Lately the washer has taken to flash “AI Cycle Complete”

Lately? Does that mean your washer is getting some kind of regular firmware updates? Why? In case “laundry” changes?

Not true at all. Businesses didn’t move onto the next product, they specialized, making the exact same thing year after year. Because manufacturing tolerances weren’t great, things would need repairs and replacement, so there was repeat business. Nobody kept a buffer stock and moved onto the next product.

That sounds like a difficult way to run a business.

You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/my-next-chapter-with-mastodon/

People need to realize that open source projects don’t create billionaires. In fact, they actually block billionaires from forming.

Tech deci-millionaires get rich by creating a moat around something, then put a toll booth at the drawbridge. Tech billionaires do that but make sure to enclose something essential they have a monopoly on within the moat, and then capture any and all regulators who might try to interfere. Open Source software either makes it illegal to build a moat or allows anybody who’s interested to build their own drawbridge. It’s orders of magnitude harder to get rich with open source or free software. You basically have to put up a toll booth that’s fully optional and somehow still get people to pay.

We should all thank #JohnMastodon for his selfless acts, both starting Mastodon but also now knowing when to step down.

The people running the business, presumably. Generally people don’t want to go out of business because they can’t find any customers.

There’s a huge one-time demand from consumers. But, if it’s an amazing device that never needs repairs (or that can easily be repaired by the consumer) and it has no bells and whistles, that’s a problem: there’s no repeat business.

I think this is the way you have to do it. Open hardware designs. If you make a product that’s so reliable that it never breaks, it’s a product where you never get repeat business. If it’s a super simple thing that doesn’t need or get new features, you can never sell someone an upgrade. That’s great for the consumer, but not great for the appliance maker. So, there’s always an incentive for them to enshittify.

the hot happens in the pot and not inside the stove

The pot is sitting on the stove. And induction involves electromagnetism, which means it involves metal pots and pans, and metal loops of wire to induce current in that cookware. Metal parts conduct heat very well. So, induction stoves don’t get quite as hot as conventional stoves. But, they still get very hot because they have a hot metal pot sitting on them.

Also, while induction stoves don’t get quite as hot as other kinds of stoves, they involve large currents and large amounts of magnetism. That means both stress on the electrical parts, and mechanical stress from the magnets.

Overall, I’d guess that an induction stove is probably going to have fewer things that can go wrong with it than a gas stove, a glass-top stove or an olde fashioned electrical resistance stove. But, it isn’t like an LED light or something that should last decades because there’s no moving parts, no heat, no big currents, etc.

In addition, in a well functioning economy, companies only go public when they want to raise a lot of new money, because they have ambitious plans that can’t be achieved with their current sources of funding. Now, really, that’s bullshit. Companies mostly go public because the insiders want to cash out. Going public allows them to sell their shares for actual money. But, still, in theory the company should be going public with a story about how they’re going to use all the new funds they’re raising, otherwise they (in theory) won’t be able to con people into investing.

The end result of going public is that the company is no longer in the control of the founders or even the early investors. Now it has a bunch of public investors who don’t care about the company culture, don’t care about the relationships with the employees or the customers. They just want to see a 15% year-over-year growth in the value of their stocks. That means that pretty often once a company goes public its products or services start to suffer, because you can make more money by squeezing suppliers, finding the cheapest parts, outsourcing jobs, etc.

What was that?!

Flying saucer.

Oh.

Were you thinking “I can’t believe this is WoW” or “I can’t believe how good this looks?”

Because, I haven’t experienced the first one. To me, once I’m in the game, there really seems to be an amazing consistency in how things look. After a while things look “realistic” but in a “realistic for WoW” way. Like, obviously Orcs and Demons are not realistic, but the consistency is so strong that how things look, and move, and behave is so strong and predictable.

The trouble with photorealism is that you very easily stumble into the uncanny valley. In addition, something that often looks “photorealistic” today will look really dated in a few years.

If you go with artfully styled games, it can actually be much harder. You need to adopt a consistent artistic style and have that style be used by many different artists. Unlike with photorealism, there isn’t always going to be a reference available. You have to watch that over time, and as the scope of the game grows, the style remains consistent. But, when it’s done well, it can be amazing.

One of my favourites in terms of artful styling is the game Interstate '76. It came out at a time when full motion video cutscenes were the style of the day. You’d have low resolution graphics, and then come in with a VHS-quality cutscene with real actors and real sets. Then back into low resolution graphics. Interstate '76 chose an amazing artistic style, then did in-engine cutscenes, which kept the style consistent.

