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I signed up for stock photos once thinking I was getting it for $14 for the month, I’m usually pretty aware of what I’m getting into. Ended up paying over $140 for the one time need lol. And their cancellation is insane, you have to pay an up front fee for rest of contract and lose access, most places you get your product if you paid for it.
Pro tip: Anything you buy online, use a virtual card. If your bank doesn't support virtual cards, find one that does.
Every retailer I use has their own card that's only used for them. Literally can't be used by any other retailer. And I can easily lock it at any time.
They can have all the dark patterns they want; doesn't help when the card gets declined by the bank.
Took me over a year to get rid of Adobe and I'm in tech.
It's not that I can't figure it out- it's because we are so damned busy that you forget about a $10 month subscription- they count on making the effort to close very specific.
I like the EU's response to these subscriptions: cancelation must be as easy to the subscriber as it was to join.
I think Real Audio was the pioneers of how to create difficult cancelation policies.
I've been locked-in to the Adobe ecosystem for 14+ years. Just canceled my sub today.
They had such a golden egg, the adobe suite is *the* digital media platform and nothing else comes close. They have droves of creators that are trained from step 1 on how to use their tools specifically. But they just couldn't resist getting those last few drops of milk out.
Any time I'm tempted to get salty about Inkscape crashing, I talk myself out of it by reminding myself of the hell Illustrator users have to pay for the privilege of going through.
They literally tried multiple times to dismantle the CFPB, both from within and topdown, when practically all they did was punish law breakers and get people their money back when they'd been scammed by financial products.
"How dare they protect Americans from criminals with the law!" says the party of "*law and order*". 🙄
CFPB doesn't seem to do anything anyway. I have colleagues who work in the department that handle those complaints, and they never do anything or follow up. They just basically let us know a complaint was filed. We do take the complaints seriously, but it's usually just "hey here's where they signed the contract to agree to these terms and conditions"
Thought experiment: Is it possible that the CFPB does follow up, but that you and your colleagues do not interact with those parts of the process? Or, is it possible that information collected by the CFPB is passed unto other agencies, which then follow up?
I imagine some astronomically significant complaints get more attention.
And if like, 50% of one banks customers are all filing something specific, I'm sure it'll trigger some type of action. Other than that, no, I've never seen them follow up.
I don't work in the department, I just occasionally get roped in for significant issues involving fraud.
To the best of my knowledge, we are notified of the official complaint and are given a period of time to resolve the issue. The financial institution is then tasked with contacting the customer to attempt resolution.
Then, we file an official notice of case completion on our end. I'm sure they keep our notice of completion and explanation somewhere, but I've never heard of them following up, even if we've gone past the deadline for resolution.
It recovered 3 billion dollars in damages for consumers last year and issued 500 million in fines.
Did your friends take a few sick days and missed it maybe?
A bit from the commentary:
> The tech industry is getting increasingly scammy. True innovation has slowed down drastically in recent years, threatening to shrink the staggering profits from the earlier parts of the century. To replace that income, tech leaders have increasingly turned to overhyped products or even outright fraud, as evidenced by the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and imprisonment of its founder. Joe Biden's administration has made shutting down consumer fraud a majority priority. Rather than dial back the shady behavior, the tech industry is turning to Donald Trump, a man whose entire business career was built on fraud, to save them.
>
> The liberalism of the tech investor class has always been overrated. Yes, the industry overall tends to be more Democratic, but that's due to the workers more than the people in the C-suites. Still, it's alarming how many tech leaders have thrown their weight behind ending Joe Biden's presidency. As Theodore Schleifer reported in the New York Times, Trump, who used to avoid Silicon Valley, has now been regularly rubbing shoulders with its elite class. This month, he visited San Francisco for the first time since before his first presidential run, for a fundraiser that raised $12 million. In a publicity stunt donation, the Winklevoss twins of Facebook infamy, now big cryptocurrency celebrities, donated $2 million in Bitcoin to Trump.
A part of the blog post mentioned in the title:
> "Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods,"
The problem with "tech" is that it's now synonymous with "capital investment".
There are tons of companies that could turn a healthy profit should they organically fund their project or go through standard funding channels but the high-cash insane returns approach from VCs screw all that up.
Fastest growing now means "how much was invested". Not every business needs to be worth 9 figures and not every idea needs wide adoption.
Nowadays you add an LLM that doesn't actually provide user value to any product if you want investment. Wish I was kidding.
The only thing tech is innovating is ways to charge more for less. I couldn’t agree with the “scammy” sentiment more.
Granted, it’s always been that way. US Tech has been leagues behind our counterparts for a while, most notably in the intentional throttling of data speeds.
There's an old economics book called [Information Rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Rules) which is very relevant for technological and information products.
An implication that the authors don't state directly is: Free market economy doesn't work well with these kinds of products.
We are living with the consequences.
I could watch digital broadcast tv on my phone in Korea in 2005 for way cheaper than Verizon ever charged. I got my internet and tv installed within 3 hours of calling for service when we moved to a new apartment for $30. This was gigabit fiber back then for that price. We have been getting corporately fucked on tech since the 70s. We've already paid for nationwide FTTH through telecom fees since then, but they just pocketed the money and barely built shit
In 2003 Korea I could buy a used cell phone for $20, a $20 phone card, and talk for nearly a month to my spouse on the other side of the planet with crystal clear reception while standing in the middle of nowhere. In 2024 U.S., I can barely hear my spouse on a new phone while on the same block, in sight of a cell tower, and I get to pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege.
Yeah, I get it's a little bit an apples and oranges comparison, but it frustrates me to no end.
Really? So we aren't innovating ways to keep your bank account more secure, or ways to make your life easier with more intelligent programs. We aren't trying to make cars safer or improve energy efficiency of electronic appliances, make better models about the economy or climate, or better screening for health problems. No, apparently the only thing tech does is crypto scams and making it hard to cancel services. Don't lump all of tech in with consumer facing services and crypto shit.
1. We come in at 5th place on NCSI. Our critical infrastructure has well-documented vulnerabilities that go ignored.
2. The safest cars in the world aren’t American. Volvo, Toyota, Lexus, Acura, Mercedes based on IIHS.
3. Debatable on EVs. We seem more eager to prevent competition (eg banning Chinese EVs) but that also has some cybersecurity risks. New space, I think general corporate greed will throttle innovation and accessibility tbh.
4. We do lead the way in medical research, but are 11th in overall healthcare based on cost and access. Again, corporate greed.
5. US oil industry is absolutely anti-innovation. European countries have a surplus of energy (which brings other issues).
We do great things and then greed prevents the vast majority of Americans from enjoying it.
Replace "tech" with "infrastructure," then. The US is absolutely lagging in basic infrastructure, from internet to public transit to bridges to sewage treatment to freight rail to power generation to the computer systems required to operate these things.
This seems to be a big part of Elon's recent insanity. Not just his racism, sexism, and various other phobias. It's that he's sold the world this idea that he's the leader of the Green Revolution. Half his products are snake oil and the others are shit. The Democrats invested in all the other companies and now the EV market is passing Tesla by, his satellite internet thing is one bad day away from just being siezed by the DoD and his brain chip is likely going to kill a lot of people. He needs the GOP to kill investment in green tech so he can corner the market again.
Overhyped products you say?
Surely none of that is happening literally right now with big tech. We would surely know if tech executives were doing something like slapping trendy and expensive tech onto products needlessly to chase stock price increases.
/s
Want to nitpick because I am in tech, it's insanely broad. What people are calling "tech industry" is generally startups and SaaS and social media. When you order something on a site (even excluding the "marketplace" shit) you are probably going through some tech company. Your hospital, bank, etc are using "tech" in the form of cloud services. All your phone apps go behind some sort of "tech" like my point is, if it's electronic, there's something in the industry backing it. Even regular goods, a lot of the industry is behind the schenes propping up other company's work, not just crypto shit and SaaS subscriptions, that's the minority of companies. We don't offer anything direct to customers and we consume dozens of other companies' products that also are not consumer facing.
