Its all shovel ware
this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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Err, this is dumb as rocks. The shovels would be the hardware.
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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The formatting of this joke is divine
"Yet you use AI to criticize AI. Curious!"
Curious.
At least they’re honest about it, one small step up I guess
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ironic, make fun of ai with ai
and in twitter of all places
Nvidia sells shovels, the people that push AI are the miners.
The people that push AI are the mine owners.
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:
Not sloppy enough. Needs more disembodied stick figures.
At first glance of the original I didn't even notice the giants in the background or the one guy pretending to be a shovel.
It was the shovel handles stabbed straight through the stall countertops for me.
And the only one with a blade is, ironically, missing a handle.
And the handles are on shafts that are long enough you wouldn't want 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?
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“):
That roof-shovel guy looks like he’s up to something suspicious.
He's heard of undermining and thinking outside the box
And that image? Made with AI.
It's actually a good analogy, where the shovel manufacturer is Nvidia/semicon industry
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What is the connection between San Francisco and shovels?
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
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"prospective"
You sly dog.
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.
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