Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[atomheartbevo 89686]

2 hours ago, Hefeweizen said:

Lesser expensive and lesser issues…

1 hour ago, Sawbonz said:

A critical mass of other EVs will make it a moot point. Tesla already has pilot program for non-Tesla EVs in other countries. I have a feeling they are going to be more of an electricity producer/supplier/storage company going forward 

When I look at what things like Mercedes is doing (their touchscreen/voice-activated display is gorgeous compared to Tesla), I do wonder how much they can keep sales up.

 

[atomheartbevo 89686]

31 minutes ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

You might also find out after working really hard but then getting a new boss who unilaterally decides to cut half the workforce. 

You probably can’t wrap your head around this, but a lot of those 3,700 were hard workers that found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m guessing very few will struggle finding work because, you know, they’re good at what they do.

That’s the crazy thing about Musk trying to force employees to basically sign a loyalty oath that they must work more hours of they want to keep their jobs.

This is 2022, not 1962, when you could do everything that was asked and you had plenty of companies that you could work at for decades - they were loyal to you and you were loyal to them, and many retired after working at just one or two companies.  Here in 2022, the loyalty of companies to employees is practically non-existent - you can make the company plenty of money, show up on time everyday, work extra hours, etc., and some boss or owner can come in and fuck everything up on a whim, because they want a bonus for reducing headcount, or they are hyper-focused on the next quarter or two, rather than year-over-year..  oh, and the moment they figure out they can farm your job out to a much lower-paid contractor or fen some dude overseas, they will do it.  They give no fucks about how much you gave for the company, how well you hit some goals (arbitrary or otherwise).

Tech companies (especially videogame and some SAAS) are probably the worst.

[atomheartbevo 89686]

5 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

I look forward to Elon’s remaining  sympathetic demographic deciding whether they want a Tesla or an electric F150/Silverado Denali.  There are going to be lot of virtue signalers tweeting support for Elon from their Ford trucks.

Yep. Even the Rivians look fine,  the Cybertruck…..somebody watched too much Bladerunner and was looking at late 1970s/early 1980s concept cars.

This was the 1980 Citroen Karin concept car.

https://flashbak.com/the-1980-citroen-karin-reimagines-the-car-as-futuristic-sci-fi-masterpiece-407047/

 

[atomheartbevo 89686]

2.5 minutes worth watching  posted in 2009.

 

Edited November 28, 2022 by atomheartbevo

[Nivek 16943]

Dear God I hope not.
 

Humble Beast is just setting the stage foe the us government bailing out Elon’s companies he drove into the ground.

[Chopper 17236]

49 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

When I look at what things like Mercedes is doing (their touchscreen/voice-activated display is gorgeous compared to Tesla), I do wonder how much they can keep sales up.

 

The way she looked when she sat in the seat makes me think the germans put a little extra massage button function in there.

[Sawbonz 27565]

1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

When I look at what things like Mercedes is doing (their touchscreen/voice-activated display is gorgeous compared to Tesla), I do wonder how much they can keep sales up.

 

That car really start at 75k? RIP Tesla 

[HornOnTheBayou 8931]

On 11/26/2022 at 9:04 AM, Humble Beast said:

 

Nice math.
 

All the hand wringing here about Twitter’s profitability and I don’t think I’ve seen it once mentioned how much reducing headcount will help their bottom line. Only that without all those vital personnel, Twitter won’t make it through whichever weekend. 

Scene: Humble Beast goes to the doctor with some leg pain

Doctor: It looks like you have a nasty ankle sprain. Make sure to keep it iced and elevated and everything should be fine.
HB: No, I want you to amputate my leg.
Doctor: That seems a little rash. Everything will be fine if you just rest and keep some ice on it.
HB: Sure, but I've been looking to lose some weight. Taking off a leg should take care of that.

[G650 14263]

9 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

When I look at what things like Mercedes is doing (their touchscreen/voice-activated display is gorgeous compared to Tesla), I do wonder how much they can keep sales up.

Yeah I almost went Merc for my latest car actually, but stuck with BMW. The IX has a similar screen.

