Which is bonkers given how many OpenAI competitors there are, vs the number of nvidia competitors there are, which is, being extremely generous, just the one.

the what black swan event

Bluesky, for instance, has much weaker pressure to focus on "engagement," and yet they made the Discover feed by default for new accounts, which made the site way more toxic virtually overnight.

The worst part is I think engagement is such a powerful survival mechanism that even if you remove money as a factor, the network effects implicit in engagement have the same net effect on software.

Have you seen nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyrann... ?

It's much more explanatory of how we got here than the "enshittification" cycle or malice, in my opinion.

aside from basically having a glorified minivan engine and a fragile transmission I don't think the DeLorean is actually unusually unreliable or bad for the era.

In the original BTTF the car itself is fine. In BTTF2 the car is, again, fine. (Though obviously retrofitted with hover tech)

... is that a big part of the story? There's a couple times when it's a little slow to turn over but that's just... normal for cars in the 80s and early 90s. In BTTF3 the fuel line gets cut by an arrow. (Also they got it running again after it sat in an abandoned mine for 3/4 of a century)

follow-up on this: this is totally working.

yeah it's just another tool. I don't even think it's a "you must learn to use it or you'll be left behind," a refrain I remember hearing about fully integrated IDEs vs text editors. I didn't start using a fully integrated IDE until COVID because my work had better affordances for that during WFH

every time I read any journalism about tech, which lately is often, I die a little inside

Performative decency is actually *so* important for this reason.

It tricks the 10% of ghouls into thinking that there are only 1% of ghouls.

And it makes the 30% of people that don't care one way or another follow the mostly decent crowd