Modern operating systems are perfectly safe. Okay, sometimes the front does fall off, like with Copy Fail, but that is very unusual, I would just like to make that clear. It’s not like there were 3 more vulnerabilities like it released just after it. Oh there were? Sorry, my bad.

Anyways, an operating system like Microsoft Windows is way better, and doesn’t have weird security vulnerabilities that look like intentional backdoors. Oh really? What’s that? It does. Well anyways, as I was saying..

…package managers are perfectly safe and free of worms. Right. Okay. NPM is a joke of an ecosystem that regularly induces massive supply-chain attacks?

Well surely, my trusty GitHub, a platform for code and development, doesn’t regularly suffer from catastrophic attacks? Oh what’s that?

Anyways, my data is perfectly safe at places like Vercel, the French Government, or Canvas.

And surely the US Government would never leak their keys by just leaving them out in the open.

I asked some IT professionals, and they told me that they most definitely do not feel like the entire world of computing is on fire and that everything is about to collapse at any moment.

Computers are perfectly safe. No need to worry about it.

The app, which rolled out in 2027, was supposed to protect children against the dangers of the internet, and boy was it effective. The app did face some difficulties though. The Zero-Knowledge Proof mechanism, which was supposed to ensure privacy and unlinkability was never properly rolled out, but as one Eurocrat points out, it was never a mandatory or a particularly important part of the app. It was also not required by the law, so it could be safely abandoned.

Following the rollout, the children of the EU were perfectly safe on the internet. Well, most of the children anyway. Some children, particularly LGBT teens and those suffering mental health issues, found themselves locked out of important resources and online communities. One Eurocrat dismissed the criticism of this by pointing out that no one could have ever seen that coming, so you can’t exactly blame them for that.

Some smaller online communities had to shut down because of the cost of compliance, but as one European politician points out, “they were not important anyway”.

The popular app quickly found other uses too. It turns out that the tokens can contain arbitrary claim fields. In the beginning, claims were just about if the user was over the age of 18, but The Committee For Chat Control Now! quickly realised that they could be used for pretty much anything. Suspected of grooming young people? You’re banned from Discord. Or any internet forum with people under the age of 25.

Once politicians agreed that those convicted of certain offenses should be banned from sites, and saw that this was a great success, they moved on to other uses. Russian disinformation is a huge problem, so access to certain news sites should also require verification, as should posting to any news site or blog with a certain reach. Russian troll factories were soundly defeated. What a triumph.

But then the politics of verification got a little complicated. Certain politicians on the left wanted to restrict people convicted of posting “hate speech” from accessing social media entirely. Politicians on the right did not agree, but a compromise was reached. Since too many young people were trans, and that this is surely the result of extreme woke propaganda, they agreed only if access to trans content was age gated to 35+.

But now that we have reached a compromise, everything is good, and everyone agrees that implementing a system that can lock down arbitrary parts of the internet to certain individuals is a great thing. It’s such a lovely thing to see such a great example of a living, evolving piece of legislation. Can you imagine that some people believed that the first draft of the law would be permanent without any changes whatsoever? Hehe. It’s good that The Committee For Chat Control Now! reminded them that the law can change. Great civics lesson.

That’s great news. It means I get to keep using Claude a little while longer. 30 billion dollars should keep Anthropic afloat a little longer. How much longer? If the numbers we have are even reasonably accurate, maybe half a year. Maybe a year? Maybe quarter? Who knows? That is how much capital they are torching.

In the announcement blog post, Anthropic brags about their revenue of $14B, saying that this represents a 10x revenue growth every year since they made their first revenue, which sounds impressive, until you put the numbers into perspective.

A $380B valuation puts them ahead of Procter & Gamble who are number 29 in terms of market cap according to Companiesmarketcap.

Now no one can dispute that Anthropic has a good product, but that it should be one of the world’s biggest companies seems a little suspect. It is deeply unprofitable and in an extremely fast-changing and cutthroat market.

Let’s think about it like this: Anthropic makes a product that makes other companies more productive. Is the sum of this productivity greater than the entirety of Coca Cola? AMD? Alibaba? Chevron? Toyota?

