- I'd wager two things:
1) Mosseri himself will still continue to enjoy the benefits of a flexible / remote enabled work / life balance that he is now denying his employees. Standard rules for thee not for me type BS that is typical of "Executives." I've worked for a couple larger corporations / organizations, and at both it was painfully obvious that the rules for us rank and file types categorically did not apply to the senior leadership. We were expected to "Tighten our belts" and "Do more with less" while the executives were flying around the world in their corporate jets going to "Conferences" and "Galas" or whatever, while spending the companies money lavishly on their own personal comfort. It's the same with remote work, executives love it for themselves, but deny it to the regular employees who actually make their lifestyles possible.
2) Mosseri himself, and members of Instagram's board and / or major shareholders have significant investments in commercials real estate.
The bottom line for me is this whole "Back to the office" nonsense is 100% driven by the wealthy capitalist class being heavily invested in commercial real estate. I, though no fault of my own have known a couple billionaires reasonably well in the past (Both from the same family), and they were both heavily invested in commercial real estate. The CEOs and their investors who keep prattling on with their BS about "Productivity" or "Collaboration" are the same people who own most of the commercial real estate, and all they actually care about is protecting the value of their investments, as if everyone starts working remotely, there wouldn't be much need for all these fancy corporate campuses and office parks, and the value of their investments would decline as result.
- Very telling / depressing that literally 3 out of their top 4 highlighted examples of the "Amazing" features this browser provides are just ways to help you be a good little consumerist drone and buy more crap you don't really need and that won't actually make you happy from some approved list of vendors that are likely paying openAI to promote their products.
Personally, the notion of using some kind of AI glorified "Virtual shopper" where the AI doesn't actually work for me but rather some greedy, soulless megacorp is beyond dystopian. I have literally no way to tell if the products being recommended to me are actually the best products for my needs (Or if I even need the products in the first place) and the AI companies certainly don't seem keen on disclosing whether or not they are being paid to promote the products they are "Recommending."
At least when I do a web search for a product there's clear information available to delineate the ads from the organic results, but from everything I've seen thus far there is precisely nothing being done to protect consumers and disclose when the "Product recommendations" being given by these AI agents aren't actually what would best serve the consumer (Ie., the best or cheapest products), but are rather just whatever crap some company is paying the AI company to promote.
The fact none of these AI companies are even talking about how they are going to protect consumers and provide disclosures when the products they are recommending are nothing more than thinly veiled ads is very, very telling. The current advertising rules don't really apply as the regulators are way behind the curve with AI technology, and the AI companies certainly aren't going to be pushing for the rules to be updated to include AI product recommendations themselves, as they will happily con, deceive and lie to their customers if it means they'll make more money.
- AI of the sort that will be sold via subscriptions or monetized through advertising (Or something similar to advertising yet even more insidious that is still yet to come) will be the exact opposite of a "Friend," it will in fact be your enemy, though it will dress itself in the vestments of friendship all the same.
"Friends" don't manipulate you to maximize profits for nameless third-party corporations, though that is precisely what these "AIs" are being built to do. They are not your "Friend" they are corporate employees, pretending to be your friend in service of corporate profit, and every "Friend" like behavior they exhibit will be carefully crafted to maximize their manipulative potential in order to get you to do more of whatever makes them money.
AIs will deceive, manipulate and outright lie to you to get you to buy consumerist crap the companies who own the AIs are being paid to promote, and they will bend, distort and break the truth to promote the sociopolitical biases of the companies who own them and various nefarious corporate and state actors who pay them to do so on their behalf.
People think AI is going to help them find the best deals on a flight or a new car, whereas what will actually happen is the AI will just recommend whatever airline or automaker the company who owns the AI is being paid to promote. People think AI will help them find the truth, but in reality it will just peddle whatever lie the company behind it is paid the most to perpetuate. People think AI will provide them the connection and companionship so sorely lacking in the modern world, but in reality it will just serve to isolate them further, whilst merrily manipulating them to buy crap they don't need and that won't make them happy.
AI is not going to be anyone's friend, it is going to be yet another tool of class control and wealth extraction used by the ruling elites to ensure their power and privileged is protected. AI is going make the rich richer, the poor poorer, and will likely destroy whatever is left of democracy in the process.
And yes, sure people can "Roll their own" AIs and hopefully have some control of the technology in order to mitigate the problems I mentioned above, but this is functionally irrelevant, as 99%+ of AI users are not going to be people with the technical skill to implement their own AI on their own devices, but will rather be using Chat GPT or whatever other AI as a subscription or "Ad supported" AI as a service type things that come after it. I have yet so see a single consumer facing at scale AI company that's actually selling a user owner / controlled and self-hosted AI product, as all the AI gold-rushers realize that's not where the money is. The money is in scaling a platform to replace Google and selling ads through that platform just like Google does.
