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Ed Zitron is mad as hell
- amelius 1y agohttps://archive.ph/A6XXp https://archive.ph/A6XXp
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gsf_emergency_2 1y agoIt's concerning that FT don't take more of an econs-of-AI-investment angle, explored here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399893 (Maybe Doctorow has too much of a Guardian vibe, compared to Zitron?) The Economist would argue that the investor is always right, so maybe that's too hard of a line for FT to press
- zipy124 1y agoI've said this many times but I'll say it again. The FT is not some single opinion org. It has many writers and many editors of various opinions. The FT itself does not take any angle, only it's writers and editors, who can have contradictory views and still publish articles in the same media org.
- gsf_emergency_2 1y agoTo add color to your opinion: this piece was written by one of the financial editors https://www.ft.com/tabby-kinder https://www.ft.com/tabby-kinder No "unified opinion" but an editorial stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Times#Editorial_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Times#Editorial_stan... you want to open a wikipedia debate on that :)? If I were you I'd point to the FT [Weekend] Magazine marquee instead
- oezi 1y ago> FT is not one single opinion This holds for most newspapers and makes that whole fake news argument so infuriating. As if journalists had even 15 minutes in a day to coordinate how to present an issue.
- thevillagechief 1y agoJournalists don't have to spend 15 minutes to coordinate how to present an issue. The phenomenon has been described as journalists writing for other journalists as their audience, rather than the general public. It's about sending a signal that you're part of the in-group.
- watwut 1y agoNewspapers employ journalists that write only within certain range of opinions. I am not saying it is evil or something, but there is absolutely selection of which opinions can be show and which cant.
- CPLX 1y agoWhat are the chances of reading an FT article stating that the financial sector, and financialization, are creating some of society’s core problems?
- teamonkey 1y agoThey do occasionally, with reservation. Though obviously pro-finance they also don’t want total financial collapse.
- zoenolan 1y agoThe FT recently did a series on 'The AI race', which they described as 'A three-part series exploring the quest for AI capacity and the data centres at the heart of hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investment' - ‘Absolutely immense’: the companies on the hook for the $3tn AI building boom [1][2] - Inside the AI race: can data centres ever truly be green? [3][4] - Inside the relentless race for AI capacity [5] [1] https://www.ft.com/content/efe1e350-62c6-4aa0-a833-f6da01265473 https://www.ft.com/content/efe1e350-62c6-4aa0-a833-f6da01265... [2] https://archive.ph/sn3lT https://archive.ph/sn3lT [3] https://www.ft.com/content/0f6111a8-0249-4a28-aef4-1854fc8b46f1 https://www.ft.com/content/0f6111a8-0249-4a28-aef4-1854fc8b4... [4] https://archive.ph/10tca https://archive.ph/10tca [5] https://ig.ft.com/ai-data-centres/ https://ig.ft.com/ai-data-centres/
- ksec 1y ago[flagged]
- Traubenfuchs 1y agoViralized lukewarm hot takes expanded to tl;dr pseudointellectual drivel that makes readers feel sophisticated for powering through.
- baobun 1y agoI started listening but got too reminded of the Rush Limbaugh Family Guy episode to continue more than a couple of times. It's all rage. 5 minutes of hate for our generation. Not constructive and not healthy.
- Traubenfuchs 1y agoPeople love being outraged. And no easier target than useless, overpaid, digital analphabet CEOs, AI slop and techbros.
- nativeit 1y agoJust for the record, I don’t love being outraged, and yet I frequently employ active effort to maintain my composure. Society is being looted from the top; in both scope and scale, it’s only getting worse. I can appreciate that many find Zitron’s angry energy grating, but I don’t think it’s disingenuous and he’s clearly tapping into a widely shared sense of a degraded society. Anyone who sincerely believes they’re witnessing 2000’s-levels of greed, economic malfeasance, and oversight failures would be appropriate in behaving frantically. Zitron’s core arguments describe a deeply troubling scenario, and as this article mentions he is not terribly concise—his articles contain a great deal of details and explanations for his positions, and I have largely seen only ad-hoc complaints of his bedside manner, or else vague gestures towards as-yet unrealized prosperity, in response to them.
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- laserlight 1y agoEd Zitron was famous for writing “The Man Who Killed Google Search” [0] (see also its HN thread [1]). [0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
- ath3nd 1y ago[dead]
- JimDabell 1y ago[flagged]
- luma 1y ago> this is being driven entirely by spite not insight Zitron is a PR dude who runs a PR company and has never had any experience, training, or meaningful contributions to technology. He found twitter success posting shittakes about AI, ran that into a podcast, and now he's in the FT. Zitron is a professional contrarian and PR man, saying "AI sucks" has found him fame and success.
- SoylentGreenGPT 1y agoAnd yet, he’s mostly right about the current AI landscape.
- runlaszlorun 1y agoMeanwhile, he's done deeper analysis than anyone else I've seen on financial statements and actual costs from AI for the large players and I absolutely don't think he's wrong. Unfortunately, this seems to strike a chord for you.
- frozenseven 1y agoWhen confronted with an actual analysis from a technical person, he immediately resorts to insults and hand-waving: https://old.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1n2c12q/article_are_openai_and_anthropic_really_losing/nb6p1zo/ https://old.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1n2c12q/arti... Not unlike his blog posts and podcasts. Spiteful insult-laden rants (he even admits to this on occasion). If you're looking for a financial analysis on AI, I'd literally look anywhere else.
- pizlonator 1y agoTo be fair that actual analysis had a lot of assumptions and zitron was pointing out the hand waviness of those assumptions. Super weird to say that someone is hand waving when what they are doing is pointing out that an argument is hand wavy.
