mountainriver
When I run into “Climate change is a conspiracy” I do the wide-eyed look of recognition and go “Yeah I know! Have you heard about the Exxon files?” and lead them down that rabbit hole. If they want to think in terms of conspiracies, at least use an actual, factual conspiracy.
At work, I’ve been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that’s why it’s called work.
The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.
The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.
Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will save… (drumroll)… Approximately nothing!
But if we hadn’t done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.
We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.
Having problems fitting enough GPT-3’s under that trenchcoat?
I have a suspicion, but let me first check with the AI in my phone:
“Cybercheck committed the m-u-r…”, AI suggests “murder”! That is it, case cracked!
As my AI figured out, Cybercheck themselves committed the murders and then probably created their service to cover it up!
What if my mechanical watch went rogue and killed Bezos?
On one hand Bezos is responsible for a lot of suffering and some deaths.
On the other hand, killing is wrong.
On the third hand, it couldn’t do that, because it is just a machine.
(It’s a watch, it has three hands. It also has about as much consciousness as an LLM, it “knows” what time it is. Much more energy efficient though.)
First half is straight forward dick measurement contest. Let me paraphrase: “My companies has huuuuge revenue! Why haven’t yours? Maybe because you are so toxic? Have you thought about that, man with smaaaall revenue.”
Notice how it’s all revenue, not profit. I think this mindset gives an insight into why so many tech bros if they stumble onto profit, quickly grows out of profit. Profit isn’t the score, revenue is. And it’s all about hitting that high score so you can feel like a big man.
They are a digital meeting company. A company that lives on digital meetings. Which will now enshittify digital meetings.
But line goes up, right?