Notices by Dare Obasanjo (carnage4life@mas.to), page 5

34 felonies down, 57 to go.

Another example of how Apple is getting left behind in the AI wars is that both Windows PCs and Chromebooks are going to have AI assistants, generative AI image tools and writing tools.

Apple will probably just announce the thinnest MacBook ever. Again.

https://blog.google/products/chromebooks/chromebook-plus-google/

A big problem with news headlines about demographic trends is that they hide the nuance to catastrophize the news.

The fertility crisis in the US is really a story of a huge drop in teen pregnancies. So unless we want to go back to a bunch more teen moms, it isn’t actually a “problem”.

Two years ago Google fired Blake Lemoine for trying to free their LLM-based chatbot believing it was sentient. The rise of ChatGPT has caused more people to agree with him.

The problem is that people conflate passing the Turing Test with sentience. Just because you ask a chatbot if it’s alive and its training data indicates saying yes is the best response doesn’t mean it’s true.

A mannequin that plays a scream every time you poke it doesn’t feel pain. But your instincts make you think it does.

Since every movie will eventually be available on streaming, it looks like the level of spectacle needed to get people to theaters needs to be much higher.

Furiosa is only tracking to $35M this weekend but Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire did $80M.

https://deadline.com/2024/05/box-office-furiosa-garfield-memorial-day-1235938017/

I sometimes wonder if LLMs are this generation’s self driving cars? A decade ago self driving cars were so promising it was assumed they were 90% of the way to being ubiquitous. But now it looks like the last 10% of the work is taking 90% of the time.

LLMs work well 90% of the time. The question is how hard will it be to address that last 10%?

There’s long been a notion of two internets when it comes to China and the rest of the world where super apps like WeChat reign while Google is non-existent.

It’s now the inverse where products like EVs and smartphones are barred from the US which are competitive with US ones. And these products are giving the American ones a run for their money.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-slashes-iphone-prices-china-amid-fierce-huawei-competition-2024-05-20/

Google has preemptively paid an antitrust fine in its case with the DOJ in an attempt to avoid a trial. If this works, it changes everything.

Next time the DOJ or FTC comes knocking just ask, "how much do I owe you?" https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/google-cuts-mystery-check-us-bid-sidestep-jury-trial-2024-05-20/

I think Google’s AI overviews in the search generative experience have stopped the bleeding with regard to Google being less useful each year.

The user experience is much better but I’m definitely clicking on websites less. AI sadly creates many incentives to eat your seed corn and sacrifice long term health for short term wins.

Companies laying off juniors to rely on seniors plus AI is another example of this trend.

A topic that is mostly ignored even in news coverage is that Republicans have tacitly and explicitly made it legal to kill #BlackLivesMatter protesters.

It will be an interesting section of future history books which will cover incidents like Kyle Rittenhouee’s celebrity and giving drivers immunity for hitting protesters.

Researchers from the universities of Chicago & Michigan analyzed resumes of employees of Apple, Microsoft & Space X and determined that their RTO policies led to a decrease in senior staff by 5%. This analysis was prior to layoffs at these companies.

This is evidence that RTO leads to attrition of senior employees. It seems obvious but it's great to have a research study backing the intuition.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/rto-mandates-led-to-pronounced-exodus-of-senior-workers-at-top-tech-firms/

I saw a post claiming that weekly 1-on-1s are bad because they descend into nitpicking sessions.

These are typically signs of a bad manager. A weekly 1-on-1 is a good opportunity for both the manager and report to share context on what’s going on and the report to ask for help.

Netflix now has 270M subscribers of which 40M are in their ad tier.

They are also abandoning Microsoft as their ad platform and bringing it in-house. It makes sense to not want to rely on an external party for a critical chunk of their revenue.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/netflix-ad-tier-update-40m-users-shift-from-microsoft-1235900301/

The contradiction in the profile bio of every OpenAI researcher is that you can't truly believe in AGI and that it will be net positive for humanity.

At best you're lying to yourself to justify your work and at worst you are ignoring centuries of human history.

As surmised, there was no grand strategy in laying off the entire supercharger team. It was a rage firing because an exec defied a layoff order and now Tesla has to beg these people to return now their CEO’s calmed down.

When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.

We’ve gone in a complete circle.

When I worked on the Metaverse, I talked with developers about whether generative AI would make creating games cheaper and they disagreed.

They also quoted the example of CGI in Hollywood movies. It simply raised the bar on expectations versus enabling cheaper special effects.

The typical VC podcast

Fining AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile less than $4M each on average for falsely advertising their data plans as unlimited seems like a slap on the wrist.

I’m confident they made way more than that from the consumers they tricked into purchasing those plans.

Maybe they’d have been fined more than that if it was a lawsuit about misleading shareholders instead. 🤷🏾♂️

Tesla shareholders should rejoice. The Biden administration is planning on increasing tariffs on Chinese EVs from 25% to 100% which is as good as banning them.

Similar tariff hikes are planned for solar panels.

Geopolitics >>> The Environment

https://insideevs.com/news/719283/chinese-ev-tariffs-biden-quadruple/