Windows file I/O has always felt slower than Linux, Mac, anything. Still does. I don’t know what’s wrong with it or why it’s unfixable.
SSDs make it tolerable… not by fixing it but by being fast enough to hide it. Back in the spinning disc days you could tell a windows machine by how much kerchunking the drive was doing.
I find Explorer slow and frustrating, while Finder works but is basic and cumbersome and useless for anything more than basic opening or moving.
I remember outstanding file managers way back in the MS-DOS days. Sidekick, QuickDOS, and Norton Commander were great.
My take is that expert users use the terminal while regular users don’t like to do much with files. So there’s no push for a powerful graphical file manager.
Authoritarian Communism and its variants mostly fail by the same standard: lots of misery and death.
A good principle here I think is “a thing is what it does.” It effectively banishes all the sophistry that these kinds of ideologies deploy in their defense. No, a thing is what it does, and these ideologies murder and impoverish.
I find it really disheartening that so many people today seem to want to revisit one of these two ideologies. These are the failed death cults of the early 20th century. They should be forgotten.
If what we have is not working we need new ideas, not these.
The modern right wants to replace democratic rule of law with enlightened despotism focused on eliminating perceived racial, sexual, and ideological impurities.
The modern left wants universal healthcare and high taxes for billionaires, similar to the well-known death cult of Norway. /s
The president has given up pretending to obey the law. He's torn down the east wing of the White House (which does not belong to him), he's issued Executive Orders that contradict a plain reading of the Constitution (14th amendment, among others), he has gratuitously and repeatedly violated the Emoluments Clause, he has used the DOJ to attack political enemies on the thinnest of pretenses, he is continuing an illegal "armed conflict" in violation of the War Powers Resolution, etc, etc. This has all been documented thoroughly elsewhere: the president acts like a king and demonstrates contempt for his oath of office.
That, in combination with his civil rights abuses, are tantamount to fascism. Under the guise of "immigration enforcement," he's unleashed a horde of undertrained, overpaid henchmen who apparently act above the law, killing people, including US citizens, and denying medical care to detainees, without any fear of accountability. He's also sought to withdraw citizenship from and cancel visas to those people who are legally in the US but, for whatever reason, displease him. This kind of capricious, content-based discrimination, without Congressional oversight, is exactly what the Founding Fathers fought to prevent.
I wasn’t talking about people who want social services like Sweden or Norway or more progressive taxes. That’s why I used a double qualifier of “authoritarian communism.”
That being said, I see that kind of rhetoric and adjacent rhetoric around.
Not really. I see it on social media though… the way I saw fascist and fascist adjacent ideas blossoming on social media in the 20 teens. It feels like it’s coming the way I saw fascism coming in 2014.
That makes me think first we will finish our current bad LARP of fascism with our tacky parody of Mussolini or Franco (Trump is more like them than Hitler) and then we will do some kind of bad LARP of communism in the 30s when youth unemployment and the total decimation of entry level jobs really starts to hurt bad. It will (like fascism is doing for the grievances it was marketed to) make everything worse, because these fascism and communism don’t work.
It’s probably waiting for a good populist (which means a charismatic malignant narcissist) like a tankie Trump. Imagine a more extreme Mamdani or Bernie Sanders with Trump’s narcissism.
Ultimately we are LARPing these bad ideas because there are no new ones. It’s a testament to intellectual bankruptcy that anyone takes fascism or Marxism seriously in 2026.
(Lack of anything entry level was already a problem before AI. Now we are looking at there being basically no entry level jobs in multiple fields other than “bot herder.”)
I use AI a lot and find it fascinating and probably the most exciting thing since discovering the web.
I’m not sure I disagree with this.
Schools need to figure out how to integrate it well in a way that both helps kids learn and teaches them how to use this new tool productively. I don’t think that’s been done yet. It’s not a bad idea to just keep it out until we figure it out, or there’s a risk of just slathering AI all over everything mindlessly.
At the very least it could be a giant waste of money. Schools don’t need to be spending their often limited funds thrashing around or chasing fads.
The ban should be lifted once educators figure out what to do with this stuff.
I get this but there’s this thing called the contact hypothesis. Friendly contact with people makes it harder to hate them.
I’ve heard many stories of people who were once racists or some other kind of bigot losing that attitude from living close to people of the other ethnic group. It’s common.
It’s a major hypothesis for why xenophobia is more popular in rural areas: lack of contact with out groups.
