Notices by Dare Obasanjo (carnage4life@mas.to), page 2

There have been a number of iconic consumer tech companies that while indispensable turned out to be lousy businesses. Tumblr, Twitter, Uber (for a time) and it seems Twitch as well.

The challenge is that being a great product is different from being a great business.

The problem is the mindset it takes to focus on making money is often different from the let's solve interesting problems that attracts many people to tech. So you often get one without the other especially in consumer apps.

The pay-to-play internet is here. It looks like Google’s $60M payment to Reddit means that is now the only search engine from which you can get Google results.

This pretty much kills any chance of disrupting Google with AI as they can outspend everyone on content exclusivity.

Certain tasks in video game development such as concept art are already being mostly done by AI.

If you want to pitch a first person shooter based on the Bad Boys franchise, it’s far easier to use AI to generate the concept art and have an artist fix it up than have them create it from scratch.

Wired has a report of about how Activision Blizzard is using AI to replace artists who create concept art and 3D assets in games. This is unfortunately for the artists, an inevitable trend.

It’s thus unsurprising that a shift is slowly occurring within tech both at the high profile VC level (Musk, A16Z) and rank & file (90% of donations to Dems in 2020 versus 80% in 2024) to become more aligned with Republicans. It’s big oil 2.0

The interesting question is where it leaves tech workers as they realize their source of livelihood is misaligned with their personal politics?

I think we’re already beginning to see the shifts in personal politics as the cognitive dissonance hits.

A political shift that’s occurred recently is tech’s the modern equivalent of the oil industry.

It’s not just FAANG eclipsing the market cap of Exxon Mobile but also the position of being critical to the economy while being public enemy #1

The media blames big tech for damage to society in the same way big oil is blamed for damage to the environment.

Democrats are explicitly creating policies that target both startups and big tech while endorsing even more aggressive approaches by the EU.

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is when you trust news on unfamiliar topics despite noticing errors in articles on subjects you know well.

CrowdStrike crashing Windows is unrelated to Microsoft’s security woes. This is simply a wrong take.

Yet I trust other articles in the WSJ 🤔

There is a weirdly racist trend where people blame hypothetical minorities when systems fail because management cuts corners. We saw it with the Boeing door collapse and now with the Crowdstrike crash.

There is no mythical "DEI engineer" doing sloppy work at these companies.

It's down to leadership cutting corners to make a buck. A software update causing a crash that takes down all of your customers is due to inadequate testing. It's not because some anonymous minority wrote the code.

On a positive note for CrowdStrike, it’s an impressive customer list.

This is a fascinating video from an MIT educated neurosurgeon who realized lifestyle factors like diet, exercise and stress had more impact on his patient’s lives than surgery.

So he quit his job.

This is consistent with a lot I’ve learned from books about the mind-body connection. It’s really worth watching.

https://youtu.be/25LUF8GmbFU?si=ptKjIi5O4y3fR6A0

From January to June, Tesla saw its registrations in California slump 17%, even as distant rivals such as Hyundai Motor, Kia Motors, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Ford, and Rivian increased sales by double-digit percentage points.

It's now confirmed that there isn't an EV winter, it's just a Tesla winter.

Go anti-woke, go broke.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas-california-registrations-fell-24-second-quarter-dealer-data-shows-2024-07-18/

A hard lesson for people to learn about corporate life is that the narrative about the impact of your work is often more important than the actual work.

It doesn’t matter if your team is the only one keeping the company afloat if no ins understands that.

Storytelling is key.

Reading about how Chamath, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks pitched Trump on JD Vance as VP.

These guys are the Injustice League of tech.

https://t.co/Y4bMCVcu8d

After reading an article on the average news site, there are usually links to articles of dubious quality that are often salacious clickbait. These are usually Taboola ads.

It is thus a huge surprise to hear that Apple plans to run ads from them in its News and Stocks apps.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/07/16/apple-taps-infamous-taboola-as-new-ad-seller-for-apple-news-and-stocks/

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have listed the reasons they are supporting Trump over Biden

1. Biden wants to “over regulate” AI which means America will lose the AI race to China.

2. Trump supports crypto.

3 The final straw is taxing of unrealized capital gains.

Marc Andreessen argues that tech, the economy and the military are what makes America the most successful country in the world. As the Biden administration is attacking tech, he will support Trump.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-founders-explain-why-theyre-supporting-trump/

YouTube creators are up in arms because it turns out Anthropic, Apple & Nvidia have trained their AIs on subtitles from their videos.

This fundamentally misunderstands how the web works. Crawling the web to build apps is what it’s built on from day one.

https://www.proofnews.org/apple-nvidia-anthropic-used-thousands-of-swiped-youtube-videos-to-train-ai/

Every paragraph of this story outdoes the last one until the very end.

Elon Musk’s X is the first company to be charged under the EU’s digital services act. It has been found non-compliant for

1. Blue checks decieving users since there’s no actual verification.
2. Not providing a searchable library of ads.
3. Not providing data access to researchers.

X could be fined up to 6% of global revenues if found guilty.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_3761

This is one of the most profound quotes I’ve ever encountered and is a motivator for how I approach most things at work and in life.

Many of us treat systems like they are laws of physics when they are just rules made up by people like us, often well intentioned but not perfect.

Google’s largest acquisition of all time being a cybersecurity startup (Motorola was $12.5B) is a testament to how bad things are on the security front across the industry as I mentioned a few days ago.

It’s also an opportunity to attack Microsoft’s recent public failures.

Given the prevalence of data breaches and ransomware attacks in the news, this is an investment with a clearer ROI than any money spent on Gemini and other generative AI efforts at Google.

https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/google-near-23-billion-deal-for-cybersecurity-startup-wiz-622edf1a?st=e3qv18l6e2p40rb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permal

This is exactly the level of thinking you should expect from a self proclaimed DEI expert. They are almost all a bunch of charlatans who peddle in racist stereotypes to exist.