The Gaslit Asset Class

James Grant invited me to address the annual conference of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. This was an intimidating prospect, the previous year's conference featured billionaires Scott Bessent and Bill Ackman. As usual, below the fold is the text of my talk, with the slides, links to the sources, and additional material in footnotes. Yellow background indicates textual slides.

Hard Disk Unexpectedly Not Dead

As I read Zak Killian's Expect HDD, SSD shortages as AI rewrites the rules of storage hierarchy — multiple companies announce price hikes, too I realized I had forgotten to write this year's version of my annual post on the Library of Congress' Desihning Storage Architectures meeting, which was back in March. So below the fold I discuss a few of the DSA talks, Killian's more recent post, and yet another development in DNA storage. The TL;DR is that the long-predicted death of hard disks is continuing to fail to materialize, and so is the equally long-predicted death of tape.

Luke 15:7

Source

The title of the post refers to the King James Version of the Bible:

I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.

Luke 15:7

In the throes of 2008's Global Financial Crisis Satoshi Nakamoto published Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. It inspired a large group of enthusiastic advocates who asserted that Bitcoin would possess the following attributes:

• It would be decentralized.
• It would be trustless.
• It would be censorship resistant.
• It would be securely encrypted.
• Users would be anonymous.
• Users could transact without intermediaries.
• Users could transact cheaply.

In short, it would enable users to escape the clutches of the TradFi (traditional finance) system that had so obviously failed. It has been obvious for many years that it doesn't, and in July there appeared a truly excellent mea culpa from a former advocate, Peter Ryan's Money by Vile Means. Below the fold I comment on it, and a couple of other posts describing how TradFi has obliterated Nakamoto's vision.

2025 Optical Media Durability Update

Seven years ago I posted Optical Media Durability and discovered:

Surprisingly, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 14 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 12 years old. Your mileage may vary.

Here are the subsequent annual updates:

• 2019
• 2020
• 2021
• 2022
• 2023
• 2024

It is time once again for the mind-numbing process of feeding 45 disks through the readers to verify their checksums, and yet again this year every single MD5 was successfully verified. Below the fold, the details.

The Drugs Are Taking Hold

cyclonebill CC-BY-SA

In The Selling Of AI I compared the market strategy behind the AI bubble to the drug-dealer's algorithm, "the first one's free". As the drugs take hold of an addict, three things happen:

• Their price rises.
• The addict needs bigger doses for the same effect.
• Their deleterious effects kick in.

As expected, this what is happening to AI. Follow me below the fold for the details.

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.