Ed Zitron

Can you explain how they take responsibility?

The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech Hello premium subscribers! Today I have the first guest post I've ever commissioned (read: paid) on Where's Your Ed At - Nik Suresh, one of the greatest living business and tech writers, best-known fo...

Here's this week's premium newsletter - a guest post from @mrnikli.bsky.social of "I Will Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" - about the Remarkable Incompetence of CEOs and Engineers at the heart of the tech industry.

www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkab...

I don't even know what to make of this. It's upsetting and horrible. This man is horribly mentally ill and these systems do something to people by agreeing with everything they say. They are only made possible through unrestrained growth taking over every lever of tech

did you pay for a subscription? I can't find you on there! Appreciate your business

SoftBank Taps Mizuho, SMBC, JPMorgan to Lead $15 Billion Loan SoftBank Group Corp.’s investments in AI will be financed through a loan in which Mizuho Bank Ltd., Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. serve as lead underwriters — a sign of th...

Good question! The $15bn bridge loan was from *21* banks!

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Oh so they're counting capex? Amazing stuff

hi! did you read the piece?

could be just normal growth stuff or an attempt to save on capacity/power!

Did you read it? I don't see you on the paid subscribers list!

Hahahahah there is not even $64bn of A.I. spend! Lmfao

yeah from 2022

Monologue: The Updated Pale Horses of the AIpocalypse Podcast Episode · Better Offline · 07/18/2025 · Bonus · 14m

Here's this week's Better Offline monologue. I walk you through the pale horses of the AIpocalypse - and how the AI bubble’s deepest weakness is that it’s almost entirely based on vibes.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...
Linktr.ee/betteroffline

Unknown Analyst - Analysts (SoftBank Group Corp.) My name is [ Brian from Diamond. ] My first question is about joint venture with OpenAI. So as a usage fee, $3 billion or the JPY 450 billion to be paid. And SoftBank Corp, other group companies is going to pay SoftBank Group based on pay-per-view or the pay per use. So this JPY 3 billion, this may be a bit different way of using money compared to the past investments by SoftBank Group. So this is not the investment. This is going to be expense, I believe. Is that correct? And also for this expense, I believe the -- I want to ask you how are you going -- is it going to be effective in terms of expense? As a CFO, how you look at this way of using this money? Is this regarded like R&D; type of the expense or that you are not expecting the immediate return out of it? Or this is going to be sales for the joint venture, so it is okay to expense this amount or so. So this $3 billion of expense, how are you looking at that money? That's the question I have because the way of using money is a bit different from I used to understand from SoftBank Group. Yoshimitsu Goto - Executives (SoftBank Group Corp.) As a compensation for AI service, of course, like you said, this is going to be expensed. But $3 billion per year, how are we going to pay, has not been finalized yet. And first of all, we don't have a service available yet. And in a few months or in when that we're going to be able to use this service and how are we going to pay for pay per use basis, how are we going to set the pricing scheme? That's also going to be finalized. SoftBank Corp may use a lot. So it doesn't mean that the large expense needs to record. And Miyakawa, CEO of SoftBank Corp, mentioned several times in his earnings that it's going to be paid for use, and we don't know or they don't know how much they're going to use. So that is something that we can discuss internally. So we're going to be kind of the experimental and we kind of take it to SBG and SB…

I dug in further - Q3 2025 Softbank earnings, an analyst asked about this, and the answer from Softbank's CFO was literally "we don't have the service [the $3bn-a-year OpenAI service] available yet" and "we have not finalized how we're going to be able to pay." COOL! COOL!!!!!!!!!!!

Looking back 17, 18 years ago, when we launched iPhone in Japan, what we did was to have group companies to use iPhone, completely change the business phones to iPhones and let them use iPhone for their own businesses before marketing them to the customers. Also, we saved a lot of paper. Again, my point is, if you want to be committed to a particular product, you need to try by yourself before sharing it to customers. So learning from those experiences, we are going to do the same, which is to have SoftBank Group companies to use this AI capability and market to Japanese enterprises in Japan, the sales effort will be mainly driven by a SoftBank Corp. And group will pay $3 billion as an annual purchase. And once commercial products are ready, we have group companies to use the products, and we will get a fee from those group companies on pay-for-use basis. We don't know how much and which of the group company will use the Cristal, and we need to figure out what will be the most attractive product that we can sell to the market. So that's something that we want to do before releasing to a commercial market. As for the structure, as you can see here, SoftBank OpenAI Japan will be held equally by OpenAI and intermediate holding company, which is held by SoftBank Corp, 51% and by SoftBank Group, 49%. And SoftBank will consolidate SB OpenAI Japan. And we hope that we can get started as soon as possible and start developing a product and want to help transforming all industries in Japan, and SoftBank will have exclusive right to market the product in Japan

back in February 2025 SoftBank claimed they'd be spending $3 billion on OpenAI's services annually yet there has been no reporting of any kind of whether this money actually exists. They've mentioned it *once* in their earnings, and never since.
group.softbank/en/news/pres...

