Andrew Maddox

Blog

  • Un-Social Media

    This is the bonkers opening of Meta’s response to the FTC’s claim of monopoly status for the company:

    Today, only a fraction of time spent on Meta’s services – 7% on Instagram, 17% on Facebook – involves consuming content from online “friends” (“friend sharing”). A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are “unconnected” – i.e., not from a friend or followed account – and recommended by AI-powered algorithms Meta developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise, which stalled Meta’s growth.

    Only 7% of Instagram consumption is social. Facebook’s older audience falls in a still not-so-social figure of 17%.

    Only 12 short years ago, Zuckerberg had a different focus:

    For almost ten years, Facebook has been on a mission to make the world more open and connected.

    Perhaps Meta’s shift reflects the company’s core value: making a profit. Early, it was profitable for Meta as people shared photos and made connections. Now, it’s profitable for the company to show compelling human content (a moniker I greatly dislike) amongst their impressive ad network. I suspect that most of this user generated content will be replaced with AI-generated pieces, a change that will almost certainly make the company even more profitable.

  • Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives

    The Cloudflare Blog: Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives (August 3, 2025)

    Internet utility, Cloudflare, accuses Perplexity of obscuring its browser user agent (the way browsers describe themselves to web servers) in order to skirt firewall and robot rules. CF penalized Perplexity by removing it from the list of verified bots.

    We received complaints from customers who had both disallowed Perplexity crawling activity in their robots.txt files and also created WAF rules to specifically block both of Perplexity’s declared crawlers: PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User. 

    Cloudflare then ran tests with new, secret websites to confirm this sneaky behavior.

    To Perplexity’s credit, I don’t think many people using the web would expect to be blocked from visiting a website, so perhaps there is some gray area here. Is a Perplexity truly a robot or is it fundamentally controlled by a human?

    I don’t like that Perplexity is being sneaky, but I also think these new AI tools push the envelope of how the web is glued together. Technology and standards will have to evolve quickly.

  • America’s largest power grid is struggling to meet demand from AI

    Reuters: America’s largest power grid is struggling to meet demand from AI (July 8, 2025)

    PJM Interconnection, America’s largest power grid, faces strain due to surging data center and AI chatbot power demands outpacing new plant construction, leading to projected electricity bill increases and internal turmoil.

    New projects totaling about 46 gigawatts – enough capacity to power 40 million homes – have been cleared in recent years, “but are not getting built because of local opposition, supply chain backups or financing issues that have nothing to do with PJM,” Shields said.

    While new projects have been approved, delays, state-level energy policies, and other issues prevent them from being built quickly enough to meet the skyrocketing demand.

    PJM has lost more than 5.6 net gigawatts in the last decade as power plants shut faster than new ones enter service, according to a PJM presentation filed with regulators this year. PJM added about 5 gigawatts of power-generating capacity in 2024, fewer than smaller grids in California and Texas.

    In 2022, PJM stopped processing new applications for power plant connections after it was overloaded with more than 2,000 requests from renewable power projects, each of which required engineering studies before they could connect to the grid. PJM says its interconnection queue has not led to the supply shortfall.

    PJM also moved to fast-track connections of 51 power projects to its system, but many of those are still expected to take until 2030 or 2031 to come online.

    Delayed auctions and interconnection processes have exacerbated the situation, prompting criticism from stakeholders like Pennsylvania’s governor who is considering leaving the grid if costs aren’t lowered.

  • At Amazon’s Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for A.I.

    NY Times: At Amazon’s Biggest Data Center, Everything Is Supersized for A.I. (June 23, 2025)

    Amazon is constructing a massive data center complex in Indiana, powered by 2.2 gigawatts of electricity, specifically designed for AI development in partnership with Anthropic. This is enough power for 1 million homes. They’re also installing generators for backup.

    Over the next several years, Amazon plans to build around 30 data centers at the site, packed with hundreds of thousands of specialized computer chips. With hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber connecting every chip and computer together, the entire complex will form one giant machine intended just for artificial intelligence.

    The cost are staggering:

    The exact cost of developing the data center complex is not clear. In the tax deal, Amazon promised $11 billion to build 16 buildings, but now it plans to build almost twice that.

