First thoughts

[degringolade]

 

 

Woke up early this morning.  Not a problem, just an observation.  

I have been reading too much news lately and I am coming to the conclusion that most folks who write about what is going on in the world know about as much as I do, which isn’t very much.  But the desire to spin long and detailed accounts about how the future will go seems important to them and the lack of actual data doesn’t seem to bother them.  On the other hand, everyone needs a hobby.

It appears that the place to be for the hobby of being a relatively uninformed know-it-all is over at Substack.  Being a long term connoisseur of screechy it-is-all-shit scribblings for some reason I see this phenomenon as kind of nouveau riche.

Substack seems to be where one goes, replete with stars in one's eyes to see if a living can be made while drinking coffee, banging away on your laptop, and watching your day job be replaced with an AI.

I think that every service like dreamwidth or substack has its own business plan.  They have a set of customers whose “mission” matches a certain profile and they charge a service fee to keep things running.  Google does this still and its blogger website still runs, even though it is annoyingly commercial and has morphed into a means of providing you “sponsored ads” on their search engine.  I used this service for years and still occasionally post on it to keep it active.   

Greer is having a spot of bother by having his current provider for his “big” site get out of the hosting game.  I wish him the best, but he wrote a piece years ago about the “Pre Mortem of the Internet” and I think that he may well be looking at just this kind of thing.  One of his dominant themes of the long decline we are facing is that of disintermediation.  I think that he is looking at just this kind of thing in his current troubles.  I would guess that, at best, his current site is hosted on a blade owned by the provider on a server farm somewhere, but I don’t see that as all that likely.  Best guess is that the provider just rents space on a google server.  No shame here, being a sysadmin is a pretty damn thankless job when you are responsible for the vagaries of hardware.

So my guess is that the big boys who own the server farms are letting AI do the shit work of administering the systems.  This changes the economics enough to make the annoyance/money equation so that the money that the middlemen sysadmins used to do will be captured by the big boys.