Pretty bad, right? My goose is cooked? All those analysts seem pretty mad! Except it's not, my goose is raw! Yours, however, has been in the oven for over a year!

next week's newsletter includes a few moments where you can see my brain begin to melt

Which programmers are competent? They can’t possibly tell, because they don’t know what sorts of delays are suspicious. Should we shut down that late project? They have no idea, because every project they’ve ever run has been late. Even the normal avenues available to thoughtful people – learning with a sound epistemology – are unavailable. The number of executives who do not read is fucking astounding. There’s an entire industry around summarizing business books for executives. Imagine needing a summary of a business book, a genre less challenging than young adult fiction. That’s not a slam on YA fiction, I’m being entirely literal. I’m pointing out the fact that, in the world that we inhabit, we have enough leaders who struggle to read material at a level attainable by many 16-year olds that we’re able to run an entire industry off just the ones who are at least attempting to learn. Now think about how many aren’t even trying.

Software executives are so disconnected from production that they don't know what their engineers are doing - or really what their engineers do - meaning that they have no idea how to build function teams or, indeed, functional software.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkab...

Everyone, even grifters, would actually prefer clear and unambiguous wins of the sort you’d get from solving the problems above. The preferred way to defeat your political opponents and other companies is force-of-arms, not grifting. If you’re the one person that gets their projects delivered on-time, at high-quality, without the need to lie, then you’ll have a great career. The issue? Society does not systematically produce nearly enough people who can do this. In their absence we select people who are either deliberately lying or so vapid that they really do think they’re incredible despite all evidence to the contrary. None of this helps them ship software, but it does make it easier to accept awards on stages and maybe get a TED talk one day, fantasies of which put them in danger of orgasm. They do not have the ability to address the hard problems, because they cannot even perceive the problems accurately.

Nik's thesis is fascinating - tech leaders don't lead, buying software as a means of putting the responsibility for their company's future on someone else's back, allowing them to do specious TED talks and as little work as possible.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkab...

The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech Hello premium subscribers! Today I have the first guest post I've ever commissioned (read: paid) on Where's Your Ed At - Nik Suresh, one of the greatest living business and tech writers, best-known fo...

Here's this week's premium newsletter - a guest post from @mrnikli.bsky.social of "I Will Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" - about the Remarkable Incompetence of CEOs and Engineers at the heart of the tech industry.

www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkab...

that's why it's inexplicable! i can't explic it!

yeah it's in the generative AI database for some reason?

He taught at a school where he screamed at students and had an inappropriate relationship with a fellow teacher. One of his students was 46!

Radio Better Offline: Allison Morrow, Paris Martineau & Ed Ongweso Jr. Podcast Episode · Better Offline · 04/09/2025 · 1h 25m

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...

Monologue: The Updated Pale Horses of the AIpocalypse Podcast Episode · Better Offline · 07/18/2025 · Bonus · 14m

Here's this week's Better Offline monologue. I walk you through the pale horses of the AIpocalypse - and how the AI bubble’s deepest weakness is that it’s almost entirely based on vibes.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...
Linktr.ee/betteroffline

To be honest, I haven’t trusted Stephen Colbert ever since he conveniently abandoned all his right wing views as soon as he got hired to host a network talk show

Radio Better Offline: Brian Koppelman, Cherlynn Low & Mike Drucker Podcast Episode · Better Offline · 07/16/2025 · 1h 16m

Here's this week's Better Offline. I'm joined by @briankoppelman.bsky.social @mikedrucker.bsky.social and @cherlynn.bsky.social to talk about the tech industry, what AI can actually do, and what the world looks like in a year.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/r...
linktr.ee/betteroffline

Did you see this
bsky.app/profile/edzi...

Didn't think of that. Pretty nice.

The reason this is happening is that the markets enable growth, the inevitable crest of the rot economy

It's fine. This is an x files plot. It's fine

This goes out tomorrow on the premium wheresyoured.at feed.

"The Stunning Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech"