New Ed Zitron, giving exact numbers for how much money Cursor and Anthropic have lit on fire and continuing to shed light on the AI industry's ability to incinerate revenue.
How do you even get to the point that you think that’s something you want to advertise?
Man's spent several years and shitloads of cash destroying his public image (and probably his brain) via slop bots, I suspect he's getting desperate to prove his LLM booster turn wasn't a career-ruining blunder
(He's also probably lost the ability to tell good work from bad work as well - that's a universal quality among slop advocates, as Gerard has pointed out on multiple occasions)
EDIT: Just gonna add in something I gotta get off my chest:
Even from a "ruthless capitalist" perspective, Framework's fash turn is pretty baffling to me. They positioned themselves as beacons of right-to-repair, as good guys in tech trying to "fix consumer electronics, one category at a time" - their shit was overtly political from the fucking start. People weren't buying them to get the fastest laptops, or to get the best value for money, they bought them because they believed in their stated mission. Anyone with business sense would've known shilling a fascist's personal Linux "distro" would've presented a severe risk to Framework's brand.
Exactly how Nirav got blindsided by this shit, I genuinely don't understand. Considering his response to the backlash involved "aPoLiTiCaL" "bIg TeNt" blather and publicly farming compassion from Twitter fash, its probably because he's an outright fascist himself and assumed everyone else around him shared his utterly rancid views.
We know we’re reaching the late stages of a bubble when we start to see multiple “people in tech don’t really believe in all of this, honest, we just act like it because we think we have to, we’re a silent majority you see”, but the truth is that what you believe in private doesn’t matter. All that matter is that you’ve been acting like a true believer and you are what you do
In work and politics, it genuinely doesn’t matter what you were thinking when you actively aided and abetted in shitting on people’s work, built systems that helped fascists, ruined the education system and pretty much all of media. What matters, and what you should be judged on is what you did
“As part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”
There's this magical thing called "commissioning a porn artist" Sammy Boy. I recommend trying it out for once - it gets you an objectively better result than throwing money into a planet-destroying slop machine, and its much cheaper too. You've done nothing but attack the human soul for the past three fucking years, you might as well give an infinitesimal amount of your undeserved billions to one of the millions of artists whose livelihoods you've been murdering.
Whilst accurate fedi stats are pretty difficult to get, I'm inclined to believe the influx is genuine - after the CEO Meltdown on Bluesky, its clear people are jumping ship.
And in related news, worldwide ecosystems are already getting perma-fucked by billionaires' repeated and relentless wrecking of our planet for personal gain.
I mention billionaires specifically because the average Joe, the 99% of humanity being told to cut down their carbon footprint and delete emails to save water, is completely fucking blameless in this.
They didn't choose to have car-centric architecture forced on them for the past goddamn century, they didn't choose to have planet-wrecking crypto farms/NFTs forced on them a few years ago, and they sure as hell didn't choose to have planet-killing AI slop extruders forced on them, either.
(Anyways, unrelated hot take of the day: taking responsibility for something you're not responsible for is a moral failing, and needs to be treated as such)
New Ed Zitron, giving exact numbers for how much money Cursor and Anthropic have lit on fire and continuing to shed light on the AI industry's ability to incinerate revenue.