Karen Hao asked John Borthwick at CUNY whether we are in an AI bubble, and he said “absolutely.” Borthwick runs Betaworks and has lived through two of these cycles already. He calls this a productive bubble, like the railroads or the fiber buildout: too much money goes in, things break, and the survivors inherit the…
TBT: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Fast Growth — What Fifteen Years of Shop Talk Says In December 2024, Pam Ikegami published The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Fast Growth in Screen Printing, a profile of Vlad Kalman at Printing on Main Street. $3,500 in sales in 2019. Around $320,000…
Karen Hao has one line I keep coming back to. “AI is like the word transportation,” she told Mishal Husain on Bloomberg. “Transportation refers to everything from bicycles to rockets.” ChatGPT is a rocket. It costs a fortune to build, it eats land and water and power, and, as she put it, “we never go…
TBT: Crows and Shiny Things: Eight Rules, Fifteen Years of Evidence In April 2015, Rick Roth published Crows and People Like Shiny Things… It came out of a Cambridge shop near MIT, a reflective company down the street called Reflective Technologies, and a production manager named Aaron who summed up an entire product category in…
°FAI: Karen Hao Says the US-China AI Race Is Fake. Karen Hao wrote Empire of AI, and she has been watching OpenAI longer than almost anyone. She spent three days inside the company in 2019 and came away unconvinced. I have followed her work since I started the Fahrenheit AI series, mostly because she reports…
TBT: Where Was Your Shirt Made? Eight Years Later In April 2018, Rick Roth published Where was your shirt made? How was your shirt made? It ran five years after the Rana Plaza collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, which killed at least 1,129 garment workers and injured more than 2,000. The piece named four companies…
°FAI: Which Number Is Lying? A Morning of Making the Data Honest Our weekly press report showed setup running at 18.2 minutes per screen, over our target. That target isn’t arbitrary. It came out of the work I walked through in °FAI: Screen printing setup times, where it drops by a minute a week as…
The first problem is not powder Homer, running two converted Epsons, put it plainly in January 2022: “Powder isn’t the problem, it’s the damn white print heads clogging up.” Three months later he had a machine on a pallet ready to leave. “I spent 3 days trying to unclog the print head. Nothing worked.” TBT: DTF…
The Shirt Board has been quietly running for over twenty years. Somewhere in those threads is almost every screen printing question that’s ever been asked, and answered, argued about, answered again better. The problem is finding any of it. Search engines barely touch old forums anymore. So we built a system that lets an AI…
Drawn from working printers’ conversations on The Shirt Board, 2013–2015. Direct quotes link to the exact post. Other references link to the thread. TBT: Thin Thread Mesh: The Best Upgrade Screen mesh has two numbers. Most printers only know the first one. A “150” screen has 150 threads per inch. But the second number, the…
