Web Excursions 2023-02-21
A Short History of My Last Six Years
On the afternoon of June 18, 2016, I was sitting on the couch engaging in a familiar ritual: looking through my list of future post ideas, trying to pick my next topic. And then I had a thought.
So I decided to write what I call a “mini post.”
So I opened WordPress to write a little post about that cloud I felt hovering over my other post topics.
This fear of writing about this topic seemed like it was an important part of the topic.
I didn’t write anything. Instead, I started jotting down notes and ideas in a Text Edit document called “society” that quickly became long and messy.
Note: so wbw writes with TextEdit.app in RTF formatAnd so began the next six years of my life.
And the problem with this particular delusion is that it’s a perfect way to ruin your life. If I believed I was working on a six-year project, I’d have worked the project into my normal life. I’d get into a rhythm that would allow for a work-life balance. But when you think you’re at most a couple months from finishing a big project, it makes sense to put everything else on hold for just a little bit more until the project is done.
In May of 2017, I asked my girlfriend to marry me. We had been dating since 2011. She had seen the whole Wait But Why journey up close and had now been living with “I’m almost done with this big project” Tim for a year. We set our wedding date for October of 2018.
As 2017 became 2018, I decided that the wedding would be the hard deadline that I needed.
Finally, in mid-2019, I hatched a plan that would once and for all end this thing. Rather than post a gargantuan blog post, I’d make it a series.
I called it The Story of Us and in August of 2019, the first chapter went up. The whole thing would be 12 chapters, I decided
So I started writing the book. I’d call it the name it should have always been called: What’s Our Problem? I knew what I wanted to say. I just had to write it.
I finished V1 in December of 2021 and triumphantly tweeted about it.
Then one day in June of 2022, my wife woke me up by handing me a positive pregnancy stick.
The baby was due on March 7, 2023, so this book would be completely done by mid-February, period end of story.
It took 2,440 days, but my mini-post on society is done and coming out on Tuesday. Fuckin shit.
Bada Bing: Why Microsoft Wants Google to Dance
Microsoft doesn’t care if it wins the market or not.
There are two ways to get ahead in business: be better than everyone else or make everyone else worse.
The integration of large language model-style AI answers into search is a case of the latter.
These types of searches are far more expensive than the typical query done on Google.
According to the excellent SemiAnalysis newsletter, if all searches were done with LLMs, it would add an additional $36B in annual costs to Google.
Not only do LLM searches raise Google’s costs significantly, but it also reduces its revenue.
None of Google’s current ad formats fit into an AI output.
Their entire revenue model is based around having links to click on, but an LLM search doesn’t bother with links besides citations.
Microsoft wants Google to “dance” to a tune that will destroy its revenue, crush its margins, and remove Google as a serious competitor.
If the company doesn’t come out to play, Microsoft will happily take market share (even at a lower margin) because it can’t get much worse than the 10% it currently has.
Let’s forecast for a second and play out what happens if AI does disrupt search:
With the almost complete collapse of small publications, power law outcomes intensify among publishers and only a few, ideologically aligned national outlets remain.
Misinformation runs rampant, and AI summarizes it beautifully.
Bing’s launch is uninteresting because it’s about the pursuit of profits instead of progress.
I had thought leading AI labs would’ve been smarter.
Instead, we got Sydney.