latkin

I'd score it as 3 out of 5.

> "By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI."

Nah. Not by any common-sense measure at least. i.e. not if you ask a person on the street "what is Google's main product?", not if you look at where their revenue comes from. Perhaps if you look at where their staffing/spending/attention is going, but I don't think it's fair to say AI is their "main product" yet. (disclaimer: I work there, not directly on AI)

> "oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences"

Directionally, yes. The number is too low, though, at least for now. As someone not even super closely following everything, I can rattle off more than 2 or 3. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta, Microsoft, DeepSeek + other Chinese players... Probably in the eyes of the public it really is just 2 or 3 (ChatGPT + something from work, perhaps).

> "The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services"

Yeah.

> "The bulk of AI will be special purpose software brains"

Feels underspecified... I'd say this is a miss. "most of the commercial work completed by AI will be done by nonhuman-like programs" Most by what measure? Most invocations/day? Most users? Most economic output? Most public awareness? "AI" or "ML" in one form or another is ubiquitous and indeed if you were to make a giant list of "AI" or "ML" applications it would probably be dominated by hyper-specialized non-human examples, e.g. the image processing in your phone's camera, your Spotify recommendation algo, image recognition on factory floors. But in the public consciousness, the term "AI" means know-everything, do-everything human-like chat/assistant systems.

> "in conversational tones, any question at all"

Yeah.

Indeed, it appears that he's now deleted his social profiles. Good on him! That is exactly the right thing to do at this point to follow through, so kudos to him.

TFA was published a day ago, the corresponding YT video was published 3 months ago. He had cross posted the blog (not sure about the YT) across multiple social media channels in that time, up until an hour ago (or thereabouts) when he finally deleted his socials. That was the state of things when I wrote my original comments and follow-ups. So I stand by the assertion that he was clearly interested in promoting the content, at least initially.

Unfortunately I can't edit any of those comments any longer.

100%. I get it -- I'm _also_ burned out on social media, AI, screens, the treadmill of the tech industry, etc.

But you can just stop doing those specific things. Delete your social media accounts. Put a screen time timer on your phone. Continue to work on your hobby projects or work projects without AI. There is a middle ground without going full "1980s tech Amish life conversion". Email, text messaging, Maps, basic websites, etc are all still super useful and generally non-harmful. You can still perfectly-well enjoy analog hobbies like typewriters, vinyl, film photography, etc _alongside_ common-sense modern tech.

And you look dumb to anyone paying attention when you launch a multi-pronged social media moment to tell the world that you don't think social media is worth using. It's kind of sad, like someone making a huge deal about "this is my L A S T cigarette everyone!", "this is my L A S T drink!" but all their friends are kind of cringing inside.

Also sad that he feels the need for online promotion of his paper zine about fully offline life.

> He is not fucking around for clicks in any shallow sense.

He is undeniably "fucking around for clicks." When you don't want clicks, you don't cross-post to YouTube, BlueSky, LinkedIn, your blog, etc. Clearly a lot of effort went into making this announcement social media friendly and click-worthy. He has analytics on his blog to track how many clicks he gets.

Whether it's in a "shallow sense" or not is subjective and there's no way to really argue against that. Do I think he's karma-obsessed and drooling over engagement dashboards? No. And maybe that's what you mean.

But you have to be willfully naive to deny the irony in deploying numerous completely unnecessary layers of tech, over numerous social media channels, to let everyone know that you no longer want tech and social media in your life.

This whole thing is eye-searingly performative. Whether or not he follows through and goes dark after this, this farewell is just so ridiculous.

Claims to have not used the internet or a phone since February, does all communication via USPS, declares that AI and social media make him hate himself... But somehow is continuing to post on Bluesky, continuing to update his blog, continuing to post YouTube videos, continuing to solicit donations on GoFundMe for personal matters. The account that posted this link to HN is brand new and this is the only submission -- hmm...

If you are serious about being done with tech and plan to go off-grid, you just go off grid.

Need to tie off some loose ends first? Write a paper letter to your IRL inner circle and/or business partners. Get it copied at Kinkos. Call people (use a land line if you need) and talk to them about it.

Just this last time (you swear!) you absolutely must announce this at internet scale? Then walk the walk and minimize the tech involved by typing out your farewell in plain text and posting it directly. Y'know, like we did pre-AI, pre-social media. Don't pull out a typewriter, write a sappy "Dear Internet" letter, add a bunch of likely-pre-planned "edits" in red pen, pull out your digital camera, take a photo, transfer it to your laptop, carefully adjust and crop, then finally combine it into a multimedia update that you go out of your way to promote across multiple social media channels. This announcement has obviously been tailored for maximum social media engagement -- supposedly the thing they are making a principled stand in opposition to.

This takes me back to my teenage juggling glory days. Truly the golden years in hindsight.

I grew up in Silicon Valley in the late 80s/90s and learned to juggle, as many people did back then, from the book "Juggling for the Complete Klutz." As a kid I devoured almost every Klutz Press book.

A product of Stanford people, Klutz had a small brick and mortar store in Palo Alto. It sold all of their books, of course, but also juggling equipment, magic props, and random fun stuff like rubber chickens and fake corpse legs you could hang out the trunk of your car. Absolute paradise for ~12 year old me.

But the best part was that they ran a weekly juggling club out on the back deck area. Just show up and play. I learned a lot from all of the kind folks who turned out for that. My mom would drop me off every week, and I'd run out there excited to show the older guys what I learned that week. I wasn't a prodigy or anything but I was decent. Got to the point where I was juggling 4 clubs and I could hang with the club passers if they kept the pattern tame (and were skilled enough to catch my slop). Of course I also got proficient at other juggling-adjacent stuff like yo-yo, devil sticks, contact juggling... Just pure joy, really a cherished memory.

I was at the shop enough that my friend and I ended up being recruited to model for the 1998 edition of the Klutz Yo Yo book. There are 2 photos of me in there, I think. I was pissed that my friend was more photogenic and they ended up using way more of his photos than mine.

I would agree that the proper next step after getting comfortable with 3 balls is to learn 3 clubs, not 4 balls. It's much easier to go 3 balls -> 3 clubs than 3 balls -> 4 balls. So many fun things to do with clubs, and of course once you learn clubs you have learned torches/knives which never fail to impress.

And I spend a lot of my time at home on my computer. The article should have said LinkedIn is searching my house.

> The only difference is that the ratio of fructose:sucrose is slightly (~5%) higher in corn syrup.

I think this is a typo? Should be "fructose:glucose"

Interesting challenge, and very impressive.

But he isn't honestly accounting for the cost of the salmon, even by his own rules ("Food that I don't use needs to be factored into my costs.", "if it goes to waste, I have to charge myself for it.").

The salmon, at $1.99/lb, costs $4.48 for 2.25lbs (36oz) of whole fish. From that, he's only able to extract 3x 6.25oz portions (19oz total) of meat.

Despite consuming everything he could/would from $4.48 worth of fish, he only charges himself $0.77 * 3 = $2.31, ignoring the cost of the waste that he was required to purchase in order to obtain the meat.

IMO a fairer accounting for 3 equal servings would be $4.48/3 = $1.49 per serving. Nearly double.

In case others gave up, it took about 2.5 minutes to load my (midsize city) hometown from OpenStreetMap. So hang in there.

Depends on the kid. Mine was a superstar sleeper from 2-6mo (8p-7a every night, predictable 90min-2h naps during the day), and then as he got older his napping took a nosedive -- shorter duration, lower quality, less predictable.