If for no other reason than he doesn't start off by dramatically overstating the current state of this tech, isn't trying to sell anything, and unlike ChatGPT is actually a good writer.
It’s like a restaurant selling granite rocks for dessert. Nobody will buy them or eat them—so the product fails miserably. But if a popular restaurant adds a dollar to the meal price, and gives every customer a rock with their bill—well, then they can say that:
Every customer gets rocks for dessert.
Every customer pays for it.
Their business is more profitable because of the tasty granite rocks.
I just wanted to spotlight this excellent metaphor tbh.
It's gonna be so awkward when Anthropic reveals that inside their data center is actually just Some Guy Named Claude who has been answering everyone's questions with his superhuman typing speed.
I also absolutely hate this "abundance" narrative that these assholes keep trying to push. Like, outside of some parts of the housing market the problem isn't that the stuff (or the productive capacity to make the stuff) doesn't exist, it's that we have an economic system focused on maximizing profit and you can't make money selling things to people who can't afford to buy them. Like, economic inequality is the primary obstacle to the kind of universal abundance that these people claim to want, but because it necessitates some kind of redistribution they can't actually acknowledge that. But mark my words if we ever do get serious about our social safety nets and making sure that low-income people have enough money to buy the things they need for a good life we will start seeing the Saltmans (maybe not him specifically) start innovating to find ways to get those things to them.
On one hand, the ghostwriters of the world truly didn't deserve to have to cope with those conditions. On the other hand, I don't know that taking them out back and telling them about the rabbits is what we had in mind.
I think we're well past "God help us" and into "God forgive us" territory. I started driving a delivery van for Amazon to pay the bills while hopefully getting back into the actual network exorcism business and I think as of tonight I think I'm gonna stop complaining about it.
Nah, I feel you. I think this is pretty solidly a "plague on both their houses" kind of situation. I'm glad he chose to focus his apparently amazing grift powers on such a deserving target, but let's not pretend that anything whatsoever was really gained here.
Alongside the "Great Dumbass" theory of history - holding that in most cases the arc of history is driven by the large mass of the people rather than by exceptional individuals, but sometimes someone comes along and fucks everything up in ways that can't really be accounted for - I think we also need to find some way of explaining just how the keys to the proverbial kingdom got handed over to such utter goddamn rubes.
There are so many different ways to unpack this, but I think my two favorites so far are:
We've turned the party's surveillance and thought crime punishment apparatus into a de facto God with the reminder that you could pray to it. Does that actually do anything? Almost certainly not, unless your prayers contain thought crimes in which case you will be reeducated for the good of the State, but hey, Big Brother works in mysterious ways.
How does it never occur to these people that the reason why people with disproportionate amounts of power don't use it to solve all the world's problems is that they don't want to? Like, every single billionaire is functionally that Spider-Man villain who doesn't want to cure cancer but wants to turn people into dinosaurs. Only turning people into dinosaurs is at least more interesting than making a number go up forever.
I had a straight-up "wait I thought he was back in his hole after being outed" moment. I hate that all the weird little dumbasses we know here keep becoming relevant.
Damn cat just stood on my phone and launched Gemini for the first time, so we can drop Google's monthly active user count by one relative to whatever they claim.
I think that "Whatever", or maybe content(derisive) is yet another valuable bridging concept that connects the different threads of how we got here. If "Business Idiots* are the 'who' and "the Rot Economy/Shareholder Supremacy" is the 'why' then "contentification" or "Whateverization" is a huge part of the "how".
I think I liked this observation better when Charles Stross made it.
If for no other reason than he doesn't start off by dramatically overstating the current state of this tech, isn't trying to sell anything, and unlike ChatGPT is actually a good writer.