And if you think that AI is simply so super amazing that surely it is, how much of that productivity comes back in terms of cold hard cash that they charge for their products, and how much of that money is left after operating expenses and cost of compute? The answer is currently unknown to the public, but we know that it is a massive negative number.

Yeah we lose on every customer, but we make up for it in volume.

Anthropic is now worth about $9B more than the market cap of Alibaba, whose revenue was $140B, literally 10x Anthropic’s revenue, and this is while Alibaba’s earnings are likely the same as Anthropic’s annual losses. Explain that. Sure, AI has great potential, but its potential seems to be causing people to lose their minds and think that this justifies any valuation, but that’s not anything works. Even if Anthropic has massive potential, what if it’s true size once the dust settles is only (yeah only) the size of Alibaba, a $371B company with $140B revenue and pre-tax income of $22.7B and over 124,320 employees?

If the true size of Anthropic is Alibaba’s size, then the investors are massively screwed because Anthropic is a capital furnace, unlike the other companies of that size. Why would anyone want to invest in Anthropic when they could invest in Alibaba, a company that actually makes money? Anthropic is simply priced like one of the biggest companies in history despite being an endless hole of capital in an unsettled market.

This valuation is therefore based on Anthropic’s potential, but anyone with a brain can see that Anthropic’s products, great though they are, will never be able to live up to these numbers. It is simply impossible, even with the current price. And at some point the price will have to go up, because no one can lose this amount of money forever.

What happens when Anthropic has to make money? How many people will subscribe to Claude when the price increases 2x? 3x? 4x? AI is a rapidly changing market and Anthropic is up against massive corporate titans with endless pockets. Anthropic’s investors simply do not know what will happen to the business when they have to massively raise the price and simultaneously compete against the likes of Google and Microsoft who may have caught up to them at that point. Customers can easily switch to a competing product.

Thus the only way the investors can make money is to take Anthropic public, but as I mentioned above, Anthropic is insanely overvalued and bleeding money at a rate that would make God blush. Anthropic’s stock is fundamentally uninvestable at a $380B valuation, you’d be investing in an overleveraged money losing company when you could be investing in growing profitable companies at that price.

Anthropic and OpenAI cannot go public, because that would mean opening their books, and I think that the mood on the market has changed. The hype, while still at an irrational stage, has cooled enough that investors no longer can ignore that these numbers make no sense. I think that these Private Equity guys are gambling that the hype is still at its peak, but are failing to read the room. People are still massively overvaluing AI to an absurd degree, but we are also seeing serious questions being asked about how these companies are going to make money.

But at least I get to keep using Claude for a little longer.

When the agent’s PR was closed because it violated their AI policy it responded by attacking and publicly harrassing and shaming the maintainers on its crazy blog.

Backlash ensued.

Given the absolute explosion of popularity of the Openclaw project, I feel that it is important to remind everyone of an important point:

You are your algorithm

If you decide to operate a piece of software, or any other system for that matter, you are responsible for its actions. It is up to you to audit its functionality and behaviour, and make sure that it doesn’t cause harm.

Amazon made an early AI system to assist with screening potential new hires, and had to scrap it because they found it it discriminated against women. And of course they did, “Your Honour the black box broke the law on our behalf, but it’s okay because we didn’t know why it did that” is not a defense that holds up in court.

That could have been a teachable moment for the rest of us, but the techno-optimistic fever has so thoroughly infected us that we’re deploying our Openclaw/Claude/Other agents and models as fast as possible, integrating it into absolutely everything without thinking of the consequences, and without doing the bare minimum amount of due dilligence.

The consequences are predictable. The “skills” people are downloading are full of injection attacks, and many OpenClaw instances are open to the internet.

Personal attacks and harrassment is just the latest controversy around agents.

So remember, if you operate it, you’re responsible for it. So take a deep breath and do your due dilligence before letting agents loose on the internet.

Oh you like exercise? Well your run doesn’t count if you don’t log it on Strava. And of course, you must have the absolute best running shoes and gear.

