Trying to sell consumers on “scaling solves everything” is going to be a hard sell.

If we look at general purpose computation, which had decades of actual scaling-solves-everything growth, you had two influences that made the message resonate with customers:

• Clear existing applications where more power made the experience straightforward better. Your spreadsheet took an hour to recalculate at 8MHz and 20 minutes at 25MHz. A lot of the “bigger model” stuff is plateauing with marginal or spotty gains. If I feed another 5 Internets of data to ChatGPT, will that summarized email be that much better?

• New applications that could be demoed on specialised low capacity hardware and scaled down to consumers as more power became available. Think of early CGI on hardware costing tens of millions, and now you can run Blender on a $149 laptop. Since most commercial AI plays are hosted services, there’s not much opportunity to tease that way anymore.

I figured SDF were the sort of people who would consider uptime a badge of honour.

I should probably be on Hexbear but I didn’t know of its existence at the time. Very problematic, my Xibuck direct deposits keep bouncing.

Transhumanity would be exciting if they had cool visions. I’d be all over raising a creche of draconic children.

But no, it’s just rich people gluing a Palm Pilot to their cerebrllum or doing a dance to shoo away the reaper.

The difference was that Amazon knew how to make a profit, but was reinvesting into infrastructure plays and bigger fish.

If they had to, they could have been a modestly profitable bookshop in 2002. AWS and monster logistics might not have developed to put them in the 13-digit club though.

Does any AI-centric play have that fundamental fallback? The services that seem to be most effective at direct monetization, the coding tools, are typically running at huge losses. If they raised costs to cover, precious few firms will pay basically the salary of a senior dev for an emulation of an enthusiastic junior dev with an affinity for footguns.

The less enterprise-focused products-- parasocial toys, image and video gen, will likely try to dip into consumer subs and advertising, but can that generate the cash volumes these platforms demand?

All the best firms continvoucly morg these days.

The “default” mode for a USB keyboard allows submitting 6 keys + modifiers. Some boards define nontraditional input descriptors that allow more, but that mode is not guaranteed to work in places like the BIOS menu or naive KVM switches.

To avoid phantom keypresses when you hit three keys in a “square” on the matrix, a diode can be placed in series with each switch so current can’t go through an “indirect” route.

There’s also an execution problem.

Truly knowing your customer might produce very different outcomes than the current compliance checkbox approach.

“I know Fred just sold his old car. The idea he suddenly has $12k in cash is not suspicious” or “Jane’s been talking about going to Montreal for momths. We should not block her card when it lights up there.”. That’s real KYC, but it requires human connection and human judgement, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide the right paperwork for demonstrating compliance with arbitrary mandates.