Predictions indicate the AI bubble could burst or face a major correction between 2026 and 2027, as high infrastructure costs clash with low, slow-growing returns. While some analysts suggest a correction is already underway, others, including Benchmark’s Bill Gurley, anticipate a reset due to unsustainable investment.
Key Factors and Predictions:
Timeline: Many expect a significant market adjustment within 2–3 years (by 2027), with some predicting a crash as early as 2026.Root Causes: The bubble is fueled by immense capital expenditures on data centers—expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2028—and potentially low demand or slow adoption.
Profitability Concerns: Many AI companies currently burn cash, and it remains to be seen if they can survive without subsidized token costs.
Market Sentiment: According to a Polymarket poll, a significant number of traders are betting on a correction by the end of 2026.
If the expected high returns from AI fail to materialize by early 2027, a severe correction could follow, similar to past technology bubbles. However, a potential “soft landing” could occur if AI adoption slowly matures over decades.
Category: Tech / Science
This Day on Slashdot – March 23
| 2011 | Apple Removes Gay Cure App From App Store | 917 |
| 2010 | US Lawmakers Eyeing National ID Card | 826 |
| 2008 | Network Solutions Suspends Site of Anti-Islam Film | 874 |
| 2005 | When Would You Accept DRM? | 1288 |
| 2004 | The Unhappy World of IT Professionals | 981 |
Re: The Unhappy World of IT Professionals
npistentis writes
“According to an article on ZDNet.com, only 1 in 7 IT professionals rate themselves as “very happy” with their chosen profession- which stands in stark contrast to one in three hairdressers, plumbers and chefs, and one in four florists. But then again, very few plumbers have to deal with users who consistently download BonziBuddy, blindly click on suspicious email attachments and use their cd trays as cupholders.”
Of course, it should be noted that by and large IT professionals earn more money then most other jobs – which I suppose is once again a warning of money != happiness.
Agentic vs Mimetic
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men. I set out to meet them.
Child’s Play
Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking
by Sam Kriss
Harper’s Magazine
Note – Interesting article on San Francisco’s tech culture
Somehow people manage to live here. But of all the strange and maddening messages posted around this city, there was one particular type of billboard that the people of San Francisco couldn’t bear. People shuddered at the sight of it, or groaned, or covered their eyes. The advertiser was the most utterly despised startup in the entire tech landscape. Weirdly, its ads were the only ones I saw that appeared to be written in anything like English:
hi my name is roy
i got kicked out of school for cheating.
buy my cheating tool
cluely.com
Venting Not Shown to Quell Anger
Venting when angry seems sensible. Conventional wisdom suggests that expressing anger can help us quell it, like releasing steam from a pressure cooker.
But this common metaphor is misleading, according to a 2024 meta-analytic review. Researchers at Ohio State University analyzed 154 studies on anger and found little evidence that venting helps. In some cases, it could increase anger.
“I think it’s really important to bust the myth that if you’re angry you should blow off steam – get it off your chest,” said senior author and communication scientist Brad Bushman when the results were published.
“Venting anger might sound like a good idea, but there’s not a shred of scientific evidence to support catharsis theory.”
https://www.sciencealert.com/venting-doesnt-reduce-anger-but-something-else-does-review-finds
Random Website Generator / Discovery Tool / StumbleUpon alternatives
What is the equivalent of Netscape’s random site button now?
Google AI:
The spiritual successor to the Netscape “What’s Cool” or random site button—most famously embodied in the 2000s by StumbleUpon—is found today in a variety of “random website generators” and serendipity-driven discovery tools.Here are the best equivalents to the random site button in 2026;Top Random Website Tools (Closest to “Netscape” Feel)
- Cloudhiker (cloudhiker.net): Curates interesting, weird, and awesome websites, providing a high-quality, hand-picked alternative to purely random generators.
- Random Web Button (randomweb.click): Inspired by “The Useless Web,” this site provides a simple button to land on weird, delightful, or absurd websites.
- Random Website Machine (whatsmyip.org/random-website-machine): A classic, simple tool that sends you to a random website from a database of millions.
- The Useless Web (theuselessweb.com): While not purely “random” in the sense of finding any site, it brings you to the best, weirdest corners of the internet in a similar spirit of discovery.
Abandoned IBM regional headquarters
Does Amazon Search Suck Now or What? – Google AI on
does amazon search suck now or what?
Google:
Yes, many users and reports suggest Amazon’s search quality has declined, becoming cluttered with irrelevant ads and sponsored products, making it harder to find specific items, with some blaming strategic choices to prioritize ad revenue. The shift prioritizes paid placements over organic, relevant results, leading to user frustration, while some find using advanced search filters or external search engines helps.
Common complaints about Amazon Search:
Ad Overload: The top results are often sponsored listings, even for exact product searches, pushing genuinely relevant organic results further down the page.
Irrelevant Results: Search terms can bring up a mix of unrelated items (e.g., Halloween decor when searching for Christmas lights), creating “noise”.
