So I should be clear, I dont think theres anything special about Tech companies that should let them be treated differently. But for whatever reason, it is a fact that places like We or Tesla or Theranos or fucking Groupon gets stupid valuations just because they’re “tech” adjacent.

If the market ever catches on that theres no secret ingredient (and as Zitron’s shown, there are pretty visible public numbers pointing at this), we’re looking at a correction at the trillion dollar scale. Or maybe we never ask Google to put up or shut up, and just keep the fairy powder in our eyes forever.

I’m terrified for the future, and not even on hater shit. The public numbers are bad, and barring some extremely surprising reports locked behind a wall of NDAs, the private numbers don’t seem much better - even Saltman, perpetual cheerleader he is, doesn’t have much to offer except desperation to keep the party going, barely even a week after their big model drop.

So if all the big tech players know that this is garbage, the continual doubling down on this either points to: 1. scrambling for the pie while it’s there because they need it to stay afloat, or 2. everything else they have to offer is even worse somehow? And in either case, the aura of being a tech company instead of a company is lost, and I don’t know what happens in the fallout. The probably best case scenario is that only tech workers like myself have to eat the blowback, but I suspect things won’t play out so cleanly.

I admit, in my haste, I read that link as Marc Andreessen openly announcing they’re investing in the Chinese Communist Party, which is slightly funnier than the reality of yet another crypto game.

Sadly, he’s left the game just the last month: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/dining/pete-wells-how-restaurants-have-changed.html

Criticizing others for not being perfectly exacting with their language and then jumping in front of the LLM headlights all at once, truly the human mind has no limits.

Spotify setting aside a pool of total royalties that everyone competes over is crazy. I get it’s necessary to avoid going bankrupt when people like this show up, but wow, there’s layers to this awfulness.

[0] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/

We distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders… From there, the rightsholder’s share of net revenue is determined by streamshare.

Food analogy

This level of discourse wouldn’t fly on 4chan, how is it so popular with LLM fans?

I don’t accept a wrong caption is better than not being captioned. I’m concerned that when you say “High tolerance for error”, that really means you think it’s something unimportant.

Exactly, its a natural conclusion of accepting commodification as the One True Path. Words don’t mean anything if they don’t make a profit, and clearly you’re a bozo who can’t Make It (and the bar of Making It is always rising because Number Go Up), so you should join the borg and let my buddy Claude speak for you.

I can at least understand the guys who are using the AI text conveyor belt to make a cheap buck. Do the hustle, get your bag, whatever. We live in a capitalist hellscape and if that’s how you choose to survive, then fuck you, but I get it.

I don’t understand these guys who think it’s actively good that people don’t write their own words. It’s just a level of misanthropy that doesn’t make sense for how inflated their egos are.

For the level of continued investment AI has gotten, it isnt possible to be too harsh on these clowns.

Its posts broke containment, however, after an unsolicited reply from Sam Altman himself:

amazing tbh — Sam Altman (@sama) August 8, 2024

aren’t you supposed to be running the most valuable startup ever made? why are you cosplaying Ryan Gamestop Cohen?

This seems incredibly shortsighted even in their own framing. The SEO spammers who care about being on top of Google the most are the ones generating fake AI websites en masse, so wouldn’t this just cause immediate AI inbreeding?

This world is a joke and we’re just watching the punchline.

The slightly grimy, cynical tone is very well done, really made me feel like a soulless suit.

I wonder how much M&As still hinge on demos working at this point, isn’t it an open secret that every startup is run by hustlers?

actually, this is lampshaded directly here:

seemed slightly surprised that _______ would be acquiring a genuinely pretty valuable company.

I usually dislike the whole line of thinking of “Well, it might not be true, but it tells you something that you believed it.”

But, the world in which AI succeeds is the world where every book published is a fake field guide to mushrooms, or a recipe book for shaving cream. And it’s like… I dunno, after 4 years of happily proclaiming that this is the thing we’re going to sell, why have these guys never considered that fraud is bad, actually. Is fully automated luxury gay space fraud really so enticing?

Is this list just a summary of a bunch of downvoted SCPs?

“I even hate when you say the word ‘nigga’, but that’s just me I guess. Some things just cringeworthy, it ain’t got to be deep I guess.”

• Kendrick Lamar, euphoria, in response to Aubrey Graham.

It’s really funny that this was probably the closest thing to a killer app powered by genAI to exist.

Wonder if they’re getting rid of this stuff because they realized it’s actually a liability to mine these ERP convos for data and they’re burning money on every conversation as it is.