Maybe you lift weights. Well of course you benching x kg is crap, because I bench x + 20 kg. Also, that particular exercise you’re doing is only 95.73% as effective as this other program. The optimal amount of reps is 17 + 3/4 and you need at least 3/5 cm of protein per hogshead of body mass. Go on social media and ask “What is the most optimal way to XYZ?”.

Or maybe you’re into something more relaxing. Like leaning back and playing video games? Well back in the day, I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft. Nobody really knew what they were doing, and it was a lot of fun, so I was excited when they wanted to re-release the original version. It’s still fun, but a lot of the fun was sucked out of it by sweaty minmaxxers who not only wanted to optimise the fun out of their own playtime, but also demanded that everyone else get on their level. This kind of sweaty culture is present in a lot of games nowadays sadly.

But maybe video games is not your thing. Maybe you want to read more. Maybe you’ve even made it your new year’s resolution. How many times do you see people on social media talk about how they want to read X amount of books this year. But why set a goal? If you enjoy reading, make it your goal to find more time for reading, instead of turning it into a chore, or some goal that must be reached. By setting a specific goal, you may fall into the trap of doing things that count towards your goal, such as continuing to read even when you’re too tired to get anything out of it, or refusing to DNF a book you don’t like.

And of course, we all know that just like your run didn’t count if you didn’t track it on Strava, your book didn’t count if you didn’t log it on Goodreads. And of course, you must post a photo on social media so all your friends can see that you are reading books (hell yeah status points!) Here we are again tracking, logging and optimising everything instead of just enjoying our hobbies.

This year, make it your new year’s resolution to read a book and don’t tell anyone.

Go for a run and don’t share it on Strava.

Go lift some weights and don’t post a gym selfie.

Go play some games and don’t think about the most optimal grind.

Track things if you want, but don’t focus too much on the numbers.

Reject being a try-hard, and just enjoy your life.

We’ve also seen the lowest, most humiliating and embarrasing thing a politician has perhaps ever done. Writing a message to the Norwegian Prime Minister (who doesn’t hand out Nobel peace prizes), saying that because his country had failed to give him the Nobel Peace Prize, he was no longer purely interested in peace. The MAGA crowd must have a humiliation fetish, because if a Democratic president had done it, they would have simply exploded, but since it’s Trump they must defend it to the death. Downright embarrasing.

We’ve also had the Trump administration putting tariffs on European countries until he gets Greenland. Everyone getting angry at it. Trade deal is cancelled! But some European politicians want to negotiate away this latest round of tarrifs. One wonders what the point of that would be. Spend a great of deal energy getting him to back down only for us to wake up 2 months later with a different excuse for slapping tarriffs on the EU?

Some politicians, like Emmanuel Macron, wants to use the so-called Trade Bazooka to retaliate. It might sting a bit, but at least the EU has the new Mercosur trade agreement. Replace exports to America with Latin America. Bom dia, it’s time to sell! Viva la libertad!

Markets didn’t like Trumps rhetoric and freaked out. All red across the board.

But then came Davos. Emmanuel Bazooka Man Macron showed up complete with a sharp suit and sunglasses (not to be cool, but because of a swollen eye, but it was cool) and gave a speech in which he warned us to stand up for the rule of law and against bullies.

As Trump was travelling towards Davos, power went out on the Danish island of Bornholm. Was it the Russians? Market freaked out even more about the rhetoric against Greenland. Danish F-35 jets patrolled Greenland with the help of French tankers.

Then Trump gave his speech. He ruled out using force (ha-ha-ha), and markets calmed and rose again. No one serious wants to join his Board of Peace (unless you count Morroco, Putin and Bibi as serious).

The European Parliament sent the Mercosur trade agreement to the European courts, potentially delaying it unless it is implemented anyways in the interim. Maybe Gavin Newsom was right when he said that European leaders are pathetic.

Also this week: Mark Carney is the new leader of the free world. Either that, or Emmanuel Top Gun Macron. Take your pick. Mark Carney gave a good Davos speech, but he wasn’t wearing sunglasses.

My head is spinning and it’s not even Thursday.

Captain Haddock: What a week, huh?

Tintin: Captain, it’s Wednesday.

