Most HN criticism of Zitron appears to fall into one of two categories:
1) He uses expletives and is “too angry” 2) He runs a PR firm and has no experience working with LLMs
Which I think says a lot more about his detractors than it does about him. Time will tell all, and I think he will be remembered as a prescient individual. It’s undeniable that these financial games that OpenAI, Oracle, and now Nvidia are playing are unsustainable and indicative of a large upcoming crash.
Yeah, his financial arguments are good. But I did listened a but to his podcast ... and good bulk of it is pure ranting. There are episodes with no economic analysis as far aw I can tell, but a stream of complains about Sammy Clammy being idiot and people whose names I dont remember being idiots.
He has literally hours and hours of that.
Even his financial arguments are often weak. Of late he’s been constantly ranting about the use of ARR, like that hasn’t been a norm in SaaS businesses for almost two decades now. And that they’re using it to fool… who exactly? Wholesale investors on their current investor roadshow who deal with these things literally every day?
The episode with Shingy also really rubbed me the wrong way too. Just constantly “yeah, but it still hasn’t done anything useful” followed by Shingy relaying numerous examples over and over of how AI has transformed our he things he does, followed by “yeah, but when is it going to do something actually useful?” over and over.
He’s become some one note on the AI stuff it’s tiresome. Moreso given he’s unwilling to actually listen to any other perspective. I wish he’d go back to talking about literally anything else.
When he's making arguments and offering analysis, I think they're very often sound. That's why I (at least sporadically) continue to listen to episodes of his podcast, or read his pieces.
I'd love to read/listen to one that he worked on with a talented editor. I don't mind the swearing or the tone, and I enjoy a good rant here and there, but for me the amount of rambling and ranting obfuscates the good points he's making, just by sheer volume.
The key problem is that his economic analysis is absolute trash. I used to think he was just totally incompetent at it, but given the bias in the errors, it is pretty clearly intentional deception. But it's often pretty hard to address that, because every article he writes is a 10k word gish gallop. I've tried debunking key points a few times in HN comments for just one of the intentional mistakes he makes, and people complain about the reply being too long.