Mastodawn

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)4d ago

RE: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/116226720041425679

Louder for people at the back:

If ‘AI’ gives you a 20% productivity increase, in an economic system that rewards growth at the expense of everything else, the rational thing for any company to do is use that productivity increase to expand into new markets. This may involve some redundancies because you need different skills for the new opportunities but they will be matched by increased hiring in the other areas. If you and your competitors both see a 20% increase in productivity and you use it to make people redundant and they use it to ship more products in more areas, then they will grow at your expense. Their products will be better than yours and you will lose market share.

If you are claiming that you have redundancies because ‘AI’ is increasing productivity, then one of the following is true:

Your leadership team does not understand market economics (in which case, investors should worry that the board has not replaced obviously incompetent leadership).
You are an unchallengeable monopoly and have already filled all adjacent markets and have literally no possibility of growth (in which case, investors should take note and set their price predictions based on today’s revenue, with no expectation of future growth, which would wipe out over 80% of Meta’s market cap).
You are lying about productivity gains (in which case, investors should worry about what else you’re lying about and should start prodding the SEC to investigate).

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Jordan B. L. Smith 5d ago

@TodePond Maybe you've heard some "1-2-3" music before; it's that niche style of music that you can count to! Toe-tapping is often involved. It's that subset of music sometimes called "music".

I didn't get the job, and I was glad. Maybe they noticed my soul briefly leave my body in that moment, and the way I couldn't quite settle back into "enthusiastic applicant" mode.

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Jordan B. L. Smith 5d ago

@TodePond When I was applying for faculty jobs, my first interview was with a music tech department. At my job talk I explained the work I had just published on jointly performing loop analysis and source separation. The first panelist, trying to understand the limitations of the method, asked me: "So it relies on repetition? So it would only work on '1-2-3' music?"

I'd never heard that epithet before, so it took me a beat to understand. It still boggles my mind that he asked that.

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Jordan B. L. Smith Mar 10

I clicked the story expecting to see theft of *code* front and centre, but the code is open source anyway. It's lamer than that: a very familiar grift involving SEO and domain imitation. OSS has always been vulnerable to attacks like this, but from the point of view of the grifters, GenAI is essential to making it feasible to copy-with-variation at this scale.

Jordan B. L. Smith Mar 10

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@theTangentSpace/116202005587236047

A story of GenAI-assisted theft, that is honest and clear about the nature of what's being stolen: "It would be fine if people were building their own riffs on WigglyPaint’s ideas; they’re just ideas. It would be easy to create something new from these ideas, but the thieves can’t be bothered to add even the tiniest creative spark of their own."

Jordan B. L. Smith Mar 7

PAIGE! 🍁Mar 6

Don’t think I’ve ever seen a difference
where #canada and #usa were polar opposites before.

Jordan B. L. Smith Mar 4

jenny (phire)Mar 3

what the—and I cannot stress this enough—absolute fuck:

"...sensitive and personal footage captured by [Meta Smart Glasses]—including people going to the bathroom, getting dressed, and having sex—is being reviewed by contractors who see all of it uncensored."

https://gizmodo.com/dear-meta-smart-glasses-wearers-youre-being-watched-too-2000728928