jj4211

'AI experiences' go in favor of moar datacenter for AI bros to play with.

Basically the infrastructure play has started running out of loans, and the market is switching to who can secure the most debt in a stingy market. So moves like this try to mitigate the hit to credit ratings, trying to avoid what has happened to Oracle for example.

I don't know the details of the microsoft offer, but at another company we had a few of them, and the 'fine print' was:

• If too many people applied to participate, the company reserved the right to deny applicants
• If someone was deemed too critical, executives reserved the right to reject individual cases

So offering to 60k does not mean they actually accept the risk of all 60k leaving.

More interesting is the logic of a 'buyout'. Now the superficial assumption is that it's better for morale, but as you saw, it's pretty much certain that morale will be hurt by an involuntary layoff action anyway after the buyout. But maybe you could argue the hit was softened by the buyout earlier...

However, I think the actual goal is to disproportionately get the people in their 60s, the folks that given the right 'nudge' will just nope out into retirement. They would love to do that in layoffs, but historically that has hit age discrimination suits. Whenever we had a farewell celebration in a buyout, the people were mostly people at retirement age.

Pretty much. The industry was for 'those nerds' in the days, then dot-com came and holy shit, money to be made, but for a time, let the nerds cook because the investor class had no idea and kind of knew they had no idea.

Then the crash put the investor class firmly at the wheel and the industry has been significantly distorted since then, motivation wise.

Clearly good things have happened, but there's always this anti-user angle at play now.

She’s fully capable of coming up with three superlatives about her child

You may underestimate how much of a sociopath these people are...

I largely agree with you, though by the time she took the reigns at yahoo, it was already pretty dead.

But this pattern of executives proudly offloading 'pesky personal connection' to AI just works to confirm that their stratum of society are almost exclusively sociopaths.

LLM above all else are good at baseless confidence without regard of whether they actually know what is being discussed. So just like a c-suite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1AMFirysrc is an example of exactly why C-suite loves the hell out of it.

Man I have noticed a severe drop in intelligence lately.

I'm getting beyond the most basic dumb questions from people that have been in the industry long enough to know better. I know they could have answered it themselves earlier. Basically I'm getting either hard questions that the AI can't answer, or really dumb questions that the AI chokes on because the question doesn't make sense ("How do I log into a directory?" Yes, someone forgot about cd and asked it in such a weird way the AI was unable to understand it)

I'll say that on youtube, the implementation has been problematic.

There's a channel where the creator has used a speech synthesis for long before the modern crop of AI text to speech. He still uses the same old speech synthesis, not even one of the newer models, but flagged as 'AI'.

Conversely, blatant slop appears with zero indication. With no option to report as AI slop.

But the point is that if someone used an LLM to do some code completion, technically AI but I don't think anyone would consider something like 'multiply all members of this array by this other array' to be 'slop' when turned into what an LLM would turn it into. There's some point where it's lost the plot entirely, but it is going to be relatively unlikely that folks ever give up the 'still micromanaging, but letting an LLM bake in the very specific syntax needed' level of AI.

On the other hand, we have people turning a total lack of idea into big, time-consuming content that requires a minute to figure out how hollow it is. It's a continuation of what I'll retroactively call 'asset-slop' where people just tossed in a bunch of existing assets, but harder to tell at a glance. Saw an ad recently for Perplexity, saying you can just ask Perplexity to make video slop and post to youtube with zero effort and make $10k/month, brazen in the worst of the worst of the AI users.

All that said, Sweeney is pretty firmly in the 'let the slop flow' end of the AI spectrum, so screw him.

Why not fear both? It has gotten to the level where it doesn't live up to the investment levels and crashes, or it absolutely lives up to it and just trashes the economy in various ways.

Well, since they are using GenAI, someone is litterally getting paid by the word...

401k isn't necessarily dependant on the stock market, but the stock market being the 'right' investment has been a self-fulfilling property, any 'default' election goes mostly stock, because stock goes up. stock goes up in part because a portion of everyone's paycheck defaults to being spent on stocks.

But what you can do with a 401k can be limited. I was looking at my options for something that would be a bit more bubble resistant, back testing them against the crash of the attack on Iran, and every single one of the options my plan allows had market exposure, even if more of them were not directly stock.

Seems like that wasn't argued, just a maneuver to preserve the control facet of the shares even while surrendering some of the financial value could be seen as acceptable...

Wealth tax is a property tax, and just like I am forced to pay tax based on a presumed amount I could sell my house for, it can absolutely make sense to do the same for stocks. But I can totally accept that whatever that is, it shouldn't mean someone must cede control of a company based merely on a tax burden.

Of course, that said, these 'too big' companies arguably have too much public interest broadly to be focused in so few people, but that's a separate discussion than the taxation part.