Tags: money

ongoing by Tim Bray · Money Bubble

What we’re seeing is FOMO-driven dumb money thrown at technology by people who have no hope of understanding it. Just because everybody else is and because the GPTs and image generators have cool demos.

What’s going to happen, I’m pretty sure, is that AI/ML will, inevitably, disappoint; in the financial sense I mean, probably doing some useful things, maybe even a lot, but not generating the kind of profit explosions that you’d need to justify the bubble. So it’ll pop, and my bet it is takes a bunch of the finance world with it.

This is mostly about the intersection of finance, hype, and technology, but Tim mentions something that I’ve also been saying:

I’m super impressed by something nobody else seems to talk about: Prompt parsing.

Maybe it’s because I spent formative users playing text-only adventure games, but I am way more impressed by the way generative tools do natural language parsing than I am by their output.

Crypto: the good, the bad and the ugly | Seldo.com

A very even-handed and level-headed assessment by Laurie, who has far more patience than me when it comes to this shit.

The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger

Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.

This resonates:

I’m not alone in believing in the fundamental technical uselessness of blockchains. There are tens of thousands of other people in the largest tech companies in the world that thanklessly push their organizations away from crypto adoption every day. The crypto asset bubble is perhaps the most divisive topic in tech of our era and possibly ever to exist in our field. It’s a scary but essential truth to realise that normal software engineers like us are an integral part of society’s immune system against the enormous moral hazard of technology-hyped asset bubbles metastasizing into systemic risk.

The Non-Innovation of Cryptocurrency

There is zero evidence that crypto is creating any technical innovation connected to the larger economy, and a strong preponderance of evidence it is a net drain on society by circumventing the rule of law, facilitating tax evasion, environmental devastation, enabling widespread extortion through ransomware and incentivizing an increasingly frothy ecosystem of scams to defraud the public. Nothing of value would be lost by a blanket cryptocurrency ban.

Subscribe to change

A very smart way of matching up the amount of money you spend on entertainment to contributions to causes you care about.

Over 40 million Americans subscribe to Netflix, which means that ~$400 million dollars are taken out of our accounts monthly. Many Americans don’t even notice this. Imagine what could happen if we set up as many automatic contributions to help nonprofits do what they need to do.

Does responsive web design make you more money?

For once, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines doesn’t hold true, because the data in this article shows that the answer is a resounding “yes!”

What Does My Site Cost?

A terrific little tool from Tim that puts performance into perspective by measuring how much money users are spending just to view your website on a mobile device.

LukeW | Data Monday: E-commerce Performance

Time is money …especially when it comes to performance on the web.

Occupy George

A stroke of genius: turning money itself into the carrier for infographics on wealth distribution in America.

The Serif - Your daily dose of design inspiration - The Serif

"£5000 in £10 and £20 notes were individually dropped around the streets of London with a removable sticker." Clever.

FT.com / Home UK / UK - Brighton cluster at new media cutting edge

I'm living on the cutting edge, apparently. This article is more like a press release meets an annual report, completely missing out the real reasons why Brighton is a cool place to live and work.

BBC NEWS | UK | Ryanair issues security ultimatum

"Restore airport security measures to normal or risk being sued for compensation." Ryanair are such a bunch of assholes. I refuse to fly with them.