pick — it's just something that adds really fascinating historical colour to a useful expression, that people often mistakenly re-correct)

I was just observing that if that is a consensus on the continent — that we're going to be begging to be let back in on the old terms — it is people spinning a yarn for their own reasons. Because it isn't a correct characterisation.

Even the Leave voters have had long enough to realise that what Remain campaigners were saying about the structural advantages of membership and the speed of recovering any comparative position are true. Brexit-means-Brexit types all seem to project success into the future long enough that the only people who will call them on it will be nursing home carers.

You are right that there is no pathway to rejoin that isn't a humiliation. And the longer we wait, the more people forget what we had. Hence Reform and Restore can rage about a worsened border situation that their own politicians actually created; their voters have forgotten that Brexit made it worse.

There's no campaign asking for that; we understood it would be gone before we even left, and it was a key part of the Remain position that we were squandering a unique position within Europe.

We will, I think, never rejoin the EU as it is currently constituted; it is better off without us. If it can retain its current unity — which is by no means a given — then we will be on the outside of it forever.

You have your own issues and I do not believe that euroskepticism in continental Europe is gone, though I do think the Hungary transition shows that the Trump administration's deliberate, right wing bigot meddling is having less of an effect that they would like. Not that it is the only reason you have a surging xenophobic far right.

We in the UK have to fend that off a different way; Trump and that evil shit JD Vance present a different threat and we have other levers we must pull, and if we were in the EU at the moment the USA would only be using our tensions with the EU against everyone; without it they have much less power to stoke nationalist fires.

So for the next few years at least I think the campaign to rejoin should be on pause.

Once we stepped out of that, we needed to find new incentives for France and Belgium to care. We have failed to do so and we had destroyed many agreement frameworks within which any such deal could be struck.

Plus, what he thinks and what is possible are different things, and he absolutely knows it.

We will, I believe, not rejoin the EU while it is in its current form, because leaving closed us off to the bespoke deal we had before; that deal mattered and was the thing that made our relationship with the EU functional.

We will now suffer as a result of the hubris of idiots for generations; it's unavoidable, and it compounds almost every problem we have.

There is, however, reason not to talk a lot about rejoining for the next two years, because two of our biggest economic threats are Hormuz and Trump; the former can only be addressed as part of a global coalition now, and the latter can only be addressed by playing directly to his narcissism with royal visits and very bespoke strategy. Trump plays the EU by trying to divide it anyway.

Mind you, because I am not that interested in long-context, fire-and-forget tasks, I think the faster MoE model has more value generally.

If you want it to know more things locally, you could hopefully distribute wikipedia or other appropriate large sources on a flash storage, properly pre-indexed, with a local tool API, and let it work its magic on that. Not least because that is as I understand it, considerably easier to incrementally update.

This is, without doubt, a very difficult target, not least because it is rather at odds with the way LLMs work on a crude level.

He does think the market is going to crash.

Like I say, I find his tone enjoyable, some of his predictions are interesting (and he has already been proved right on its risks to Oracle for example).

I'm not interested in self-soothing and I am not afraid of AI. I am even a bit less bearish than Zitron. I am concerned about a world that is fucking stupid enough to fall for the elements of grift, but I am insulated enough from the consequences, for now, that it's not my primary concern.

Is it? I don't think this is really true.

For example he's spent some time talking about Oracle's relatively more dangerous exposure to OpenAI. Here he is back in April:

https://shows.acast.com/the-tech-report/episodes/how-openai-...

Here's S&P in July, downgrading Oracle specifically because of their exposure to risks from OpenAI.

https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/vie...

> and he's been predicting it for a while now (2024)

Like I said elsewhere, the first accurate, detailed, correct predictions of the subprime crisis were made four years before it finally unfolded. There's likely at least one more round of funding to come for both OpenAI and Anthropic. The big systemic risk to the USA is if the bubble bursts in 2028, if you ask me; that is shaping up to be a restless year.

