The question here is why weren’t Google and the Mac and eBay all originally invented in Europe. Not why don’t the tech barons of 2026 all live in Europe.

The question is even more pointed because some of the people who invented the above were immigrants from Europe. Why did they have to leave to do their world-changing work?

Google was world-changing before it was the big tech nightmare it is today. So stop hiding behind the glory of GDPR and face the actual question.

For years, Meta has been hell for smaller companies trying to hire, because Meta would routinely offer $100k over the market rate, and hire people just to hire them. I swear about half a dozen times I interviewed people and made them job offers only to realize afterward that all I accomplished was giving them a bargaining chip for their negotiation with Meta.

Now it’s the reverse. People are out in the cold searching for work while Meta dumps all those people they overhired back out into the market, where their time at Meta gives them an edge. Yes, we can hate Meta all we want but it still looks good on a resume.

And yes life is different on tech wages but these are still people with bills to pay and families to feed. My HCOL property taxes are equivalent to some people’s entire mortgage.

They certainly think they do a lot of good. We sit off in the distance reading the latest Reddit threads about whatever latest outrage has happened, and it looks all negative to us. But from their point of view they are serving 3 billion people’s needs to connect and network.

I’m not saying I see it that way. But you seem to imply that they all know they work for an Evil Empire but they truly don’t see it that way. There are a lot of young people there who don’t look past the cachet of working for a well known and successful company. And there are wiser ones who genuinely believe the good outweighs the bad.

Yeah another thought to have though is that 8,000 Meta employees suddenly on the market makes life harder for other people who’ve been laid off and are still looking for work, some of them for a whole year without success.

I’m still waiting for that company to actually die. From what I can tell, Yi Long Ma has spun it into one of his other companies and spun that company into SpaceX. And he’s milked the AI thing. I used to laugh wondering where he’d get the 40 billion to pay off Ellison and the rest of the funders who actually paid for Twitter. The sad truth is he can find 40 billion in his couch cushions, but won’t even have to because he’ll book-cook his way out of it.

Yeah there’s a lot of wishful thinking in this article. They still have a shit ton of cash, a lot of smart people, an incredible ad engine they can deploy onto any internet property. The metaverse was a complete wank but they still have more to work with than just about anyone out there.

Even if this article is right, and their arc has finally turned downward, it’s because they’ve finally hit the peak of an absolutely epic run. Stink of death? I hate them as much as anyone, but yeah… no.

When the messenger has a stated mission of generating ad views, you should absolutely question them. Damn you really are absolutely miserable at telling when someone has an agenda.

Yeah we just say clankering

Ah yes, Gizmodo, arbiter of scientific truths. Their agenda is clear: to get you to click, typically with an outragey clickbait headline that reinforces your favorite narrative.

You need to learn the difference between debating someone and shouting at them that they have no argument, no logic, no evidence, and ill motivations. I can think of a couple other things you also need to do, but I’ll keep it PG.

I laugh in your face. This article has a clear agenda, not me.

Here’s that last paragraph. Microsoft’s finding actually sounds like it does have the disruptive factor: people are trained to use AI and then it is removed. And finally, finally in the very last sentence of the entire article we get the one piece of information that’s been missing the entire time: doctors perform better with AI help, but then worse than ever without it.

My conclusion? Let people have AI and perform better with it.

Carpenters trained on power tools will suddenly perform worse with hand tools than carpenters who were never given power tools. But if they are given power tools, they can build homes faster.

No shit?

The findings are also in line with a study Microsoft published last yearthat looked at cognitive decline among knowledge workers, which found that the more people lean on AI, the worse they perform when asked to work without support. It also echoes a study out of Poland, which found that while doctors are better at spotting cancer risks with AI assistance, they perform worse than the no-AI baseline once that assistance is removed.

Changing the terms of the test in the middle of it, without warning, is disruptive. I’m not convinced it “fried their brains.” The same would happen with a calculator suddenly removed during the middle of an exam.

Some of them are actually realizing that the computing resources needed are more expensive than the human workers. Once these companies stop fucking around and start charging real prices, this will be more obvious.

Ah yes, “synthetic users.” This is being pushed at my job as well. We’re supposed to use AI to design the next feature for our website, then ask AI “users” what they think of it.

That’s not our entire vetting process - it’s supposed to replace someone just writing down an idea and saying “I think this is good.” And I agree that just firing from the hip like that is dumb. We want our product managers to do more research into their ideas before they get greenlit to be built.

The question is whether AI “synthetic users” add anything of value. The team that put this tool into service noted it has a “positivity bias,” aka “you’re absolutely right!” So we feed it an idea we think is good, and it says oh yes it’s very good.

It’s read every customer email we’ve ever received and every user research report ever conducted by our human UX researchers. But it’s still just not that useful. I think AI is very useful for summarization, searching, and collation of information, but this goes beyond that, asking AI to imagine it is a person and then come up with things to say about an entirely novel concept. And AI is not good at that.

It’s not necessarily that. It’s more like, if I configure my phone to silence notifications for an hour on the weekend, there’s a chance either through my own fuckup or the settings being so complicated that come Monday morning I will miss something from work.

I don’t know why people are losing their minds over the concept that someone might want to get away from their phone for a while.

Well in part it’s just being perceived that way. The car will decide if you’re drunk somehow becomes government surveillance. The App Store will ask for proof of age: government surveillance. And so on.

I’m not saying that this is a false interpretation but certainly it’s leaned on extremely hard in the way people report on and talk about these things. Hence why you get the sense that everyone everywhere is suddenly completely about government surveillance.

I think we could have a whole conversation about drunk driving and the efficacy and fairness of this kind of measure without even cracking the lid on government surveillance. But no one wants that. Nope, if it isn’t a direct descent straight into Fascism, it doesn’t get clicked on.

As far as I’m concerned, Tom Waits solved ticket scalping back in 1999. He did two shows in my area on the Mule Variations tour. When you bought tickets, you could only buy two, and you had to give a name. Not an id, just a name. And then at the door, you had to show ID. You would anyway because it was a 21-and-up show, but the name on the ID had to match the name on the ticket. They didn’t scan shit. Just the doorman glanced at the name, and compared it to what was printed on the ticket. You could buy as many pairs of tickets as you wanted under the same name, but you couldn’t then sell them to people because their ID wouldn’t match at the door.

Simple. Non invasive. It worked. The show was amazing.

There is a difference between authoring and submitting, right?

Also, having buttons on your clothes is an abomination. Hooks and eyes only.

What accountability has there been for bad code by humans?