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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. What a year, huh?)
Amazon's latest round of 16k layoffs for AWS was called "Project Dawn" 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. They're not cutting jobs because their financials are in the shitter, oh no, it's because they're just too amazing at being efficient. So efficient they sent the corporate fake condolences email before informing the people they're firing, referencing a blog post they hadn't yet published.
It's Schrodinger's 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 "Amazon axes 16,000 jobs as it pushes AI and efficiency" that are distinctly ambivalent on how 16k people could possibly have been redundant in a tech company that's supposed to be a beacon of automation.
Their financials are not even in the shitter! except insofar as their increased AI capex isn't 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 I'm glad I didn't purely because I wouldn't have then had your vivid hog simile.