Notices by Rob Landley (landley@mstdn.jp)

@dalias @stevel @evacide I'll take bug reports and test reproduction sequences from anywhere, but an LLM patch is at least as bad as a GPLv3 patch to a BSD project.

Linux had that whole developers certificate of origin procedure with the signed off by chains, and then dove straight into https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/ land merging patches that legally came from nowhere and are at BEST unlicensed.

Bra fscking vo.

The AI bubble is a symptom of the end of Moore's Law.

https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3mnvdzq6mr224

Software capability was never growing exponentially, the hardware that ran it was until Moore's law ended.

If Moore's Law hadn't stopped they wouldn't be spending billions on data centers, your phone would be powerful enough to run it all.

Exponential growth is _always_ an s-curve that bends back down eventually. Software revenue stopped growing when a ~15 year old laptop could run today's software reasonably well.

The LLM bubble is the Weekend at Bernies version of the dotcom boom, which happened on DIALUP internet. The first linksys router came out the year of the crash (before which wifi and always-on broadband connections weren't readily available). The first modern smartphones came out 6 years later. The dotcom crash happened with a decade of technological growth left.

But there's no exponential LLM growth, only linear returns for linear cost increases. Silicon Valley beating a dead business model.

Every period of exponential growth turns out to be an S-curve. You can't sell 2x as many phones each year on a planet of 8 billion people forever, eventually everyone already has one.

Moore's Law's S-curve bent down in 2010, and we've had maybe 3 of the expected 10 doublings since then, putting us ~100x behind the old trend line.

That's why they announce data centers twice the size of downtown Minneapolis using water cooled chips powered by a dryer outlet each: Moore's Zombie.

Amazon Web Services was built when Moore's Law was still happening, meaning they knew their data centers would be cheaper to repair and cheaper to upgrade in future.

AI data centers will only get _more_ expensive to maintain as the helium runs out and international shipping faces state sponsored piracy and so on.

They're spending trillions to do what AWS spent billions on because Moore's Law stopped, but their business model depends on it continuing.

That's why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process says:

"The 5 nm node is expected to have a gate length of 18 nm, a contacted gate pitch of 51 nm, and a tightest metal pitch of 30 nm. In real world commercial practice, '5 nm' is used primarily as a marketing term by individual microchip manufacturers..."

Moore's Law has been dead for 15 years. Number go up because number MUST go up, capitalism demands it as a sacrament, so they changed what number is measuring.

Increasing clock speed stopped helping Moore's Law move forward around 2003, "CPU performance growth as we have known it hit a wall"

http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

Then around 2013 shrinking feature size stopped helping Moore's Law move forward. Here the coinventor of the FinFET (a transistor built on its side so it looks smaller from above) said "Nobody knows anymore what 16 nm means or what 14 nm means".

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-status-of-moores-law-its-complicated

Clock speed and resolution both succumbed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

The death of Moore's Law is also why the AI bubble buildout causes shortages: https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/the-rising-tide-of-semiconductor

Moore's Law didn't just make things cheaper, it produced more of them. Moore's Law was "twice as much for the same price every 18 months" meaning the same amount was half the cost.

VC bros trying to brute force their way to the old growth curve physically cannot buy enough RAM and storage because the amount the old laws led them to expect does not exist. Exponential growth stopped, past tense.

Another fun thing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse

Feeding LLM output into LLM training is like sticking a microphone into a speaker to get a shrieking noise.

LLM output is POISON to LLM training data, the compression math collapses with fairly small amounts of contamination. Finding clean sources of data was already a problem back in 2023.

Another reason despite all the frantic scraping of the internet over the past few years, it keeps coming back to piracy:

https://bsky.app/profile/lynnemthomas.com/post/3moksjjsyxk2a

This is the data version of growing snowflakes in a lab. No two alike, results unreproducible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

"Training" is how you put new data into a model. ChatGPT-3 (circa 2020) didn't know about Barbenheimer, let alone the impact of the Hormuz quagmire on gas prices.

You can never STOP training, the same way news sites can never stop putting out new stories, so AI business models separating that out are lying.

