This is a very harsh and bleak view on the current generative AI craze. Clearly it survives on some sort of weird faith that things will magically improve. Some decision makers clearly run fully on said faith and lost all kind of realistic view of the situation. They are just very disconnected from the user's needs.

There's even a funny quote in there: "Generative AI must seem kind of magical when your entire life is either being in a meeting or reading an email".

When this bubble bursts, it's hard to predict what the fallout will be on the tech industry... for sure it won't be pretty. It also begs the question: what is this industry going to do next? There's clearly no plan after generative AI.

Interesting initiative. I'm looking forward to the results of this first pilot.

Of course it sounds complicated to break Google up... but that's not the point. It's about avoiding its monopolistic position, the fact that it's complicated is just another symptom.

I'm rarely on the side of a Goldman Sachs... Still this paper seems to be spot on. The equation between the costs (financial and ecological) and the value we get out of generative AI isn't balanced at all. Also, since it is stuck on trying to improve mostly on model scale and amount of data it is doomed to plateau in its current form.

Interesting, with the price hikes and bundles to come, we might indeed see a resurgence in physical media. It will stay niche for sure, but looks like demand is about to grow.

The price hike on the generative AI services will happen sooner or later. That much is clear.

Indeed, fads come and go mainly to keep the circus running. You can't have growth with something nicely working and stable, change needs to be brought up to justify selling more.

Good exploration on how the total cost of ownership is spread depending on how is licensed the software you use and where you get your support from. I think there's one point a bit too glanced over in the analysis of the cost for the proprietary SaaS case: what's the cost of fixing a bug that affect your team? You might be a tiny fish in a large pond, good luck getting attention from support in this case.

Interesting report. Apparently so far a more widespread use of remote work doesn't seem to boost of hinder productivity growth at large scale.

A good reminder that even though GPU tend to be faster, the added complexity and price might not be worth it in the end.

Very interesting paper about the energy footprint of the latest trend in generator models. The conclusion is fairly clear: we should think twice before using them.

That's a very good question. What will be left once all the hype is gone? Not all bubbles leaving something behind... we can hope this one will.

Interesting opinion piece about GPT and LLMs. When you ignore the hype, consider the available facts, then you can see how it's another extra tool and unlikely to replace many people.

Very interesting explorations of the early days of automation and computation. This shows another face of Babbage which is often ignored. It is a cruel demonstration on how his machine were first and foremost encroached on division of labor as inspired by plantations.

Very interesting model, I didn't know about this one. As pointed out you can't really base policy decisions upon it but that's still powerful since it explains some of the phenomena at play in the real world. In this way it is enough to debunk some of the assumptions taken a bit too much for granted.

Interesting food for thought. Not necessarily easy to see it used in as many fields as the article claims. Maybe a bit too much on the techno solutionist side at times. Still, that sounds like an interesting guideline and path to explore.

Hear! Hear! No, moving your infrastructure to managed services doesn't make sense in all cases. You need to be in the right place in term of complexity and traffic to really benefit from it. It's less common than you'd think due to the marketing pressure.

Very interesting report although I admit I'm a bit skeptical at the strong "apolitical" message in it. This highlights very well a few challenges specific to Europe. We need to see them tackled I think. It's nice to see moves in the public sector but clearly it needs to go further and faster. Same thing regarding the creation of OSPOs in companies.

This is definitely well put, users shouldn't feel entitled. Maintainers do what they can (even if there's a company backing up your favorite FOSS project) and if you use the software for free with no support contract... things will be done when they're done.

An excellent piece about the links between collapse and complexity. Obviously focuses more on socio-economics systems. Still some of it applies to other fields.