Notices by Dare Obasanjo (carnage4life@mas.to)

If someone kills me in a road rage incident, please do not make an AI version of me that says I forgive them for murdering me at their trial.

What is going on?

https://www.404media.co/email/0cb70eb4-c805-4e4e-9428-7ae90657205c/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

So many people have grown up to be the villains of our stories.

You can’t outrun Father Time. Film at 11.

Working on a CEO speak translator. So far I’ve got

1. We’re ending remote work and returning to office to improve collaboration = stealth layoffs

2. We are an AI first company and you don’t get more resources until you can show why you can’t do the job with automation = hiring freeze

Any others?

We really went from AI means you’ll only have to work 3 days a week to AI is going to take your job unless you work harder, faster and more efficiently in the blink of an eye.

The CEO of Fiverr sent out the following email warning to employees that AI is coming for their jobs

“It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person - Al is coming for you.”

Shopify, Duolingo and now Fiverr.

This doesn’t sound like a great defense strategy because I can easily see the Biden administration saying “You’re right, we’ll ban them too”.

There’s already talk about tightening the under $800 loophole that avoids tariffs on imported goods which both Temu & Shein depend on.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-defense-china-ban/

Snap plans to charge $99/month ($1,188/year)to developers who want to build apps for their 5th generation spectacles.

So developers can choose between paying $99/year to Apple to develop for 1.3 billion iPhone users or $1,188 to Snap to target what is currently 0 users on Snap’s future smartglasses platform.

Tough choice.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/17/24245572/snap-spectacles-ar-developers-evan-spiegel

Every company is going to use AI, both traditional machine learning or generative AI. Articles decrying this is like articles complaining about companies making products in factories with machines instead of by hand.

It’s old man yelling at clouds.
https://futurism.com/hasbro-ceo-ai-dungeons-dragons

There are two professors named Kate Baker at the University of Cambridge. One works in the department of genetics studying pathogens while the other works in the department of pathology studying genetics.

A perfectly symmetrical coincidence.

Generative AI companies are like arms dealers selling weapons to both sides in a war.

Bob here are tools to turn bullet points into lengthy emails and documents. Alice here are tools to turn lengthy emails and documents into bullet points.

No real value being created.

The idea that talent and hard work aren’t the primary path to success has been a gradual psyop in popular culture. Reality TV and viral stars showed talent isn’t needed to be famous. Privilege discourse implied race is destiny. Even in tech VCs and founders exposed as false gods.

Microsoft heard Google had stolen the crown for naming products terribly and just dropped the nuke of terrible product naming decisions to get the crown back.

OpenAI is planning to update its corporate structure from a non-profit to a for-profit to make itself more attractive for a new funding round valuing it at over $100B with Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft as potential investors.

This is the most predictable tech story of the year.

OpenAI being a non-profit has been a farce for several years and it would be great to stop insulting everyone’s intelligence and formalize it as just another well funded tech startup.

https://www.ft.com/content/841f6e58-b1bb-4c8e-bce0-a4c0b46ee2f8

A notable difference between this election season and 2016 & 2020 is how the liberal discourse on social media is dunking on JD Vance or Trump crowd size jokes instead of freaking out about Trump’s tweets.

Quite a vibe shift.

Disney has given up on making the legal argument that they get to kill your wife if you’ve ever signed up for Disney Plus.

Using AI to fake support from Taylor Swift and Swifties seems like it’ll backfire horribly as she’s on record as a Trump hater.

Kamala really has him rattled into making unforced errors.

Android is the best thing that happened to Apple from a regulatory perspective.

A duopoly gives each the abusive clout of a monopoly when it comes to developers (after all you can’t avoid having an iPhone or Android app) while marketshare is too small to fall under antitrust.

After a headline making stock market crash earlier this week, if you didn’t panic and simply did nothing then you’d be up 4%-5% this week. If you’re an Nvidia shareholder, you’d be up 11%.

This is the difference between investing and trading.

People have long argued the endgame for riding hailing services is autonomous cars. What used to seem like an expensive pipe dream is now reality if you ride Waymo in San Francisco.

Uber has smartly partnered with them. It seems inevitable that human drivers will be disrupted.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas-drivers-fret-robotaxis-pick-up-pace-passengers-2024-08-08/