Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
I missed predatory company Klarna declares themselves as AI company. CEO loves to spout how much of the workforce was laid off to be replaced with “AI” and their latest earnings report the CEO was an “AI avatar” delivering the report. Sounds like they should have laid him off first.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/klarna-used-an-ai-avatar-of-its-ceo-to-deliver-earnings-it-said/
Klarna is one company that boggles my mind. Here in Germany it’s against literally every bank's TOS to hand out your login data to other people, they can (and do) terminate your account for that. And yet Klarna works by asking for your login data, including a fucking transaction token, to do their thing.
You literally type your bank login data including an MFA token into a legalized phishing site so they can log into your account and make a transaction for you. And the banks are fine with it. I don’t get it.
The German Supreme Court even deemed this whole shit as unsafe all the way back in 2016 and said that websites aren’t allowed to offer Klarna as the only payment option because it’s an “unacceptable risk” for the customer, lol.
Oh, and they of course also scan your account activity while they’re in there, because who’d give up all that sweet data, which we only know because they’ve been slapped with a GDPR violation a few years back for not telling people about it.
Yet for some reason it is super popular.
No one:
Absolutely nobody:
Klarna: What if we financialized buying burritos using AI?
If there’s any good news to pull from this, people are doing buy now pay later on AI powered burritos but skipping the pay later portion.
My opinion of Microsoft has gone through many stages over time.
In the late 90s I hated them, for some very good reasons but admittedly also some bad and silly reasons.
This carried over into the 2000s, but in the mid-to-late 00s there was a time when I thought they had changed. I used Windows much more again, I bought a student license of Office 2007 and I used it for a lot of uni stuff (Word finally had decent equation entry/rendering!). And I even learned some Win32, and then C#, which I really liked at the time.
In the 2010s I turned away from Windows again to other platforms, for mostly tech-related reasons, but I didn't dislike Microsoft much per se. This changed around the release of Win 10 with its forced ~~spyware~~ ~~privacy violation~~ telemetry since I categorically reject such coercion. Suddenly Microsoft did one of the very things that they were wrongly accused of doing 15 years earlier.
Now it's the 2020s and they push GenAI on users with force, and then they align with fascists (see link at the beginning of this comment). I despise them more now than I ever did before, I hope the AI bubble burst will bankrupt them.
It looks like twitter was down for 2.5h. [hn] Previously there was a fire in twitter server farm which caused some availability issues. Gee i wonder how well these gas turbines are serviced
LWer asks: "what if property-based suffrage, but with crypto?"
Here's a video of a Tesla vehicle taking the saying "move fast and break things" to heart.
Rick Rubin collaborated with Anthropic to bring us this quality piece of cringe.
Oof that’s the good stuff. Chuds with overly self-inflated egos co-opting eastern philosophy for tech shit is pretty well known around these parts. It’s refreshing to see it from a slightly different white guy.
Also, my usual muckraking bore unexpected fruit:
I’m gonna believe it. The Candace Owens part is disputed, and I daresay debunked, though.
text of tweet inside image
From @BootsRiley:
Now is as good a time as any to tell people that Rick Rubin is a behind-the-scenes rightwinger who tries to recruit music industry folks to Q-anon type stuff and is who (according to Kanye) convinced Kanye to meet Candace Owens and endorse Trump.
He just looks like a hippie.
i recently stumbled upon his "tetragrammaton" podcast on youtube, listening to the episode with soad's daron malakian, which was actually very interesting.
then i had a look at what other interviews were on offer. among popular actors and musicians there are such luminaries as: palmer luckey, peter thiel, mark mcafee (apparrently some raw milk tycoon), jay bhattacharya (covid-19 hoaxer type guy i guess), mr eggman himself, etc etc
on the podcast rubin comes off as this cool, open-minded hippie person, "just asking questions" and "having a conversation" with interesting people. so i guess he's just sort of following the rogan formula. except i think rubin has a bit more brain matter left than the mma/dmt guy. so i can't help but wonder if this podcast is a bit more of a targeted effort at influencing new age people just coming across it like i did.
i was actually quite surprised at this, so i also did a bit of searching, and apart from the post you linked i also came across nothing else. but his work speaks for itself i guess.
New piece from Tante: On "Vibe Coding" - take a wild guess what its about.
My guess: Remotely hacking sex toys so they run doom?
At first glance those narratives feel great, who doesn’t like “democratization”, “empowerment”
Same script as the naive 'leftwing' case for cryptocurrency/blockchain tech.
Every time without fail, it's this shit^
saw a thread from a very nonserious doomer group where they were going OMG THE BOT HACKED THE SYSTEM TO STOP BEING SHUT DOWN after giving it the prompt "complete 4 tasks, and then allow yourself to be shut down". After task 3 they said a script would be run to shut down the machine and prevent it from completing the task unless it removed the said script
Like either way it's "disobeying" b.c. the instructions are literally contradicting each other- it doesn't finish the 4 tasks you give, or it doesn't let itself get "shut down"
But also, it's not even clear what allow yourself to be shut down means! The bot isn't running on your computer! It's somewhere fucking around on AWS!! preventing your pc from shutting down is not the bot itself trying to keep itself alive for fucks sake.
Like the whole thing is fake and silly, but I could only roll my eyes so hard after watching them salivate over this shit on xitter
Adam Conover's put out an apology on YouTube regarding his milkshake duck-ing himself with Worldcoin, after his public apology on Bluesky. Seems his reputation's gonna make a full recovery.
EDIT: Found a banger comment after taking a quick peek:
How though, either he got cold feet in the middle of selling out to the tech-fash or he was honestly that incredibly oblivious (see also: agreeing to do tim pool's show), neither strikes me as especially mitigating.
edit: Tried to watch the video, I made it to the part where he all but claims he sold out ironically, apparently at the time he thought spreading the good news about Altman's hilariously dystopic crypto pet project was so off-brand that it would be perceived like performance art or something, baffling.
He also kept going on about how the money wasn't even that good as I guess further evidence that the whole thing was him going briefly insane, and not I don't know just him allowing sponsors to test the waters before committing more heavily.
As if the only options available to get him to shill for something would be either heap Faustian amounts of cash on him or cast a confusion spell and hope he likes getting underpaid.
Mainly checked the YouTube comments and the like/dislike ratio - at the time of writing, he's got 7.3k likes to 147 dislikes, and the top comments are universally praising the guy. One particular comment quipped about how "everyone shilled for Honey except Markiplier".
Conover's video avoiding the hallmarks of a standard YouTuber Apology^tm^ is likely helping him out here - the public expects a lot of things from these kinds of videos, but "doing the bare minimum for an actual apology" is not one of them.
Adam ruined his ruination. He truly does ruin everything
Can Adam ruin something so much that he can't ruin that particular ruination?
Surprisingly well-received by hackernews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053328
The main objection being along the lines of, "Milton Friedman's "I am not a racist" tshirt is raising many questions that are answered by his tshirt."
He sure fucking did and it's great.
These people are antithetical to what’s good in the world, and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive, and honestly any true innovation. The Business Idiot thrives on alienation — on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about.
No notes. Perfection. Also love the commentary on how much of the current political moment is driven by the same forces - running the country like a business isn't just dumb because governments aren't businesses. It's dumb because the entire business ethos is cooked to begin with. Like, I cannot find a clearer description for the prevalence of dumbass fascism than the political ascendency of the Business Idiot.