[956 Worldwide 34715]

Hmm, I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that Twitter’s new, smaller anti-propaganda team can’t keep up with Chinese bots trying to prevent information about protests from getting seen. Or just happy serendipity? Well, the important thing is that Ye has his Twitter back, that’s the real victory for freedom.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/twitter-china-spam-protests/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1OhpXnvu_RCI5RRMh85F0b5fvR-mkAbDON4Yx5Uj77hldgeavzOlvrOog

Quote

Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.

The result: For hours, anyone searching for posts from those cities and using the Chinese names for the locations would see pages and pages of useless tweets instead of information about the daring protests as they escalated to include calls for Communist Party leaders to resign.

 

Why isn’t anyone talking about the COST SAVINGS at the new, engineer-driven Twitter 2.0? After all, why does a global free speech platform need (checks notes)…a functioning China influence analyst team.

 

Quote

In mass layoffs and resignations, Twitter’s overall staff has been slashed from about 7,500 to roughly 2,000, surviving employees estimated. Some groups, including those dealing with human rights issues, safety concerns and deceptive foreign influence operations, have been reduced to a handful of people or no staff at all.

Sunday’s campaign was “another exhibit where there are now even larger holes to fill,” the ex-employee said. “All the China influence operations and analysts at Twitter all resigned.”

 

 

 

 

[Post Oak 20232]

Can't or won't?

[HenryJames 66081]

[Hefeweizen 5324]

His crack pipe must be in his hand.

[immamac 42857]

1 minute ago, HenryJames said:

I don't really understand why anyone thinks anything about this tweet. It made me laugh. That's an obvious replica of a gun from team fortress and it doesn't even have a trigger. The caffeine free diet coke (which I drink caffeine free coke zero) is also hilarious. 

[956 Worldwide 34715]

3 minutes ago, immamac said:

I don't really understand why anyone thinks anything about this tweet. It made me laugh. That's an obvious replica of a gun from team fortress and it doesn't even have a trigger. The caffeine free diet coke (which I drink caffeine free coke zero) is also hilarious. 

(Maybe) the world’s richest man, who is a titan of industry and allegedly trying to create a trustworthy free speech platform, is shitposting to get attention. It’s bizarre behavior. 

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

10 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

That’s the crazy thing about Musk trying to force employees to basically sign a loyalty oath that they must work more hours of they want to keep their jobs.

Do you even cult, dude?

What you wrote below your sentence is all on point, but save for the visa workers, anyone who stays IMO either has compelling reasons that encumber their job search elsewhere or they are wholly bought in to what he's selling. Given Musk's behavior and methods displayed over time (prior to the twit buy), it is not my cup of tea. High risk, low reward unless one is named Musk or is able to spin off the name association into one's own start up is IMO the FAAFO that seems to lead to an Icarus level sunburn or a lot of simmering rage once the blinders are off.

[SimonBolivar 10958]

12 hours ago, Incredulity said:

Si

If what?

[Francisco 2.0 32395]

10 minutes ago, immamac said:

I don't really understand why anyone thinks anything about this tweet. It made me laugh. That's an obvious replica of a gun from team fortress and it doesn't even have a trigger. The caffeine free diet coke (which I drink caffeine free coke zero) is also hilarious. 

In the grand scheme, it means nothing.  However, if the CEO of any other large multinational firm did this, people would begin to question their sanity.

People are already questioning Elon's sanity, so that's a wash.  However, Elon is also wanting advertisers (and others) to take Twitter (and by extension, him) seriously.  Shit like this doesn't help.

 

 

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

12 minutes ago, immamac said:

I don't really understand why anyone thinks anything about this tweet.

I'm thinking if that's his bedside table he must have to go to the bathroom a lot in the middle of the night.

[atomheartbevo 89686]

19 minutes ago, Hefeweizen said:

His crack pipe must be in his hand.

4 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

I'm thinking if that's his bedside table he must have to go to the bathroom a lot in the middle of the night.

I like that he doesn’t feel the need to hide his brass butt plug, but surprised it’s not gold.

[NoName 16353]

22 minutes ago, immamac said:

I don't really understand why anyone thinks anything about this tweet. It made me laugh. That's an obvious replica of a gun from team fortress and it doesn't even have a trigger. The caffeine free diet coke (which I drink caffeine free coke zero) is also hilarious. 

the gun (Diamondback) is a promo item for the Spy in TF2 from one of the Deux Ex games.

that said, Elon used to play a good bit of TF2 - here is all you need to know: he was an engie main.