The other master of this, IMO, is World of Warcraft. It must be a gargantuan undertaking to have a game with that many different models and to have a consistent style for all of them, but they mostly do. They often do out-of-engine cutscenes, but their style is so consistent that their cutscenes just look like even more detailed shots from that same world.

But we’re not talking about getting money in the future. We’re talking about getting full ownership of a house in the future, while being able to live in it for the full 50 years that it is being paid off.

The bank also isn’t talking about getting money in the future, they’re getting a steady revenue stream for 50 years.

So, I don’t see how this really applies to 50 year mortgages.

Poor timing? You bought at the absolute peak of something known as The United States Housing Bubble. Your experience is not typical. You’re one of the unlucky people who had the absolute worst timing possible.

The idea of using a home as part of your retirement should be a lie, but unfortunately for the vast majority of people it isn’t. The world would be much better off if people only got what they paid back when they sold their houses. But, the reality is that most people have been absurdly lucky and their homes have been going up faster than all but the best stocks on the stock market. You just happened to be someone who jumped on the ride at exactly the wrong time.

Not “Public Domain”. That has a specific meaning in copyright law. It’s about creative works that are owned by the public and not subject to copyright.

What the judge decided is that their outputs are Public Records: “qualified as public records subject to the state’s Public Records Act”.

Put a license plate reader indoors?

We may have to wait for another three years.

Which is also a clue that he isn’t short selling.

There are two ways of making money when a stock goes down. One is to sell the stock short. The other is to buy a put option.

A short sale is extremely risky. Say the shares are at $50 and you think they’re going to go down, so you sell 1000 shares you don’t own (short selling) and agree to buy them back by some date in the future. If you’re right and the stock tanks to $20, you can buy the shares and pocket $30,000. But, if the stock doesn’t sink, you might have to buy the shares for $60 each, so you lose $10 per stock, or $10,000. If there are tons of people shorting the stock, you can get a short squeeze, where everybody needs to buy shares to close out their short position, and because everybody needs to buy, the stock price rockets up, so you get people having to buy a stock that used to be $50 for $200, leading to $150,000 in losses for a 1000 share short where the maximum possible gain was only $50,000.

An option is much safer. There you’re buying the option to sell the shares at a certain price at some time in the future. Say you think a stock is going to crash. It’s currently trading at $50/share. You can buy 1000 put options at a strike price of $40 with a date 1 month in the future. It will cost you something to buy those options, say $1 per share, so $1000. If the stock goes up or stays at $50, your bet didn’t work out. You don’t have to sell the shares, you just tear up the options contract. You’re out whatever you paid for the option, say $1000 here. But, say the stock tanks and it’s now at $20/share. Now your bet did pay off. You can buy 1000 shares at $20 each for $20,000, then immediately exercise your option and sell them for $40,000, netting you $20,000. With put options the upside is significantly smaller, but the potential downside is tiny. It’s just the cost of the options.

Someone predicting a crash within 3 years isn’t going to short sell the shares. Between now and then the shares could continue to rise for a while, and they’d be on the hook for a huge payout in that case. If they buy options the down side is much smaller. They may have to re-buy new options a bunch of times. But in the worst case they just have to let the options expire unused and eat whatever cost they paid for them.

For the coming AI crash, I don’t think it will be very soon. I think there will be a crash. But, I think the government will try to keep the bubble from bursting. Too much of the US economy is now invested in AI. So, even under Biden, or Harris, or Obama they’d try to prevent a catastrophic crash by using taxpayer money to prevent the most damaging bubble burst. With Trump, there’s going to be even more government interference in the market. His backers are crypto bros. They’re the ones making him billions on his meme coins. They bankrolled JD Vance’s political career. If they demand that he rescues their failing companies, he’ll do it. And, since the GOP does whatever Trump wants, they’ll just fork over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep things from crashing. But, eventually there will have to be a crash, because there’s just not a sustainable business model in any of this, at least not at anything like the current scale.

Also, the way short positions work is that the people who are most successful at shorting a stock are the ones who have a megaphone to announce they’ve shorted the stock. They go on as many podcasts, news shows, interviews, etc. as possible to say things are going to crash. Because, the more people who hear about it, the more hesitation there will be to invest, which means the more chances of their prediction coming through.

So, he’s not just some guy who is betting on the bubble bursting, he’s a guy who is now heavily incentivized to cause the bubble to burst so he can make his investors a lot of money.

Which bubble was that?

AFAIK none of the previous AI bubbles really had much investment. There was hype, but it was hype within the computer science, or cognitive science fields. But, maybe there’s a financial bubble bit that I’m missing.