- Guess the child born into abject poverty in a war-torn country in sub-Saharan Africa who died before their 5th birthday due to malnutrition and disease just didn't properly prepare or have enough ambition then right?
Classic survivorship bias BS.
The privileged always think the people on top got their through their hard work and ambition, and those on the bottom just lacked the strength of character to succeed and give no consideration whatsoever to the structural / systemic conditions created by those on top to ensure they remain there, and no consideration paid to how said conditions disproportionately negatively impact those on the bottom.
Must be nice to sit all the way up there on high and look down on the world with such a smug sense of superiority.
- $400 USD for a $50 Japanese stainless steel blade, and what amounts to the guts from a $10 electric toothbrush.
I mean I get that you spent some R&D money on developing this thing, but selling something direct to consumers at 10X the BoM cost is abhorrent.
- Some context it seems a lot of folks in these comments have missed is that the off grid folks apparently use 1/120th of the town's water, yet contribute 15% of the town's water revenue. So effectively they are subsidizing the towns water system while using an insubstantially tiny fraction of the towns water, and even then the townies shut them out for reasons.
- The #1 reason I would never EVER use any of these AI agents or browsers or whatever, is despite what these companies may say, they don't work work for ME, the work for the corporations who own them, and those corporations don't give a single f*ck about any of us, all they care about is money.
That means if I want to buy a widget, and I ask the AI to find me the best deal on a widget, the AI agent isn't actually going to find me the lowest priced widget, but rather the widget that makes the most profit for the AI company and whichever widget maker has paid the AI company the most money to have their AI promote it.
There will be zero transparency and accountability around any of this, and all the AI agent / browser companies will claim their AIs are working for their "Users" but like everything else these days they'll actually be working for whichever sleazebag scammer or deep pocketed mega corp that's willing to pay them the most money to shill their products, as there's just far too great an incentive to lie, cheat, steal and deceive, and if capitalism has taught us anything, its that principles get tossed in the bin ASAP as soon as real money gets involved.
- Its not just Rotten Tomatoes, the vast majority of so called "Reviews" the average consumer sees these days are being manipulated in service of corporate interests.
Amazon's full of paid reviews for scam products, so called "Independent" review sites like Wirecutter are basically just advertorial hosting platforms now, or are even secretly owned by the companies who's products are being "Reviewed," 99% of YouTube reviews are nothing more than sponsored content that regurgitates press release talking points from companies who provide the reviewers free products, Google and Yelp reviews of local businesses have an entire manipulation industry built up around them (Just Google "Yelp review service" to see what I'm talking about," and the sad reality we live in now is most anywhere you go, most so called "Reviews" you see these days are either from bots or corporate shills.
We officially live in the "No trust" era and its only going to get so, so much worse from here.
- They are far less interested in stopping crime than they are in ensuring the wheels of the capitalist world-eating machine remain sufficiently greased.
The primary role of the police after all is to protect capital, not people.
Shutting down a port would cost the billionaires (who donate to the politicians who are in charge of the police) money, so its much preferable to the police and those in positions of power over them to let the crime run rampant so long as the ports keep operating so that the billionaires profits can flow unimpeded.
- Fortunately the kind of AI generated images as described in this article is broadly against real estate board rules across most of North America.
At least where I live, you can use AI to put furniture in empty rooms and to remove temporary objects from photos (Like cars in front of a house, or photos from a wall inside the house) but pretty much every other type of AI generated imagery is strictly prohibited and will result in substantial fines and potential loss of their license if an agent is caught using them.
- The depressing reality is none of these people actually believe in their vaunted missions or purposes or whatever nonsense they spout to justify the exploitation of their employees, they believe in money, and are willing to say and do absolutely anything to get it.
- "We don't believe in work life balance, we believe in exploiting our employees."
- What a shock, the guy who works for Trump and at a bunch of right wing think tanks thinks UBI is a bad idea.
I'm sure there's no political bias or cherry picking of data to support a predetermined conclusion going on here whatsoever.
- The thing that really boils my blood with these generative AI services, is they are essentially creating throw away, algorithmically generated content that no one else is ever going to use (In this case music) but they expect you to subscribe to their services and pay them literally forever to use the schlock their algo churns out.
It just feels so profoundly wrong and exploitative of both the artists work the models have been trained on, and the users actually using these services, that some generative AI uses a few cents worth of electricity and a few more cents of allocated overhead to spit out a song, yet the user is then expected to pay $20 a month or whatever, forever, if they want to use that song in a say a YouTube video.
