RE: https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/116653554177369852

If anybody is wondering how this bubble hasn’t popped yet - I still run into companies with blockchain teams. Everybody pretended GameStop could buy eBay this month. Businesses are really good at huffing glue.

I still frequently run into orgs where they renew Darktrace, an AI sensor thing from a decade ago, each year at a cost of 6-7 figures and they can’t explain why.

Nexthink’s another common one. Co-op had several Nexthink analysts, with that in their job title. Nobody used it. They renewed it because it was easier than admitting they wasted the money. Microsoft had it too, every endpoint installed. Why? Who knows.

Who is going to admit they wasted money on GenAI?

@GossiTheDog I think the sheer amount of cost and disruption of genAI may be enough for people to actually admit things this time around
@joshin4colours @GossiTheDog the bigger the amount, the less enthusiastic are people about admitting their mistakes
@GossiTheDog (dabs away a tear) "I could have been the one to collect shitloads of money on software subscriptions that nobody wants to use...I could have created so much value..."
@GossiTheDog it was fun when one of my customers' Darktrace system (that they hadn't even mentioned that they had) decided all of their normal internet traffic was an attack and injected RST packets into random VLANs. Fun times debugging that one. Thankfully the RST packets that Darktrace injects contain a googlable string!

@GossiTheDog legit half of all my business is finding Darktrace customers and getting them off the thing. It’s wild how many people pay for it when their team literally does not know what to use it for. I remember one team that was like “oh yeah it’s our backstop, we look at it if we don’t know what’s up”, and they hadn’t done that for 18 months.

Didn’t stop their execs from saying they were AI first cause they had Darktrace.

@GossiTheDog do you (or anyone else reading this) have some more context or info why Darktrace is not great? Did someone make a comparison?

I see people telling the world Darktrace is bad, but haven’t found the evidence backing that up. I would love to link to something else than a Mastodon thread from rando’s.

@jtig @GossiTheDog

As I vaguely recall, their company and former execs were implicated in fraud. Here's an older article. I think they just barely pulled off an acquittal before Lunch ended up dying aboard his sailing yacht Bayesian in that storm a couple years ago.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/07/darktrace-future-clouded-by-concerns-over-culture-and-case

That and a lot of the commentary I've seen suggested they're big on marketing but often fail to deliver on results. Reviews seem mixed. I have no personal experience with them, but there's enough shadiness surrounding them that I'd be very reluctant to get in bed with them.

‘Toxic’: Darktrace’s future clouded by concerns over culture and fraud case

Analysts have also criticised the cybersecurity firm’s business model but a US private equity fund is still pondering a takeover

The Guardian
@DaveMWilburn @jtig @GossiTheDog A few years ago their marketing team managed to get by me and talk to leadership. Ended up in a demo deployment, which nobody was impressed with the results of. And the project thankfully died when leadership received a quote.
@GossiTheDog my last employer had about 8 different licenses for assorted monitoring and security told that they dutifully renewed every year. Most of them had never been configured beyond the default or network auto scan. There were no notifications configured and nobody really looked at any of the dashboards.
Darktrace wasn't one, but they had me on their call list every six months. I was more interested in getting rid of the shit we didn't use, and getting value from the ones we did.
@GossiTheDog haven't heard of Nexthink in 10 years. Did a trial once but didn't go any further as the sales guy was an arse.
@GossiTheDog also heard of a CISO once who often quoted the Art of War and stopped patching endpoints during Covid due to bandwidth limitations but was fine with it as they had Darktrace.
@GossiTheDog I wonder what working on a blockchain team is like these days
@GossiTheDog this is like a new version of the bank problem. "If you owe the investors $68 billion, they have a problem."
@GossiTheDog oh boy … at huffing glue 🤣
@GossiTheDog yeah, this is why even though it's *painfully* obvious how badly overleveraged the AI bubble is, we can't count on it popping any time soon
@GossiTheDog Reading "significantly better than its predecessor" every 2 weeks with no actual demonstration of that is getting old
@malwareminigun @GossiTheDog I was in a meeting recently where someone said "Just look at how much better models are now than a year ago and extrapolate to a year from now" and half of the meeting participants accepted that as a reason to believe in GenAI being "the future".
Claude 4 turned a year old last week. GPT4.5 is 15 months old. Even if I was dumb enough to expect improvements to come consistently, we are decades away from models I'd actually want to rely on. And that's a giant if.

@tkissing Most improvements that I have noticed have been about the "harness" rather than the models themselves; letting the model actually run builds itself was the tipping point from "always useless garbage" to "only sometimes useless garbage".

At this point I wouldn't dispute that in the last few years models have gotten better, but even so the folks making this claim should have specific examples that the old model fails at that the new one succeeds at.

@GossiTheDog apparently it is not just the LLMs that are hallucinating.
@GossiTheDog Yeah I've been assuming that the #tech sector has quietly swallowed a great deal of public humiliation and outrage over cryptocurrency and NFTs and that stuff, while secretly going hog-wild on the idea that they were making themselves independent of the global economy by gambling on blocks of cryptography
@mxchara @GossiTheDog all these companies should be legally required to replace “run rate” with “time until cash tire fire goes out” in every communication.
@GossiTheDog And I assume that somewhere, maybe multiple somewheres, there's a whole ecosystem of computer nerds nested many layers deep in software tricks, swapping their #blockchain quatloos back and forth on "Web3" maybe and daydreaming of when THEY will be "The Internet"
@GossiTheDog investors force the companies they buy to buy from each other. Money flows in incestuous pools.
@GossiTheDog as long as investors think that other investors are not going to pull out it'll keep growing. It's not based on any real productivity of companies.
@GossiTheDog look at Tesla for over a decade now with their FSD and now Space X and Starship, keeping the fraud going is the new business model, and that was just one man publicly outed as a Nazi hasn't put a dent on any of it. Now a whole lot of blue chips are working hand in hand, so it will keep going as long as they want it keep going.
New Book Portends Crisis, Possible Revolt in Saudi Arabia

In a review of Karen Elliot House’s On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines and Future, Bruce Riedel writes that perhaps the greatest challenge the next U.S. president could face is a revolution against the royal family in Saudi Arabia.

Brookings
@GossiTheDog and then came the massive global financial collapse …

@GossiTheDog @lisamelton @Techmeme

“Huffing Glue”!!!!
That’s priceless and beyond true

@GossiTheDog
I like to look at this: https://isaiprofitable.com/
$$$ spent since pageload is my favourite bit…

#AI #isAIProfitableYet

Is AI Profitable Yet?

@GossiTheDog What do you even do on a blockchain team in 2026? Are you just collecting a paycheck? Making PowerPoint slides?
@GossiTheDog The whole GameStop buying eBay thing was silly. I assume there was an insider trade behind that one.

@GossiTheDog When rationality is a national risk we can't afford the numbers on our screens to reflect any reality.

Economic lag and untamed wild growth of market corruption is only there to transfer what little the many have onto the piles of the few.

Yet even the tiniest of fishes can and have devoured incompetent giants throughout history with time and pressure.

@GossiTheDog That could be shortened to "Block-Team", for efficiency. Or "Chain gang". Maybe convert to Rust?