This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse.
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This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
@twipped we could still use word processors and spreadsheets
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This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
@twipped a usefully wider lens – thank you – on kinda the same thing narrated by @pluralistic in Dec 2025
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This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
@twipped@twipped.social i think there's a lot of truth to this tbh
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This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
@twipped @darkphoenix I love this take, and I would add the market side of the equation that all of these companies (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta) are all classed as growth stocks and they have nowhere logical to grow.
So they try to make them. Meta went on its own for VR. Apple is largely sitting out AI.
They’re simply blue chip companies now waiting to be disrupted, spending their owners cash buying the potential disrupters before they can be disrupted.
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This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
@twipped It is not hard to find problems that need solving, solutions with real value. That’s not as easy as following the gravy hype train. Potemkin village tech. Vibeware = Vaporware, rebranded.
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@twipped It is not hard to find problems that need solving, solutions with real value. That’s not as easy as following the gravy hype train. Potemkin village tech. Vibeware = Vaporware, rebranded.
@meltedcheese @twipped There’s so much crushing drudgery that could be automated, but the tech industry isn’t trying hard because exploiting poor people is so much cheaper.
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@meltedcheese @twipped There’s so much crushing drudgery that could be automated, but the tech industry isn’t trying hard because exploiting poor people is so much cheaper.
@SistaWendy @twipped That’s a very important fact. It’s why clothing manufacturer in is outsourced to impoverished 3rd world countries. Automation is too expensive. Workers in developed nations are too expensive.
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This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
@twipped This seems pretty dead-on. The tech industry as a whole has hit the top of the S-curve -- the new area of the economy opened up by computers has been filled. Which is fine, and we're seeing the effects of an industry switching from growth to maintenance while everyone at the upper echelons has only ever experienced growth and has their whole self-image (and score, can't ever forget the score) wrapped up in things growing forever.
I suspect this also is driving the SpaceX interest.
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@meltedcheese @twipped There’s so much crushing drudgery that could be automated, but the tech industry isn’t trying hard because exploiting poor people is so much cheaper.
thinking out loud — on top of Silicon Valley only chasing the rich fragment of the economy, is a lot of the remaining drudgery physical enough that it’s a robotics problem as much as a software problem?
I have met an experimental weeding robot out in a field and, while the computer vision was reportedly cutting edge, I had the impression that grit and clods were unexpectedly difficult. 80-20 is great stuff but it’s also mostly made of crevices.
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@twipped we could still use word processors and spreadsheets
and databases and something that helps users gracefully transition between them
we’re going to keep getting the first 80% (of four-five 80%s) of the same idea for a while though
we’ll, software has capsid analogues, maybe we can incremental our way there.
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This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
@twipped
Yeah, prolly has a lot to do with the 2025 rise of FOSS too!! a small community might not be able to keep up with a 10k programmer department of microsoft, but their product has been in a finished state since windows 7, and they are just looking for something to justify more releases. Foss is slowly getting really close to also finished, while tech companies are throwing AI and subscriptions into everything, because otherwise people will just stop upgrading, because why would they? -
This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
@twipped Silicon Valley is out of ideas, so they are building atrocious bullshit to make line go up. Turns out, there cannot be an infinite money machine, even if it seemed like one for a short while.
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This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
@twipped ...and there still isn't, not even experimental. For the first time since the dawn of the industrial revolution, there's nothing new to sell, not even experimental. "AI" is global capitalism's final stand.
They're terrified of the moment people figure out that both hardware and software have been "good enough" for most everyday tasks for at least a decade, and new computers are getting faster, but not better.
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
@twipped Yeah I've been suspecting that for a while as a software dev. Feels like the higher-ups don't quite know what software we actually need and this feeling gets passed down to me, who needs to figure out how to build it anyway.
However in the process of the jobhunt I keep finding new and exciting bugs in clunky job application form software and think "if only there was someone willing and able to fix this in return for a modest wage! oh well, back to filling out these janky application forms i guess".
Therefore I think there is real work to be done in fixing software jank. But making the user experience slightly better (and for the unemployed, no less!) doesn't bring in the kind of big bucks new products supposedly do. as a result we get existing software becoming jankier and weird tech trends. and sometimes the latter causes the former!
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This is a very interesting perspective on the tech collapse. Yes, high interest rates and the loss of tax writeoffs for R&D have contributed a lot, but the biggest abandon may just be because there's not a large need. Thats why tech pivoted so hard into trying to find applications for LLMs and machine learning, there wasn't anything else to show growth in.
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