If I pay an algorithm to make me a song, I should own the copyright to that song, not the company that made the algorithm, and it should cost like a dollar at most. Until someone can offer a service that works this way, or I can implement my own self-hosted algorithm that can do this for me, I have less than zero interest in these kinds of services. They are a ripoff of the highest order, and actively hostile to their users in terms of their predatory pricing models.
- Sounds like the new owners of this already morally and financially bankrupt company are going to go bankrupt all over again if they are trying to pull this kind of scam bait and switch on their small and shrinking user base.
- While I'm sure lower construction costs would provide some positive benefits for society, all I see when I look at these sorts of efforts to transition to factory built modular housing is yet another massive wealth transfer from the working class to the capitalist class.
I live in a relatively rural place in Canada where residential construction is on of the primary drivers of the local economy and one of the last bastions of well paying local jobs. You start shipping in a bunch of these "Microfactories" or transition to prefab construction done offsite in some "Megafactory" somewhere, and you put a heck of a lot of people who are supporting families and spending their incomes in my local community out of work.
Rather than a whole town's worth of construction workers swinging hammers making a decent local buck, you now have a scant few foreign billionaires capturing most of the profit in the residential construction value chain. We're being sold the concept on the bullshit promise "Cheaper houses" but all we're going to get is the enshitification of the construction industry, as like with everything else, once startups and VCs get involved in an industry, a few people make billions, but everyone else ends up worse off.
The framers, dry-wallers, concrete pourers, etc. aren't "Retraining" to be "AI prompt engineers" or whatever bullshit we're being fed will be the "Jobs of the future" either, they are going on government assistance or taking minimum wage retail jobs, never financially recovering from the loss of stable, relatively well paying local jobs, and ultimately pulling their families and entire communities down with them.
Meanwhile 1/100th as many people as have been put out of construction jobs around the world are now employed in a few factories owned by billionaires, who then use their wealth to influence public policy to engage in regulatory capture of their industry, and entire swathes of communities become soulless cookie-cutter corporate suburbs of identical, shoddily built pre-fabricated "Homes" that were designed to maximize corporate profits, not for people to actually enjoy living in.
I see the writing on the wall here, as between robotics / automation, economies of scale and VCs pouring billions into businesses that will operate at a loss while they gobble up market share, I definitely think we're going to see a pretty rapid transition to factory built pre-fabricated homes in the next couple decades, as traditional local scale builders just aren't going to be able to be cost-competitive, but from where I'm sitting this is a terrifying rather than hopeful proposition, as at least where I live, it's not going to make housing any cheaper, but its definitely going to put A LOT of people out of work, and we don't really have anything else for those folks to do, so while it is almost certainly inevitable, the transition to pre-fabricated construction is going to absolutely decimate my community and a great many communities just like it around the world.
- Yeah this reads as a total puff piece to me too.
Seems to really want to paint a picture of the king as a pious, diligent, man of the people, yet it only leaves me with the impression that what was intentionally omitted is the true nature of the man.
Just like any officially sanctioned biography of Trump would omit his late night reality TV binge watching, his gorging on fast food and his raping of children, this account embellishes Charles' best qualities while utterly ignoring his worst, so it is of no historical value whatsoever in terms of understanding who he truly was.
- The thing you're missing here is that the automakers have spent billions upon untold billions of dollars lobbying politicians and on PR campaigns targeted at the public to convince people that literally the ONLY way American cities could possibly exist is in a form that is utterly dependent upon the automobile.
Transit ridership in the US was higher in the 1950s than it is today and it was the automakers that killed public transit. They literally bought up popular and profitable public transit companies just to shut them down so people would be forced to drive.
The problem isn't "Consumerism" it's a culture of car dependency that's largely the result of intentional action on the part of the automakers to grow and protect their profits.
The reason there's so much auto loan debt in the US is people literally HAVE TO OWN a car just to get to work to support their families in the vast majority of US towns and cities. People don't want to go into debt just so they can buy some shitty fucking KIA so they can sit in traffic for two+ hours a day so they can get to one of their three minimum wage jobs, but when the alternative is being unemployed and homeless, a lot of folks will do what they have to do to provide for themselves and their families.
- And there are literally thousands of times more examples of oral histories not matching historical events. A broken clock is right twice a day, but that doesn't mean we should rely upon it for timekeeping.
Any country that has only ever really been able to choose one of two political parties who both represent the interests of wealthy elites above all else can't really call itself a "Democracy."