Ed Zitron is one of those pundits I like but who could absolutely stand to do better.
He makes good podcasts (mostly because of guests like David Gerard), while his newsletter (especially the free articles) mainly consists of the same polemic about LLMs repeated from different angles each time.
He's good at analyzing the financial side of things, while his coverage of the sociopolitical side is too snowed in on the angle Silicon Valley latching onto LLMs because it's the only hypergrowth venture to chase and the tech media being happy to regurgitate their shiny press releases.
He's already dismissed the theory that the AI datacenters will be turned into surveillance centers as conspiratorial nonsense ("it already exists, it's called Oracle"), but he's never covered the theory that it's a ploy to grab land and water rights.
in that light, engaging with the idea of genAI as a fascist artifact (to paraphrase Tante's recent article) might give Sam Altman's insolvent carnival trick far more authority/credit/power than it deserves.
his thought process is probably something like "who cares about the slopmachines having encoded biases and that it's training data is moderated by a fleet of underpaid contractors, when their creators are biased towards burning money?": and as someone who never bothered trying the technology I can't really blame him.
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