Geffen succeeded with a gift of $100 million to Lincoln Center and — perhaps more importantly — Lincoln Center paid $15 million to Fisher’s descendants so they would not sue. What that means is that the most prominent cultural organization in New York City lit $15 million on fire so that Geffen’s name would be on a concert hall.

No they did not lit them on fire, they payed of people.

In order to lit money on fire you need to buy something - like servers, electricity - and then just waste it. For example by running crypto schemes.

But they make up for it in volume!

In the famous locomotive competition where Rocket beat Novelty (or was it the other way around?), other locomotives also participated. Some broke down and one was disqualified for containing a horse instead of a steam engine. Feels like there are lots of hidden horses today, and they are rewarded instead of disqualified.

When I run into "Climate change is a conspiracy" I do the wide-eyed look of recognition and go "Yeah I know! Have you heard about the Exxon files?" and lead them down that rabbit hole. If they want to think in terms of conspiracies, at least use an actual, factual conspiracy.

Jason Kint writes a thread on how Google spun - and publications printed their spin - on a recently lost case: https://xcancel.com/jason_kint/status/1836781623137681746

If you already are very cynical about tech journalism (or the state of journalism in general), it might be nothing new except confirmation from the internal documents of Google. But always nice to see how the sausages are made.

Isn't this just Snow Crash again? Can't these techbros read another book, we already have the Meta verse and it wasn't that popular in reality.

"Because we got paid, cause we got paid, cause we got pa-aid!"

To the tune of "Then I got high" by Afroman.

Crowdstrike offers 10 USD gift cards as apology.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/

Those that try to use them find out that Crowdstrike can't even buy gift cards at scale.

Ah, but checking the actual grade gives a correct answer. Who wouldn't want to change that for a statistically likely answer?

Gates also mentioned that AI will be a good force in providing better health care and tackling climate change, in particular by calling nuclear fusion energy a clean alternative to fossil fuels.

Ah yes, fusion. With the wealth of data we have from - checks notes - stars and bombs, the applied statistics machines will surely be able to extrapolate working fusion reactors.

Don't know what we need Gates for. Surely an AI should be able to spout this bullshit?

I think it's a good one to hand people who just vaguely has picked up something about existential threat. Short, funny, and gets to the point of the existential threat stuff being a smoke screen for crapification and redirection from climate change.

I have noted two AI companies going belly up with earnings in a year matching costs per month. So I assumed that was around the worse case scenario, and for not yet bankrupt AI companies earnings were probably a bit better, perhaps just losing ten times their earnings.

I now see the flaw of my reasoning. Capital isn't allocated on profits, it's allocated on hype. Having profits draws the company down because it's no longer pure hype, and thus doesn't contribute to the hype bubble the same way.

So existing, not yet bankrupt, AI companies probably has significantly worse cost to income ratio than twelve.