This is somehow even sadder than "I have depicted you as the wojak".

"I contracted the least efficient computer possible to depict myself as the chad, therefore I win."

ScarJo being what takes down Saltman's wannabe Skynet isn't what I have on my bingo card, but would be is insanely funny.

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.

I believe its because they A-B tested his thumbnails, editors found that they vacuumed slightly more eyeballs when he was smiling, and updated the thumbnail images of him not smiling with photoshop.

The fault isn't with the photoshop though, he just doesn't have a soul so it actually looks like that when he smiles.

Looks like this is a follow up to this article from February: https://time.com/...

Over the summer, the company agreed to construct a 24-foot sound barrier wall on one end of the property at the cost of $1 to $2 million. But while the wall reduced sound in some areas, it actually amplified it in others. “To be honest, the complaints have gotten louder for us since the mitigation efforts,” Constable John Shirley says.

Amazing. "We spent some money and made things worse, so I guess we're stuck."

Back in Granbury, the discomfort caused by the plant is causing some consternation for a region that largely prides itself on being pro-industry and anti-regulation. “I agree with people having the right to own a business if it’s not illegal or amoral,” says Granbury resident Wolf. “But when you’re harming a group of people, there needs to be some type of remedy.”

quoted in full without commentary.

We're like 3 steps removed from the iq dickmeasurers moving from measuring skulls to comparing PoE builds.

I don't even know if I'm joking here, what the fuck are these people doing.

Imagine being such losers that you get owned by the fucking Guardian, and as your brilliant followup, you start screaming "I'M NOT OWNED"

The bit about how the Bitcoiners won because the number went up is beyond parody.

I skimmed most of it once I had an idea of where this was going, and 13000 words of tone policing is just insanity. "The EA guys are great because they use moderate language and Gerald cackled at how Scott Star Alex had his life ruined by the extremist non-moderates at the NYT."

It must be exciting when you find out your startup is in the only industry that's in VCs sightlines, and it must be fucking exhausting crafting a pitch for them.

The VERA story of pet euthanasia reinforces my bias that there is nothing good to be gained at an industry conference, so I'm tempted to believe it's true. Either it's truly insane marketing copy crafted to suck up sociopathic VCs attention because these people live in hell, or it's actually real and they're happy that they've created Uber a killbot for dogs because these people live in hell.

Even when you luck out and somehow get a chance to win at capitalism by a coincidence of destiny, it still eats your soul.

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

That same tired script of "You can't say AI is useless, I use it as a $productivityApp, so it's clearly not worth nothing, which invalidates all your claims." shows up in Zitron's comment box, it's like clockwork.

I dunno man, maybe it's because the ability to generate templates and spellcheck is a free feature in most IDEs and would be a rounding error of a rounding error when we're talking about billion dollar investments?

"ChatGPT is good, but only if no one in a position of authority uses it"

Cool.

Don't sell me potential if you're not a battery manufacturer.

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.

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.

::: spoiler Image description Sam Altman responds to a user asking for the promised voice features with extreme pettiness. "how about a few weeks of gratitude for magic intelligence in the sky, and then you can have more toys soon?" :::

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.

At first I was skeptical of the guy who told me, but they seemed rich and therefore trustworthy.

This caused me to reconsider something. I had kinda assumed that everything sucks because the bar of quality for software is so low, and that's pulling it down for every other field now that software proliferated into eating the world.

But I didn't examine that the relationship could work in both directions. Software sucks some of the time, but it doesn't excuse shit like how Crowdstrike can still be in business, and we should probably look into what's caused us to develop the attitude about not caring that shit is shit, just because the shit salesmen told us it'll be less shit in the future.

This is quite minor, but it's very funny seeing the intern would-be sneerers still on rbuttcoin fall for the AI grift, to the point that its part of their modscript copypasta

Or in the pinned mod comment:

AI does have some utility and does certain things better than any other technology, such as:

• The ability to summarize in human readable form, large amounts of information.

• The ability to generate unique images in a very short period of time, given a verbose description

tfw you're anti-crypto, but only because its a bad investing opportunity.

Very based:

With all the damning evidence, the story was ready. Most reporters would now email their subjects for comment, but Woo elevated the story to performance art. He asked Austen for a recorded interview, without revealing its nature. Austen, lulled into a false sense of security by tech press puff pieces, agreed. What followed was the most riveting hour of tech journalism I've ever heard.

The premiere venture capitalists of our time, drawing from near infinity riches during ZIRP, and the most innovative thing they have is student loan debt racket but faster.

Did YC seriously think because a growth hacker was in charge, you could value a private school like its an overinflated tech company? PG going mask off to endorse slavery (sorry, "trying out a worker") for a hack like Austen is so many levels of brainworm capitalism, how has Silicon Valley not sunk into the ocean.

The logical conclusion of normalizing "Social Media Manager" as a role in companies is that as they get better at their jobs and become more believable, the average corporate communication will trend towards 13-year old edgy shitposter. God I feel old.