Day late and a dollar short, as they say.

I saw your comment a few hours after you had posted it and read through the entire article in one sitting, folowed by this manuscript of a speech that Cory Doctorow recently gave (https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/) where he introduces the concept of the “reverse centaur”.

I was originally going to respond to your comment after reading through those two articles, but I put it off, and now here we are, after Microsoft suffered an unprecedented global outage, and after the US had to literally shut down its entire commercial air space.

I don’t want it to be true, but it seems to me we are only at the beginning of such events regularly taking place, exactly because of ever more deteriorating systems, as described in the “Decoherence Trap”.

I repeated what you wrote here because I only now scrolled down, but thank you for being accurate about this. It really is a hill worth dying on, in my humble opinion.

No matter how you flip it, when it comes down to the lowest level of bits travelling over the wire, using bits/s is really the only option to use for ISP providers.

I mean, wasn’t this discussion started by whether bits per second or bytes per second is deceptive or misleading in order to make people think “woah, bigger number means better internet” ?

Also, how is a division or multiplication by a factor of 8 the difference between what most people do or don’t understand? It’s a primary school mathematical operation. If people cannot understand that, how are they going to understand that different downloads or uploads inside different applications provide them with different (byte-based) values depending on protocol and server performance of whatever service they are using?

It really is the truest and simplest unit to use that the ISP can reasonably guarantee to you, because on the lowest level, whether using fibre or copper, we send bits and not bytes across the wire.

It’s crazy that this isn’t being properly implemented (probably easier to say and talk about, but stil) because really hefty fines are the only way to stop companies from bullshitting their literal customers.

If there is one thing we know, than it is that companies will not stop at hurting people, the environment or fucking over their customers if it means they make a good profit off of it and can get away with it. It’s literally a simple calculation for them, nothing more. Literally kill an entire ecosystem and risk poisoning tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of humans? No problem, as long as it pays off.

In my opinion, there is an important difference, though: The software that people “create” with Claude, ChatGPT or whatever could have been created by most competent and skilled software developers, i.e. nothing ground breaking or world changing has been created by people using Claude or ChatGPT (at least not as far as I know, please correct me if I am wrong). However, this is different with regards to the iPhone or the light bulb, they were truly historic and world changing “creations”.

As far as I am concerned, it doesn’t really matter if you were the true “creator” of a certain product, software or invention, as long as you manage to sort of market the product and convince other people of the value of said product or invention (and as long it holds actual value to people).

Comparing Claude to a personal trainer is not an adequate comparison.

The personal trainer doesn’t train for you, he or she teaches you movement patterns and educates you on proper form and maybe also on healthy dietary choices.

It’s more like if he was paying for a personal coding tutor, which Claude or ChatGPT can theoretically be as well, but that doesn’t seem to be what he did here.

I think it would be silly to argue that they only figured that out know, or that they genuinely think that his affairs are what make him untrustworthy.

They could easily try to play it off and most people probably wouldn’t give a dime. They’d hear about it in the news, discuss it in social media and with their friends, but would anybody stop using LLMs because of it? Would any significant amount of people sell NVIDIA stock “just” because he had an affair (or two or three or…)?

I am not trying to defend him, but I genuinely do not think that the business side of NVIDIA would actually be affected by this.

However, how else could the NVIDIA board even go about firing Jensen Huang from his own company without a publicly disclosed affair with a Chinese spy or a similar situation? I don’t think they could, even if some people on the board or in the company were unhappy with him.

And to wrap back around to my first point: Maybe this covers up for something else? Why would they want to fire their CEO that has been printing them loads and loads of cash and will probably continue to do so for the next few years? I am not convinced that the board actually cares about him having an affair with that Chinese spy, but I obviously am just talking out of my a** lol

Not that I have an answer to that question, but I suppose one would have to gain a better understanding on just how important Jensen Huang was and is for NVIDIA’s success in terms of the circular financing deals and pushing its products to all kinds of companies.