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#siliconvalley

26 posts24 participants2 posts today

39 years ago, Microsoft held its very successful IPO. Microsoft didn't need the money, but were essentially forced into it. It made Bill Gates filthy rich and put Microsoft on the map. The search for the next Microsoft led to the dotcom bubble. #MicrosoftIPO #BillGates #TechHistory #DotcomBubble #RetroComputing #SiliconValley #StartupCulture #1980sTech #TechMilestones dfarq.homeip.net/microsofts-19

The Silicon Underground · Microsoft's 1986 IPOIts market cap hit $777 million and Bill Gates' net worth reached $350 million

"In late January, a crack appeared in the façade. The Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek released R1 (a rival to OpenAI’s reasoning model), and the company’s app quickly became the most downloaded free program in the iOS App Store. “They proved that you can make a reasoning model for cheap, and you can run it for cheaper” than Silicon Valley companies, Zitron said. It would no longer be necessary for companies like Nvidia to release an expensive new chip every year. In a panic, the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index dropped about a trillion dollars in value in one day, with Nvidia alone losing nearly six hundred billion in market capitalization.

Remembering the insanity of that day, Zitron smiled. He described talking with hedge-fund managers and startup founders afterward: “Everyone was sitting around going, ‘Wait, why are we spending three hundred billion dollars on cap-ex?’ ” DeepSeek’s success showed that the narrative around A.I. was wrong. “It removed the sheen from OpenAI,” Zitron said. The market and the tech companies have not fully recovered, and Zitron said that people in the tech world are “unsettled—everyone knows that something’s shifted.”

Zitron doesn’t consider himself a tech fatalist. He can still find what he calls “genuine magic” in tech, such as the use of gallium nitride in batteries and chargers. “But then there’s all of these assholes who are making all of this money getting in the way of the cool shit that tech does,” he said.

He took a bite of his plum fried chicken. Then another."

newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03

The New Yorker · Can Artificial Intelligence Stir-Fry?By Oren Peleg

"Now Meta has announced Waterworth, the company’s plan to build the world’s longest submarine cable system. It will be Meta’s first single-contract private cable of this scale. It will be built primarily for the company’s internal consumption. The longest cable in the world will thus be owned by a single Silicon Valley firm.

This shift may be significant to policymakers concerned with concentration in digital markets and infrastructure: not only do Big Tech firms dominate digital platforms and services, but increasingly also the physical underpinnings of the digital world. Rather than renting capacity from infrastructure providers, the firms are vertically integrating infrastructure with their content services. Around 60 new submarine cables are planned up until the year 2027. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are all investing in new submarine cable systems.

Waterworth’s route diverges from more established cable corridors. The current longest cable, 2Africa, starts from Europe to circle Africa and the Middle East. Waterworth skips Europe and China to connect the United States directly with major markets in the Southern Hemisphere. Unlike many existing intercontinental cables, Waterworth’s choice of route avoids geopolitical hotspots like the Red Sea and the South China Sea."

oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/what-

I started reading "The Technological Republic".

They aren't hiding anymore. They're done pretending that technology isn't political. They're just saying the quiet part out loud now: their technology, which our society depends on, is anti-worker, anti-poor, and anti-democracy.

Tech bros are living, breathing embodiments of the false authority fallacy; claiming that their professed understanding of basic logic qualifies them to reason expertly upon every conceivable topic while conveniently ignoring a fundamental maxim of their purported core area of expertise: garbage in, garbage out.

People throw the word #genius around because they do not know what the qualifications are.

Geniuses are few and rare as rocks in horse manure. Off the top of my head I can only think of von Neuman and Curie. But some #siliconvalley executive?

The amount of narcissism, sycophancy, spiritual co-opting, grifting and golden calf worshipping that goes on in those circles is so far from genius that it makes the intellect curdle.

#SteveJobs was no genius
and #ElonMusk is a moron.