Enterprise Resource Planning.

That makes a lot more sense than… uh… my first interpretation.

Let’s see if it flops just as hard as Blair’s attempt.

Sounds like a someone who needs to talk to an LLM less.

More like continuing to try to will something in to existence that can replace smart phones because they want to be in charge of the hardware so they don’t have to go through Apple and Google.

Whole other part of the company.

Like, Samsung is a big company, really like 3 or 4 companies in a trench coat.

Most professional actors who are decently well known and talented still make most of their income from ad work, and couldn’t afford to stay in the industry without it. Like, really, very very few actors get by just on work in creative production.

I suspect a lot of these layoffs are actually just cost cutting in response to these companies doing really poorly, the idea that the jobs are now being done by generative models is largely a smoke screen to save face and avoid admitting that companies are scaling back operations due to a lack of demand.

Those few cases where they actually are just replacing people are going to vanish the moment that the people hosting the models run out of money to burn and have to charge full price. Like the scale of operating losses is orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen in the past.

This is the thing that really kills me, like, what an LLM can do is not a revolutionary leap, it’s an evolutionary step beyond basic grammar, tone, and spell checking. It’s more capable than traditional auto complete, but it’s not a fundamentally different capability.

Most actors don’t make much money playing roles in theater, movies or TV shows (obvious exceptions for big name stars), rather they do those when they can get them, but make most of their money doing ads. If that ad work disappeared, way fewer people could afford to be actors and the overall talent pool would shrink.

Same goes for people doing drawn art or photography, the commodified work provides a stable income that allows them to pursue the career and creates space for them to produce genuine art.

There is absolutely a lot of issues regarding things going on in certain discord servers, or in certain subreddits, less so on twitch or steam.

But a lot of those issues are due to different use cases being pushed into proximity by being pushed off other platforms, ether by moderation decisions, or by their structure and user engagement maximizing algorithms making certain communities unviable.

So you end up with communities that need forum or chat room style organization being pushed in to close proximity to communities that run afoul of corporate moderation. This was less of an issue when these things might have just headed off to dedicated websites, but with everything ending up on platforms now, you have this milieu of mundane game or hobbyist communities, communities for mental health discussions, communities about drug usage, explicit adult content, and fringe politics, all right next to each other. Thus cross pollination between all of them becomes inevitable at a far higher rate than if they were on separate platforms, or on a mega platform with a bunch of other things that would dilute the cross pollination.

I’m not even saying that any of those are explicitly bad things that shouldn’t exist, just that having them all confined in such close proximity is a time bomb. This is not a result of careless management by these companies, but rather the result of pressures pushing these things off of other major platforms, and thus forcing them on to ones that are inherently more permissive.

Recently I’ve been going to the library a lot more. Like, I kind of want to tear my head off looking for books about certain topics online, like nothing but irrelevant but popular stuff, or stuff I’ve already read. I go to the library, go to a relevant section of shelf, boom, lots of relevant books. And if I need something more, the librarians are always happy to help look for something more specific in the system.

Compare that to corporate websites that seem like they are optimizing to waste my time at this point.

I think it’s better to go straight to Wikipedia if you’re looking something up at this point.

They get things wrong at a far higher rate than most of the websites that tend to end up at the top of a web result, and they get things wrong in weird ways that won’t stand out to users in the same way a shitty website will. These probabilistic text generators are much better at seeming like they have the correct answer than actually providing it.

It’s crazy how much money they are losing, and that’s with most of their compute being provided by Microsoft at cost, if not for free in exchange for the use of their models in Microsoft products.

Both they and Anthropic talk about their business as if they’re a software as a service company, but most SAS doesn’t get more expensive to run the more users there are, not to mention their conversion rate of free users to payed users is abysmal. Like, it’s an unsalvageable train wreck of a business model, I don’t see ether surviving more than a year unless they radically change their business models.

As other’s mentioned, probably more a way to fire a bunch of people without having to do so explicitly.

Microsoft seems to be on a warpath this year regarding layoffs. I wonder if maybe they’re trying to compensate for some giant black hole in their budget. Like, keep the costs looking stable even as some specific department balloons out of control without providing commensurate revenue. Wonder what that could possibly be?

The problem is that for a lot of people it has become a substitute that has filled the void left by the slow destruction of other social organizations and institutions. It’d be easy to say that social media sites like Facebook killed them, but I think they were already throughly hollowed out and made inaccessible by the economic pressure on people to be ever more productive workers and ever more economy driving consumers.

To ask people to dispense with whatsapp, instagram or facebook is to ask them to abandon their ability to be part of communities that matter to them. It’s sort of an intractable problem as it requires whole communities to abandon ship together, which is difficult to do. The solution to the problem is to easy that process and decrease barriers to doing so.

It’s one of those situations where we see how kind people can be, and how indifferent and cruel to that kindness a depersonalized organization can be.

The type of thinking that says “ well, yah, sure users won’t like ads in the start menu, but we need to make money on the unlicensed installs, and they’ll switch to something else if we brick them for not paying, so we’re going to inflict this on paying users as well, because they’re not going to switch.”

Is the same type of of thinking that says “well, this government is willing to sign a huge contract to use our infrastructure, but only if we punish anyone in our organization who speaks out against them, so we’ll just fire anyone who does so. This would be much harder if they were all unionized, but luckily we nipped that in the bud.”

Microsoft’s organizational and incentive structure makes these outcomes inevitable. Profit before people is the rule.

The Streisand effect.

It’s so crazy to me that people will rush out and try and ban tools like these, rather than force car companies to use more secure systems. Like, banning these is futile, they’re not that complex of a device to make, the core issue here is that car companies have fallen over them selves to be “tech forward” to justify pushing further in to the premium price range, but have completely failed to secure their systems.

Oh boy, I can’t wait for the thriving trade in VPN accounts made outside of the UK then sold to UK citizens by a third party.