onfocus

Executives that tell the press that their company has gone insane will quickly find themselves removed from their positions. Employees who are honest will find themselves fired in short-order, or “randomly” selected for a round of layoffs. In fact, it is in the interests of almost every actor in the space – boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants – to obfuscate and misrepresent the success rate of AI projects.

There's a secret underground of AI skeptics and they can't speak up without losing their jobs because the culture is all-in.

Literally a couple months ago Marc Andreessen was on Joe Rogan talking about how these dumb young progressive kids support “socialism” even though “it never works.” Meanwhile, Andreessen was just appointed by Trump to some government policy board. As Trump literally nationalizes parts of the AI industry that Andreessen insisted the prior administration was going to destroy through its woke anti-capitalist policies.

I know it's tired to point out Republican hypocrisy because that's their happy place, but come on. The supposed party of small government is only concerned about the size when the benefits of government are going to people who aren't already wealthy.

This sort of journalism doesn't really care about real consumers, labor, technology, or even whether the technology even works. Its focus is propping up extraction class narratives surrounding unchecked wealth accumulation. It's lazy fanfiction for MBAs who want to pretend to be informed without the pesky weight of ethical or even logistical realities.

But the scam is so lucrative!

The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that can't do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."

CEO brain in a nutshell.

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be.

This isn’t too far off from the software brain mindset that Nilay Patel was warning about in the previous post. Maybe software brain is intensified by the fact that tech culture is run by billionaires who never face consequences.

You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.

Nilay Patel explains the disconnect between tech culture and culture at large around AI.

The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.

What could we have done with $80 billion dollars? People like Zuckerberg shouldn’t control what we spend that amount of resources on.

“By refusing to cut off surveillance companies and sleazy data brokers, Big Tech companies are effectively collaborating with ICE’s lawless campaign of violence and terror. As a result, every internet ad on a website or app could be collecting location data that ICE will use for its next operation,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

Ads aren’t just an annoyance, they’re an attack vector.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

we can’t have nice things. The fact that this random web caching site run by one person is even important today is because we have lost the open web. This is a symptom of our broken system dominated by tech monopolies who don’t care about history, culture, or a shared set of information that we can use to understand our world.

Artifacts and technologies have certain logics built into their structure that do require certain arrangements around them or that bring forward certain arrangements.

This is a crucial point about LLMs. Sure the street finds its own uses for technology but the existence of some technologies requires a supporting system that is by nature anti-democratic.

The Google cofounder has cut ties between California and many of his assets that risked exposing him to a proposed new wealth tax in the state, meeting an end-of-2025 deadline, according to filings reviewed by Business Insider.

Morally bankrupt. California provided the environment, security, talent, and education that made Google possible. Running away because they ask for support is unethical.

If the far-right succeeds in its project, when your wife gets sick you won’t be able to afford a doctor. Your kids or grandkids won’t be able to get an education. Should you become successful in business they will force you to pay bribes. These people believe in extraction, not growth. Their goal is to subjugate, to dominate, to force everyone beneath them into a life of precarious insecurity.

If you can make it past the title, this is an excellent picture of where the tech industry and tech culture were in the past compared with where it is now.