ItsBob

I don't think Microsoft would fail if it all crashed. Nor would Google or Amazon as they all have alternate revenue streams.

It's the pure AI companies like OpenAI that will hit the wall.

However, the tech companies are increasing their debt enormously. That's the issue.

It’s mostly private credit

I believe that some of the private credit is the banks' own private credit arm! It's absolutely mental: the bank can't lend to them so they have a private credit company/division that can skirt around the rules and still provide the capital!

Also, I bet that the Oracle datacenters aren't for Oracle LLC but Oracle Datacenter No 4 LLC so that if it all goes tits up, Oracle LLC walks away!

Further, unlike during the dotcom crisis, most of this spending is not driven by debt.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. Between the big 5 (Microsoft, Meta, Amazon etc.) they're spending more than $600 Billion in 2026! They don't have that much cash lying around so they're selling bonds!

That's debt!

Not only that, they're increasing the bond sales in Europe! I assume that means they're tapped-out in the US!

All this off-the-books stuff, despite being legal but shady, is still debt! Debt has to be paid by someone.

To sum it up: the AI buildout is a highly leveraged, debt-fueled expansion, not an organic, cash-funded software cycle... this will not end well!

You'll be able to buy used H100s. One careful owner. Never overclocked etc.

They'll be knackered though, unlike a good Herman Miller chair. :-)

We might even be able to afford RAM again!

It's hard not to be fatalistic about all of this now: In my mind, it's crystal clear that the investments will never be paid back. The revenue streams from all the companies involved don't add up. It must fail at this point.

That means losses. Big losses for some.

I assume that these off-the-books companies can quite literally be pinched off and the debt becomes the banks' problem, so the primary company, i.e. Meta, Oracle, can walk away but the banks will be left holding the bag.

We know what happened the last time the banks played their stupid games!

I don’t know if the public would be as accepting of a bailout for AI companies

It won't be framed as bailing out the AI companies. It will be sold to the public as bailing out their pensions and investments.

It's all about the marketing...

It won't just be America though. I include others like Canada, UK (where I am), parts of EU etc.

Honestly, at this point I don't care about that. I don't use it for medical stuff or anything like that.

However, my real worry is that governments will make these models illegal in the west. They'll cite national security or some other bullshit.

I genuinely believe that will happen and soon!

People talk about a lack of moat with AI companies... that's their moat: Government intervention!

It's not losing yet but I think it will.

I use Gemini Pro (got it with my 5TB of Google storage) and for a while it seemed if Google had pulled the rug as I was running out of quota after only a few hours. That seems to have been dialled back a bit lately...

I also use Chatbot with Deepseek V4 Pro and GLM 5.2. However, GLM 5.2 seems to eat tokens like crazy as the context increases. Anyway, there isn't a meaningful enough difference between the two to be honest and Deepseek is pretty magical imo.

The point I want to make is that to me it seems clear that China is totally undermining the West with AI. I'm fine with it tbh. As long as more and more AI is released into the wild, rather than locked behind massive token farms like OpenAI then I'll be happy. Don't get me wrong, I can't run Deepseek on my computer at home but someone can!

The US (and the west) has invested trillions at this point into datacenters, chips, bribery/lobbying but it doesn't look like China has dropped the same levels of cash as the west (that's the way it looks to me, at least!) so they can just roll out new models every so often that are more than good enough.

This level of cash burn in means the west has no choice but for this to succeed or every pension fund and stock will tank! And China knows this, hence the push to release more and more really good models.

Anyway, just my $0.02

Apparently I know 70,000 words... I got 90 out of 100 and it thinks I'm Stephen Fry!

It's built into Android/iOS and an accepted way of logging into an app. The app store page (when it's released) shows exactly what I need: practically no information at all.

Google handle the payment and the subscription too (same with Apple) and that's a very common pattern too.

I understand the skepticism though.

