Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.

Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don't know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting

The Era Of The Business Idiot

Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)

Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

Results vary wildly depending on the game or situation, mainly depending on how fast the camera moves, and how cluttered or dark the environment is. It does pretty well in cyberpunk when you're walking around the city on a sunny day with a low camera sensitivity, but looks pretty bad when driving in the rain at night. But yeah, I personally wouldn't use lower settings than DLAA unless my framerate is below 30.

Nothing I can do to resist?

Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.

Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.

Gmail? I don't remember when I opened mine the last time...

All what's really remaining right now is a good YouTube alternative.

Google has gotten so fucking dumb. Literally incapable of performing the same function it could 4 months ago.

How the fuck am I supposed to trust Gemini!?

imagine if a company said they're going all in on quality instead

It's basically how any business starts today, whether it's computers, the internet, or the industrialization of processes.

AI is undergoing the same product life cycle, which is divided into four stages. In Stage 1, a company has a novel product, and it's the only one, so the price is usually very high and profits are higher.

In Stage 4, there's fierce competition; the novel product is now available to many companies, the price is usually cheap, and profits are low. Technology companies look for developing sectors to stay in Stage 1 as much as possible and avoid reaching Stage 4.

AI may be between Stage 1 or 2, or perhaps Stage 3 of the product life cycle. Stage 4 is still a long way off, and we'll only say we're in that stage if AI becomes very cheap and very common in society.

Thankfully I’ve been “all out” on Google for some time.

Google did the same thing with Google Plus they went all in on social and it failed miserably

Nothing I can do to resist?

I admire your optimism, but we are pissing in the wind.

Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.

Windows 11 is forcing people to throw away functional computers that Microsoft seems "not secure enough" (it's lacking TMP 2.0)

This means you can get a great deal on one of these "inscure pc"... but in the long run your pc now and tomorrow will have TPM. As time progresses, the use of TPM/attestation will become more and more entrenched in application, web pages, everything. ... and Linux, with its 4% user base, will be left out in cold.

Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.

Currently, many banking apps won't run on Graphene (or any custom firmware) due to attestation.

Graphene issued calls for help, because Google is restricting public access to the latest android source code (I cannot find the links atm).

Gmail? I don't remember when I opened mine the last time...

Today things like "email reputation" make it difficult to host your own mail server, so your stuck paying someone who has a better "reputation".

My point is: today, you and I can resist with some (minor) success, but our days are numbered.

Can confirm. The more you deal with people who have climbed to the tops of corporate ladders, the more it becomes clear that it's all vibes. It's all people telling stories to other people who tell stories about those stories.

The peter principle is wrong - in an oversized corporate structure, there is no upper bound for incompetence. You can keep rising for no reason, because after a certain point other people just trust that you know what you're talking about, and the people that know better work around you instead.

The people beneath you can't trust the people above you enough to explain the situation, the people above you don't really listen to the people beneath you anyway, and so plenty of middle managers just muddle through and constantly make shit up to justify their own existence, while everyone above and below is left in the dark about what's really going on.

Decisions are constantly made by people without any real connection to the consequences, and it shows. With the everything.

the fuck does service now even need AI for?

I hate any company I work for that uses ServiceNow. And now it's getting worse??

“Bad” is SN’s claim to fame. Everybody hates it. Apparently, the worse they make it, the more companies will throw money at them.

In regard to Linux users being left out in the cold.. how so? Do you think that distros are going to start enforcing attestation? I doubt that it will be a hard requirement for most, even in the next decade or two. It's an option, yes, but mandatory?

FWIW, all of my banking apps work just fine with compatibility mode enabled on Graphene. Also, I'm not sure saying it's inevitable is the right way to go, it certainly won't make others care about their privacy and security.

You might be joking but I honestly think that's the case. It's wild to me. I've worked for Fortune 500 companies using SNOW and everybody hated it and regularly voiced complaints and issues and yet the company refused to change. Started doing shit like releasing more training docs on how to use it or doing brown bag lunches on SNOW effectiveness.

But ultimately none of that mattered, it is just inherently garbage.

I find this current timeline so confusing. Supposedly we're going to have AGI soon, and yet Google's AI keeps telling you to stick glue on pizza. How can both things be true?

It was actually a really good product, way better than Facebook, unfortunately if you have a social media platform that's invite only then it's never going to succeed. I really have no idea why they did it like that.

It already has script automation and has had for years so I'm not sure what AI is going to bring to the table.

I assume it's big tech that has this weird ai they try to sell while the scientists are using different ai for real useful stuff, like the protein something I heard. Or at least that's what I'd like to believe.

Well one of the big problems with it is it's never properly configured. One of the most annoying things that it does is that it generates tasks only when previous tasks are closed, in theory that makes sense but really the result is that you close a task, and then you have to go looking in the ticket queue for the new task it's just generated, so you can close that one too. Total waste of time.

It actually makes a lot of sense. AI is a good use case for case management. The problem is how much you depend on it without human intervention, but even humans fuck up, especially if they’re following the same rules and processes that the AI tool would. The AI tool just gets through cases faster, so in theory you can sus out root causes sooner.