This is why https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_on_CD/DVD never really took off.

An LLM is basically lossy compression for the google cache.

"Training" is the data compression. "Tokens" are decompressing a zoomed in fractal slice of morphed together training data, with lots of brownian motion jiggling to make it work and a ton of autocorrect applied to the jpeg artifacts.

"Agents" feed the output back into the input a bunch of times (adding zillions of prompts to the decompressor's starting dictionary) to take lots of slices until the metrics add up to something sellable.

Apple's $10,000 super-laptop has 128 gigs ram and 8 terabytes of storage.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch-space-black-nano-texture-display-apple-m5-max-chip-18-core-cpu-40-core-gpu-128gb-memory-8tb-storage

According to Moore's Law, a machine costing 1/4 that much should have 512 times as much RAM and storage.

More's Law is _measurably_ dead. The S-curve bent down, by the numbers.

That's why Silicon Valley went fascist and bought into LLM hallucinations. The gold rush is over, their business model is obsolete, and they're in screaming denial about it.

If Moore's Law wasn't dead, the original curve would see 2026 introducing laptops with 64 terabytes of ram.

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html#id248066

Instead, LLM-induced DRAM shortages are _shrinking_ the amount of memory in systems. The largest mac mini for sale recently went from 64 gigs of ram down to only 16.

https://www.techradar.com/computing/macs/apple-removes-more-mac-mini-and-mac-studio-models-from-sale-as-ceo-tim-cook-warns-it-may-take-several-months-to-reach-supply-demand-balance

Note: Apple is once again the largest company in the world.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2026/07/17/apple-unseats-nvidia-as-worlds-largest-company/

And even they are rationing RAM.

Where is the kernel's "slop event horizon"? Should I stay with 7.0? 7.2?

I'm aware the LLMbros are trying to boil the frog just like the rusticles were, but with rust I can just not have rustc in the $PATH and it either builds or it doesn't.

"This project is no longer meaningfully maintained by humans" is harder to regression test for...

Yeah yeah, put the effort into netbsd migration instead, I know...

So many "orange fucker announced" things turn out to be "a reporter asked 'we fear you might do X' and he goes 'yeah sure, that, I've been thinking about that forever, definitely going to do it, what was it again?'"

https://universeodon.com/@jaykuo/117327135791247909

Yes it's stupid policy du jour (the east coast imports its diesel and heating oil from europe: FDR's New Deal built all our pipes across the appalachian mountains 80+ years ago, and all the big oil tankers go to europe and back) but the reporter started this

@Sujiyan これは mstdn.jp に影響しますか?

Culture is full of persephone eating pomegranate seeds, beware of greeks bearing gifts, don't eat fairy food, don't accept favors from demons because you'll owe them, monkey's paw wishes...

And then all these "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" fuckers tell you to check in LLM pull requests, and mock the reluctant as fools. STRINGS ARE VERY MUCH ATTACHED. This crap is fucking sticky at nuclear contamination levels. You pivoted from NFTs to this, we watched you do it.

I'm actually somewhat appreciative of google periodically doing the "prove you're not a bot" paywall, because it reminds me to run the search on ecosia.org instead.

(It's probably triggering because this entire apartment building gets natted out to the world through the same IP. Although that's an excuse: when you click the checkbox javascript is uploading your browsing history and contents of your clipboard for AI training. Pay-with-data. Hope you didn't have any passwords in there!)

Kids in the UK are defeating age checks by drawing on a mustache with eyebrow pencil.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/kids-are-bypassing-online-age-checks-by-drawing-fake-beard-on-their-face/

It's not that the checks are porous, I"m sure they'll get more expensive. It's that pearl-clutching fascist plutocrats are teaching a generation to rebel against authority en masse because their elders are fucking idiots who have no respect for them, and the only way to be treated like people is to break the geezers' power via direct action. The "law" is bad and wrong.

German rooftop solar company's sales tripled in march, expected to triple again this month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rklp7CB55-U

Renewables met all new demand for electricity in 2025.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMsjUM4cEq0