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Posts tagged with tech

šŸ¤– Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee

Users voted to restrict Anthropic’s Claude to its own channel, but Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a moderator in the Discord, overrode them.

The word of the year might be Slop, but the theme of the year is companies forcing things on their users that they didn’t ask for and do not want.

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šŸ¤– Inside the Creation of Tilly Norwood, the AI Actress Freaking Out Hollywood

Over the next six months, Van der Velden toiled with her 15-person team to nail down the look of her leading lady, creating 2,000 iterations of an actress unbound by the limits of physical ability, age or talent.
In recent weeks, she has signed about 60 nondisclosure agreements for hybrid movies (with real actors), full AI films and Tilly-specific projects, most of them in the $10 million to $50 million range.

This is so embarrassing. It took a 15-person team to ā€œnail down the lookā€??? There are thousands (if not millions) of individual artists who can draw a person with any detail and look you desire. And why would someone pay a human actor $5 million when you can pay an AI actor $50 million. What on earth are we doing here???

šŸŽµ Pay per stream is a messy metric

So I’ll ask again, would you rather have had your music listened to by more people and you earned more money, or would you like to have had fewer people listen and make less money?

I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. The whole point of the conversation is to move people off of Spotify and to other places. If more people move to other streamers, those streamers will start paying the artists more… So if an artist had a choice of where they’d prefer people listen to their music, they’d choose the one that pays more per stream every day. This is even before getting into the real ethical issues with Spotify when it comes to how they do business and the actions of their leadership. Plus, if you have only now heard of Qobuz, then it’s clear this isn’t actually a topic you’ve spent much time on or cared about before… (For the record, I use Apple Music because we pay for Apple One as a family.)

šŸ§‘ā€šŸ’» Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World?

When that happens, companies (especially the VC-backed kind) now need to contrive new and increasingly stick-like reasons for customers to pay again. From made-for-marketing ā€˜features’ that suck to use IRL, to breaking compatibility with older versions, to spamming you with marketing notifications and embedded ads. Their relationship with customers goes from symbiotic to parasitic.

Pirijan, the creator of Kinopio, is always incredibly thoughtful with his approach to building and his writing—this is no exception. Longtime readers will know my distaste for where the economy is going with ā€œventure predation,ā€ and the growth-at-all-costs approach in the tech and financial spaces. As Pirijan notes, it all leads to parasitic relationships. Rather than build the best product that users want to use and pay for, they do their best to look flashy, attract new users, and trap them in their ecosystem.

šŸ†• So many ".new" options

.new - Google Registry
Browse the full list of .new shortcuts available today from Adobe, Spotify, and many more.

I have long been a frequent user of "docs.new" to quickly create new Google Docs. TIL that there are far more '.new' style "action domains" that work in this way. This list of all of the .new shortcuts is super useful – even if .new first rolled out to non-Google entities way back in 2020.

Some of these feel a bit spammy ("New casino blog") and a good number don't work as of this writing but there are some useful gems like "zip.new" to be found.

šŸ¤ž I hope you find something new and useful here!

šŸ¤– San Francisco’s youngest billionaires are betting on a new kind of job boom

When I pressed Foody on his utopian vision, and why he thinks tech companies won’t hoard the spoils of the AI boom, he waved his hand and described a future in which everyone has $10 million in purchasing power, lives in a nice apartment, and works only if they want to.

Oh yeah, because every 22-year-old has vast experience of what it’s like at the workplace for all types of jobs across the country. Problem solved, everyone, you can now work when you want and buy anything you want! It’s getting ridiculous.