During WW II in occupied Scandinavia paperclips were worn on lapels as a non-violent symbol of resistance.
Depending on who you ask1) it either started in Denmark or in Norway, and the discussion then usually devolves towards who actually invented the paperclip in the first place.
1) If you ask me I’m gonna say Norway.
I like the cat and it’s cool and all but I don’t believe that banding together as consumers is going to work. Not unless it involves mass boycotts and civil disobedience which are… difficult in the current environment.
Ah yeah, I agree. There’s a followup where he talks about ‘slacktivism’ and how people who are actually in the chain of making the bad things happen and making decisions might care, but might not say anything or do anything because they don’t think that the boss will care or others will back them up and so on.
So his idea is to get people on the inside to realize that there are other people who would agree and support them if they say “no, let’s not do that” so they’ll feel ok speaking up and doing something to try to stop it.
Still mostly just thought it was funny how Clippy, a much hated bit of software back in the day, is now a symbol of how things used to be better.
He mentions that in the clip (fnarr!) there too. And I guess, maybe? But surely enshittification is in part driven by utter contempt for your employees. It’s both inspiration and a desired outcome of enshittification. At the top they believe that, morally, they have no choice as they are bound by the moral duty of line go up (“shareholder value”) as if that is actually the case. It isn’t by the way. That’s a lie they told themselves in order to do dreadful things to get toys/money/success aura before they die an empty husk of what could have been a human being.
Who are these morons who imagine everyone wants to interact with their computers by talking to them? It’s not efficient nor desirable and it would become an instant nightmare in any environment where you’re not completely alone and sealed in a soundproof room.
How could anyone at Microsoft possibly think that would be a compelling idea? Hasn’t people’s reluctance to use the voice-to-text interfaces that we’ve all had available for years now taught them anything? Normal people hate dictating to their phones and computers. I’ve got a cheap, years-old no-name Chinese phone and could be using the voice dictation to type out this post for me. But I don’t have any interest in doing that because I’m not (that particular type of) weirdo.
I literally only know one guy who regularly used the Siri voice interface on his phone and everyone always gives him a little side-eye when he does it.
The main tech companies truly seem to have run out of any good ideas years ago.
Sounds lovely.
Gotta pay for that grift somehow. AI will probably never be profitable, they’re pumping in orders of magnitude more money than they’re making and when the bubble bursts it’s going to be spectacular.
No company that actually stakes their entire product on generative AI appears to be able to make money. Glean, a company that makes at best $8.3 million a month ($100 million annualized revenue) said it had $550 million in cash December of last year, and then had to raise $150 million in June of this year. Where did that money go? Why does a generative search engine product with revenues that are less than a third of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team need half a billion dollars to make $8.3 million a month?
I’m not saying these companies are unnecessary, so much as they may very well be impossible to run as real businesses. This isn’t even a qualitative judgment of any one generative AI company. I’m just saying, if any of these were good businesses, they would be either profitable or being acquired in actual deals, and there would be good businesses by now.
The amount of cash they are burning does not suggest they’re rapidly approaching any kind of sane burn rate, or we would have heard. Putting aside any kind of skepticism I have, anything you may hold against me for what I say or the way I say it, where are the profitable companies? Why isn’t there one, outside of the companies creating data to train the AI models, or Nvidia? We’re three years in, and we haven’t had one.