Skip to Content
tech

tech

21 posts

Posts tagged with tech

Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in 4 months

Bloomberg reports that the company has instituted a new rule that places a monthly $1,500 cap per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor.

AI fanatics love to say “this is the worst AI will ever be,” but it’s probably also the cheapest it will ever be as it’s subsidized by VC money until they can get people hooked and loyal to brands; bleeding billions as they do. And still, Uber has to put caps on their employees (caps which feel pretty high to me). Just imagine how expensive things’ll be when they have to start turning a profit.

Instagram and Facebook are about to be filled with affiliate content

theverge.com

The new shopping features come a few weeks after a dustup in which influencers caught Instagram adding shopping links to their content without their permission. The “Shop the look” feature added links to cheap lookalike products and not the actual items, an influencer who discovered the feature said. Meta said at the time it was a limited test and that the company was “exploring various changes” to the feature.

I don’t really care about the actual meat of this. It’s already flooded with ads and affiliates and people just trying to make a buck. I think the consistent abuse, exploitation, and misleading of customers is shameful and paying $375m in New Mexico isn’t enough of a punishment.

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...