19 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

(Maybe) the world’s richest man, who is a titan of industry and allegedly trying to create a trustworthy free speech platform, is shitposting to get attention. It’s bizarre behavior. 

he's been shitposting on Twitter for well over a decade at this point.

[texasdago 7573]

41 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

The reality is a bunch of mouthbreathers are going to see that and think... "look Mabel, he loves guns, freedumb and garbage soft drinks like us!!!!"

That's just Elon's version of US Weekly...

 

[fattyflattie 4639]

His coaster game is weak af. 

[wildcat09 29355]

Caffeine free cokes are true sicko shit and that bedside table looks like the countertop in a hotel bathroom.

[Nivek 16943]

16 minutes ago, fattyflattie said:

His coaster game is weak af. 

It is his best feature.

[956 Worldwide 34715]

12 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Caffeine free cokes are true sicko shit and that bedside table looks like the countertop in a hotel bathroom.

Agreed on that, WTF?

[Armybrat 40850]

Maybe he thinks he’s George Washington?

[Goredho 17408]

12 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

That’s the crazy thing about Musk trying to force employees to basically sign a loyalty oath that they must work more hours of they want to keep their jobs.

This is 2022, not 1962, when you could do everything that was asked and you had plenty of companies that you could work at for decades - they were loyal to you and you were loyal to them, and many retired after working at just one or two companies.  Here in 2022, the loyalty of companies to employees is practically non-existent - you can make the company plenty of money, show up on time everyday, work extra hours, etc., and some boss or owner can come in and fuck everything up on a whim, because they want a bonus for reducing headcount, or they are hyper-focused on the next quarter or two, rather than year-over-year..  oh, and the moment they figure out they can farm your job out to a much lower-paid contractor or fen some dude overseas, they will do it.  They give no fucks about how much you gave for the company, how well you hit some goals (arbitrary or otherwise).

Tech companies (especially videogame and some SAAS) are probably the worst.

Yep, if you can be replaced for something cheaper, you will be.  Tangential thread hijack ensuing...

Everyone at my job is all atwitter (pun intended) about Github's CoPilot, which uses AI to generate code from natural human language.  "Open a csv file and convert each row to JSON with attribute names equal to header values" and it spits out code in your chosen programming language that will do just that.  It's AI is trained on all the code repositories on Github, and also leverages your use of it as a digital coding assistant to continue to train its model.

It speeds up some repetitive tasks for sure, and the people using it are getting some things done faster.  It is still somewhat crude and needs human oversight, but it is not inconceivable that at some point it's continued training leads to it being a good enough code monkey that some (most?) human code monkeys are no longer needed.  It will probably hit the outsourced workforce first, but if/when the outsourced workers are all replaced by lower cost AI code monkey options, it will start to eat away at US tech jobs.

The people I see embracing and using this don't seem to realize they are willing participants in automating away tech jobs.  Individuals getting more done in less time means the company can maintain the same throughput with less human engineers.  Your training of the AI to do what you do is training your non-human replacement.  It's like auto factory workers in the 1960s training the robots that would start to replace them en masse in the 1970s.  Tech nerds are bedazzled by the technical coolness of AI writing code for them while executives above them twiddle their handle bar mustaches while contemplating the potential cost savings opportunity.

It's probably poetic justice, given it has been the tech nerds who have been the foot soldiers in the war of automation against American workers.  But how does the mass of the population earn a living in a post-post industrial capitalistic society where even skilled labor has been automated away?

[fattyflattie 4639]

1 hour ago, longhornmatt said:

The richest man in the world’s interior decorator is apparently a hospital.

That reminds me. Didn’t he sell all of his houses except one in SF and one tiny home in south Texas?  Maybe that’s why he furniture is lol. 