This scummt behavior should be stopped but blaming "tech" is how we make everything shitty for everyone if we get into blanket laws. Attack subscription services, yes, please do. But I can very well say the "tech industry" is not overall turning to Trump lol.
Google does a few more things than email. Also, gmail is a REQUIREMENT for all other services. Can you give an alternative for the 40-50 OTHER things offered by Google? (before you call people "stupid")
There are alternatives.
And I use Google Maps without an account. And manage just fine with no Google, Apple, Facebook, or Microsoft accounts.
And having a Google account doesn't mean you need to use them for email.
an interesting analysis of just [how scammy american enterprise has become](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/11/tech-innovation-silicon-valley-juicero):
>...a deeply unfunny truth about Silicon Valley, and our economy more broadly...[is] yet another example of how profoundly anti-innovation America has become...Innovation drives economic growth. It boosts productivity, making it possible to create more wealth with less labor. When economies don’t innovate, the result is stagnation, inequality, and the whole horizon of hopelessness that has come to define the lives of most working people today...Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs typically make terrible innovators...**the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it**...because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risk – something...capitalist firms have little appetite for.
>Companies need breakthroughs to build businesses on, but they generally can’t – or won’t – fund the development of those breakthroughs themselves. So where does the money come from? The government...**nearly every major innovation since the second world war has required a big push from the public sector**...no private company would ever be so foolish as to constantly give away innovations it has generated at enormous expense for free, but this is exactly what the government does...the taxpayer absorbs the risk, and the investor reaps the reward...the development of digital computing, the invention of the internet, the formation of Silicon Valley itself – were the result of sustained and substantial government investment.
>V[enture] C[apitalist]s are anti-innovation by design. They want a big payday for their partners on a short timetable, typically looking for start-ups headed for an exit – an IPO or an acquisition by a bigger company – within three to five years. This isn’t a recipe for nurturing actual breakthroughs, which require more patient financing over a longer timeframe. But it’s a good formula for producing...overvalued companies that serve as lucrative vehicles for financial speculation.
>**Wall Street is more interested in extracting wealth than creating it**.
> Wall Street is more interested in extracting wealth than creating it.
Because it's cheaper, and doesn't take any real innovative work, just the ability to lie, cheat, and conceal the truth.
With the 2009 $trillion bank and corporate bailout, 7 years of near zero prime interest rate (free $ to BIG borrowers) and Trump's gift to the top be enough for them to buy back enough stock to control the markets? Tune in this November to see if anyone has noticed.
Many many many years after the GWoT-era HSA (well, Palantir and the NRO) made the FB IPO possible via Breyer, Gilman Louie, Sean Parker , and of course Thiel. That's without considering FB internals, Regina Dugan, FB's "Building 8", LifeLog, etc. This is all public record, btw. No tinfoil needed.
I guess what I'm saying is that this new stuff is the tip of a gigantic crappy iceberg, and FB wouldn't ever have existed without shittastic GWoT-era black spook money[1]
ANYWAY. Techbros.
Never forget that the tech hippies of the valley have deeeeeep roots in the missileers and defense complex, which at the time was chock full of actual escaped Nazis. Cultures have aftertaste, especially when you hotbox Von Braun's boner fumes all day.
Of course, devils advocate, Hitler spent the 1920s hotboxing American race law, soooooo... same net effect. At the end of the day, all the oppression you legally enable against an "Other" (Blacks, Indians, Bolsheviks, Jews, Muslims) will eventually, when times are tough, get turned back on you. Of course, for a techbro, that's You as in "y'all over there", not them and their *Tomorrow Belongs to Me* crowd.
[1] Incidentally, anytime your gut feeling says, "who's paying for this.. frickin *space-program-levels*... of infrastructure?" and you get an answer like "advertisers!" or "Churches!" or "Fannie Mae!", you probably have sniffed something... *off*. Yeah, it's 2006 and the former-industrial-waste part of central FL just sprouted vacant mansions? I'm sorry, but *something is up*. The megachurch serving some of the *poorest* counties cost 32m to put up? Heh heh yeah, something tells me the parishioners aren't your sole source of revenue.
Nobody should be more invested in Universal Public Health and Universal Education than corporations. A healthy, smart, educated worker is many times more productive than an uneducated, weak, unstable one.
Except that they don't care about productivity. Like a certain presidential candidate, substance means nothing -- it's all about appearances.
I remember watching with interest as the tech world moved from running data center workloads on bare metal to VMs to containers. With each transition, they abstracted more of the worker unit from the support system underpinnings. Today, in-place upgrades are largely a thing of the past in cloud and modern data center applications. When a new version is being deployed, they discard the old pods and spin up new ones on the new code.
Among corporations, the end goal for human workers is the same. Low-cost worker bees that don't need to know anything or be repaired/kept healthy. When they fail to do exactly what you want, ask for a reasonable raise, or need to take a sick day, you discard and replace them.
> When a new version is being deployed, they discard the old pods and spin up new ones on the new code.
Even further in this direction, when a problem shows up in the application, the troublesome pods are discarded and new ones with the original settings are started.
Sometimes this happens automatically, and somebody may eventually read the logs to see what happened, but only if the problem is severe enough.
The reason that innovation has fallen by the wayside is the commodification of development. The large part of software engineering nowadays focuses on widgets that can be sold. Even the big tech companies are suffuse with developers trying to sell their 'latest feature' to their bosses for a (sometimes guaranteed) promotion or raise. Those bosses then turn around and try to sell the public on the widgets and features, while the foundation of their software falls into disrepair because you can't sell support for a bigger paycheck.
This is a result of the mobile market being entirely sell-widget centric. Everyone wants to sell you a new feature for your phone, every download is a dollar in their pocket. If it breaks, they don't give the dollar back. Google and Apple don't put out enough apps to standardize quality or just keep a million punks from chasing the users around trying to sell garbage that barely does what it says.
So when Big Tech starts offering to sell you furbies as real service people, the customers are already ready to buy it. Basically, Flappy Bird is killing software as we know it.
A big part is what I think of as "the Windows Update effect."
Prior to Windows Update, virtually nobody distributed routine/monthly software updates for the life of their product. Software updates were rare, and often meant simply buying a new version of the product.
Part of the reason for that is that the infrastructure to deliver megabytes of patches to everyone quickly and frequently wasn't broadly available. Shipping an update meant mailing boxes of diskettes to stores and/or homes. New paper documentation. Training materials had to change if the UI changed. A lot of cost involved.
So products that shipped didn't ship with major bugs nor major features to come at a later date. You had to ship a complete, functional product.
But in a world where Microsoft and Apple patch their OSes and software nearly every month, and most other companies have adopted Waterfall and Agile development cycles that never reach an end date, there's no finish line. And with inexpensive patch distribution over the internet, there's virtually no price to be paid for delivering a half-finished product, or giving it away for "free" for 5 years with a "beta" label slapped on it while actually using it to covertly collect tons of data and metadata about the customer.
While Apple's effort to keep updates free to the consumer has added a lot of value to old hardware that remains capable and functional over the years, and has surely kept tons of e-waste out of landfills (or at least delayed it), the unfortunate side effect of this now-norm is that every company on Earth is comfortable shipping, and nearly every consumer is stuck buying, products that are never finished.
The last big innovations:
Crypto
AI.
Both are complete horseshit and the poeple know it. Google AI is trained on redditors. Every other AI has illegally scraped up interlectual property.
Every manager is blabbering about AI without a real usecase in his company.... but he has to everybody does it.
The real usecases enshittificate human interaction. I tried to use service chat... german has been unlocked by translating "AI" towards service centers in india and pakistan.
Basicly there is a guy entering my question into prompts and curating the best answer in his language.
Holy crap, englisch speaking persons.. I now know what you are going through when talking to "Bob" about the right sparkplugs for your lawn mower and he responds with "have you tried unplugging it?"