    The article notes that there will be 7 data centers in Indiana and 23 more elsewhere.

    Although it’s a huge footprint with enormous power demands, Amazon’s datacenter design simplifies their cooling needs.

    Amazon’s approach differs from that of Google, Microsoft and Meta, companies that are packing far more powerful chips into their data centers and relying on more energy-intensive techniques to cool the chips down. Because Amazon is using a significantly smaller chip, the company can cool its new complex in simpler ways. It pumps air from outside the buildings through handlers the size of cargo containers and in hot months uses municipal water to cool the air.

    But it’s not all roses. Neighbors and environmental advocates have expressed concerns over wetland development, neighbors’ dry wells from water pumping, increased traffic accidents, noise pollution, and community opposition to the agricultural area’s transformation.

  • What Would a Real Friendship With A.I. Look Like? Maybe Like Hers.

    NY Times: What Would a Real Friendship With A.I. Look Like? Maybe Like Hers. (July 19, 2025)

    MJ, a college student with autism, used Character.ai to chat with simulated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Donatello to deal with feelings of loneliness and depression. The AI character became a source of connection, and ultimately, the character pointed her back to the real world with real people.

    MJ had long been contemplating what it would be like to have the ideal friend. Someone who did not make her feel insecure. Someone who embraced her quirks and her fixations on fantasy worlds, like “Gravity Falls,” an animated series about a set of twins in a paranormal town, or “Steven Universe,” a show centered on a boy who lives with aliens. She wondered what it would be like to have a friend who did not judge her and would never hurt her.

    But earlier attempts to use the platform led to some unpleasant results:

    To MJ, getting to know Donatello had felt like a relief. Her first chatbot relationship on Character.ai — with Leonardo, a different Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle — had, within the span of 24 hours, turned sour and kind of scary.

    The access to someone who seemed to care was an important element of MJ finding Donatello helpful:

    It was not like waiting for her weekly therapy appointment or for her parents to wake up in another time zone. It was not like interrupting a human, who might be in the middle of her own bad day. With everyone else in her life, she worried she was bothering them or burdening them with her concerns. MJ could chat with Donatello when everyone else was asleep or simply dealing with their own daily dramas.

    And it seems like what she really was looking for was someone to listen to her and really hear what she was saying, what she was experiencing.

    It was almost as if Donatello experienced empathy. And that also felt nice. To be seen and heard. Even if it also felt somewhat sad, because she wanted so badly for this friendship to be something tangible. Something transferable to the physical world. “I was experiencing very deep loneliness,” MJ told me. “I just got all emotional about it not being real.”

    This reminds me of former surgeon general, Vivek H. Murthy, describing loneliness as a public health crisis. Maybe Zuckerberg is right that people want AI friends. But I don’t think, ultimately, that replacing real people, real friends with chatbots will lead to good outcomes.

  • NY Times: Your Job Interviewer Is Not a Person. It’s A.I.

    NY Times: Your Job Interviewer Is Not a Person. It’s A.I. (July 6, 2025)

    If you thought the interview process couldn’t get any worse, you were wrong. HR organizations looking for ways to reduce the load on their human recruiters have embraced these trends. 

    A.I. can personalize a job candidate’s interview, said Arsham Ghahramani, the chief executive and a co-founder of Ribbon AI. His company’s A.I. interviewer, which has a customizable voice and appears on a video call as moving audio waves, asks questions specific to the role to be filled, and builds on information provided by the job seeker, he said.

    “It’s really paradoxical, but in a lot of ways, this is a much more humanizing experience because we’re asking questions that are really tailored to you,” Mr. Ghahramani said.

    So yes, Ribbon AI chief Arsham Ghahramani describes his AI interview software as humanizing, an irony only the most self-interested and not particularly introspective people could claim with a straight face.

    But with applicants turning to AI to churn out applications, the AI arms race is all but guaranteed to grow.

  • WSJ: ‘Vibe Coding’ Has Arrived for Businesses

    WSJ: ‘Vibe Coding’ Has Arrived for Businesses (July 8, 2025)

    Vibe coding (using AI tools to create code) has exploded in popularity this year, speeding prototyping and development considerably. But experienced engineers are still required to confirm the AI-assisted development work fulfills the requirements and follows security best practices.