[NoName 16353]

3 minutes ago, fattyflattie said:

That reminds me. Didn’t he sell all of his houses except one in SF and one tiny home in south Texas?  Maybe that’s why he furniture is lol. 

yup, he sold 7 of his houses in CA for like 120-130m and has vowed to "own no house"

https://news.sky.com/story/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-sells-all-of-his-seven-homes-after-vow-to-own-no-house-12566747

[MeerkatBong 115]

Saw this objective analysis from a newsletter I subscribe to (bold emphasis mine):

 

--

Twitter, of course, has not gone down (although there do at times seem to be oddities consistent with some sort of degradation, but it’s hard to know to what extent this is a sort of psychosomatic suspicion of bugs that have always existed), and Musk is bragging about record users and engagement. That, though, doesn’t solve the issues I have raised around monetization and regulators; the advantage for Musk, though, is that those are no longer the expectations: simply staying online is now seen as a Musk victory.

This isn’t the first time we have seen similar dynamics, of course: there is sometimes a tendency to imagine the worst possible outcome and to proceed as if it is an inevitability, and then, when that outcome does not come to pass, more moderate concerns are discredited in the wash. Like, for example, a potential degradation in service, or, as I have been writing about, concerns about monetization and regulatory action. Those are still real concerns — and to be fair, I suppose Twitter could forget to renew a security certificate or something — but it seems to me that the hysteria of last Friday has, counter-intuitively, increased the chances that Musk succeeds because it already seems like he has.

What I have not seen much discussion about is the positive impact on Twitter’s financials of all of Twitter’s layoffs and resignations. According to Platformer Twitter had 2,700 full time employees as of last Monday; that’s down from 7,500 at the end of last year (there were also a reported 4,000 contractors let go). Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that 20% of Twitter’s Cost of Revenue, and 80% of Research & Development, Sales & Marketing, and General & Administrative were salaries:

2021 (in thousands)	Total Costs	$ Salary	Salary Costs
Cost of Revenue	$1,797,510	20%	$359,502
R&D, S&M, G&A	$3,007,010	80%	$2,405,608
Total			$2,765,110
Employees	7,500	Average	$368,680
Post-Layoffs	2,700	Total	$995,440

Again, these are very rough estimates, but I think it is reasonable to assume that Twitter’s employee costs have been cut significantly, leaving its total annual costs at around $3.0 billion (excluding last year’s lawsuit settlement); add on the company’s reported $1 billion in interest payments and the company needs to come up with $4.0 billion a year in revenue. 2021 revenue, meanwhile, was $5.1 billion, and remember, Twitter had around $6 billion in cash pre-buyout. In other words, while I suspect Twitter’s ad revenue has been impacted, it will take a pretty large impact to drive the company bankrupt.

Edited November 28, 2022 by MeerkatBong

[SydneyCarton 48108]

1 minute ago, MeerkatBong said:

Saw this objective analysis from a newsletter I subscribe to (bold emphasis mine):

 

--

Twitter, of course, has not gone down (although there do at times seem to be oddities consistent with some sort of degradation, but it’s hard to know to what extent this is a sort of psychosomatic suspicion of bugs that have always existed), and Musk is bragging about record users and engagement. That, though, doesn’t solve the issues I have raised around monetization and regulators; the advantage for Musk, though, is that those are no longer the expectations: simply staying online is now seen as a Musk victory.

This isn’t the first time we have seen similar dynamics, of course: there is sometimes a tendency to imagine the worst possible outcome and to proceed as if it is an inevitability, and then, when that outcome does not come to pass, more moderate concerns are discredited in the wash. Like, for example, a potential degradation in service, or, as I have been writing about, concerns about monetization and regulatory action. Those are still real concerns — and to be fair, I suppose Twitter could forget to renew a security certificate or something — but it seems to me that the hysteria of last Friday has, counter-intuitively, increased the chances that Musk succeeds because it already seems like he has.

