I wasn't exactly sure where to put this, as after a few hours of sourcing data, applying formulas and being anal about how the charts look, I can't for the life of me figure out what I was attempting to respond to by doing this compilation.

But look! Charts! And tech valuations are involved!

The title art is spot gold Oct. 1 of each year sourced here. All other data come from here. Inflation figures to determine relative values are bog-standard BLS CPI.

My starting point was, "OK, I know these companies are valued so high because each dollar keeps getting worth less," but I wanted some actual numbers, and with gold being on a tear of late, that seemed like a good point of comparison.

1984 was chosen as the baseline because that was the year Apple started trading publicly, with most of the other companies IPOing thereafter. I only went back and added Intel (hence it being missing from the chart titles) because it happened to start trading the same year, and I already had the formulas. What a shitshow that's been.

Anyway, y'all know how to read line graphs, so I'm not going to go into detail. If you have any questions on methodology, please feel free to ask.

Absent inflation, only Apple. Microsoft and Nvidia would ever have been trillion-dollar companies.

And in terms of value against gold, Tech Stocks At All-Time Highs looks pretty damn anemic.

The company says the machine is less painful and the tattoos look like they are laser-printed.

Landed on my radar recently- thought I’d post it here

The eSafety Committee has requested that multiple platforms identify themselves as 'social networking sites that put children at risk.' The companies and organizations requested to be identified are:

・Meta(Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) ・Snap (Snapchat) ・TikTok ・YouTube ・X Roblox ・Pinterest ・Discord ・Lego Play ・Reddit ・Kick ・GitHub ・HubApp ・Match ・Steam ・Twitch

DCRainmaker video that does a pretty good job also explaining what's going on and company history behind the features and patents being disputed

Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on “Jeopardy!,” his name usually goes for at least sixteen hundred dollars. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, in 1989, but people informed of this often respond with a joke: Wasn’t that Al Gore? Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you’re reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He’s the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called “the gentle singularity”—or else buries us in slop—that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness.

Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain. An emeritus professor at Oxford and M.I.T., he divides his time between the U.K., Canada, and Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Rosemary Leith, live in a stout greige house older than the Republic. On the summer morning when I visited, geese honked and cicadas whined. Leith, an investor and a nonprofit director who co-founded a dot-com-era women’s portal called Flametree, greeted me at the door. “We’re basically guardians of the house,” she said, showing me its antique features. I almost missed Berners-Lee in the converted-barn kitchen, standing, expectantly, in a blue plaid shirt. He shook my hand, then glanced at Leith. “Are you a canoer?” she asked. Minutes later, he and I were gliding across a pond behind the house.

Berners-Lee is bronzed and wiry, with sharp cheekbones and faraway blue eyes, the right one underscored by an X-shaped wrinkle. There’s a recalcitrant blond tuft at the back of his balding head; in quiet moments, I could picture Ralph Fiennes playing him in a movie—the internet’s careworn steward, ruminating on some techno-political conundrum. A twitchier figure emerged when he spoke. He muttered and trailed off, eyes darting, or froze midsentence, as though to buffer, before delivering a verbal torrent. It was the arrhythmia of a disciplined demeanor struggling with a restless mind. “Tim has always been difficult to understand,” a former colleague of his told me. “He speaks in hypertext.”

He visibly relaxed as we paddled onto the water. Berners-Lee swims daily when it’s warm, and sometimes invites members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to “pondithons,” or pond-based hackathons. “We have a joke that if you get any number of them on the island, then they form a quorum, and can make decisions,” he said, indicating a gazebo-size clump of foliage. He spoke of the web as though it were a small New England town and he one of the selectmen. Berners-Lee raised his two children in nearby Lexington, the cradle of the American Revolution, and rose early for the annual Patriots’ Day festivities. “We took them to the reënactment on the Battle Green,” he recalled, “and the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”

The Founding Fathers idolized Cincinnatus, who was appointed dictator to save the Roman Republic, then peacefully returned to his fields. Berners-Lee is admired in a similar spirit—not only for inventing the web but for refusing to patent it. Others wrung riches from the network; Berners-Lee assumed the mantle of moral authority, fighting to safeguard the web’s openness and promote equitable access. He’s been honored accordingly: a knighthood, in 2004; the million-dollar Turing Award, in 2016.