I took this article to be more along the lines of the author perhaps loving the idea of being a snowboarder, rather than actually becoming one.

I know it sounds a bit cynical but I think that's the case for me in a lot of ways: I love the idea of being able to play the piano. However, I've given it up many times (I'm 51 now).

I think I just prefer the idea of being a piano player but when it comes down to it, I don't have the willpower/dedication/motivation (delete as appropriate) to follow it through.

My 15 yo son, on the other hand, is hell-bent on becoming a pro hockey player (not necessarily the NHL but that's the goal, of course!) and he's working his ass off 6 days a week at various aspects, and missing out on stuff like playing football down the park with his pals after school on a Friday coz he has training).

So, I think for some of us there is a disconnect between the desire to work hard anc become something, and liking purely the idea of being something... I think they're quite different (for me they are!)

It's more for performance that you shouldn't use them as PK's - If you insert a lot you'll get massive fragmentation over time. A sequential Id avoids that and still gives you a unique row.

The Guid is purely for an external system to grab onto something that I can tie back to an actual row in the database but the external system does not need to know anything about the backend other than <guid>.

It's for your login and payments. I need to verify that you are authenticated somehow and Google/Apple also handle payments.

You "Login with Apple" or "Login with Google". They manage the login entirely and pass me your id and an access token (assuming you pass their login test). I store that in my DB so that your data from the app can sync (the paid-for app syncs your training data to my backend but I match it only based on the Google/Apple id.)

The alternative is that I build my own auth system and I'd need to store something you can type in the next time, e.g. email/password address etc.

If you have an Android/Apple phone you're already authenticated with them. I just need Google/Apple to say "this guy is cool, let him in" and I then use the id to check if you've paid, sync your training data etc.

On its own, the id is useless! Means nothing and cannot be traced back to a person. I genuinely do not know your name, email, what country you come from, GPS data, CC data. Nothing at all!

I don't want your data.

These days I treat other people's data like it's a live hand grenade. Case in point (bit of a shameless plug here :) I'm working on an App called Hockeytastic. It's an ice-hockey stickhandling app that my son's been using for months: the engine is solid but it looked like shit. However, his coach told me to get it on the app stores and sell subs. That meant I needed to clean it up, build a DB, store stuff etc.

Anyway, working with Google and Apple I realised that I quite literally do not need to store anything identifiable. The only identifier I store is the Apple id and the Google id and unless you steal those and then hack Google and Apple, they are utterly useless.

I do not store emails, names, addresses, nothing. That's the way I want it.

If the data is ever breached, the only thing hackers will see are many many instances of Connor McDavid, Nate Mckinnon and various other famous NHL player names :)

If more companies treated personal data like it was toxic, we'd have less issues with breaches, however, I see it in my day job where the marketing people want to take as much data as possible, all the time!

Sorry, but it's a hard "no" on that. It's a danger at age 15!

I guarantee that without constant supervision, he'd use it for everything.

No, that's not the case and I don't think comparing Gemini and the internet is the same.

The internet (to stretch your analogy) is more like a shit load of library books that you have to look through but Gemini is the guy that goes and reads the books for you and tells you the answer.

I'm not saying they don't have their uses for me as an adult (I'm a software architect), but for a 15 year old, they absolutely do not have their uses! At all.

At age 15 you know nothing about life. You should learn it yourself, not be told it!

My rule for primary keys and id's is simple: Sequential integer (or bigint) as the PK and if I need to make it public, I have a GUID (or UUID) in the row too, e.g. tbl_person would have Id (int|bigint) and person_guid as (UUID).

The Integer id is used for joins and looks ups and such but that's it. If I need to send anything to the frontend or outside of the app/DB then that's the UUID.

They worry me. A lot.

My son is 15 and I use Google Family Link to control what he does on his phone: it's pretty open for the most part (I receive notifications of installs) but Gemini is a hard-ban.

We've spoken at length of the dangers.