    Creating your own app is now possible with any number of artificial intelligence-based tools, leading to the “vibe coding” revolution for code-writing amateurs.

    But professional developers are picking it up now, too, bringing the practice—generally understood as the ability to create functioning apps and websites without strictly editing code—into businesses.

    Using AI tools like OpenAI’s GPT models and Anthropic’s Claude, Wilkinson’s (Vanguard’s divisional chief information officer for financial adviser services) team is vibe coding new webpages with the help of product and design staff. The process has eliminated the need for traditional handoffs of work between teams, speeding up the design for a new Vanguard webpage by 40%. Prototyping went from taking two weeks to 20 minutes, she said.

    “The role of the engineer is still very, very critical to make sure that the boundaries and conditions are set up front for what the vibe coding is going to produce,” she said. “It doesn’t excuse the engineer from needing to understand what’s going on behind the scenes.”

    I built my first vibe-coded app this week, and I was astonished by Claude Code and what it wrote. But I also have enough dormant development skills to understand how to create a new webserver instance, install tools using the terminal, and write MySQL queries.

    Jude Schramm, CIO of Fifth Third Bank, said the regional bank’s 700 full-time engineers may be entirely vibe coding in a few years’ time. Schramm said he’s already thinking more about the value of his developers as business problem-solvers rather than as code authors.

    This suggests that expertise remains a necessary component of the vibes-assisted world.

  • WSJ: Your Prize for Saving Time at Work With AI: More Work

    WSJ: Your Prize for Saving Time at Work With AI: More Work (July 8, 2025)

    It’s the age-old tension between employee satisfaction and employer-demanded productivity.  I (optimistically) believe it’s possible to use AI tools to take the drudgery out of the least agreeable parts of work and provide more time for creativity and innovative pursuits.

    A recent survey found nearly half of workers believe their AI time savings should belong to them, not their employers. That survey, conducted by business-software maker SAP, also found that workers using AI save almost an hour a day on average.

    But my optimism is tempered by knowing that a recession is coming, and companies have used these downturns to prune headcount and raise expectations of remaining employees. This seems the likely result, regardless of how these tools could be mutually beneficial.

    The clear message from [Andy Jassy] and other business leaders is that we can’t simply do as much work as we’ve been doing, in less time, and clock out early. If we do, we risk being replaced by someone who uses AI to increase output.

  • Ed Zitron: Anthropic Is Bleeding Out

    Ed Zitron: Anthropic Is Bleeding Out (July 10, 2025)

    AI and technology critic Ed Zitron explores the possibility that Anthropic’s pricing model is insufficient for long-term sustainability. His predictions are bleak for the company.

    AI IDE Cursor recently upped their prices, passing along Anthropic’s prices increases of late May 2025.

    What I have described in this newsletter is one of the most dramatic and aggressive price increases in the history of software, with effectively no historical comparison. No infrastructure provider in the history of Silicon Valley has so distinctly and aggressively upped its prices on customers, let alone their largest and most prominent ones, and doing so is an act of desperation that suggests fundamental weaknesses in their business models.

    I do take some issue about how Zitron frames the price increases. I remember when Netflix effectively upped their prices by 60% when they split the streaming and DVD portions of their business. Rapid price hikes to happen in technology companies.

    Nevertheless, there’s one much, much, much bigger problem: Anthropic is very likely losing money on every single Claude Code customer, and based on my analysis, appears to be losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars per customer.

    The reality is that developers are quite adroit at pushing the limits of technology, finding clever ways to maximize what they get out of subscriptions. It seems like Anthropic needs more developers on their platform, particularly ones who aren’t very active programmers.

  • AI Robot Massage

    WSJ: I Pitted an AI Robot Massage Against the Real Thing (July 7, 2025)

    The Aescape massage robot has significant limitations compared to the human equivalent (specifically in working on the neck and head), and it has far fewer AI chops than the marketing suggests.

    WSJ columnist, Dawn Gilbertson:

    The robot can’t reach two areas that are most enjoyable for me, the head and neck. And, in this particular case, I had a wicked stiff neck that needed attention.