Now Sir Tim has written a memoir, “This Is for Everyone,” with the journalist Stephen Witt. It might have been a victory lap, but for the web’s dire situation—viral misinformation, addictive algorithms, the escalating disruptions of A.I. In such times, Berners-Lee can no longer be Cincinnatus. He has taken up the role of Paul Revere.

“They thought they were safe,” he said, as the boat startled a flock of geese. Platforms had lulled users into complacent dependency, then sealed off the exits, revealing themselves as extractive monopolies. Berners-Lee’s escape hatch is a project called the Solid Protocol, whose mission is to revolutionize the web by giving users control over their data. To accelerate its adoption, he launched a company, Inrupt, in 2017. “We can build a new world in which we get the functionality of things like Facebook and Instagram,” he told me. “And we don’t need to ask for permission.”

Berners-Lee knows that the obstacles are formidable. But he’s pulled off a miracle before. “Young people don’t understand what it took to make the web,” he said. “It took companies giving up their patent rights, it took individuals giving up their time and energy, it took bright people giving up their ideas for the sake of a common idea.” The dock slid into view just as he reached a crescendo. Smiling, he set down his paddle. “Shall I drop you here?”

Sometimes I wonder if the AI push is about firing people for being stupid about trusting any of its output.

Not to mention, this doesn't feel like actual coverage but rather a bit of the author fellating this new development.

You’ve probably heard of vibe coding — novices writing apps by creating a simple AI prompt — but now Microsoft wants to introduce a similar thing for its Office apps. The software maker is launching a new Agent Mode in Excel and Word that can generate complex spreadsheets and documents with just a prompt. A new Office Agent in Copilot chat, powered by Anthropic models, is also launching today that can create PowerPoint presentations and Word documents from a “vibe working” chatbot.

“Today we’re bringing vibe working to Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agent Mode in Office apps and Office Agent in Copilot chat,” says Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Office Product Group. “In the same way vibe coding has transformed software development, the latest reasoning models in Copilot unlock agentic productivity for Office artifacts.”

Agent Model in Excel and Word is a more powerful version of the Copilot experience that Microsoft has added to its Office apps. It’s designed to make the complex parts of Excel more accessible to users that aren’t experts. “It’s not just simple assistive short answers, but board-ready presentations or documents,” Chauhan says. “It’s work, quite frankly, that a first-year consultant would do, delivered in minutes.”

Are there any programs that implement iOS 26 icon styles (Light, Dark, Clear and Tinted) on other platforms (preferrably Windows and Linux) already?

I've heard but can't yet verify that x and reddit are exempt. Still bluesky is still doing this. Enough to make me seriously question their motivations.

I don't see how this could be seen as anything but a violation of privacy and an attempt to chill free speech.

I had no idea there was a federal law regarding this!

Brian Merchant has done excellent work covering how LLMs have devoured the work of translators, using cheap, “almost good” automation to lower already-stagnant wages in a field that was already hurting before the advent of generative AI, with some having to abandon the field, and others pushed into bankruptcy. I’ve heard the same for art directors, SEO experts, and copy editors, and Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal covered these last year.

These are all fields with something in common: shitty bosses with little regard for their customers who have been eagerly waiting for the opportunity to slash contract labor. To quote Merchant, “the drumbeat, marketing, and pop culture of ‘powerful AI’ encourages and permits management to replace or degrade jobs they might not otherwise have.”

Across the board, the people being “replaced” by AI are the victims of lazy, incompetent cost-cutters who don’t care if they ship poorly-translated text. To quote Merchant again, “[AI hype] has created the cover necessary to justify slashing rates and accepting “good enough” automation output for video games and media products.”