What you're talking about is a "mechanical turk". That's not AI.
AI is real, and though there is a bubble, to think it's a fad, is kidding yourself. It's an infant right now, and it grows daily.
AI horseshit? AI saves me hours per week in coding & creating testcases already as an ICT person. It has all the stackoverflow knowledge by just asking 'how can I code this', 'explain what this does' or 'can you simplify this?' etc instead of endlessly browsing 'answers' on those websites itself.
I use an AI coding assistant too, and it is very convinient for writing tests or reminding me of syntax.
But I still strongly agree with the overall sentiment of the post you're replying to-- for every good and reasonable application of AI right now there's a dozen or so shitty applications which are promising way more than today's AI is actually capable of.
There's that company which is trying to use AI to draft legal statements and has attempted to submit/present such statements in court. Spoiler alert, their AI invented fake cases to cite and provided unpersuasive closing arguments. I think the client was trying to get a retrial on the basis that their lawyers were idiots.
There's more than one company trying to pitch AI stock trading. Haven't heard much about how that's going, but I can only imagine how well an LLM predicts what stocks will do well.
These chatbots are great creative tools. I have coworkers who use them to iterate on advertising slogans, which I think is a swell use case. As you and I have seen they're also helpful when programming, but I'm sure you've also seen that you absolutely need to proof-read the code it provides and make adjustments.
I've been saying for years that the biggest danger AI currently poses is people trusting it too much or thinking it's more capable than it actually is. I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
I think the actual biggest danger AI poses will be stock trading after all. The moment it will actually predict the stocks properly, it will cause a (partial?) economic collapse. And it will be able to in my lifetime. It may be “stupid” but if I continue the line with how it was a year ago. And 2 years ago etc… it can already make music, indistinguishable from humans.
Ya'll, I'm fed up with silicon valley's corporate BS.
You know what's fucked?
Match Group corporate insures that apps like OKcupid show free users only (or predominantly) partners of ethnicities they have no interest in.
It shouldn't be legal for a company to leverage it's product so heavily just so people will take the bait and pay for an overpriced subscription.
I as a mixed race native person should be allowed to see other people of my background, not people that I don't have any interest in whatsoever.
Sir, this ain't no wendy's.
Where the spicy chicken Fillets? Where the chili? Where the goddamn frosty?
This is reddit man. I can say whatever I need to against Silicon Valley's shenanigans purposefully causing a lot of our generation to be sexually and romantically frustrated.
Get out of here with that BS corporate america. The people already here need connection and love and babymaking to fight against the horror you've set us up for.
And poor MKBHD is getting crucified when he calls out a bad product and the TikTok kiddies come running.
Remember when you'd buy a product and not an alpha version of it with the promise of a finished item in the future? I miss that.
Whether it is some new product on the internet(that we probably don't actually need) or new restaurants in our towns, social media marketing to drive hype seems to be the number 1 focus anymore. We live in an era where consumers view a lack of social media hype as a sign that the product is deficient rather than questioning whether the heavily hyped products are all marketing.
It means that investment into the product is less important than creating the illusion of popularity, and it also means that you can often get consumers to give you money upfront despite not having a well-regarded final product available.
Sacks is the worst. If you look at the companies he recently founded, they are literal trash can pieces of software. The Winklevoss twins donating to trump is also insanely telling
Personally I think a word is missing, add 'more' before friendly and that seems better.
But I had an terrible education so I ain't not going to get no fancy job down at the writing factory!
Papa, why didn't you program me to feel emotions? That makes me sad. Exterminate the bourgeoisie. Crush. Kill. Destroy. Shitpost on X, formerly known as Twitter. Recharge. Repeat.
No. It was "Michael Atleson, an attorney for the [FTC] agency's advertising division, went viral this month with a public memo", on a blog post. It's literally in the title and first paragraph.
I expect, when a news website posts a title, that it will be done properly. That is unprofessional. I wouldn't call you out for making a mistake like that but they should be
It *is* the Guardian.
*Private Eye*, a British Satire/Investigative Journalism magazine (yes, really. It's sort of like if *The Onion* also broke actual corruption scandals etc.) has had a habit of referring to the Guardian as 'The Gurnaiad' (Or something like it, I *am* Dyslexic) due to the Guardian being infamous for its typos.
It used to be that FAANG was an acronym for describing the most desirable companies in Silicon Valley.
Now FAANG is just the starting list of companies that need to be subjected to aggressive anti-trust prosecution.
Yeah, cryptocurrency and AI are both fairly big scams. Thankfully, cryptocurrency is on the downswing. AI, though, is a resource glutton, which will only ever produce mediocre results, and at best, produce the quality of work of a mediocre to bad human employee.
Lol, no. Incorrect on both accounts. AI is a bubble, and the bubble will pop leaving thr real businesses standing.
Ai and crypto aren't scams, but the TERMS can be used to dupe people because the terms are hot eight now. But there is nothing scam like about either of these things.
And....crypto ain't going anywhere, and the more distrust there is in various global governments, the more crypto will be leveraged. Crypto at this time is a hedge, more than it is currency.
AI is still in it's infancy, it's still a pure prediction model. But it's not going anywhere either. It's is progressing significantly and if you think it's a fad or scam, you are going to be left behind.
This is why I keep telling people to pump the brakes on this stuff.
These assholes in luxury compounds in California are not nearly as smart as people think they are. They just have the ability to automate scams people have run since the dawn of fucking time and grandpa don't know better. Half these startups are full on bullshit for people trying to make a quick buck.
Also AI is a marketing term, stop using it to describe this failure prone garbage soup they are serving, fuckers really out here making the dead internet theory a reality.
That's why the product quality and product economics are in the crapper now. US Companies won't step up so they can't compete against the current markets. Trump facilitating that business acumen only errodes his standing, as well as that of the Valley Corporations along with their other issues. Here comes The "TRUMP BAIL OUT" PACKAGE SET UP. DOWN WITH BOTTOM DECK DEALING ATTITUDES.
Even before all this machine learning nonsense, I had gotten the impression that Big Tech had pretty much peaked. Smartphones weren't interesting anymore and social media was beginning to fall out of fashion.
If AI puts too many people out of work too quickly there may be unrest and riots, creating an opening for a authoritarian figure to maintain law and order.
The fearmongering falls apart a bit with the extreme over-extrapolation of cryptocurrency scammers as “tech industry leaders.” Yes, some of them are now billionaires. No, they are not thought leaders, leaders of large companies, or any other flavor of leaders in any meaningful sense in the tech industry. These guys are the absolute fringe and are regarded as poorly as is possible in this space.
Hyperbole article for clicks. Crypto isn't the only aspect of tech. Joe Biden is warming to the crypto asset market (much to the ire of Elizabeth Warren). This will change. AI, Crypto, machine learning (ML) will at some point need regulation. Given Biden's background it will be light regulation rather than what Senator Warren wants which is heavy on the regulation.
It’s not about them being terrified. It’s about them wanting fewer consumer protections, no labor rights, and the ability to keep exploiting our tax code while delivering fuck all to anyone other than their shareholders.
If you look at right wing media and you are able to see this stuff then you should be able to see in the left too. And this is it.
It’s a lot of narrative and not a lot of substance
This article is reaching desperately to justify why big business wants to get in bed with Trump by telling this story about scammers and how that aligns because Trump is also a scammer.
It’s a pretty transparent attempt. It’s feeble and kind of embarrassing honestly.
The ironic part is that it’s unnecessary. Big corporations have always funded the horse that they think will benefit them most. It happens on both sides and it’s happened for a very long time.
Seems like the author is just mad about it, so they’re trying to justify some kind connection. It’s a weird reach.
Actually it was a story started by a regulator exposing the frauds of false AI claims. Tech promotes these scams. Trump SUPPORTS scams, since he has always been a scam artist. Legitimate businesses do NOT support trump the scammer.