- mark_l_watson 1y agoI can’t read the linked FT article but I wanted to mention that Ed Zitron’s podcast Better Offline is interesting for me because he has a contrarian view of tech that is often different from my own. Some of his recent podcasts on the funky economics of excessive AI investments and data center investments vs. any real payoffs for society. I feel my own views slightly shifting when I listen to him. I value material that makes me re-visit my own assumptions about the world.
- justfix17 1y agoI found "Better Offline" through "Tech Won't Save Us" where Ed is occasionally a guest. It also has some critical takes on technology if you are looking for more of that content.
- nchmy 1y agoI found him in the same way, and thought he was interesting and insightful. But I tried listening to some of his podcasts and read his articles, but just could not suffer them at all. Tech Wont Save Us is worth people's time though - great work there.
- jsnell 1y agoInteresting if he really is more convincing in speech than in writing. His writing is certainly flamboyant, but the aggression and expletives seem more targeted at hyping up people who already believe the things he writes, not for making people change their minds. He found a niche in anti-tech grift, and is now exploiting the niche for all he can. But you might want to actually fact-check a few of the things he says that convince you, because at least for his written articles basically everything is made up or misrepresented. There's plenty of links to sources, sure, but if you follow them down to the primary source what they're saying is very different from what Zitron is implying. It seems hard to believe that he's better at this in spoken form where citing a source is even harder.
- nchmy 1y agoYeah, I have no doubt that he's got some good insights, but its crystal clear that he's just hyping it all up as part of a grift. I get serious Alex Jones vibes from him I've tried to listen to a few podcasts and read some articles, and its just unbearable. Moreover, I find the main point that he harps on about - that none of the AI stuff is financially sustainable - to be largely unimportant. Like, if they want to burn their money, go for it. The real issues - intellectual property, implications for the future workforce, environmental costs, or even that the money really ought to be invested in something else, whether public funds are going towards it, if taxes are being avoided etc - seem to be, at best, tertiary concerns for him. He only seems to be "mad as hell" that they're wasting money and no one else is talking about it. He's also just plainly wrong when he keeps saying things like there's been zero discernable benefit to AI, as if it is just a creepto scam.
- iamnotagenius 1y ago[dead]
- southernplaces7 1y agoBut is he not gonna take it?
- Zak 1y agoI tried listening to a few episodes of his podcast a while back. I stopped because he was spending more time on how mad he is about some problem with big tech than he was on the problem itself. I'd like to hear stories about big tech abuses, but I don't care much about some random podcaster's anger.
- sanex 1y agoI started reading and listening to Ed after "The Man Who Killed Google Search" but grew tired of him ranting on and on about a technology that "brings no value to the world" while I use it to great effect many times every single day (LLMs).
- nchmy 1y agoYeah, he's a lunatic and/or grifter for that and many other reasons
- duncan-donuts 1y agoSerious question – what’s the grift?
- packetlost 1y agoAd revenue from podcasts? Building up a personal brand to monetize in arbitrary ways later?
- infoseek12 1y agoHe’s flogging a paid newsletter.
- therobots927 1y agoMost HN criticism of Zitron appears to fall into one of two categories: 1) He uses expletives and is “too angry” 2) He runs a PR firm and has no experience working with LLMs Which I think says a lot more about his detractors than it does about him. Time will tell all, and I think he will be remembered as a prescient individual. It’s undeniable that these financial games that OpenAI, Oracle, and now Nvidia are playing are unsustainable and indicative of a large upcoming crash.
- watwut 1y agoYeah, his financial arguments are good. But I did listened a but to his podcast ... and good bulk of it is pure ranting. There are episodes with no economic analysis as far aw I can tell, but a stream of complains about Sammy Clammy being idiot and people whose names I dont remember being idiots. He has literally hours and hours of that.
- hoistbypetard 1y agoWhen he's making arguments and offering analysis, I think they're very often sound. That's why I (at least sporadically) continue to listen to episodes of his podcast, or read his pieces. I'd love to read/listen to one that he worked on with a talented editor. I don't mind the swearing or the tone, and I enjoy a good rant here and there, but for me the amount of rambling and ranting obfuscates the good points he's making, just by sheer volume.
- glenngillen 1y agoEven his financial arguments are often weak. Of late he’s been constantly ranting about the use of ARR, like that hasn’t been a norm in SaaS businesses for almost two decades now. And that they’re using it to fool… who exactly? Wholesale investors on their current investor roadshow who deal with these things literally every day? The episode with Shingy also really rubbed me the wrong way too. Just constantly “yeah, but it still hasn’t done anything useful” followed by Shingy relaying numerous examples over and over of how AI has transformed our he things he does, followed by “yeah, but when is it going to do something actually useful?” over and over. He’s become some one note on the AI stuff it’s tiresome. Moreso given he’s unwilling to actually listen to any other perspective. I wish he’d go back to talking about literally anything else.
- jgalt212 1y agoSatya is not an idiot. He's just doing the things that make the investor class idiots ecstatic.
- ksynwa 1y agoI don't know. If it's an act it is very convincing.
- throw0101c 1y agoIs the "mad as hell" an allusion to the movie Network? > In one impassioned diatribe, Beale galvanizes the nation, persuading viewers to shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" from their windows. He is soon hosting a new program called The Howard Beale Show, top-billed as "the mad prophet of the airwaves". * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film) Scene: > It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone." > Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. > I want you to get mad! * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RujOFCHsxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RujOFCHsxo * Transcript: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechnetwork2.html https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechne...