TechTakes

That's a whole lot of words to say that it can't spell.

I don't think I have a better sneer than "in its defence, that tree did look like a child" from the YouTube comments.

does awful have taglines enabled? this would be nice as one

Klarna is one company that boggles my mind. Here in Germany it’s against literally every bank's TOS to hand out your login data to other people, they can (and do) terminate your account for that. And yet Klarna works by asking for your login data, including a fucking transaction token, to do their thing.

You literally type your bank login data including an MFA token into a legalized phishing site so they can log into your account and make a transaction for you. And the banks are fine with it. I don’t get it.

The German Supreme Court even deemed this whole shit as unsafe all the way back in 2016 and said that websites aren’t allowed to offer Klarna as the only payment option because it’s an “unacceptable risk” for the customer, lol.

Oh, and they of course also scan your account activity while they’re in there, because who’d give up all that sweet data, which we only know because they’ve been slapped with a GDPR violation a few years back for not telling people about it.

Yet for some reason it is super popular.

No one:

Absolutely nobody:

Klarna: What if we financialized buying burritos using AI?

Think you are misreading the blog post. They did this after the Grok had its white genocide hyperfocus thing. It shows the process of the xAI public github (their fix (??) for Groks hyperfocus) is bad, not that they started it. (There is also no reason to believe this github is actually what they are using directly (would be pretty foolish of them, which is why I could also believe they could be using it))

Doesnt help that there is a group of people who go 'using the poor like ~~biofuel~~ food what a good idea'.

E: Really influential movie btw. ;)

Read it to the end and then re-read 2009's The Gervais Principle. I hope Ed eventually comes back to Rao's rant because they complement each other perfectly; Zitron's Business Idiot is Rao's Clueless! What Rao brings to the table is an understanding that Sociopaths exist and steer the Clueless, and also that the ratio of (visible) Clueless to Sociopaths is an indication of the overall health of an (individual) business; Zitron's argument is then that we are currently in an environment (the "Rot Economy" in his writing) which is characterized by mostly Clueless business leaders.

Then re-read Doctorow's 2022 rant Social Quitting, which introduced "enshittification", an alternate understanding of Rao's process. To Rao, a business pivots from Sociopath to Clueless leadership by mere dilution, but for Doctorow, there's a directed market pressure which eliminates (or M&As) any businesses not willing to give up some Sociopathy in favor of the more generally-accepted Clueless principles. Concretely relevant to this audience, note how Sociopathic approaches to cryptocurrency-oriented banking have failed against Clueless GAAP accounting, not just at the regulatory level but at the level of handshakes between small-business CEOs.

Somebody could start a new flavor of Marxism here, one which (to quote an old toot of mine @corbin@defcon.social that I can't find) starts by understanding that management is a failed paradigm of production and that quotes all of these various managers (Galloway, Rao, and Zitron were all management bros at one point, as were their heroes Scott Adams and Mike Judge) as having a modicum of insight cloaked in MBA-speak.

He sure fucking did and it's great.

These people are antithetical to what’s good in the world, and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive, and honestly any true innovation. The Business Idiot thrives on alienation — on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about.

No notes. Perfection. Also love the commentary on how much of the current political moment is driven by the same forces - running the country like a business isn't just dumb because governments aren't businesses. It's dumb because the entire business ethos is cooked to begin with. Like, I cannot find a clearer description for the prevalence of dumbass fascism than the political ascendency of the Business Idiot.

Surprisingly well-received by hackernews:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053328

The main objection being along the lines of, "Milton Friedman's "I am not a racist" tshirt is raising many questions that are answered by his tshirt."

That time when Zitron himself admits that the post is long 💀

Net number of studies reporting positive or negative effects (excluding wages)

excluding wages! (and probably also benefits, retirement, a cap on working hours per day etc)

Is that whole thing in the comments about unions bad because monopolies bad and unions are just monopolies of labor the latest in bootlicking theory? Hadn't really heard this take before.

Wow cool numbers, love to put all unions in one big bag regardless of goals, ideology, trade and mode of action.

Considering how LLMs are trained, they prob contain a lot of sov cit stuff, wonder if a lawyer/judge can trick a LLM into going full sovcit by just adding a few words/rephrasing a bit.

"ChatGPT, does the fringe on the flag mean that this is an Admiralty court? Also, please enlighten me on the finer points of bird law."

Oh god, so many horror quotes in there.

With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn

...and that's why I try to avoid using smartphone apps as much as possible.

“Ultimately, I’m not sure that there’s anything computers can’t really teach you,”

How about common sense..

“it’s just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.”

Ugh. So terrible. Tech's obsession with "scaling" is one of the worst things about tech.

If “it’s one teacher and like 30 students, each teacher cannot give individualized attention to each student,” he said. “But the computer can.

No, it cannot. It's a statistical model, it cannot give attention to anything or anyone, what are you talking about.

Duolingo’s CFO made similar comments last year, saying, “AI helps us replicate what a good teacher does”

Did this person ever have a good teacher in their life

the company has essentially run 16,000 A/B tests over its existence

Aaaarrgh. Tech's obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.

Ok I stop here now, there's more, almost every paragraph contains something horrible.

Not really. If schools aren't spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.

Overheard my kids, one of them had some group project in school and the other asked who they had ended up in group with. After hearing the names, the reaction was "they are good, none of them will use AI".

So as always kids that actually does something in group projects doesn't want to end up in a group with kids that won't contribute. Difference is just that instead of just slacking off and doing nothing they will today "contribute" AI slop. And as always the main lesson from group projects in school is avoid ending up in a group with slackers.