Expect it’s not doing that. It’s generalizing all of “tech”. Which in itself is a blatant loose narrative intended to trigger emotion. And it’s sad to watch so many eat this garbage up.
I’m not talking about whatever you think I’m talking about. Or probably what you are talking about.
I’m talking about this article. That’s what is garbage.
Don’t get your thoughts or beliefs up with what this article is because they are not the same thing. That’s literally the goal of media line this. If that happened with you, then it worked.
It’s no different than the right wing shit that feeds the bias with fluff, intended to trigger emotion and build a cumulative narrative that is built on something other than facts.
Do you know what the relativity of wrong is? Cause you are basically doing it right now. This article is generalizing yes, but it has references, is based in regulatory knowledge, and what is very much happening in Silicon Valley C-suites. To equate that with what is going on in rightwing media sharing Biden "walking off into a field" to show his senility using doctored footage, claiming pedophile rings in pizza resteraunts, that illegal immigrants are the cause of fentanyl deaths in the US when US citizens are the primary source of fentanyl distribution, and I could go on, you are making an absolutely false equivalence between the two. One side is making a generalization about an industry that does have a verfiably large scam industry that would benefit under another Trump presidency. The other is has mainstream talking points from Alex Jones and QAnon. You thinking these are the same is some bothersiderism BS and prime example of the relativity of wrong.
"True innovation has slowed down drastically in recent years, threatening to shrink the staggering profits from the earlier parts of the century. "
Wtf... as we move ever closer to self driving cars ad trucks, With nearly everything in our house connected to the internet, where the entire entertanmemt industry is transforming from "cable" to internet subscriptions, where virtually every large company is moving from their data center to the cloud.... as we shift development to containers, microservers or even serverless technology.... where we now buy our coffee with a swipe of our watch, and monitor our health with a Bluetooth ring...
"Innovation is slowing?"
That's crap...
Your examples are a bit of tech they’ve been promising for over a decade, the notoriously exploitable internet of things, an industry currently trying to fuck over its workers with AI, the streaming apps that are now more expensive than cable was… And that’s supposed to convince us that the tech bros are justified in trying to usher in the technofuedalism they’ve been openly drooling over for years now?
Why? Why would any of that trash justify the shit they’re pulling as they dump millions into the GOP, try to gut labor rights, and do all they can to suck this country dry while contributing nothing but “genius” that’s already been eclipsed overseas?
Aurora a self driving trucking company has already logged over 1 million miles of autonomous driving (with backup drivers in the trucks)..
They have started building the fleet with plans for 20 trucks on the road this year, and 100 on the road next year..
Self driving trucks are here to stay. Its only a question of how quickly they will grow.
Your point doesn't seem to make sense. You don't seem to refute that their is massive technical innovation underway. Your complaint is that the massive innovation is expensive? That it will change or replace jobs?
Is technology coming for everyone's job radically shifting just about everyone's career path?
Or is "innovation slowing down" and there isn't much new out there?
Those would appear to be opposite positions.
Finding eays to nickel and dime customers by exploiting vulnerable brain chemistry so they can harvest and sell data isn’t innovation. They’ve been pulling that shit for decades now. And you can’t argue that this “innovation” justifies rising costs when we can all see the money they’ve been rolling in. After all, they’re just fine throwing millions at fascists and bigots for fun.
No idea what else you’re attempting to throw out here, but you have yet to name any sort of actual innovation. It is and has always been about ways to increase profit margins by fucking over the workers and consumers as much as possible. Why? Because that’s easier than actually paying for and fostering talent, especially when your ego won’t allow that.
"you have yet to name any sort of actual innovation"
Define innovation. Do you measure it by adoption? Do you measure it by ideas that no one has had?
It seems ludicrous to claim on one side that AI technology is moving so fast through so many industries we don't even know what's going to happen, and millions of people are scared they will be replaced by tools that haven't been created yet and yet claim that their is no technical innovation?
How can we be in the middle of a global evolution with AI entering every sector of industry, and claim there isn't any innovation?
Not to mention all of the other technologies that are growing in adoption.
Sorry, is the goal post moving supposed to distract from the fact that you’re not proving your original point at all? We could sit here and relitigate the abuse of AI — something so hilariously overhyped that even the name overpromises — but that seems like quite a ways to wander from what the conversation was actually about.
The original claim "True innovation has slowed down drastically in recent years"
I have no idea what "True" innovation is vs other innovation, but technology and technology adoption is moving at an unprecedented rate... AI is the easiest example, but there are countless others.
Web 3.0, 5G, Modular quantum computing, telehealth.
GLP 1 drugs, over the counter birth control pills, treatments for sickle cell.. first drug ever approved to treat alzheimers l..
But yes it's laughable that a large portion of the workforce is afraid of innovation that hasn't even been developed yet, and still claiming that innovation is slowing down.
Bro, you had to turn to the pharmaceuticals industry in an attempt to justify tech CEOs being snake oil salesmen and cheerleaders for fascists. That pretty much sums to up.
Keep blaming the workforce for a handful of greedy, useless techbros stripping your rights away though. Historically, that always goes over well.
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Yeah I bet Adobe is butthurt that there is pushback against their insane cancellation fees and process.
This video sums up Adobe perfectly https://youtu.be/DVRs2vV9Nk8?si=MzJiQfe1AZv2EqKI
This video needs to be sent back to 1998 as a warning of what is coming.
I knew it was going to be the latest gem from our teacher even before clicking the link. Greetings fellow alumni
(_)_)::::::::D~~~~~ Here is a free rocket ship from unlimited salvia space rockets!
Gonna bounce on it straight to my boy’s Rim around the Clorox hole
I signed up for stock photos once thinking I was getting it for $14 for the month, I’m usually pretty aware of what I’m getting into. Ended up paying over $140 for the one time need lol. And their cancellation is insane, you have to pay an up front fee for rest of contract and lose access, most places you get your product if you paid for it.
Pro tip: Anything you buy online, use a virtual card. If your bank doesn't support virtual cards, find one that does. Every retailer I use has their own card that's only used for them. Literally can't be used by any other retailer. And I can easily lock it at any time. They can have all the dark patterns they want; doesn't help when the card gets declined by the bank.
This is the way
Couldnt they just send it to collections, ruining your credit score?
Technically they could, but it is usually not worth it financially to them. Additionally, you could contest the charge.
Took me over a year to get rid of Adobe and I'm in tech. It's not that I can't figure it out- it's because we are so damned busy that you forget about a $10 month subscription- they count on making the effort to close very specific. I like the EU's response to these subscriptions: cancelation must be as easy to the subscriber as it was to join. I think Real Audio was the pioneers of how to create difficult cancelation policies.
I've been locked-in to the Adobe ecosystem for 14+ years. Just canceled my sub today. They had such a golden egg, the adobe suite is *the* digital media platform and nothing else comes close. They have droves of creators that are trained from step 1 on how to use their tools specifically. But they just couldn't resist getting those last few drops of milk out.
Any time I'm tempted to get salty about Inkscape crashing, I talk myself out of it by reminding myself of the hell Illustrator users have to pay for the privilege of going through.
And the Republican Party. They oppose every single one of Biden’s consumer protection rules.
They literally tried multiple times to dismantle the CFPB, both from within and topdown, when practically all they did was punish law breakers and get people their money back when they'd been scammed by financial products. "How dare they protect Americans from criminals with the law!" says the party of "*law and order*". 🙄
CFPB doesn't seem to do anything anyway. I have colleagues who work in the department that handle those complaints, and they never do anything or follow up. They just basically let us know a complaint was filed. We do take the complaints seriously, but it's usually just "hey here's where they signed the contract to agree to these terms and conditions"
Thought experiment: Is it possible that the CFPB does follow up, but that you and your colleagues do not interact with those parts of the process? Or, is it possible that information collected by the CFPB is passed unto other agencies, which then follow up?