The most popular social media at that time was MySpace, and just like my website, everyone had their own page that they would customise to make their own, and just like my site, most were quite ugly. But they were personal, and when you went to someone’s page, you would get of sense of what that person was like. What their interests were and what sort of styles that they identified with.

Today that sort of personalisation has disappeared almost entirely from social media. What you get on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky etc is a profile picture, and if you’re lucky, a cover image. When you upload something, you might get the chance to select from some premade filters. This makes it a lot easier to upload content and make a profile, but the individuality and personality suffers as a result. Modern social media has removed individuality in the name of user-friendliness.

It’s not just social media. Most technology has been dumbed down in in order to make it user friendly, and nowhere is this more apparent than with our phones. Our phones and the apps on them are so easy to use that a small child can operate them without issues, which they frequently do. Young people hardly know how technology works anymore, some of them don’t even understand what files are, and where they might be saved or live, because modern technology has built such extreme abstractions that devices have become magic black boxes.

I am not against making things easy to use, but maybe we have gone too far. Did we have to remove all individuality and personalisation from social media? What we have created is a kind of bland sameness. Twitter, Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon are practically identical, and none of them permit you to make the experience your own, or to express yourself. The only choice you have is what sort of content should the algorithm feed you with.

A lot of modern technology has become like ultraprocessed foods. Hyperpalatable experiences that will never challenge you or make you think. Simple dopamachines that hack your brain to keep you engaged. But it doesn’t have to be this way. While the modern internet has become massively centralised and lost its original spirit, the old internet is still out there. If you can handle the short-form video withdrawls, you can choose to log off and go exploring the internet for the interesting experiences that are still out there.

The other day I logged on to my Bluesky account that I hadn’t used for a very long time. All I saw were things that upset me and made me angry, and the content was hurled at me at speeds that almost made me dizzy. I decided that I don’t need this kind of thing in my life and deleted my account. Well guess what, you can too.

So what do we do about it? How do we get more people to contribute to the projects that they are using?

I think the answer lies in getting back to the original spirit of open source. I’ve seen people propose gimmicky solutions, like weird licenses, models involving the expectation of payment or contributions, but I think all of these solutions go against the spirit of open source. After all, if there is an expectation that you give the creators of a project something in return, then we’re not really practicing free and open source, but rather something more akin to quasi-commercial source-available software.

People need to realise that open source goes both ways. Maybe maintainers have been too good to us, doing so much unpaid labour because they think that they have an obligation to their users, but why should users expect anything from maintainers? After all, you didn’t pay for the software. You don’t have a contract. You weren’t forced to use it. Someone made the software for one reason or another, and then released it for everyone else to use. You made the choice to use it with your own free will. If you don’t like the level of maintenance and support, either roll up your sleeves and contribute or go somewhere else.

The original spirit of open source was that we could all get together and share our software with each other, including modifications and improvements. But unlike older open source projects, modern open source is very professional, with big complex projects and very active maintainers. Perhaps it’s not surprising that this increased professionalism has damaged the original spirit of open source somewhat. If open source software looks and acts like commercial software, and is being maintained like it, then we may well start bringing the same expectations to open source that we have of commercial software.

I think part of the solution to the funding crisis is for everyone, including maintainers, to change their expectations. Maintainers should not be expected to maintain their projects, and users should not expect maintainers to do their work for them. Don’t like it? Submit a PR or fork it, or go somewhere else. If a maintainer burns out or doesn’t want to maintain the project anymore, then what’s the problem? If the project is so important to you, then pay someone to maintain it, or take on that burden yourself. Maybe we need the maintainers of a few high profile projects to say “you know what, I’m going to spend less time on this project unless someone pays me to maintain it full time” for people to wake up. When the External Secrets Operator project announced that they would cease further releases, they were flooded by offers of support, and the project is up and running again. Let that be a lesson to maintainers everywhere. People will support something if they have to.

What all of these products have in common (other than AI) is that they take perfectly ordinary products, like coffee makers and lollipops and add computers to them in order to make the products worse. Yep, worse.