What I have not seen much discussion about is the positive impact on Twitter’s financials of all of Twitter’s layoffs and resignations. According to Platformer Twitter had 2,700 full time employees as of last Monday; that’s down from 7,500 at the end of last year (there were also a reported 4,000 contractors let go). Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that 20% of Twitter’s Cost of Revenue, and 80% of Research & Development, Sales & Marketing, and General & Administrative were salaries:

2021 (in thousands)	Total Costs	$ Salary	Salary Costs
Cost of Revenue	$1,797,510	20%	$359,502
R&D, S&M, G&A	$3,007,010	80%	$2,405,608
Total			$2,765,110
Employees	7,500	Average	$368,680
Post-Layoffs	2,700	Total	$995,440

Again, these are very rough estimates, but I think it is reasonable to assume that Twitter’s employee costs have been cut significantly, leaving its total annual costs at around $3.0 billion (excluding last year’s lawsuit settlement); add on the company’s reported $1 billion in interest payments and the company needs to come up with $4.0 billion a year in revenue. 2021 revenue, meanwhile, was $5.1 billion, and remember, Twitter had around $6 billion in cash pre-buyout. In other words, while I suspect Twitter’s ad revenue has been impacted, it will take a pretty large impact to drive the company bankrupt.

Lots of assumptions in there. Now why doesn't you add in the debt service. 

[wildcat09 29355]

Lol, "objective." 

[MeerkatBong 115]

5 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Lots of assumptions in there. Now why doesn't you add in the debt service. 

Good question, the author doesn't explicitly say why not added in the debt service for total annual cost of 2022 (FY23), but I am guessing it's because it was a one time cost and it was reconciled in 2021. Per the link back (you need a paywall, it's a newsletter, but I'll copy/paste here, bold emphasis my own):

 

Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations. That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders. The company also does not appear to have a lot of extra cash on hand. While it had about $6 billion in cash before Mr. Musk’s buyout, a large portion of that probably went into the cost of closing the acquisition.

These numbers are deceiving; in December 2021 Twitter made a $809.5 million payment to settle a shareholder class-action lawsuit for having allegedly misled investors about user engagement metrics in 2015. Without that payment Twitter’s 2021 cash flow from operations would have been $1.4 billion, which is, needless to say, enough to cover its debt burden. This shouldn’t be a surprise, by the way: while I am sure the banks regret agreeing to fund Musk’s horribly overpriced acquisition, it is silly to think that they would have committed more money than Twitter as currently constituted could afford to pay.

[MeerkatBong 115]

3 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Lol, "objective." 

okay? Is Ben Thompson some known media bias weirdo? This is the newsletter: https://stratechery.com/

[F250 28777]

1 hour ago, Goredho said:

Everyone at my job is all atwitter (pun intended) about Github's CoPilot, which uses AI to generate code from natural human language.  "Open a csv file and convert each row to JSON with attribute names equal to header values" and it spits out code in your chosen programming language that will do just that.  It's AI is trained on all the code repositories on Github, and also leverages your use of it as a digital coding assistant to continue to train its model.

When CoPilot ingests my shitty Python code on Github.

[956 Worldwide 34715]

1 hour ago, Goredho said:

Yep, if you can be replaced for something cheaper, you will be.  Tangential thread hijack ensuing...

Everyone at my job is all atwitter (pun intended) about Github's CoPilot, which uses AI to generate code from natural human language.  "Open a csv file and convert each row to JSON with attribute names equal to header values" and it spits out code in your chosen programming language that will do just that.  It's AI is trained on all the code repositories on Github, and also leverages your use of it as a digital coding assistant to continue to train its model.

It speeds up some repetitive tasks for sure, and the people using it are getting some things done faster.  It is still somewhat crude and needs human oversight, but it is not inconceivable that at some point it's continued training leads to it being a good enough code monkey that some (most?) human code monkeys are no longer needed.  It will probably hit the outsourced workforce first, but if/when the outsourced workers are all replaced by lower cost AI code monkey options, it will start to eat away at US tech jobs.

The people I see embracing and using this don't seem to realize they are willing participants in automating away tech jobs.  Individuals getting more done in less time means the company can maintain the same throughput with less human engineers.  Your training of the AI to do what you do is training your non-human replacement.  It's like auto factory workers in the 1960s training the robots that would start to replace them en masse in the 1970s.  Tech nerds are bedazzled by the technical coolness of AI writing code for them while executives above them twiddle their handle bar mustaches while contemplating the potential cost savings opportunity.

It's probably poetic justice, given it has been the tech nerds who have been the foot soldiers in the war of automation against American workers.  But how does the mass of the population earn a living in a post-post industrial capitalistic society where even skilled labor has been automated away?

