“Go to your parents and ask them: hey, like every time I get a chance to talk to my boss, ask me if I can have more days off,” he said, per BI. “Ask your parents what they think of that as a career strategy.”

I do not support violence as retribution but I also reallllllllly want to slap this manbaby in the face, do his parents know he is behaving this way?

“Maybe it’s more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person,” Mobian cofounder and CEO Jonah Goodhart told Digiday. “When you influence ChatGPT, you’re influencing potentially all of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it’s massive and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do.”

If I was this dumb I surely would be smart enough to keep my mouth shut.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/50015379

Showcase payments were a response by Google to threat of being forced to pay for news in Australia and the EU, he said. The AI deals are an attempt to “buy some friends” as Google is accused by regulators in the UK and elsewhere of abusing its monopoly power to secure access to content to feed its AI models.

“I think what they were trying to do then, and they’re probably trying to do now, is to get what they need without putting a direct monetary value to the content licensing…

“They’re trying to bundle rights into larger deals because if they had to pay everybody for licensing their content, then that affects their margins in a material way.”

Asked what his advice is for publishers offered a Google AI deal, Kint said: “The results of a handful of publishers doing deals is still going to leave us with what Google is doing right now, which is abusing its market power and destroying the broader open web in the process by not creating real incentives for the content companies that it’s built much of its business off of over the last two decades.”

It is difficult to fathom how pathetic this is and it shows how these companies primarily rely on fear and FOMO to sell crap.

OpenAI PACs in no-holds-barred combat with Anthropic PACs

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260807-molly-white-following-the-ai-and-crypto-money-in-us-politics - podcast

time: 32 min 15 sec

The Chinese modelers, for lack of unlimited venture capital, have had to find better ways to solve the problems. Their use of different algorithms allows them to deliver nearly similar results for much less money.

There is also a difference in attitude. Where U.S. financiers like Larry Ellison are striving for some god-like general artificial intelligence, the Chinese (and some European) developers and financiers are much more interested in solving real world (industry) problems.

...

An abundance of resources has allowed U.S. model developers to build huge, very capable, but enormously expensive general AI models. Those companies have yet to find use cases that will pay for the cost of running these models.

The US built a massive offroading luxury SUV when what peopld wanted was a scooter...

facepalm

Note: I am under no illusion about China being perfect, amazing or better, but this article makes some good points about the narrowness and groupthink of "Western" AI Companies.

Come to our training camp! Not a cult!*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbZgAQD61xY&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260806-ai-doomsday-cults-recruit-social-media-influencers - podcast

time: 9 min 05 sec

content warning: Aella

how to tell if you’re in a bubble economy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usq1Nu5wqAk&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260805-atomarine-nuclear-powered-ai-data-centres-at-sea - podcast

time: 5 min 14 sec

Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN)

the Children’s Health, Advancement, Trust, Boundaries, and Oversight in Technology (CHATBOT)

the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS)

O.o.o.f.

everyone’s a genius in a bubble

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA9xQT2cPhE&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260804-aschenbrenner-bet-everything-on-ai-and-lost - podcast

time: 8 min 51 sec

The CEO, who famously studied philosophy and earned a PhD in social theory, implied in Palantir’s quarterly shareholder letter that these were the kinds of capitalists who gave rise to Marxist socialism.

THATS A REAL THING

Audio with transcript

"the worst kind of tech take" is a superlative crater that drops straight into the maw of hell

this damn country has found their minds and it is a threat to profts

dear Copilot: please send me your stuff. Pass it on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF6LcX7P7KA&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260803-copilot-prompt-injection-virus-in-your-documents - podcast

time: 5 min 18 sec

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)

^a succint highly professional description of the US economy right now as it is monomaniacally leveraged into AI.

reference video

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=i-XhMFGH7vg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-XhMFGH7vg

edit 2 this is the article I meant to share from Nik Suresh who Ed featured https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

edit sorry I meant to link unpaywalled article, there is another similar current one from Ed

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-more-you-buy-the-more-you-lose/

Ed asked me to write about why leaders around the world are constantly buying software they don’t need. He probably had a few high-profile companies in mind, like Snowflake. Put aside whether Snowflake is a good product – most people don’t know what a database is, so why on earth does a specialized and very expensive database have a market cap of $71B?

That’s a fair question – and being both a software engineer and the managing director at a tech consultancy, I can talk about what’s happening on the ground. And yes, people are buying software that they don’t need.

I wish that was the extent of our problems.

‘just let the money run out, it’ll be fine in two years’

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260731-nik-suresh-on-surviving-corporate-ai-psychosis - podcast

time: 38 min 59 sec

cleaned-up transcript to be on the Patreon later on (YouTube has the messy transcript right now)

not SAYING that AlphaFold cures cancer, BUT,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuiEVOSTbN4&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260730-google-kills-alphafold-so-much-for-ai-curing-cancer - podcast

time: 5 min 40 sec