Algorithm Changes: The search engine sometimes alters search terms or hides well-selling products, frustrating sellers and buyers alike.
Decline in Quality Control: A focus on infrastructure and third-party sellers has led to a “disorienting mess” with less discernible quality.
Three – Alternative / Niche / Lesser Known / Specialized – Search Engines
https://marginalia-search.com/
Explore the Web
Prioritizes non-commercial content
Tools for both search and discovery
Find lost old websites
https://www.mojeek.com/
Looking for different results?
Value your right to privacy?
Trying to escape big tech?
https://wiby.me/
Why Wiby?
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn’t great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn’t know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today’s web.
Fix it Later and Ad-Hoc Procedures, Amazon Returns
[Jeff counseled the same “fix it later” strategy in the early days when we didn’t have good returns tracking. For a window of time in the early days of Amazon, if you shipped us a box of books for returns, we couldn’t easily tell if you’d purchase them at Amazon and so we’d credit you for them, no questions asked. One woman took advantage of this loophole and shipped us boxes and boxes of books. Given our limited software resources, Jeff said to just ignore the lady and build a way to solve for that later. It was really painful, though, so eventually customer service representatives all shared, amongst themselves, the woman’s name so they could look out for it in return requests even before such systems were built. Like a mugshot pinned to every monitor saying “Beware this customer.” A tip of the hat to you, maam, wherever you are, for your enterprising spirit in exploiting that loophole!]
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptotes
Best Books I Read in 2025 that Weren’t Published in 2025
Selections mine. Comments via Amazon. In order of publication date.
The Night of the Gun
David Carr
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: In his fabulously entertaining The Kid Stays in the Picture, legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans wrote: “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.” David Carr’s riveting debut memoir, The Night of the Gun, takes this theory to the extreme, as the New York Times reporter embarks on a three-year fact-finding mission to revisit his harrowing past as a drug addict and discovers that the search for answers can reveal many versions of the truth. Carr acknowledges that you can’t write a my-life-as-an-addict story without the recent memoir scandals of James Frey and others weighing you down, but he regains the reader’s trust by relying on his reporting skills to conduct dozens of often uncomfortable interviews with old party buddies, cops, and ex-girlfriends and follow an endless paper trail of legal and medical records, mug shots, and rejection letters. The kaleidoscopic narrative follows Carr through failed relationships and botched jobs, in and out of rehab and all manner of unsavory places in between, with cameos from the likes of Tom Arnold, Jayson Blair, and Barbara Bush. Admittedly, it’s hard to love David Carr–sometimes you barely like the guy. How can you feel sympathy for a man who was smoking crack with his pregnant girlfriend when her water broke? But plenty of dark humor rushes through the book, and knowing that this troubled man will make it–will survive addiction, fight cancer, raise his twin girls–makes you want to stick around for the full 400-page journey. –Brad Thomas Parsons
Planet Funny
Ken Jennings
Publication Date: May 29, 2018
In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. “Fascinating, entertaining and—I’m being dead serious here—important” (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.
The Art of Logic in an Illogical World
Eugenia Cheng
Publication Date: September 11, 2018
In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to readers drowning in the illogic of contemporary life. Cheng is a mathematician, so she knows how to make an airtight argument. But even for her, logic sometimes falls prey to emotion, which is why she still fears flying and eats more cookies than she should. If a mathematician can’t be logical, what are we to do? In this book, Cheng reveals the inner workings and limitations of logic, and explains why alogic — for example, emotion — is vital to how we think and communicate. Cheng shows us how to use logic and alogic together to navigate a world awash in bigotry, mansplaining, and manipulative memes. Insightful, useful, and funny, this essential book is for anyone who wants to think more clearly.
The History of Bones
John Lurie
Publication Date: August 17, 2021
In the tornado that was downtown New York in the 1980s, John Lurie stood at the vortex. After founding the band The Lounge Lizards with his brother, Evan, in 1979, Lurie quickly became a centrifugal figure in the world of outsider artists, cutting-edge filmmakers, and cultural rebels. Now Lurie vibrantly brings to life the whole wash of 1980s New York as he developed his artistic soul over the course of the decade and came into orbit with all the prominent artists of that time and place, including Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, Boris Policeband, and, especially, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the enigmatic prodigy who spent a year sleeping on the floor of Lurie’s East Third Street apartment.
The AI Bubble – Price to Earnings Ratio, History
Kai Ryssdal
A huge chunk of the S&P gains of late have come because of the hundreds of billions that are being invested in Artificial Intelligence. So, bearing in mind that the average p/e ratio on the S&P right now is 25, price to earnings ratio, what does that tell us?Michelle Lowry
People have very optimistic expectations of how fast these AI companies are going to grow, into the future.John Steinsson
There are kind of two episodes in the past where the price to earnings ration has shot up to really high levels. One was right before the great depression. One was in the late 1990’s, during the internet bubble.
What’s a price-earnings ratio anyway?
Kai explains the P/E ratio of the S&P 500, which is higher that it’s been since the early 2000s.