Bigger side-track: if you look at old Industrial Revolution up to almost jet age fantasies about automation and tech, they almost uniformly predict a world where we live in a land of plenty, work fewer hours, share the benefits, and devote ourselves to family, leisure, hobbies, creativity. 
 

Now even liberals are asking “how can we all survive if we aren’t forced to do something we don’t like for most of our waking lives.” 

[Surly Bevo 24971]

[Goredho 17408]

2 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Bigger side-track: if you look at old Industrial Revolution up to almost jet age fantasies about automation and tech, they almost uniformly predict a world where we live in a land of plenty, work fewer hours, share the benefits, and devote ourselves to family, leisure, hobbies, creativity. 
 

Now even liberals are asking “how can we all survive if we aren’t forced to do something we don’t like for most of our waking lives.” 

I think those jet age fantasies imagined a world where the profits and cost savings were not consolidated into so few pockets.  I think liberals are asking that question within the context of living in a capitalistic thunder dome.  Your increasingly menial job may increasingly suck, but you still need money to pay rent, or a mortgage, for your food, or for your kids braces, and so on.  A more accurate picture of having automation and tech becoming fully endemic in our society could be more accurately viewed under a 183 overpass a couple years ago.

[Fudge Nuggets 19195]

18 hours ago, Hefeweizen said:

Only Dumas es compare the number of hours they work.  That is truly pathetic.

My philosophy has always been if I can get my shit done before 10:00AM and it takes you until 7:00PM then you’re the one that should be fired. 

[GenXer 2881]

1 hour ago, Goredho said:

Yep, if you can be replaced for something cheaper, you will be.  Tangential thread hijack ensuing...

Everyone at my job is all atwitter (pun intended) about Github's CoPilot, which uses AI to generate code from natural human language.  "Open a csv file and convert each row to JSON with attribute names equal to header values" and it spits out code in your chosen programming language that will do just that.  It's AI is trained on all the code repositories on Github, and also leverages your use of it as a digital coding assistant to continue to train its model.

It speeds up some repetitive tasks for sure, and the people using it are getting some things done faster.  It is still somewhat crude and needs human oversight, but it is not inconceivable that at some point it's continued training leads to it being a good enough code monkey that some (most?) human code monkeys are no longer needed.  It will probably hit the outsourced workforce first, but if/when the outsourced workers are all replaced by lower cost AI code monkey options, it will start to eat away at US tech jobs.

The people I see embracing and using this don't seem to realize they are willing participants in automating away tech jobs.  Individuals getting more done in less time means the company can maintain the same throughput with less human engineers.  Your training of the AI to do what you do is training your non-human replacement.  It's like auto factory workers in the 1960s training the robots that would start to replace them en masse in the 1970s.  Tech nerds are bedazzled by the technical coolness of AI writing code for them while executives above them twiddle their handle bar mustaches while contemplating the potential cost savings opportunity.

It's probably poetic justice, given it has been the tech nerds who have been the foot soldiers in the war of automation against American workers.  But how does the mass of the population earn a living in a post-post industrial capitalistic society where even skilled labor has been automated away?

I’m skeptical of ai doing away with dev jobs. At this very moment I’m blocked from testing a downstream issue because the software application won’t let me perform an upstream function. When this happens, I chat with a dev to troubleshoot the upstream issue. Assuming devs go away, explaining this to some ai and having it explain whether it’s a data issue, configuration issue, or some previous deployment failed seems dubious.

[Brisketexan 105152]

1 hour ago, Goredho said:

But how does the mass of the population earn a living in a post-post industrial capitalistic society where even skilled labor has been automated away?

Thus the question that's been asked around here many times: what are we going to do with our morons?  If we want to expand it to more skilled labor, that's fine.  The point remains that for a society to function, the people in it have to have something to do and to feel valued.

That doesn't mean that we're only happy if we're working like mules 80 hrs a week for shitty pay.  But there's basic human dignity in work, and it also feeds a broader utilitarian and egalitarian goal and need -- if all we have is a handful of kings and hundreds of millions of peasants who fight over the scraps, that's not a sustainable model (nor is it a good or decent thing, and that matters as well).  This is some digression from the thread topic, but maybe not.