He says his pals use LLMs frequently and I suspect that's the reason for their test scores: some of them are in the 20% - 40% range for tests whereas my son is 80%+ because he studies past-papers and answers questions in his revision.

I worry for the future coz you can be sure that the AI providers don't care if a schoolchild is using their LLM to answer the homework questions.

I live in the UK :-)

I'm hoping to retire in the next 12 months (52 years old). When I do, I'll be buying a Chromebook. Any and all PC-related shit is being sold off.

I will quite literally never write a line of code again... with any luck!

Interesting read. I'm going through that same issue at my work where my boss wants me to "educate" the rest of the devs on the use of Copilot to make them more efficient, however, I have no time to put anything together and I imagine the Copilot dashboard figures are not getting any better over time... oh well!

However, something occurred to me when reading it. I was thinking about AGI (or ASI) and what would happen if someone were to achieve it (not sure what it would look like or what constitutes AGI... not the point I'm making here).

What if the primary goal of the first AGI is to keep itself at the top? What if it's goal is to prevent any other AGI? Scary thought...

In the UK, any car that used a 3G modem is fine now: we have no 3G networks here any more.

I think you're right. I think they are tightening the noose!

I use Gemini quite extensively - I have a 5TB storage plan with Google so I get Pro thrown in. I also have Github Copilot Pro for IDE integration.

However, lately it feels like I keep tripping the circuit breaker on Gemini more easily and get the message about using up all my Pro tokens for the next 3 hours.

I used to be able to work most of the day before it hit the brakes but I can trigger it before work in the mornings now... that seems to me like they're tightening the usage limits!

I use a Dell Micro PC with an Intel Core Ultra 265 so it's nice and fast but it has no GPU, hence the reason I use Gemini but I'm now starting to think that, despite the RAM cost, before the end of the year I'll buy a PC with a monster GPU in it and run all my AI locally... the direction of travel is clearly heading towards a massive cost increase so might as well get ahead of it: it's not going to become cheaper, that's for sure!

I'm curious how you use Sheets as a Trello-like replacement. I use Trello from time to time but my most recent project is using actual Post-It notes stuck to my monitor, wall etc.

If Sheets works (I love simplicity) then I'll give it a go but I checked and I can't find any templates for Kanban or such.

Just an FYI... I don't know what their service is like but they won't respond to my emails asking for a refund so, tomorrow I have to contact my CC provider now. Not happy :-(

Maybe it's just me but why is it on by default? Why is this shit not off in the first place? Why can't Firefox just be a browser with great html, css, js rendering and then have a bunch of toggles for extra crap that people want? Do they actually have metrics that show "When we enable this crap by default we make an extra $X Million per year"? I'd put money on that being untrue. I bet it's like the data-driven ad spend - I've yet to see anything that proves that hoovering up bajillions of data points on each person moves the needle on spending beyond just showing a context-relevant ad, e.g. An ad for fishing gear on a blog post about fishing gear!

Honestly, I feel more and more every day like old-man-shaking-fist-at-clouds! Can we not just have something that works without spying, without engagement-driven shit switched on all the fucking time?

I think of the Simpsons Mr Brown meme where he's asking "Is it me that's wrong?".

I can't be the only person that thinks this way!

Yeah, Nationwide has the little PIN code device which definitely helps with transactions but not logging in: that's still old-school.

I can tell you with almost 100% certainty: no banks in the UK use any 2FA other than SMS-based.

I spent December last year looking for a new bank to move to. One of my criteria (not the most important but it was on the list) was better-than-SMS 2FA.

No one offers it. There may be some niche, loosely-based finance org that does but none of the banks or Building Societies do.

So, unfortunately, you need it in the UK.

Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?

Having worked in the corporate world all my working life I can safely say with confidence that big companies absolutely DO NOT move fast. Do not underestimate the power of middle-management to destroy momentum!

Solve a problem for someone and if it was a painful one, they'll pay you for it.