Marketplace – Nov 12, 2025
Note – transcription approximate, done by hand, not ai.
Wearable Recording Technology – With Artificial Intelligence
Both Ikeda and Comans are software engineers in suburban Sacramento and are just generally really into AI. When Ikeda first broached the idea of buying an AI wearable, partly to record and summarize their conversations about tech, Comans was reluctant.
“I said ‘absolutely not,’” said Comans. “This is a horrible idea. Like, why would I invite this in my life? And why would I put the most intimate moments of my life onto a server on the internet where I don’t know what’s going to happen with it?”
But Ikeda eventually convinced him. They were already sharing so much information online anyway. And at the very least, the Limitless transcripts were supposed to be only accessible to them.
While the technology isn’t perfect — it often mistakes Comans and Ikeda for one another, and doesn’t really understand sarcasm — the couple says, for the most part, it’s been helpful to have their conversations recorded.
Even the fights.
“The fact that it records the like, deeply unflattering things that you say right in a moment of weakness, or when you know you’re being really defensive, is kind of the stuff you really, actually need to see,” said Ikeda.
The Limitless Pendant is just one of a new generation of always-on AI wearables that have recently hit the market. There’s the similar Amazon-backed Bee, a bracelet that records and transcribes everything you say. And there’s the yet-to-be-seen device OpenAI and iPhone designer Jonny Ive are reportedly collaborating on.
The covert recorder wasn’t one of the newest generations of AI wearables. But Miller sees the possibility of a near future where everyone needs to assume they’re being recorded at all times.
It’s made her less trusting and more careful about what she says.
“It’s a strange thing that part of being a human is a weak memory,” said Miller. “We did not evolve to have every single thing we’re saying or doing to be remembered.”
From her perspective, even if AI never forgets, maybe humans still should.
What it’s like to have an AI wearable record everything you say
A new generation of wearable AI gadgets can record, transcribe and analyze your every interaction. Here’s how early adopters say it’s changing their relationships.
Zen of Python
The Zen of Python is a collection of 19 “guiding principles” for writing computer programs that influence the design of the Python programming language.[1] Python code that aligns with these principles is often referred to as “Pythonic”…
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Flat is better than nested.
- Sparse is better than dense.
- Readability counts.
- Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
- Although practicality beats purity.
- Errors should never pass silently.
- Unless explicitly silenced.
- In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
- There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.[c]
- Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
- Now is better than never.
- Although never is often better than right now.[d]
- If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
- If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
- Namespaces are one honking great idea – let’s do more of those!
Constantly Wrong and Out of Your Depth – Psychology of Programming
“The thing that gets lost, and which I think is important to know, is that programming is never easy,” he says. “You’re never doing the same thing twice, because code is infinitely reproducible, so if you’ve already solved a problem and you encounter it again, you just use your old solution. This means that by definition you’re kind of always on this frontier where you’re out of your depth. And one of the things you have to learn is to accept that feeling—of being constantly wrong and not knowing.”
Which sounds like it could be a Buddhist precept. I’m thunderstruck.
“Well, constantly being wrong and out of your depth is not something people are used to accepting. But programmers have to,” he concludes.
Devil in the Stack: Searching for the Soul of the New Machine
Andrew Smith
AI vs Persian Etiquette
Why AI Chatbots Can’t Process Persian Social Etiquette
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
If an Iranian taxi driver waves away your payment, saying, “Be my guest this time,” accepting their offer would be a cultural disaster. They expect you to insist on paying — probably three times — before they’ll take your money. This dance of refusal and counter-refusal, called taarof, governs countless daily interactions in Persian culture. And AI models are terrible at it.
New research released earlier this month titled “We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof” shows that mainstream AI language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta fail to absorb these Persian social rituals, correctly navigating taarof situations only 34 to 42 percent of the time. Native Persian speakers, by contrast, get it right 82 percent of the time. This performance gap persists across large language models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3, DeepSeek V3, and Dorna, a Persian-tuned variant of Llama 3.
A study led by Nikta Gohari Sadr of Brock University, along with researchers from Emory University and other institutions, introduces “TAAROFBENCH,” the first benchmark for measuring how well AI systems reproduce this intricate cultural practice. The researchers’ findings show how recent AI models default to Western-style directness, completely missing the cultural cues that govern everyday interactions for millions of Persian speakers worldwide.
“Cultural missteps in high-consequence settings can derail negotiations, damage relationships, and reinforce stereotypes,” the researchers write.“Taarof, a core element of Persian etiquette, is a system of ritual politeness where what is said often differs from what is meant,” the researchers write. “It takes the form of ritualized exchanges: offering repeatedly despite initial refusals, declining gifts while the giver insists, and deflecting compliments while the other party reaffirms them. This ‘polite verbal wrestling’ (Rafiee, 1991) involves a delicate dance of offer and refusal, insistence and resistance, which shapes everyday interactions in Iranian culture, creating implicit rules for how generosity, gratitude, and requests are expressed.”