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try out my AI agent bro, it'll change your life bro, I swear...
(thelemmy.club)
ironic, make fun of ai with ai
and in twitter of all places
Curious.
The formatting of this joke is divine
At least they’re honest about it, one small step up I guess
"Yet you use AI to criticize AI. Curious!"
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That roof-shovel guy looks like he’s up to something suspicious.
He's heard of undermining and thinking outside the box
Using AI to make a stick figure comic is peak laziness.
When all you have is a shovel everything you make looks like dirt
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Almost all billboards in the Silicon Valley area are for AI and related services, it really does look like selling shovels to shovel sellers.
IMO the Silicon Valley startups are the miners, and companies like Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI are the shovel sellers. And from that perspective there aren't that many shovel sellers.
Goes further up the pike than that. The phrase is "in a gold rush, sell picks and shovels". The real shovel seller is NVIDIA, with their graphics chips.
Really, this is just an extension of the graphics chip boom crypto started. A lot of "mining" server farms transitioned smoothly into renting server time for AI training. It's always been the same bubble: overproduction of graphics cards.
Ed Zitron has a recent post showing that NVIDIA is the only company making money in the AI gold rush.
I get your point, and mostly agree, but the companies developing closed models are sometimes selling data center services to the real miners - the SV startups that are building products with AI, who are burning a ton of money on tokens. The data centers are making a profit, and will mostly be fine when the bubble pops. So Nvidia is clearly a shovel seller, and SV startups are clearly miners, but the analogy starts to break down when you look at Google, MS, etc.
A look at San Francisco billboards (“past month” plus “anytime“):
It's actually a good analogy, where the shovel manufacturer is Nvidia/semicon industry
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There's only one shovel in that slop. The rest are all just handles.
For real, here is a super shitty approximation of the same image. It took me roughly three minutes to make. And most of that was simply remembering how to get ProCreate to do the things I wanted it to do, because I don’t use it regularly:
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And the only one with a blade is, ironically, missing a handle.
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And they didn't even give it the same handle to show any kind of continuity that might at least allude to all those handles being representative of a shovel... Love the meme making fun of AI has a "Made with AI" badge on it... wtf are we doing?
Nvidia sells shovels, the people that push AI are the miners.
The people that push AI are the mine owners.
What is the connection between San Francisco and shovels?
The California gold rush. This was an actual, legit thing where there were more people trying to score bigtime selling supplies to prospectors and miners than there were prospectors and miners trying to score bigtime with striking gold.
California gold rush
That was 200 years ago, though... Is it still some viral local joke?
It's a metaphor being applied to AI companies. A major one in SF has ads literally saying "stop hiring humans."
I didn't get this, thank you for the explanation
It's not a local joke, I wish it was a joke, it's a nugget of wisdom in tech world: when there is rush for gold, sell shovels.
The biggest example today is proliferation of LLM services. There are some uses, some success stories, but a lot of companies are selling services, use my tools bro, you'll save so much money bro, you'll vibe-code the next Uber bro...
A few years ago it was blockchains and NFTs. There is no proven use case but so many startups selling crypto wallets and NFT services to "help customers".
San Francisco is still relevant I guess, for being home to Silicon Valley and tons of tech companies.
it’s a nugget of wisdom in the tech world
This phrase has been around for much longer than the tech sector has existed as an industry. Depending on how close you need the actual phrasing to be to the currently most common wording of the idiom, it goes as far back as the 1890s and has been common parlance in investing, manufacturing, and even the practice of divorce law for a century.
It's an astute observation. I don't watch TV except for the playoffs and they have zero ads for AI, just for AI integration services.
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During the "Gold Rush" era (Wild West 1800s), there were plenty of people descending onto California to try and make their fortunes by staking out land to mine and pan for gold.
However, the first millionaire wasn't anyone who got lucky staking out a mine. It was the largest store owner in the area selling all these prospective miners their shovels to dig with.
The "AI industry" has a lot of parallels here, but everyone wants to be the store owner, and hardly anyone has a genuine need for their tools.
Said first millionaire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
It's quite wild. He's also considered the first to publicize that there is a gold rush, much like these modern AI companies hype up their products to no end.
The actual store owner is nvidia and they make filthy money right now
Boy, I can't wait to buy two 5090s so I can play Starfield and make that black guy white with postprocessing.
"prospective"
You sly dog.
And that image? Made with AI.
Or Seattle.
I was in both cities very recently and Seattle is nowhere near the level of insanity that SF is at.
This is about the cities' history.
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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