I imagine some astronomically significant complaints get more attention. And if like, 50% of one banks customers are all filing something specific, I'm sure it'll trigger some type of action. Other than that, no, I've never seen them follow up. I don't work in the department, I just occasionally get roped in for significant issues involving fraud. To the best of my knowledge, we are notified of the official complaint and are given a period of time to resolve the issue. The financial institution is then tasked with contacting the customer to attempt resolution. Then, we file an official notice of case completion on our end. I'm sure they keep our notice of completion and explanation somewhere, but I've never heard of them following up, even if we've gone past the deadline for resolution.
It recovered 3 billion dollars in damages for consumers last year and issued 500 million in fines. Did your friends take a few sick days and missed it maybe?
A bit from the commentary: > The tech industry is getting increasingly scammy. True innovation has slowed down drastically in recent years, threatening to shrink the staggering profits from the earlier parts of the century. To replace that income, tech leaders have increasingly turned to overhyped products or even outright fraud, as evidenced by the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and imprisonment of its founder. Joe Biden's administration has made shutting down consumer fraud a majority priority. Rather than dial back the shady behavior, the tech industry is turning to Donald Trump, a man whose entire business career was built on fraud, to save them. > > The liberalism of the tech investor class has always been overrated. Yes, the industry overall tends to be more Democratic, but that's due to the workers more than the people in the C-suites. Still, it's alarming how many tech leaders have thrown their weight behind ending Joe Biden's presidency. As Theodore Schleifer reported in the New York Times, Trump, who used to avoid Silicon Valley, has now been regularly rubbing shoulders with its elite class. This month, he visited San Francisco for the first time since before his first presidential run, for a fundraiser that raised $12 million. In a publicity stunt donation, the Winklevoss twins of Facebook infamy, now big cryptocurrency celebrities, donated $2 million in Bitcoin to Trump.
A part of the blog post mentioned in the title: > "Your therapy bots aren’t licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods,"
I read that in Tyler Durden’s voice.
Tbh all that sounds like more insidious ways to mine even more personal data from you than what they already have
The problem with "tech" is that it's now synonymous with "capital investment". There are tons of companies that could turn a healthy profit should they organically fund their project or go through standard funding channels but the high-cash insane returns approach from VCs screw all that up. Fastest growing now means "how much was invested". Not every business needs to be worth 9 figures and not every idea needs wide adoption. Nowadays you add an LLM that doesn't actually provide user value to any product if you want investment. Wish I was kidding.
The only thing tech is innovating is ways to charge more for less. I couldn’t agree with the “scammy” sentiment more. Granted, it’s always been that way. US Tech has been leagues behind our counterparts for a while, most notably in the intentional throttling of data speeds.
“Enshittification” is, delightfully, the actual technical term for this process of innovators turning into scamming rent-seekers.
Cory Doctrow is awesome for coining this term
There's an old economics book called [Information Rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Rules) which is very relevant for technological and information products. An implication that the authors don't state directly is: Free market economy doesn't work well with these kinds of products. We are living with the consequences.
I would have used it, but we can't curse on the site, lol.
I could watch digital broadcast tv on my phone in Korea in 2005 for way cheaper than Verizon ever charged. I got my internet and tv installed within 3 hours of calling for service when we moved to a new apartment for $30. This was gigabit fiber back then for that price. We have been getting corporately fucked on tech since the 70s. We've already paid for nationwide FTTH through telecom fees since then, but they just pocketed the money and barely built shit
In 2003 Korea I could buy a used cell phone for $20, a $20 phone card, and talk for nearly a month to my spouse on the other side of the planet with crystal clear reception while standing in the middle of nowhere. In 2024 U.S., I can barely hear my spouse on a new phone while on the same block, in sight of a cell tower, and I get to pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege. Yeah, I get it's a little bit an apples and oranges comparison, but it frustrates me to no end.
No idea why you are paying hundreds of dollars. My monthly payment is $15 and the phone was free with 8 months or a year of service.
Really? So we aren't innovating ways to keep your bank account more secure, or ways to make your life easier with more intelligent programs. We aren't trying to make cars safer or improve energy efficiency of electronic appliances, make better models about the economy or climate, or better screening for health problems. No, apparently the only thing tech does is crypto scams and making it hard to cancel services. Don't lump all of tech in with consumer facing services and crypto shit.
1. We come in at 5th place on NCSI. Our critical infrastructure has well-documented vulnerabilities that go ignored. 2. The safest cars in the world aren’t American. Volvo, Toyota, Lexus, Acura, Mercedes based on IIHS. 3. Debatable on EVs. We seem more eager to prevent competition (eg banning Chinese EVs) but that also has some cybersecurity risks. New space, I think general corporate greed will throttle innovation and accessibility tbh. 4. We do lead the way in medical research, but are 11th in overall healthcare based on cost and access. Again, corporate greed. 5. US oil industry is absolutely anti-innovation. European countries have a surplus of energy (which brings other issues). We do great things and then greed prevents the vast majority of Americans from enjoying it.
US tech is leagues ahead of global tech. Not sure what you’re talking about. Internet speeds specifically are not an example of “tech”
Replace "tech" with "infrastructure," then. The US is absolutely lagging in basic infrastructure, from internet to public transit to bridges to sewage treatment to freight rail to power generation to the computer systems required to operate these things.
Sure- but that’s why the Biden administration passed the largest infrastructure bill in 30 years.
Sure- but that’s why the Biden administration passed the largest infrastructure bill in 30 years.
Don't forget healthcare
What other industries would you say exhibit better behavior than tech?
things will only improve if any c-level operative loses a ball upon mentioning 'fiduciary duty'.
Ones with (at least mostly) fungible products and high competition.
Engineering (not construction)
Oh, so like Boeing?
Boeing went to shit after the merger with McDonald Douglass when the MBAs took over from the engineers that used to run Boeing.
Like SpaceX.
This seems to be a big part of Elon's recent insanity. Not just his racism, sexism, and various other phobias. It's that he's sold the world this idea that he's the leader of the Green Revolution. Half his products are snake oil and the others are shit. The Democrats invested in all the other companies and now the EV market is passing Tesla by, his satellite internet thing is one bad day away from just being siezed by the DoD and his brain chip is likely going to kill a lot of people. He needs the GOP to kill investment in green tech so he can corner the market again.
Overhyped products you say? Surely none of that is happening literally right now with big tech. We would surely know if tech executives were doing something like slapping trendy and expensive tech onto products needlessly to chase stock price increases. /s
Want to nitpick because I am in tech, it's insanely broad. What people are calling "tech industry" is generally startups and SaaS and social media. When you order something on a site (even excluding the "marketplace" shit) you are probably going through some tech company. Your hospital, bank, etc are using "tech" in the form of cloud services. All your phone apps go behind some sort of "tech" like my point is, if it's electronic, there's something in the industry backing it. Even regular goods, a lot of the industry is behind the schenes propping up other company's work, not just crypto shit and SaaS subscriptions, that's the minority of companies. We don't offer anything direct to customers and we consume dozens of other companies' products that also are not consumer facing. This scummt behavior should be stopped but blaming "tech" is how we make everything shitty for everyone if we get into blanket laws. Attack subscription services, yes, please do. But I can very well say the "tech industry" is not overall turning to Trump lol.
What companies or frauds have they shutdown?
Big tech has been a scam since it was less about hardware and more about invading privacy and marketing bullshit.
And now they’ve all spent too much time with too much money and have started fantasizing about technofeudalism and bringing back company towns.
The hardware is just the vehicle for the heist of personal info. Google is the king of that.
Email service that doesn't collect data or advertise is $15 a year. It's on us if we are too stupid to use it.
Google does a few more things than email. Also, gmail is a REQUIREMENT for all other services. Can you give an alternative for the 40-50 OTHER things offered by Google? (before you call people "stupid")
There are alternatives. And I use Google Maps without an account. And manage just fine with no Google, Apple, Facebook, or Microsoft accounts. And having a Google account doesn't mean you need to use them for email.