But if you instantly call someone out for their views, condemn them, take a self righteous position, that doesn’t happen. It might even have the opposite effect.
So maybe let the bigot next door borrow some eggs. Smile at them. But make sure they know it if you’re one of the people their dogma or emotional conditioning says they’re supposed to hate.
Might change someone’s mind every now and then.
It’s also important to note that people often don’t change their minds quickly. Seeds get planted. Experiences that contradict a dogma or an unexamined conditioned attitude are noted. The brain slowly updates its priors.
Here's the thing that's a little different about data centers; we can tell from Anthropic and OpenAI that they're capacity constrained. Inference demand is there. I notice Cerebras doesn't offer much directly any more, all their capacity is getting completely sucked up by B2B sales. Grok did overbuild, but Anthropic was so desperate for more compute they ate their pride and leased the excess capacity.
That means all these data centers are being heavily utilized by actual end user inference demand. Well, some is research on new models, but a lot is actual end user demand. No one has given an explanation of why peoples usage would decline.
On top of that, margin on inference appears to be decent. It's model training that's a serious financial burden.
And maybe that's where there will be a slowdown, maybe the market doesn't justify spending as much on R&D as it does, but the end demand for inference is there.
Does that justify these stock prices? That's a different question. But the housing boom left behind endless rows of empty homes because demand disappeared. The 'dot com' boom left behind thousands of miles of dark fiber that'd been built out well ahead of demand for bandwidth. I can see the stock market having a giant sell off, but I don't see data centers sitting idle in that same fashion.
The number of planned data centers and the scale is pretty nuts.
Here's what you have to believe:
- AI demand is at least several times larger than what can currently be satisfied, or will grow. (This one I can buy, but...)
- AI chips (GPUs, TPUs, compute-in-memory, whatever else is being studied) will not get significantly more efficient than they are now. It will not be possible in, say, 5-10 years, to do 2X or 4X or 10X more AI requests per rack than is possible now. I think this one's the single most likely thing to be false, since all computing history contradicts it.
- Edge devices (PCs, laptops, specialized but smaller scale AI compute nodes) will never be powerful enough to run frontier models at a reasonable price that's appealing for professionals, enthusiasts, or businesses, and there will never be a market for this. None of the demand will be served on-device or near-edge. AI must all go in giant data centers.
- AI models will not become significantly more efficient than they are now. There are no large gains on the table from better model architectures, better training, more efficient quantizations, better harnesses, etc.
If all those things are true, than the current planned like 4X-10X increase in data center capacity makes sense. If even one or two of them are not true, then the planned data center build-outs start looking excessive. If all four are not true, it's a total bubble that will crash and burn. Answer is probably somewhere between, but how far toward bubble? That's why I picked a number like "only 20% ever gets built." It might be as high as 50%. It ain't gonna be 100%. The planned built-out is batty.
Oh I forgot two more...
- Data center capacity currently serving non-AI work loads does not shrink through either reduced demand, more efficient software, or (most likely) faster chips and denser RAM. If that happens, more pre-existing DC space can serve AI work loads.
- Orbital solar powered compute nodes never happen. If this happens (free power! much less political opposition!) then terrestrial data centers have significant competition.
Zitron reminds me of a lot of people who got oversized reputations after the 2008 financial crash. They predicted it, or could spin past statements as predicting it, and rode off that.
But from that point on they basically assumed this role of what financial punditry call perma-bears, people who constantly predict financial doom. It gets clicks and sells subscriptions, which is probably why they do it. But from that point on their predictions weren't very good. If you constantly predict doom then every now and then you'll look like you were a genius, but it's just survivorship bias. People discount all the other times you were wrong.
I don't know a whole lot about Zitron himself. Didn't he get big calling BS on cryptocurrency stuff that actually was BS?
The problem is that AI isn't cryptocurrency. This is very real.
I do suspect there's some bubbly stuff around it. I think data center construction looks very bubbly, especially the totally ludicrous amount of permitted planned data center construction. I bet no more than 20% of that ever comes online. I'm sure there's some AI companies that won't make it, and a bunch that are overvalued. But AI as a whole is real, not just hot air.
To me it has a writerly New Yorker vibe to it, as in the magazine which reads as “polished” and probably performs well in RL but is totally exhausting to read in long sessions and completely inappropriate for coding where precision is paramount above all. In writing terms its called purple prose.
SSDs make it tolerable… not by fixing it but by being fast enough to hide it. Back in the spinning disc days you could tell a windows machine by how much kerchunking the drive was doing.
reply