Elmo is not advancing any social good.  He is a strident proponent of oligarchy -- just pay attention to what he says and actually does.

[MeerkatBong 115]

55 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Lol, "objective." 

I'm waiting on your ruling here on if this source can be considered objective and bias-free. I'd like to know what is wildcat-approved for business news consumption that isn't mind-warping. In that vein, do you have any newsletters or dailys that you read for news that you can share that you find to be objective?

Edited November 28, 2022 by MeerkatBong

[elguapo 4586]

[wildcat09 29355]

28 minutes ago, MeerkatBong said:

I'm waiting on your ruling here on if this source can be considered objective and bias-free. I'd like to know what is wildcat-approved for business news consumption that isn't mind-warping. In that vein, do you have any newsletters or dailys that you read for news that you can share that you find to be objective?

This isn't hard, making up "very rough estimates" that don't appear to be based on anything at all isn't objective.

[Captainant 27679]

2 hours ago, Goredho said:

Yep, if you can be replaced for something cheaper, you will be.  Tangential thread hijack ensuing...

Everyone at my job is all atwitter (pun intended) about Github's CoPilot, which uses AI to generate code from natural human language.  "Open a csv file and convert each row to JSON with attribute names equal to header values" and it spits out code in your chosen programming language that will do just that.  It's AI is trained on all the code repositories on Github, and also leverages your use of it as a digital coding assistant to continue to train its model.

It speeds up some repetitive tasks for sure, and the people using it are getting some things done faster.  It is still somewhat crude and needs human oversight, but it is not inconceivable that at some point it's continued training leads to it being a good enough code monkey that some (most?) human code monkeys are no longer needed.  It will probably hit the outsourced workforce first, but if/when the outsourced workers are all replaced by lower cost AI code monkey options, it will start to eat away at US tech jobs.

The people I see embracing and using this don't seem to realize they are willing participants in automating away tech jobs.  Individuals getting more done in less time means the company can maintain the same throughput with less human engineers.  Your training of the AI to do what you do is training your non-human replacement.  It's like auto factory workers in the 1960s training the robots that would start to replace them en masse in the 1970s.  Tech nerds are bedazzled by the technical coolness of AI writing code for them while executives above them twiddle their handle bar mustaches while contemplating the potential cost savings opportunity.

It's probably poetic justice, given it has been the tech nerds who have been the foot soldiers in the war of automation against American workers.  But how does the mass of the population earn a living in a post-post industrial capitalistic society where even skilled labor has been automated away?

AWS also has their own version, but for cloud infra as code. Watch out cloud admins, CDK is coming to get ya 👀

 

34 minutes ago, GenXer said:

I’m skeptical of ai doing away with dev jobs. At this very moment I’m blocked from testing a downstream issue because the software application won’t let me perform an upstream function. When this happens, I chat with a dev to troubleshoot the upstream issue. Assuming devs go away, explaining this to some ai and having it explain whether it’s a data issue, configuration issue, or some previous deployment failed seems dubious.

AI code is moreso to create the foundational boilerplate and give you a starting off point that's already mostly ready to go, and then you customize from there. There's not really any pattern of "AI code" that isn't still steered by a human, since neural nets haven't learned the ins and outs and whathaveyous of IaC. Yet

[F250 28777]

10 minutes ago, elguapo said:

Sela Ward filled a restraining order on Brisketexan. Does she hate free speech in America?

 

[HenryJames 66081]

 

[MeerkatBong 115]

9 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

This isn't hard, making up "very rough estimates" that don't appear to be based on anything at all isn't objective.

Ah okay, so I guess any attempt to try and model out business impact (using conservative SG&A benchmarks and assumptions, but admittedly assumptions) by non-biased business reporters is bad pool. But internet posters like briskettexan saying "revenue good, advertisers and layoffs bad, twitter go bye-bye" is considered smart conjecture and objective analysis. cool, cool.

You can just say "I think his assumptions are bad and the model is wrong/bad-- not buying this" rather than call the guys integrity in question, right? Especially since you had zero clue the source.

Edited November 28, 2022 by MeerkatBong

[wildcat09 29355]

It's not questioning his integrity to say his analysis isn't objective. Brisket's isn't either, yours isn't, mine isn't.