I’m not sure which is worse:

• greedy, irresponsible tech bros trying to convince everyone that their pinball machine can fly an airplane.
• people desperate to let the same pinball machine tell them what to do with their lives.

Oh, stop your complaining. It’s not perfect, but we’ve all seen how easy this is to fix. Just barge into Tesla tomorrow and randomly fire 20% of the employees. That’s how real leaders get things done.

/s

I think, “I don’t” would be a better title than, “Yes”.

I read a quote somewhere to the effect, “The successful politician knows the exact time to step in front of the parade and pretend they’re leading it.”

They’re saying “free” email services. What they mean are disposable e-mail services. You go to a website, they provide you with a random e-mail address. You enter that address into the form, check for the verification code on the disposable e-mail site and you’re done with the disposable e-mail. You never visit the disposable site again. Do a search for “disposable email”.

I will never forgive Carley Fiorino for killing HP.

Eventually they’ll start demanding you run their crypto-miners in order to watch a video.

“AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation).

Yup. That was very intentionally done by marketing wanks in order to muddy the water. Look! This computer program , er we mean “AI” can convert speech to text. Now, let us install it into your bank account."

Sure. And AI that identifies objects in pictures and converts pictures of text into text. There’s lots of good and amazing applications about AI. But that’s not what we’re complaining about.

We’re complaining about all the people who are asking, “Is AI ready to tell me what to do so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace everyone that works for me with AI so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace my interaction with my employees with AI so I can still get paid for not doing the one thing I was hired to do?”

Agreed. Unfortunately, one half of our population thinks that anyone in power is a genius, is always right and shouldn’t have to pay taxes or follow laws.

Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.

/s

This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.

Guess this means Apple has run out of ideas on how to make iPhone better.

What can we do to distract attention away from the fact that we don’t have any decent new features?

• “Rename the business unit so we can print new letterheads and business cards?” Our customer don’t work here, sir. “Dammit!”
• “Release a new color that nobody wants? How about a light blue that is so close to the regular silver no one can tell?” We did that last year, sir. “Dammit!”
• “Oh, I know: Repeat the year 2000 mistake by naming our OS versions after the current year using only 2 digits. That will never bite us in the ass in the future.” Brilliant, sir.

So, have any of you ever been in Ikea during a fire alarm?

We were shopping in an Ikea a year or so ago, in the furniture section. It’s just a bit past the entrance to “the maze”. A screeching fire alarm goes off. For about 10 minutes, everyone – including the Ikea employees – just ignore it and continue doing whatever. Then the Ikea employees start saying, “Please exit the store” or somesuch. That’s when I dawns on me that exiting the store is not as easy as it sounds. We could see no marked fire exits. The employees just said the “follow the arrows”.

Everyone knows how hard it is to get through an Ikea at the best of times. What about during a fire alarm? Well, I’m looking for the “shortcuts”, but they are not clearly marked. We do make it to a stairwell (I’ve been in this store a few times) and manage to avoid traversing the entire top and bottom floors. We’re faced with a pair of big doors marked, “Not an exit” or somesuch. We push through those doors and they dump us out at the front of the store, near the registers.

Now we’re at the front of the store, with no idea how to get out. Toward the front of the store, we see some exit doors. We try to push them open, but they’re blocked by carts on the outside. We finally get the carts pushed out of the way and people pour out into a small parking area. Note, that this Ikea has a parking garage under the store, so if the building were actually on fire, we’d be fucked because this second-level parking area we’re standing in is very close to the building and gives no easy exit to the ground and away from the building.

If there was actually a fire with smoke, people would have panicked and it would have been a deadly shit-show getting out.

Fuck going to that Ikea again.

Used to have an admin that would fully spell out every word except ‘pls’.

“pls don’t microwave fish in the breakroom”, etc.

You spell out every other word… is ‘please’ really that hard to write?

They have and will always be most interested in drama, which is easy to fabricate.

Remember all the Reality Shows ™ that took over because they had no scripting and relatively tiny production crews? They took over because they were cheap.

Looks like AI is about to lower that bar yet again.

I legit got an e-mail from Facebook telling me that I should join Facebook because “no one uses e-mail anymore”. Ummmm……well someone must be still using e-mail and No.

Wait. I thought we were going to be replaced with robots. What do they need AI for? To interview the robots?

People keep forgetting that these companies’ product is stock price, not whatever they’re advertising at any given moment.
Their “CEOs” have gotten sloppy because the grift has gotten so easy they naturally assume everyone is in on it. If everyone is in on the grift, there’s no need to lie about it.

Looks like the Oligarchs are serious about crashing the economy.

That sounds like a good plan, except for the cautionary tale of the Golgafrinchams from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Golgafrincham was a planet, once home to the Great Circling Poets of Arium. The descendants of these poets made up tales of impending doom about the planet. The tales varied; some said it was going to crash into the sun, or the moon was going to crash into the planet. Others said the planet was to be invaded by twelve-foot piranha bees and still others said it was in danger of being eaten by an enormous mutant star-goat.

These tales of impending doom allowed the Golgafrinchans to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The story was that they would build three Ark ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B Ark would hold everyone else, such as hairdressers and telephone sanitisers. They sent the B ship off first, but of course, the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

/s