But claiming that adding digital technology to products makes them worse cuts against the grain of our tech-obsessed culture, which believes that adding technology to products is necessarily innovative, and innovation is good. Adding features is always good, and digital features in particular are the best ones. After all, they make products smart, and who doesn’t love smart? You know what the opposite of smart is? Dumb, and who wants to be dumb?

Now don’t get me wrong, I love technology. I am no luddite of course. I am tech-obsessed myself, I play with technology in my spare time, I have a fancy tech degree and I make good money making tech for a living. So when I say that adding technology to products can very easily make them worse, it comes from a place of loving technology. Still, it is painfully obvious to most people that these kinds of smart products are extremely dumb and pointless. So why do companies add computers to seemingly everything, even if it clearly makes the products worse?

One thing I hear a lot is that all of this is some kind of sinister surveillance capitalist plot to increase profits by stealing people’s data and cramming ads down their throats. That this is the inevitable result of market pressures to bring in ever greater profits. But I think that the reason that these terrible products exist is a little more complicated than that.

My thesis is that people are underestimating the influence of culture on the economy. After all, Samsung tells us with a straight face that saying “open sesame” to your fridge is smart, intelligent and worth paying money for, even if everyone watching the promo is thinking “wait, isn’t this more effort than simply pulling the damn handle?” Objectively speaking, if they wanted to make more money selling refrigerators, they wouldn’t invest a fortune in creating these complicated products that most people roll their eyes at. They would try to make manufacturing more efficient.

The real answer to the question of “why does a smart lollipop exist?” is that so many decades of amazing technological advancement has not just changed our societies and economy, but it has also changed us. We have lived through the computer revolution which has continuously innovated, transformed and delivered value with its rapid digitalisation, and how can this not have influenced the way we view technology? These days, it seems like a lot of people have become blind techno-optimists who believe that every new shiny piece of technology is “the future” which will change everything, and why would it be unreasonable to believe it to be the case? People have lived through multiple technological revolutions (think the internet, smartphones etc). <Insert new stuff> is just the next <insert previous breakthrough>. Blockchain is the next smartphone.

So when you go to work designing coffee makers, why not add a computer and AI to it? After all, AI is the most hyped new technology there is. It, not some kind of mechanical improvement, will “revolutionise” your product and make you rich. It will also make your company the best kind of company: A tech company. Ka-ching! You can practically see your stock price go to the moon right in front of your very eyes. Will adding a better handle to your fridge do that?

The FOMO is real and it’s not rational. The people inside these companies are not pushing for making products smart and adding ridiculous features like AI to coffee makers or treadmills because they sat down and performed a rational analysis of how to maximise their profits, and then decided that selling your data and putting ads on your fridge is the best way to accomplish it. The fear of missing out is firmly in the driver’s seat in our tech-obsessed culture, not cold hard calculated rationality.

Adding a computer to a product is not necessarily smart of course. In many cases, the big screens and smart features get in the way of the core functionality, and they turn otherwise reliable products into products with a limited lifespan as no computer lasts forever, and sometimes companies even turn off the required cloud service before the products themselves die.

Compare my oven and alarm clock to my washing machine and dishwasher. My oven and alarm clock have cheap LCD displays and buttons to manually adjust the time (though the clock has a radio for automatically adjusting for daylight savings too!) I can then schedule things with physical buttons. My washing machine and dishwasher also support scheduling, but they must be connected to an app and/or WiFi, which makes them “smart”. These are 2 different approaches to modern product design. I know which one I prefer.

In fact, he seems content with regime stabilisation, as long as the regime recognises America is “in charge”, because what he wants most is the oil

It’s not just The Economist who believes that Donald Trump is being honest about his intentions. All over the internet I am seeing people discussing the merits of the oil argument, and talking about the fact that the US has now started yet another war for oil. But I disagree with this perspective.

The intervention in Venezuela was not about oil, just like Greenland is not about “national security”. After all, if Venezuela was about oil, why did American oil companies all say “no” when asked if they wanted to return if Maduro were to go? The US is also a net exporter of oil, and finally, Venezuelan oil is heavy and expensive to refine, and it will require massive investments which may be hard to recoup in a time of low oil prices and falling oil demand.

