The Ring “Search Party” ad is probably the most tone deaf I’ve seen in years given the context of rising racism in the United States. Doorbell cameras can be accessed by the authorities but don’t worry it’ll only be used to find lost puppies. 😉

A fifth co-founder has left xAI. I wonder why anyone would want to leave the world’s top chatbot for generating CSAM and deepfake porn just as they’re merging with SpaceX? 🤔

The fact that there are adults near tears because OpenAI wants to shut down its sycophantic GPT 4o is exactly why they are shutting it down. People developing an unhealthy attachment to being praised by ChatGPT is a recipe for future lawsuits as it encourages them to make all sorts of bad decisions

Instead of AI adopters having a lot more free time because it makes them more productive, they often work harder than ever because they now have a tireless companion that can write code or produce documents past the point when they would have been mentally exhausted.

The uncomfortable topic in Big Tech last year was whether AI actually makes people more productive and will it cause layoffs? This year it’s moved on to since AI makes people more productive, how will it change people’s jobs and will it cause layoffs? My advice remains focus on getting good at AI.

Of all the Super Bowl AI ads, the weirdest was a vodka brand that had an AI-generated ad showing dancing robots drinking vodka that spilled out of their necks. Very reminiscent of both the dot com and crypto era Super Bowl ads.

How it started vs How it's going (Jake Paul vs Bad Bunny edition)

Talk about missing the point when it’s staring you in the face. I was wondering why Bad Bunny had props and a set with electricians on power lines then figured it out when I saw this post. MAGA people are so bad at critical thinking and only good at racism.

It’s funny, I used to wonder about students who use ChatGPT to cheat because if ChatGPT can do the work then why do they need you? Now I realize that question applies to the entire workforce from CEO down to intern.

This is the same tech that all the software engineering influencers on X are telling you to use to open PRs to your codebase without reviewing the diffs.

I thought this Super Bowl commercial was unintentionally hilarious. Asking AI to finish populating a spreadsheet so you can leave work early to celebrate your team winning the Super Bowl is an almost criminal level of malpractice at work. 🤣

The Super Bowl is a window into how much the U.S. economy has changed. I remember when it was mostly ads for cars, beer and stuff you’d find in the grocery store. Now it’s all AI, gambling, crypto (also gambling) and Ozempic.

Mike Tyson is broker than I thought.

Props to the NFL for this half time show. Not only is it a great show, the message is crystal clear.

Surprised Jesus hasn’t had a commercial yet in this Super Bowl. Did he finally give up on us or did he get priced out by all the AI companies?

This is spot on, Moltbook hype is just AI fanboy navel-gazing. LLMs faking Reddit threads is uninteresting. OpenClaw is the real sauce. It showed us what a true personal AI agent looks like; accessing files, photos, & tasks. It’s the smart, integrated assistant that Siri and Google should have been

I was talking to someone about Amazon laying off 30K people over the past few months and their response was that’s relatively small given COVID over hiring. I thought that was insensitive and decided to look up how many people they hired during the pandemic. They hired 500K people in one year. 🤯

I suspect that over time AI will render document reviews at workplaces worthless. Authors already don't read their AI-generated drafts. Some reviewers now use AI to generate questions just to fake engagement. It’s becoming a performative waste of time where only the AI companies actually benefit.

Block has started informing employees that they may be affected by layoffs that will cut up to 10% of its 11,000 employees after performance reviews are completed. We’re now entering the 4th year of mass layoffs in tech and if anything it seems to be accelerating not slowing down. 😕

Claude, and to a lesser extent Anthropic, is having its ChatGPT moment. If you’re an exec or in software, it’s obvious this will reshape how you work. And unlike OpenAI, Anthropic has a credible line of sight to profitability without the employee-drama circus that’s becoming the AI startup hallmark

Hot startups being acquired by Big Tech isn’t new. The Instagram and YouTube acquisitions come to mind as hot startups that sold versus going solo. What is new is that this is happening at the individual co-founder and employee level. Individuals are being headhunted like free agents in sports.

Apple reverses three years of sales declines in China by growing sales +38% year over year with a refreshed hardware design and a new color fans are calling “Hermès orange”. I sometimes forget that iPhones are as much a luxury status symbol as they are technology device.

MAGA saw a Black man become president and decided they’d rather burn it all down than let it ever happen again. There was nothing racist about Obama, he was simply Black. Meanwhile their guy posts videos of the Obamas as monkeys during Black History Month.