Generative AI creates outputs, and by extension defines all labor as some kind of output created from a request. In the case of translation, it’s possible for a company to get by with a shitty version, because many customers see translation as “what do these words say,” even though (as one worker told Merchant) translation is about conveying meaning. Nevertheless, “translation” work had already started to condense to a world where humans would at times clean up machine-generated text, and the same worker warned that the same might come for other industries.

Yet the problem is that translation is a heavily output-driven industry, one where (idiot) bosses can say “oh yeah that’s fine” because they ran an output back through Google Translate and it seemed fine in their native tongue. The problems of a poor translation are obvious, but the customers of translation are, it seems, often capable of getting by with a shitty product.

The problem is that most jobs are not output-driven at all, and what we’re buying from a human being is a person’s ability to think.

Every CEO talking about AI replacing workers is an example of the real problem: that most companies are run by people who don’t understand or experience the problems they’re solving, don’t do any real work, don’t face any real problems, and thus can never be trusted to solve them. The Era of the Business Idiot is the result of letting management consultants and neoliberal “free market” sociopaths take over everything, leaving us with companies run by people who don’t know how the companies make money, just that they must always make more.

When you’re a big, stupid asshole, every job that you see is condensed to its outputs, and not the stuff that leads up to the output, or the small nuances and conscious decisions that make an output good as opposed to simply acceptable, or even bad.

The only thing “powerful” about generative AI is its mythology. The world’s executives, entirely disconnected from labor and actual production, are doing the only thing they know how to — spend a bunch of money and say vague stuff about “AI being the future.” There are people — journalists, investors, and analysts — that have built entire careers on filling in the gaps for the powerful as they splurge billions of dollars and repeat with increasing desperation that “the future is here” as absolutely nothing happens.

You’ve likely seen a few ridiculous headlines recently. One of the most recent, and most absurd, is that that OpenAI will pay Oracle $300 billion over four years, closely followed with the claim that NVIDIA will “invest” “$100 billion” in OpenAI to build 10GW of AI data centers, though the deal is structured in a way that means that OpenAI is paid “progressively as each gigawatt is deployed,” and OpenAI will be leasing the chips (rather than buying them outright). I must be clear that these deals are intentionally made to continue the myth of generative AI, to pump NVIDIA, and to make sure OpenAI insiders can sell $10.3 billion of shares.

OpenAI cannot afford the $300 billion, NVIDIA hasn’t sent OpenAI a cent and won’t do so if it can’t build the data centers, which OpenAI most assuredly can’t afford to do.

NVIDIA needs this myth to continue, because in truth, all of these data centers are being built for demand that doesn’t exist, or that — if it exists — doesn’t necessarily translate into business customers paying huge amounts for access to OpenAI’s generative AI services.

NVIDIA, OpenAI, CoreWeave and other AI-related companies hope that by announcing theoretical billions of dollars (or hundreds of billions of dollars) of these strange, vague and impossible-seeming deals, they can keep pretending that demand is there, because why else would they build all of these data centers, right?

That, and the entire stock market rests on NVIDIA’s back. It accounts for 7% to 8% of the value of the S&P 500, and Jensen Huang needs to keep selling GPUs. I intend to explain later on how all of this works, and how brittle it really is.

The intention of these deals is simple: to make you think “this much money can’t be wrong.”

It can. These people need you to believe this is inevitable, but they are being proven wrong, again and again, and today I’m going to continue doing so.

Remember how the evil Dems were going to steal elections with AI videos? Instead, it's time to play Piss Off Your Own Dying Base With Empty Promises (batteries and oxygen not included).

President Donald Trump shared a bizarre AI video to social media in which he’s seen promoting “med beds” — a far-right conspiracy involving a magical bed that can supposedly heal any sickness.

In a post to his Truth Social platform late Saturday night, Trump shared a phony, AI-generated Fox News clip — purportedly from Fox’s My View with Lara Trump — in which he’s seen rolling out this magic technology to hospitals nationwide. (UPDATE: Trump has now deleted the video.)

“Every American will soon receive their own medbed card,” AI Trump said. “With it, you’ll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.”