> but if it's the gospel you want and/or need to hear,

It's not, especially? I listen every now and then; I don't even use a podcast app as a rule, so I'm far from a subscriber or follower. I am more interested in what Cal Newport has to say. I am probably slightly less bearish about AI's long tail value than Zitron is, as it goes.

> But also, if you don't want to talk about this stuff, why comment about it?

I'm happy to talk about it. I just don't care enough to make predictions beyond the personal, because I'm just not that invested and other people are better at it than me.

To the extent that I think personal observations scale up to the rest of the world, I would say that leads me to think that on-device AI will very significantly derail optimistic consumer AI revenue predictions (in particular OpenAI's), that cloud-based agentic coding is closer to its useful limits than people so far understand, that local (on-prem or boutique-hosted if not necessarily on-device) LLMs will do more and more of that work, and that as a result the total addressable market for cloud AI in the next five years is closer to its apex than people in the industry think.

But I am not going to bother to make more specific predictions about the fates of the two big AI companies or the value of the market, because I am not invested in them or the celebrity OpenAI/Anthropic employee influencer aspect of it. I have no team (and I am trying to avoid the products as much as possible).

I have learned in my life not to have too much anxiety about things that won't affect me or I am not close enough to influence.

My limited interest in AI is in the potential offered by smaller models, and I personally think people in the tech industry are thinking in a shallow, FOMO way, obsessing about shiny "frontier" model baubles and what a handful of overpaid loudmouths think, when they should be spending that energy exploring running open weights models and open source tools.

At the beginning of this whole thing, when I still had an X account to log in with, I used to scroll back on an AI influencer's profile to see how many tweets I'd have to go past before I saw "ETH" or "NFT".

Me? I didn't downvote you for it and you are projecting a lot onto me without a sound basis.

Either way, my predictions are all personal, because as someone with his own problems I don't really have the spare energy to give a fuck what happens to the US economy or its tech industry. In practice for the rest of the world, I think it will all be dwarfed by the USA's failings in the Strait of Hormuz.

Though as a man in his fifties who has spent his life in the tech industry, I am slightly invested in the possibility of Larry Ellison's humiliation. Bring that on.

In retrospect it seems that one of the hallmarks of a property boom is people being persuaded they can afford mortgages they can't, or persuaded to round up, pad their application, and willing naïve people lining up to be sold stuff they can't afford, out of an urge to take advantage of what is being sold as a golden opportunity.

In this bubble, one of the hallmarks is CEOs pressuring employees to use AI, urging suppliers to sell them AI solutions they can report to their investors, etc.; people are eager to buy things with fully unproven value out of an urge to take advantage of what is being sold as a golden opportunity.

> IMO that's anti-AI Psychosis, the evil twin of believing GPT-4o was sentient.

IMO that’s a particularly scraggly straw man. Even Ed Zitron, who we can stipulate is among the most cynical, thinks that some value will be left after the bubble either deflates or bursts.

You know what created the AI backlash as well as anyone, and it is: AI and AI people.

If e/acc voices were not so abrasively, obtrusively YOLO about their technology, if their entire take on what they earn millions to do was not so easily reduced to “yeah it sucks that your job will go away, learn AI I guess LOLz” then there would be far less to have a backlash against.

Being lectured about the future by people who do not have a fucking business plan for how they will repay a trillion dollars and who might actually crash the economy does tend to grate on the nerves of the reality-based. Being told again and again that we will be ruled over by two firms that ultimately amount to the corporate equivalent of trust fund kids, that is annoying.

If you want to convince people otherwise, find an analyst who is not churning out AI slop.

As to the “predicting it for years” thing, the first correct-with-specifics predictions of the subprime crisis were published in 2004, by a pretty fringe outlet (karmabanque) and its author, Max Keiser. I remember not being shocked at all when it finally happened, or being shocked at LIBOR rigging. Because Max Keiser presented his reasoning on his crazy radio show, and told his listeners what signs to look out for.

If someone is right for the right, well-informed reasons and presents that reasoning, it doesn’t always matter all that much if their background is unconventional. They tend to be dismissed, and they were back then. “People will always need houses” is what we were told, as if that was enough to ward off massive structural problems.