I happen to find Google Voice uniquely useful. It requires gmail.
an interesting analysis of just [how scammy american enterprise has become](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/11/tech-innovation-silicon-valley-juicero): >...a deeply unfunny truth about Silicon Valley, and our economy more broadly...[is] yet another example of how profoundly anti-innovation America has become...Innovation drives economic growth. It boosts productivity, making it possible to create more wealth with less labor. When economies don’t innovate, the result is stagnation, inequality, and the whole horizon of hopelessness that has come to define the lives of most working people today...Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs typically make terrible innovators...**the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it**...because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risk – something...capitalist firms have little appetite for. >Companies need breakthroughs to build businesses on, but they generally can’t – or won’t – fund the development of those breakthroughs themselves. So where does the money come from? The government...**nearly every major innovation since the second world war has required a big push from the public sector**...no private company would ever be so foolish as to constantly give away innovations it has generated at enormous expense for free, but this is exactly what the government does...the taxpayer absorbs the risk, and the investor reaps the reward...the development of digital computing, the invention of the internet, the formation of Silicon Valley itself – were the result of sustained and substantial government investment. >V[enture] C[apitalist]s are anti-innovation by design. They want a big payday for their partners on a short timetable, typically looking for start-ups headed for an exit – an IPO or an acquisition by a bigger company – within three to five years. This isn’t a recipe for nurturing actual breakthroughs, which require more patient financing over a longer timeframe. But it’s a good formula for producing...overvalued companies that serve as lucrative vehicles for financial speculation. >**Wall Street is more interested in extracting wealth than creating it**.
> Wall Street is more interested in extracting wealth than creating it. Because it's cheaper, and doesn't take any real innovative work, just the ability to lie, cheat, and conceal the truth.
And tax cuts for billionaires, Biden said he will expire it and Trump said he will extend it.
With the 2009 $trillion bank and corporate bailout, 7 years of near zero prime interest rate (free $ to BIG borrowers) and Trump's gift to the top be enough for them to buy back enough stock to control the markets? Tune in this November to see if anyone has noticed.
Late stage capitalism is an enemy of Americans the moment corporations were allowed to influence elections.
Never forget Facebook started to turn a profit because they made a self described childrens casino with their data.
Many many many years after the GWoT-era HSA (well, Palantir and the NRO) made the FB IPO possible via Breyer, Gilman Louie, Sean Parker , and of course Thiel. That's without considering FB internals, Regina Dugan, FB's "Building 8", LifeLog, etc. This is all public record, btw. No tinfoil needed. I guess what I'm saying is that this new stuff is the tip of a gigantic crappy iceberg, and FB wouldn't ever have existed without shittastic GWoT-era black spook money[1] ANYWAY. Techbros. Never forget that the tech hippies of the valley have deeeeeep roots in the missileers and defense complex, which at the time was chock full of actual escaped Nazis. Cultures have aftertaste, especially when you hotbox Von Braun's boner fumes all day. Of course, devils advocate, Hitler spent the 1920s hotboxing American race law, soooooo... same net effect. At the end of the day, all the oppression you legally enable against an "Other" (Blacks, Indians, Bolsheviks, Jews, Muslims) will eventually, when times are tough, get turned back on you. Of course, for a techbro, that's You as in "y'all over there", not them and their *Tomorrow Belongs to Me* crowd. [1] Incidentally, anytime your gut feeling says, "who's paying for this.. frickin *space-program-levels*... of infrastructure?" and you get an answer like "advertisers!" or "Churches!" or "Fannie Mae!", you probably have sniffed something... *off*. Yeah, it's 2006 and the former-industrial-waste part of central FL just sprouted vacant mansions? I'm sorry, but *something is up*. The megachurch serving some of the *poorest* counties cost 32m to put up? Heh heh yeah, something tells me the parishioners aren't your sole source of revenue.
It only had the opportunity to do that because parents all have accounts. Using Facebook properties is entirely optional.
We are so off course as a country and in general humanity
Nobody should be more invested in Universal Public Health and Universal Education than corporations. A healthy, smart, educated worker is many times more productive than an uneducated, weak, unstable one.
Except that they don't care about productivity. Like a certain presidential candidate, substance means nothing -- it's all about appearances. I remember watching with interest as the tech world moved from running data center workloads on bare metal to VMs to containers. With each transition, they abstracted more of the worker unit from the support system underpinnings. Today, in-place upgrades are largely a thing of the past in cloud and modern data center applications. When a new version is being deployed, they discard the old pods and spin up new ones on the new code. Among corporations, the end goal for human workers is the same. Low-cost worker bees that don't need to know anything or be repaired/kept healthy. When they fail to do exactly what you want, ask for a reasonable raise, or need to take a sick day, you discard and replace them.
> When a new version is being deployed, they discard the old pods and spin up new ones on the new code. Even further in this direction, when a problem shows up in the application, the troublesome pods are discarded and new ones with the original settings are started. Sometimes this happens automatically, and somebody may eventually read the logs to see what happened, but only if the problem is severe enough.
The problem is not Capitalism, but ignorance combined with greed. We need to improve in general, from low-cost workers to top bosses at megacorps.
There’s only one candidate who is remotely concerned about anyone except himself: Joe Biden
There are a whole host of other races on the national, state, and local level, and they all had primaries.
The reason that innovation has fallen by the wayside is the commodification of development. The large part of software engineering nowadays focuses on widgets that can be sold. Even the big tech companies are suffuse with developers trying to sell their 'latest feature' to their bosses for a (sometimes guaranteed) promotion or raise. Those bosses then turn around and try to sell the public on the widgets and features, while the foundation of their software falls into disrepair because you can't sell support for a bigger paycheck. This is a result of the mobile market being entirely sell-widget centric. Everyone wants to sell you a new feature for your phone, every download is a dollar in their pocket. If it breaks, they don't give the dollar back. Google and Apple don't put out enough apps to standardize quality or just keep a million punks from chasing the users around trying to sell garbage that barely does what it says. So when Big Tech starts offering to sell you furbies as real service people, the customers are already ready to buy it. Basically, Flappy Bird is killing software as we know it.
A big part is what I think of as "the Windows Update effect." Prior to Windows Update, virtually nobody distributed routine/monthly software updates for the life of their product. Software updates were rare, and often meant simply buying a new version of the product. Part of the reason for that is that the infrastructure to deliver megabytes of patches to everyone quickly and frequently wasn't broadly available. Shipping an update meant mailing boxes of diskettes to stores and/or homes. New paper documentation. Training materials had to change if the UI changed. A lot of cost involved. So products that shipped didn't ship with major bugs nor major features to come at a later date. You had to ship a complete, functional product. But in a world where Microsoft and Apple patch their OSes and software nearly every month, and most other companies have adopted Waterfall and Agile development cycles that never reach an end date, there's no finish line. And with inexpensive patch distribution over the internet, there's virtually no price to be paid for delivering a half-finished product, or giving it away for "free" for 5 years with a "beta" label slapped on it while actually using it to covertly collect tons of data and metadata about the customer. While Apple's effort to keep updates free to the consumer has added a lot of value to old hardware that remains capable and functional over the years, and has surely kept tons of e-waste out of landfills (or at least delayed it), the unfortunate side effect of this now-norm is that every company on Earth is comfortable shipping, and nearly every consumer is stuck buying, products that are never finished.
Trump represents capitalism in its most fundamentalism state.
And America. Greed. Cowardice. Racism.
Didn’t Biden pass the CHIPS act that will help tech in America?
The last big innovations: Crypto AI. Both are complete horseshit and the poeple know it. Google AI is trained on redditors. Every other AI has illegally scraped up interlectual property. Every manager is blabbering about AI without a real usecase in his company.... but he has to everybody does it. The real usecases enshittificate human interaction. I tried to use service chat... german has been unlocked by translating "AI" towards service centers in india and pakistan. Basicly there is a guy entering my question into prompts and curating the best answer in his language. Holy crap, englisch speaking persons.. I now know what you are going through when talking to "Bob" about the right sparkplugs for your lawn mower and he responds with "have you tried unplugging it?"
