Ed Zitron, writer of 'Where's Your Ed At' with 115,000 subscribers, has published his Hater's Manifesto: a direct accounting of why the AI industry has become, in his words, detestable. The core argument is not that LLMs are useless. It is that the trillion-plus dollars in capex and tens of billions in training compute have produced a tool that, in his own testing, took 30 minutes to sort-of-fix a Minecraft mod and broke a PS5 controller configuration in the same session. The gap between that reality and the industry's claims is where Zitron plants his flag.
The piece earns a full read because Zitron does not stop at 'AI is overhyped.' He traces the problem backward through what he calls the Rot Economy, the growth-at-all-costs mindset that has already broken Google Docs spell-check, crashed Microsoft Word on endnotes, and turned Slack into what he calls a digital Escher painting of notifications. His argument is that LLMs were bolted onto already-degraded software by Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon, making those products more convoluted, not less, while shifting blame for failures onto users. The autonomous framing, he writes, is the lie that holds the whole pitch together.
This week Zitron follows the manifesto with a premium piece titled 'The Hater's Guide To Circular Financing,' examining how the AI industry has structurally become a mechanism to funnel capital to NVIDIA and Broadcom regardless of downstream value. If you want to understand the financial architecture underneath the hype, that is where the argument goes next. Tip him on Signal at ezitron.76.
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