If we look at the common exhibitionist subtype of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) that most people think of when they hear the term narcissist, it is fairly easy to see that they use a simple three-part defense to create a façade of extreme self-confidence. I call this the “GOD defense.”
G – Grandiosity: They act as if they are special and entitled to do or say whatever they want. Grandiose motto: “I am special.”
O – Omnipotent: They make all sorts of unrealistic claims about how powerful and knowledgeable they are. Omnipotent motto: “I can do anything, and I know everything worth knowing,”
D – Devaluing: They feel free to attack and devalue anyone who is not clearly above them in their status hierarchy. Devaluing motto: “You are worthless, defective garbage, and are here to serve me.”
Yeah, you could just put "Example: Donald Trump" on all three.
The current models depend on massive investment into server farms. They aren't generating profit, and probably can't. When the companies involved realize it's not going to happen, they'll pull it all. That will generate a new AI winter, and in 20 or 30 years, maybe the pieces will be picked up and the field will go through another summer cycle. This sort of boom/bust cycle has happened before in AI.
And no, self-hosted models aren't going to make up for it. They aren't as powerful, and more importantly, they will never be able to drive mass market adaptation.
Every ticket scheme for NFTs fails because of a simple reason: contract law. Venues don't stick with TicketMaster because they like it. TicketMaster's store front doesn't have any magic technology; a room of overcaffinated fresh CS grads could recreate it in a weekend of binge coding.
Venues stick with TicketMaster because they are contractually obliged to do so. NFTs do not and cannot change that legal reality.
Those are put there for SEO purposes. Google favors sites with these big stories. The copyright issue alone doesn't justify what's there; you could do a quick blurb of a few sentences and it would be enough. Plenty of cookbooks do that.
This is why a lot of those sites have a button that says "skip to recipe". It's a bunch of text that's meant to be for robots, not you, and they really don't care if you read it.
Now that it's being created by LLMs, we may have the first known example of human language written by robots and intended for robots. Welcome to a cyberpunk dystopia.
Have you ever chained three Cisco 2600 routers together and then successfully ping'd clients on each end? Do you know what BGP is? OSPF? Do you know the difference between routing and routed protocols?
I know you don't, because people who do don't make the claims you're making.
Skype won't be supporting anything at all very soon.
What happened with Vonage is something that could happen with any kind of instant messaging, including things like Discord.
With everything directly addressable (not just static addresses, but directly addressable), an IM/VoIP service can simply connect to the recipient. No servers are necessary in between, only routers. That doesn't work with NAT (CG or otherwise), so what you have to do is create a server that everyone connects into, and then that forwards messages to the endpoint. This is:
More expensive to operate
Less reliable
Slower
A point for NSA eavesdropping (which almost certainly happened)
This is largely invisible to end users until free services get enshittified or something goes wrong.
Yes, it's only tangentially related to static addresses, but it's all part of the package. This is not the Internet we should have had.
And at least in the US (in single family homes) its crazy unlikely that your router is behind any NAT
Your router has NAT. That's the problem. CGNAT is another problem. My C&C: Generals issues did not have CGNAT.
Plenty of people used Skype and Vonage. Both were subverted because they have to assume NAT is there.
. . . quick game servers don’t need static . . .
But they do work better without NAT. That's somewhat separate from static addresses.
My old roommate and I had tons of problems back in the day when we tried to host an Internet game of C&C: Generals behind the same NAT. I couldn't connect to him. He couldn't connect to me. We could connect to each other but nobody outside could. It's a real problem that's only been "solved" because a lot of games have moved to publisher-hosted servers. Which has its own issues with longevity.
You can get IPv6 addresses. What you can't get, in many cases, is a static IPv6 prefix assignment.
CGNAT is not fine. Its problems are simply hidden from most people. ISPs have to have more equipment that's less reliable, increases latency, and is potentially a bandwidth bottleneck.
The reason they have no use for a static address is because applications haven't evolved to work that way. Roll back the clock 30 years, do IPv6 seriously so that everyone has static assignments by the time the Y2k problem has come and gone, and you have a very different Internet.
In fact, many applications, like VoIP and game hosting, have to go through all sorts of hoops to work around NAT.
I built my own blog that way. All static generated, no JavaScript, no cookies, just enough CSS to get a nice dark mode look. Loads in 0.3 seconds on a modern connection, or around 10 seconds if you're on a shitty 2G connection. 370KB load, and about 270KB of that is a picture on a post that could be slimmed down if it used something more modern than jpeg compression.
Deepseek is not the huge leap it appears. It's better, but not at all what was initially claimed.
Nor is smartphone AI going to do the things people what AI to do. It won't let the CEO take your job.