Meta: Slow Blogging Ahead

Source

There will be fewer than usual posts to this blog for a while. I have to write another talk for an intimidating audience, similar to the audience for my 2021 Talk at TTI/Vanguard Conference. That one took a lot of work but a few months later it became my EE380 Talk. That in turn became by far my most-read post, having so far gained 522K views. The EE380 talk eventually led to the invitation for the upcoming talk. Thus I am motivated to focus on writing this talk for the next few weeks.

Wikipedia's description of the image is:

Titivillus, a demon said to introduce errors into the work of scribes, besets a scribe at his desk (14th century illustration)

The Selling Of AI

Not AI, just a favorite

On my recent visit to London I was struck by how many of the advertisements in the Tube were selling AI. They fell into two groups, one aimed at CEOs and the other at marketing people. This is typical, the pitch for AI is impedance-matched to these targets:

• The irresistible pitch to CEOs is that they can "do more with less", or in other words they can lay off all these troublesome employees without impacting their products and sales.
• Marketing people value plausibility over correctness, which is precisely what LLMs are built to deliver. So the idea that a simple prompt will instantly generate reams of plausible collateral is similarly irresistible.

In The Back Of The AI Envelope I explained:

why Sam Altman et al are so desperate to run the "drug-dealer's algorithm" (the first one's free) and get the world hooked on this drug so they can supply a world of addicts.

You can see how this works for the two targets. Once a CEO has addicted his company to AI by laying off most of the staff, there is no way he is going to go cold turkey by hiring them back even if the AI fails to meet his expectations. And once he has laid off most of the marketing department, the remaining marketeer must still generate the reams of collateral even if it lacks a certain something.

Below the fold I look into this example of the process Cory Doctrow called enshittification.

The Festschrift For Cliff Lynch

Source

The festschrift that includes the edited version of the draft we posted back in April entitled Lots Of Cliff Keeps Stuff Safe has been officially published as Networking Networks: A Festschrift in Honor of Clifford Lynch, an open access supplement to portal: Libraries and the Academy 25, no. 3. Joan K. Lippincott writes:

The final CNI membership meeting of Cliff’s tenure, held April 7–8, 2025, in Milwaukee, was to include a surprise presentation of the Festschrift’s table of contents. Though Cliff’s health prevented him from attending in person, he participated virtually and heard readings of excerpts from each contribution. Clifford Lynch passed away shortly after, on April 10, 2025. Authors completed their essays before his passing, and the original text remains unchanged.

Below the fold is a bried snippet of each of the invited contributions and some comments.

Tesla's Robotaxi Revolution!

The mythical CyberCab

@ChrisO_wiki tweeted:

How to tell if someone's bullshitting: watch for them to give a deadline that they repeatedly push back.

This was apropos of Donald Trump's approach to tariffs and Ukraine, but below the fold I apply the criterion to Elon Musk basing Tesla's future on its robotaxi service.

The State Of Storage

The Register is running a series on The State Of Storage. Below the fold I flag some articles worth reading.

The Back Of The AI Envelope

Sauce

The rise of the technology industry over the last few decades has been powered by its very strong economies of scale. Once you have invested in developing and deploying a technology, the benefit of adding each additional customer greatly exceeds the additional cost of doing so. This led to the concept of "blitzscaling", that it makes sense to delay actually making a profit and devote these benefits to adding more customers. That way you follow the example of Amazon and Uber on the path to a monopoly laid out by Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. Eventually you can extract monopoly rents and make excess profits, but in the meantime blitzscale believers will pump your stock price.

This is what the VCs behind OpenAI and Anthropic are doing, and what Google, Microsoft and Oracle are trying to emulate. Is it going to work? Below the fold I report on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, which I did without using A1.

The $740B Prize

Forty-two months ago I wrote The $65B Prize citing Divesh Aggarwal et al's 2019 paper Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them. They noted that:

the elliptic curve signature scheme used by Bitcoin is much more at risk, and could be completely broken by a quantum computer as early as 2027, by the most optimistic estimates.

It is time to re-visit the "optimistic estimates", so follow me below the fold.