Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. What a year, huh?)
Amazonās latest round of 16k layoffs for AWS was called āProject Dawnā internally, and the public line is that the layoffs are because of increased AI use. AI has become useful, but as a way to conceal business failure. Theyāre not cutting jobs because their financials are in the shitter, oh no, itās because theyāre just too amazing at being efficient. So efficient they sent the corporate fake condolences email before informing the people theyāre firing, referencing a blog post they hadnāt yet published.
Itās Schrodingerās Success. You can neither prove nor disprove the effects of AI on the decision, or if the layoffs are an indication of good management or fundamental mismanagement. And the media buys into it with headlines like āAmazon axes 16,000 jobs as it pushes AI and efficiencyā that are distinctly ambivalent on how 16k people could possibly have been redundant in a tech company thatās supposed to be a beacon of automation.
Their financials are not even in the shitter! except insofar as their increased AI capex isnāt delivering returns, so they need to massage the balance sheet by doing rolling layoffs to stop the feral hogs from clamoring and stampeding on the next quarterly earnings call.
In retrospect the word quarterlies is what I should have chosen for accuracy, but Iām glad I didnāt purely because I wouldnāt have then had your vivid hog simile.