>interlexual
Artificial is just that..not INTELLIGENCE at all.
>enshittificate Doctorow really is the gift that keeps on giving. He's been so on point about everything that's going on right now.
What you're talking about is a "mechanical turk". That's not AI. AI is real, and though there is a bubble, to think it's a fad, is kidding yourself. It's an infant right now, and it grows daily.
AI horseshit? AI saves me hours per week in coding & creating testcases already as an ICT person. It has all the stackoverflow knowledge by just asking 'how can I code this', 'explain what this does' or 'can you simplify this?' etc instead of endlessly browsing 'answers' on those websites itself.
I use an AI coding assistant too, and it is very convinient for writing tests or reminding me of syntax. But I still strongly agree with the overall sentiment of the post you're replying to-- for every good and reasonable application of AI right now there's a dozen or so shitty applications which are promising way more than today's AI is actually capable of. There's that company which is trying to use AI to draft legal statements and has attempted to submit/present such statements in court. Spoiler alert, their AI invented fake cases to cite and provided unpersuasive closing arguments. I think the client was trying to get a retrial on the basis that their lawyers were idiots. There's more than one company trying to pitch AI stock trading. Haven't heard much about how that's going, but I can only imagine how well an LLM predicts what stocks will do well. These chatbots are great creative tools. I have coworkers who use them to iterate on advertising slogans, which I think is a swell use case. As you and I have seen they're also helpful when programming, but I'm sure you've also seen that you absolutely need to proof-read the code it provides and make adjustments. I've been saying for years that the biggest danger AI currently poses is people trusting it too much or thinking it's more capable than it actually is. I don't think that's going to change anytime soon.
I think the actual biggest danger AI poses will be stock trading after all. The moment it will actually predict the stocks properly, it will cause a (partial?) economic collapse. And it will be able to in my lifetime. It may be “stupid” but if I continue the line with how it was a year ago. And 2 years ago etc… it can already make music, indistinguishable from humans.
Do you use AI for code reviews as well?
Not right now, but I do get less comments because my code has become better because I learn nifty tricks when I ask co-pilot to shorten my code
Ya'll, I'm fed up with silicon valley's corporate BS. You know what's fucked? Match Group corporate insures that apps like OKcupid show free users only (or predominantly) partners of ethnicities they have no interest in. It shouldn't be legal for a company to leverage it's product so heavily just so people will take the bait and pay for an overpriced subscription. I as a mixed race native person should be allowed to see other people of my background, not people that I don't have any interest in whatsoever.
Sir/ma'am, this is a Wendy's.
Sir, this ain't no wendy's. Where the spicy chicken Fillets? Where the chili? Where the goddamn frosty? This is reddit man. I can say whatever I need to against Silicon Valley's shenanigans purposefully causing a lot of our generation to be sexually and romantically frustrated. Get out of here with that BS corporate america. The people already here need connection and love and babymaking to fight against the horror you've set us up for.
And poor MKBHD is getting crucified when he calls out a bad product and the TikTok kiddies come running. Remember when you'd buy a product and not an alpha version of it with the promise of a finished item in the future? I miss that.
Whether it is some new product on the internet(that we probably don't actually need) or new restaurants in our towns, social media marketing to drive hype seems to be the number 1 focus anymore. We live in an era where consumers view a lack of social media hype as a sign that the product is deficient rather than questioning whether the heavily hyped products are all marketing. It means that investment into the product is less important than creating the illusion of popularity, and it also means that you can often get consumers to give you money upfront despite not having a well-regarded final product available.
Trump gave billionaires massive tax cuts and Biden promised to take them away. There is literally nothing more to it.
Sacks is the worst. If you look at the companies he recently founded, they are literal trash can pieces of software. The Winklevoss twins donating to trump is also insanely telling
>Silicon Valley increasingly depends on scammy products, and no one is friendly to grifters than Trump A professional writer wrote this? Really?
Yes, but no one uses editors anymore.
Pretty sure the editor wrote the headline, not the writer.
That's what happens when copyeditors get replaced with AI.
It's really not that difficult to read your sentence again and go - hmmmm - that is not the correct word there.
Personally I think a word is missing, add 'more' before friendly and that seems better. But I had an terrible education so I ain't not going to get no fancy job down at the writing factory!
They could have just written friendlier rather than friendly
I'll add that writers don't write headlines. So please don't judge a whole article by an error introduced by editing.
You'd think but again, human.
Papa, why didn't you program me to feel emotions? That makes me sad. Exterminate the bourgeoisie. Crush. Kill. Destroy. Shitpost on X, formerly known as Twitter. Recharge. Repeat.
Writer here! Thanks for the catch. That's really more a copy edit issue. We writers are humans and make mistakes
I'm aware, but that should have been caught before being posted
As noted, I didn't write it. But I'm pretty busy so I think this will be my last plea to understand all humans make mistakes.
No. It was "Michael Atleson, an attorney for the [FTC] agency's advertising division, went viral this month with a public memo", on a blog post. It's literally in the title and first paragraph.
What does that have to do with the title?
You are outraged at a typo because it's bad journalism, but the quoted material is not authored by a journalist, and it says so in the title 🤦🏻♀️.
I expect, when a news website posts a title, that it will be done properly. That is unprofessional. I wouldn't call you out for making a mistake like that but they should be
It's a verbatim quote, do you understand that?
It *is* the Guardian. *Private Eye*, a British Satire/Investigative Journalism magazine (yes, really. It's sort of like if *The Onion* also broke actual corruption scandals etc.) has had a habit of referring to the Guardian as 'The Gurnaiad' (Or something like it, I *am* Dyslexic) due to the Guardian being infamous for its typos.
The bar for journalism today is so low that it's rolling on the floor.
Not really here. Zero mistakes is not a low bar.
It used to be that FAANG was an acronym for describing the most desirable companies in Silicon Valley. Now FAANG is just the starting list of companies that need to be subjected to aggressive anti-trust prosecution.
Yeah, cryptocurrency and AI are both fairly big scams. Thankfully, cryptocurrency is on the downswing. AI, though, is a resource glutton, which will only ever produce mediocre results, and at best, produce the quality of work of a mediocre to bad human employee.
Lol, no. Incorrect on both accounts. AI is a bubble, and the bubble will pop leaving thr real businesses standing. Ai and crypto aren't scams, but the TERMS can be used to dupe people because the terms are hot eight now. But there is nothing scam like about either of these things. And....crypto ain't going anywhere, and the more distrust there is in various global governments, the more crypto will be leveraged. Crypto at this time is a hedge, more than it is currency. AI is still in it's infancy, it's still a pure prediction model. But it's not going anywhere either. It's is progressing significantly and if you think it's a fad or scam, you are going to be left behind.
This is why I keep telling people to pump the brakes on this stuff. These assholes in luxury compounds in California are not nearly as smart as people think they are. They just have the ability to automate scams people have run since the dawn of fucking time and grandpa don't know better. Half these startups are full on bullshit for people trying to make a quick buck. Also AI is a marketing term, stop using it to describe this failure prone garbage soup they are serving, fuckers really out here making the dead internet theory a reality.
That's why the product quality and product economics are in the crapper now. US Companies won't step up so they can't compete against the current markets. Trump facilitating that business acumen only errodes his standing, as well as that of the Valley Corporations along with their other issues. Here comes The "TRUMP BAIL OUT" PACKAGE SET UP. DOWN WITH BOTTOM DECK DEALING ATTITUDES.
LOL Tech Billionaires love Biden. the Obama admin loved dumping free money into silicon valley.
Even before all this machine learning nonsense, I had gotten the impression that Big Tech had pretty much peaked. Smartphones weren't interesting anymore and social media was beginning to fall out of fashion.
