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Posts tagged with ai

Allbirds, the San Francisco shoe brand that made 'Salesforce Ones,' pivots to AI

American Exchange Group, which entered a purchase agreement with Allbirds earlier this year, intends to “build on Allbirds’ legacy and deliver compelling products to Allbirds’ customers” by changing its name to NewBird AI. The company is set to receive $50 million from an investor, and stocks have soared to $19 per share, up from $2.59 earlier this year.

This feels like the moment when we can officially say AI has jumped the shark. Even as a skeptic, I have to admit the usefulness is real; I've been able to utilize Claude Code to help me make some little web apps and tools for myself, but I don't know how you go from being a huge shoe company—even if you are based in the Bay—to an AI company. Its capitalism run rampant. Everyone's just chasing a dollar rather than working on things that they actually think are important, that they enjoy, or that they want to do. It's the personification of a bad MBA.

Personal Encyclopedias

whoami.wiki

This is when I realized I was no longer working on a family history project. What I had been building, page by page, was a personal encyclopedia. A structured, browsable, interconnected account of my life compiled from the data I already had lying around. I've been working on this as whoami.wiki. It uses MediaWiki as its foundation, which turns out to be a great fit because language models already understand Wikipedia conventions deeply from their training data. You bring your data exports, and agents draft the pages for you to review.

This is an incredible open source project that I love. I've always tried to dabble with tools like TiddlyWiki, Roam, and Obsidian to essentially build my own little personal wiki. This is a tool to help make that happen based off of data that already exists and working with Claude Code (or other AI tools). I wish there was a more user-friendly interface for it, but beggars can't be choosers, and this tool is incredibly cool. It's also really neat to read about how it came to be, this little personal encyclopedia.

Pentagon’s ‘Attempt to Cripple’ Anthropic Is Troublesome, Judge Says

wired.com

Hamilton acknowledged that Hegseth has no legal authority to bar military contractors from using Anthropic for work unrelated to the Department of Defense. When asked by Lin why Hegseth would have posted that, Hamilton said, “I don’t know.”

It’s 100% punitive. You don’t go from using the product and negotiating a new contract to expand capabilities to declaring they are a supply chain risk and can’t be used by any government contractor. It’s ridiculous.

Sora is dead

birchtree.me

What is the Venn diagram of people who thought Clubhouse and Sora were the next big thing, and is it a perfect circle?

I think a big "feature" of the start-up age we've been in since "apps" on our phones became a thing, is people building something because they can, not because they see a practical use for it. Then rich people give them lots of money to help shove it down peoples throats. Obviously, there has been some good to come from it, but overall, we still have this move fast and break things attitude in society where we throw something out there to see what happens without thinking about consequences or downstream effects. This, of course, is partly due to capitalism, but also because people "experience" life a lot less to know how things work in the real world.
Now I'm really starting to sound like a crotchety old man...

🔊 How We Built Monologue for iOS

lucas.love

I just learned that friend of the Variable, Lucas, developer extraordinaire, developed the Monologue app for iOS, taking the initial concept and prototype that was vibe-coded based on the Mac app and turning it into an absolutely killer iPhone app. Still not a huge fan of the extremely AI bullish Every, but knowing that a developer like Lucas, who puts time, care, and attention into everything he does, is working on it now means this app should progress and only improve for the better. I’ve now switched to it from SuperWhisper for all my transcription needs.

🤖 OpenAI amending deal with Pentagon, CEO Altman says

Reuters

Surprisingly absolutely no one with half a brain, OpenAI actually couldn’t fulfill the same deal as Anthropic while holding to the same high standards and principles.

And it’s all of these shortsighted nincompoops that are going to absolutely destroy the economy—and not just the stock market, but the everyday lives of normal folks—along with the idiotic policies, actions, and war (crimes) of the current administration.

I’m rambling and getting a bit off topic now, but we are at the point (and, to be clear, have been for sometime) in a post-capitalistic society where outputs don’t actually matter. Instead what businesses make is irrelevant as all they care about are numbers on a spreadsheet to appease Wall Street. The best ideas or products don’t prevail, just those who have inherited or “created” wealth, sitting on billions of dollars with companies that make billions in profit, but somehow can’t afford to pay full-time employees enough to keep them off of welfare.

It’s almost funny when the right wing made up this fake idea of a “welfare queen” who just wanted to sit at home and collect a check, when, in reality, they created a system where those same people have to work two jobs to survive—working harder than any CEO pencil pusher—while still sitting below the poverty line because of the actual welfare class that was created due out of Regan and trickle down economics.