It’s somewhat sad to consider how many things that seemed like permanent forms of progress such as globalization, a thriving middle class or white collar work may have been anomalies of the 20th century. AI will definitely reshape and commodify software, marketing and content creation businesses.

Steve Yegge writes about Anthropic’s culture. Nothing concrete, mostly vibes. He says it has that early Google/Amazon lightning in a bottle energy. He notes Google lost that energy when Larry Page pivoted to focus on profits, killed 20% time and suddenly had too many people with not enough work.

It’s funny how few guardrails Trump has shown exist in government. President decides to sell pardons to the highest bidder? Oops, I guess there’s nothing that can be done besides a few mean tweets.

Silicon Valley accurately predicted the vibe coding era.

Lots of product teams are being tempted to save costs by vibe coding a replacement to some SaaS app. Managers on such teams need to ask two questions: what will it cost to maintain and who will train people on the tool? Someone will make a lot of money solving the proliferation of vibe coded apps.

OpenAI has a lot of key challenges that makes this a do or die year for the company. 1. Their AI models are increasingly undifferentiated as too many labs have caught up. 2. Even with raising $100B they are still being outspent by most of FAANG and can’t keep up that fundraising pace annually.

I can't think of anything I'd want to do less with my time than attending a protest against taxing billionaires. This is an insane amount of bootlicking energy.

Is this the first time the media is uniformly calling something Trump did racist? Not even “racially charged” just racist.

On one hand, big tech plans to spend $650 billion on AI data centers next year. On the other hand, the cloud providers (Amazon, Google and Microsoft) have a backlog of customer demand worth $1.1 trillion. AI demand is still quite massive. The only wrinkle being few believe OpenAI can pay its share.

That feeling when you want to folllow someone posting super smart or funny threads and see they already follow you.

Happy Black History Month from the president of the United States of America.

When it comes to AI workers like to point out that LLMs are far more error prone than humans. However businesses ask “Is it cheaper to have people check/fix the errors than having them produce the work?” In many, industries (software, marketing, design, etc) the LLMs are winning that argument.

Anthropic to developers: Claude Code makes you more productive when building SaaS apps. Anthropic to businesses: Our AI agents make SaaS apps obsolete.

Anthropic is like The Joker complaining about Gotham City’s undrinkable water while dumping barrels of arsenic in the water supply. The CEO is constantly in the news about how AI will cause mass unemployment and yet at the forefront of selling AI tools to automate jobs. Brilliant marketing strategy

It’s a terrible time to be someone who pays attention or cares about other people.

EU regulators have ruled that TikTok is too addictive because it shows a never ending stream of videos with a highly effective recommendation algorithm. They argue this harms the well-being of users especially minors. It faces a fine of up to 6% of global revenue as this violates the DSA.

Steve Jobs accurately predicted the future with Siri and then Apple spent 15 years fumbling the execution until eventually giving up and asking Google for help. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

In five years, Apple is either going to look extremely smart or extremely stupid. No in-between.

This post is funny. The reason the r/Bitcoin subreddit doesn’t discuss bitcoin like a traditional financial asset is because there are no fundamentals. The price is based on vibes and FOMO. Being upset that’s all you find on the subreddit is like being upset at finding sand on the beach.

Roblox is such a conundrum to me. The business is still growing fast (Bookings up 63% at $2.22B vs $2.05B expected and daily active users at 144M vs 138M expected). Yet it’s losing more money than ever. It declared a -$315M loss for the quarter versus -$220M the previous year. What gives?

They deleted this when it turned out they read the poll wrong and it's 38% who said their finances are improving and 62% who said it's the same or they're worse off. 🙃

It’s a tough time for a company whose business model is simply “we own a lot of bitcoin” when the BTC price is in free fall. They declared a Q4 net loss of -$12.4 billion compared to $671 million the year before. 😬

While Wall Street now thinks AI will disrupt SaaS apps. I think the reality will be nuanced: 1. Companies vibe coding solutions will hurt niche apps but not major ones. Vibe coding a CRM or HR system to save costs would be madness. 2. Some apps will die because they will just be features of LLMs.

Down -$9K so far today. My condolences to anyone who bought the dip. Better luck finding greater fools tomorrow.

The U.S. economy used to do so well that conservatives had to invent the culture wars and being upset about other people’s genitalia to have something to complain about. Trump has now fixed that by tanking the economy so hard that people now care about paying bills and affordability.

January had the most layoffs announced by employers since 2009. Whether it’s due to Trumpflation or AI taking jobs, it’s now clear we’re in the worst tech job market in over a decade or two.

Nice…