this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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OpenAI has stated its scanning users' conversations (as if they weren't already) and reporting conversations to the cops in response to the recent teen suicide I mentioned a couple days ago.
So, rather than let ChatGPT drive users to kill themselves, its just going to SWAT users and have the cops do the job.
(On an arguably more comedic note, the AI doomers are accusing OpenAI of betraying humankind.)
Mentioned it on bsky, more externalizing of the costs of their product. And due to vpns will not even work in a lot of cases. (And also prob gdpr illegal).
They bet humanity's future on the premise that very rich people would keep promises.
This seems very stupid to me.
(On an arguably more comedic note, the AI doomers are accusing OpenAI of betraying humankind.)
The last open letter was funnier. Even though "[t]he stakes could not be higher," this one doesn't even have Yud going on a promo tour talking about all of humanity dropping dead from diamondoid bacteria that ChatGPT will order from Fiverr after going foom.
Ethan Marcotte's given his thoughts on the new "America by Design" web page, noting how its shittiness aligns perfectly with the Trump administration's values.
So the fucking Cracker Barrel rebranding thing happened. I'm going to pretend this is relevant here because the new logo looked like it was from the usual "imitating Apple minimalism without understanding it in the least" school of design. They've confirmed that they're not moving forward with it, restoring both the barrel and the cracker to the logo, so that's all good. That's not what I want to talk about.
No, what's grinding my gears is the way that the rollback is being pitched purely as a response to conservative "antiwoke" backlash, and not as a response to literally nobody liking it. This wasn't a case of a successful crusade against woke overreach, this was a case of corporate incompetence running into the reactions of actual human beings. I can't think of a more 2025 media dynamic than giving fucking Nazis a free win rather than giving corporate executives an L.
Note I dont know what a cracker barrel is irl, as we dont have them here. But my view of the bsky socials was 'rebrand sucks, dont really care, wow why are the right so obsessed over this' culminating in people talking about how these kinds of stores are a simulacrum of a cozy mom n pop store and people are unknowningly mad about losing even the simulacrum, and how this is all due to capitalism. (More commercialization than capitalism imho, but capitalism did speed up the process). Just as rainbow capitalism will betray you in the search for more profit so will cozy capitalism.
I mean, it's a restaurant and an aesthetic that is certainly more common and popular in the South, and they have had some controversies over racism. Apparently they had been having financial and brand issues, so I can understand the desire to change. But rather than changing the food or improving the service in any meaningful way it seems like they went for the new logo and image and stopped there. Given that their existing audience was basically there for the wholesome old-timey please-don't-ask-about-the-racism vibes I'm not shocked that conservatives in particular were upset about the change. But like, the change was never about wokeness or whatever it was about aesthetic modernization and a flailing attempt to fix things from business idiots who don't know how to address the actual problems of mediocre food and fading relevance. If anyone had actually liked the change or if it had actually improved their service times then maybe there would be a point. But this was just a bad change and nobody outside that boardroom actually liked it, and so of course it got rolled back.
@Soyweiser @techtakes The correct term for the type of capitalism that enshittifies its product should be "crapitalism".
I think I mentioned Doughboys in this sack somewhere, so talking about CB is fair game
new zitron https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-bubble-2027/
I like how Zitron does a good job of distinguishing firm overall predictions from specific scenarios (his chaos bets) which are plausible but far from certain. AI 2027 specifically conflated and confused those things in a way that gave it's proponents more rhetorical room to hide and dodge.
Zitron taking every opportunity to shit on Scott's AI2027 is kind of cathartic, ngl
I like how he doesn't even bother debunking it point by point, he just slams the very premise of it and moves on.
it's a long one and right behind paywall there's a
Table Of Contents
How I Am Justifying "Guessing"
NVIDIA, And What Will Happen Soonest
Nevertheless, NVIDIA Will Accelerate The Collapse If Its Stock Falters
Big Tech's Bubble Burst Moment Will Be When Growth Slows
Capital Expenditures Are The Next Thing To Go
CoreWeave — A Timebomb For The Markets and AI Writ Large
How Does CoreWeave Collapse?
The End Of AI Startup Funding
How The Collapse Of Funding Begins — A Scenario (Chaos Bet)
Costs Are A Brewing Scandal In Generative AI — Another Chaos Bet
The Curious World of Anthropic and OpenAI, And My Own Suspicions About Their Businesses
How About Anthropic's Costs?
An Important Note: Anthropic and OpenAI's Costs Are Dramatically Underrepresented Because Neither Company Pays For The Construction Of (Or Owns) Their Infrastructure
Questions About OpenAI's Revenue And Costs
OpenAI Is Using Cal State's "Edu" Contracts To Pump Its Paid Business User Numbers — And It's Unclear How Long It Keep A User In Its Numbers
What About Government Contracts?
OpenAI Is Using "$1 for a Month" Subscription Deals On Teams To Juice Business User Numbers — And Offering Deals For ChatGPT Plus For $10-a-month To Stop User Churn (REMINDER: OpenAI Loses Money On Every User Anyway)
I Believe OpenAI's Costs Are Worse Than They Seem — Where Is All The Money Going?
OpenAI Will Burn At Least $3 Billion On Salaries In 2025, And May Spend As Much As $8 Billion — With Any Layoffs Guaranteeing An Industry-Wide Panic
Compute Costs Are Likely Astronomical, Burning At Least $15 Billion — If Not $20 Billion — In 2025 Alone
OpenAI Is Bleeding Out, And Could Run Out Of Money By End Of Year
Chaos Bet: Microsoft Kills OpenAI By Blocking Its Non-Profit Conversion
Even If Microsoft Agrees, OpenAI Does Not Have Enough Time To Convert To A For-Profit By The End Of The Year
Chaos Pick: OpenAI Does Not Convert, And Does Not Receive More Money From SoftBank
Alternate Chaos Pick: OpenAI Does Convert, But SoftBank Can't Get The Money
How Does OpenAI (or Anthropic) IPO?
I Believe Both OpenAI and Anthropic May Be Overstating Revenues And User Numbers, Using The Media To Launder Their Reputations
What Happens Next?
So Why Did You Say 2027?
RE: (meta?)speculation about the quantum bubble. So the preceding two tech bubbles tried to worm their way into the arts: NFTs, and slop. How do we think the quantum hucksters are gonna try co-opt craativity?
Lots of woo and mysticism already has a veneer of stolen Quantum terminology. It's too far from respectable to get the quasi-expert endorsement or easy VC money that LLM hype has gotten, but quantum hucksters fusing quantum computing nonsense with quantum mysticism can probably still con lots of people out of their money.
No idea, but the big problem area to look out for imho is when it gets matched with quantum woo again. And if people manage to link that to computers.
Quantum as a concept doesn't really have any way to co-opt creativity that I can see - its a rather "science-y" concept in the public eye, far away from anything associated with the arts.
Probably won't stop the hucksters, though - they'll happily make shit up if it means butting in on artists' turf.
Automobile advertising
At the risk of doing some "founder mode" idiot's homework for them, impermanence is inherent to a lot of artforms, and I can see some insane and vague pitches to use quantum to "capture the magic moment". Or maybe they tie it back into NFTs with quantum technology that comes up with every variant of the bored chimpanzee at once.
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