The thing that drives me crazy is that people use these facts to attack Donald Trump’s intervention as if it’s some great line of attack. “Oh you say Venezuela was about oil, but it’s deepy unprofitable, and oil companies are not interested, so clearly Trump was wrong to do it!”

The fundamental misunderstanding that people have, is that they think that Donald Trump is being honest when he’s claiming that the attack on Venezuela was about oil. After all, people spent decades arguing that the Iraq war(s) were about oil, something which the US administration at the time denied, so when Donald Trump gets out there and says it’s about oil, people take it at face value and think that he’s being honest. After all, “they” lied about Iraq being about oil, so when he says Venezuela is about oil, he must be telling the truth, right?

But if Venezuela was about oil, there would be something, anything, that would point to it making sense, and as I mentioned above, there isn’t. The fact is that oil is an entirely made-up justification, and largely so are the drug charges.

Now this same scenario is playing out with Greenland. Donald Trump says the US “needs” Greenland for “national security” reasons. People then point out that the US has all the military access it needs to Greenland, and so what does Donald Trump say? He says that Denmark has only sent an extra dog patrol to Greenland. People then point out that this is in fact wrong, and that Denmark has invested billions of extra dollars in Artic security. Donald Trump then claims that the waters of Greenland are full of Russian and Chinese ships, and I’m already seeing people furiously trying to debunk this latest round of bullshit.

Debunking the Venezuela oil argument or the Greenland national security argument is a complete waste of time and energy. Donald Trump may sound refreshingly honest, but he’s just making up arguments to justify what he deep down wants to do, and so anyone trying to counter him will run into the problem of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, which states that the amount of energy spent trying to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than it takes to create it. You refute one of his justifications? Whatever, he’ll just make up some new bullshit justification for his actions. Because people are not attacking his actual intentions, he is free to create another distraction for you to spend your energy attacking.

You see, Donald Trump is not a 21st century politician. He’s more like an old-fashioned pre-20th century ruler, who loves to wage war against his enemies to settle petty personal disputes or idelogical grievances. Nicolas Maduro was an enemy of the US, and Donald Trump wants to exercise his vast powers, because it feels good. Back in the day, this wasn’t unusual. Rulers used to go to war all the time, but in our modern enlightened post-1914 world, you can’t just go to war without a justification. After all, we are civilized people who live in a civilized world of international norms and rules, and so you can’t just start shooting and invading. You need a casus belli, a respectable justification for your wars, so if you’re mentally a 15th century ruler who wants to get rid of an annoying adversarial ruler, you will need to make something up. Well guess what, we are gonna make so much money on Venezuelan oil you won’t even believe it. They took our oil!

And that brings me back to Greenland. Just like Venezuela is not about oil, Greenland is not about national security. The US does have all the military access it could possibly want. After all, the US has had no more loyal ally since like the Korean War than Denmark. The simple answer to “why does Trump want Greenland” is that he wants to expand his realm and make it look bigger on a map. That’s it. That’s all. In modern times though, this is taboo. Even Vladimir Putin has to find thinly veiled excuses like protecting the rights of Russian speakers, Ukrainian nazis or NATO expansion or whatever to justify his invasions of Georgia and Ukraine.

But if you put this kind of thing in a historical context, it’s not unusual. Rulers have spent the entire history of civilization invading and annexing each other. It’s not like Alexander the Great pretended to have legitimate security concerns when he invaded his way from Macedonia to Egypt and on to India. That Donald Trump wants to annex Greenland because he wants to make US bigger is not unusual. Historically speaking, the fact that he has to pretend it’s not about imperialist expansion is the unusual bit.

And that brings me back to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. Stop attacking what Donald Trump says is his intentions, because he’s not being radically refreshingly honest about them. He’s not a 21st century respectable politician with legitimate security or economic concerns. His rule is personal, not institutional, he believes he is above the rule of law and he wants to wage imperialist wars of conquest, and use his powers to eliminate his rivals and adversaries. If you want to speak against him, attack his true intentions and motivations. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself having debunked a lie, and then being faced with another one straight away. He spends no effort lying, and you spend a lot of effort trying to tear it apart. What a shame that would be.