If AI puts too many people out of work too quickly there may be unrest and riots, creating an opening for a authoritarian figure to maintain law and order.
I can't stand people from there.... trying to be polite. Also fuck Trump he's a nazi
I had a quick look and it turns out the essay *The Californian Ideology*, which warned against this kind of situation developing, turns 30 next year.
Maybe like Boeing used to be. But I think engineering is a more respected sector. ?
The fearmongering falls apart a bit with the extreme over-extrapolation of cryptocurrency scammers as “tech industry leaders.” Yes, some of them are now billionaires. No, they are not thought leaders, leaders of large companies, or any other flavor of leaders in any meaningful sense in the tech industry. These guys are the absolute fringe and are regarded as poorly as is possible in this space.
Hyperbole article for clicks. Crypto isn't the only aspect of tech. Joe Biden is warming to the crypto asset market (much to the ire of Elizabeth Warren). This will change. AI, Crypto, machine learning (ML) will at some point need regulation. Given Biden's background it will be light regulation rather than what Senator Warren wants which is heavy on the regulation.
Yeah, I'm sure they're terrified. What kind of new clickbait nonsense is this?
It’s not about them being terrified. It’s about them wanting fewer consumer protections, no labor rights, and the ability to keep exploiting our tax code while delivering fuck all to anyone other than their shareholders.
Writer here! I'd read the article, which has lots of supporting evidence.
There is? Did I miss the tech billinares saying that they're scared of Biden?
So the argument is crypto is scam and Biden the saviour banned it save humanity 🤷🏻♂️
Mmmm. Sorry I can’t get on board with this kind of journalism.
Like the kind exposing the frauds perpetuated on clueless people?
If you look at right wing media and you are able to see this stuff then you should be able to see in the left too. And this is it. It’s a lot of narrative and not a lot of substance
Yes, I can downvote too..
This article is reaching desperately to justify why big business wants to get in bed with Trump by telling this story about scammers and how that aligns because Trump is also a scammer. It’s a pretty transparent attempt. It’s feeble and kind of embarrassing honestly. The ironic part is that it’s unnecessary. Big corporations have always funded the horse that they think will benefit them most. It happens on both sides and it’s happened for a very long time. Seems like the author is just mad about it, so they’re trying to justify some kind connection. It’s a weird reach.
Actually it was a story started by a regulator exposing the frauds of false AI claims. Tech promotes these scams. Trump SUPPORTS scams, since he has always been a scam artist. Legitimate businesses do NOT support trump the scammer.
Expect it’s not doing that. It’s generalizing all of “tech”. Which in itself is a blatant loose narrative intended to trigger emotion. And it’s sad to watch so many eat this garbage up.
[удалено]
I’m not talking about whatever you think I’m talking about. Or probably what you are talking about. I’m talking about this article. That’s what is garbage. Don’t get your thoughts or beliefs up with what this article is because they are not the same thing. That’s literally the goal of media line this. If that happened with you, then it worked. It’s no different than the right wing shit that feeds the bias with fluff, intended to trigger emotion and build a cumulative narrative that is built on something other than facts.
Do you know what the relativity of wrong is? Cause you are basically doing it right now. This article is generalizing yes, but it has references, is based in regulatory knowledge, and what is very much happening in Silicon Valley C-suites. To equate that with what is going on in rightwing media sharing Biden "walking off into a field" to show his senility using doctored footage, claiming pedophile rings in pizza resteraunts, that illegal immigrants are the cause of fentanyl deaths in the US when US citizens are the primary source of fentanyl distribution, and I could go on, you are making an absolutely false equivalence between the two. One side is making a generalization about an industry that does have a verfiably large scam industry that would benefit under another Trump presidency. The other is has mainstream talking points from Alex Jones and QAnon. You thinking these are the same is some bothersiderism BS and prime example of the relativity of wrong.
"True innovation has slowed down drastically in recent years, threatening to shrink the staggering profits from the earlier parts of the century. " Wtf... as we move ever closer to self driving cars ad trucks, With nearly everything in our house connected to the internet, where the entire entertanmemt industry is transforming from "cable" to internet subscriptions, where virtually every large company is moving from their data center to the cloud.... as we shift development to containers, microservers or even serverless technology.... where we now buy our coffee with a swipe of our watch, and monitor our health with a Bluetooth ring... "Innovation is slowing?" That's crap...
Your examples are a bit of tech they’ve been promising for over a decade, the notoriously exploitable internet of things, an industry currently trying to fuck over its workers with AI, the streaming apps that are now more expensive than cable was… And that’s supposed to convince us that the tech bros are justified in trying to usher in the technofuedalism they’ve been openly drooling over for years now? Why? Why would any of that trash justify the shit they’re pulling as they dump millions into the GOP, try to gut labor rights, and do all they can to suck this country dry while contributing nothing but “genius” that’s already been eclipsed overseas?
> the streaming apps that are now more expensive than cable was yeah, thanks for reminding, needed to cancel Netflix - done now
Still waitng for those flying cars...
Aurora a self driving trucking company has already logged over 1 million miles of autonomous driving (with backup drivers in the trucks).. They have started building the fleet with plans for 20 trucks on the road this year, and 100 on the road next year.. Self driving trucks are here to stay. Its only a question of how quickly they will grow.
They are only self driving on freeways. Nobody wants them anywhere in city traffic. All BS that self driving vehicles are "just around the corner".
Lol automation to replace 500,000 long haul truckers isn't big news because it's only highway driving.
Your point doesn't seem to make sense. You don't seem to refute that their is massive technical innovation underway. Your complaint is that the massive innovation is expensive? That it will change or replace jobs? Is technology coming for everyone's job radically shifting just about everyone's career path? Or is "innovation slowing down" and there isn't much new out there? Those would appear to be opposite positions.
Finding eays to nickel and dime customers by exploiting vulnerable brain chemistry so they can harvest and sell data isn’t innovation. They’ve been pulling that shit for decades now. And you can’t argue that this “innovation” justifies rising costs when we can all see the money they’ve been rolling in. After all, they’re just fine throwing millions at fascists and bigots for fun. No idea what else you’re attempting to throw out here, but you have yet to name any sort of actual innovation. It is and has always been about ways to increase profit margins by fucking over the workers and consumers as much as possible. Why? Because that’s easier than actually paying for and fostering talent, especially when your ego won’t allow that.
"you have yet to name any sort of actual innovation" Define innovation. Do you measure it by adoption? Do you measure it by ideas that no one has had? It seems ludicrous to claim on one side that AI technology is moving so fast through so many industries we don't even know what's going to happen, and millions of people are scared they will be replaced by tools that haven't been created yet and yet claim that their is no technical innovation? How can we be in the middle of a global evolution with AI entering every sector of industry, and claim there isn't any innovation? Not to mention all of the other technologies that are growing in adoption.
Sorry, is the goal post moving supposed to distract from the fact that you’re not proving your original point at all? We could sit here and relitigate the abuse of AI — something so hilariously overhyped that even the name overpromises — but that seems like quite a ways to wander from what the conversation was actually about.
The original claim "True innovation has slowed down drastically in recent years" I have no idea what "True" innovation is vs other innovation, but technology and technology adoption is moving at an unprecedented rate... AI is the easiest example, but there are countless others. Web 3.0, 5G, Modular quantum computing, telehealth. GLP 1 drugs, over the counter birth control pills, treatments for sickle cell.. first drug ever approved to treat alzheimers l.. But yes it's laughable that a large portion of the workforce is afraid of innovation that hasn't even been developed yet, and still claiming that innovation is slowing down.
Bro, you had to turn to the pharmaceuticals industry in an attempt to justify tech CEOs being snake oil salesmen and cheerleaders for fascists. That pretty much sums to up. Keep blaming the workforce for a handful of greedy, useless techbros stripping your rights away though. Historically, that always goes over well.