This world is a joke and we're just watching the punchline.
FredFig
The slightly grimy, cynical tone is very well done, really made me feel like a soulless suit.
I wonder how much M&As still hinge on demos working at this point, isn't it an open secret that every startup is run by hustlers?
actually, this is lampshaded directly here:
seemed slightly surprised that _______ would be acquiring a genuinely pretty valuable company.
I usually dislike the whole line of thinking of "Well, it might not be true, but it tells you something that you believed it."
But, the world in which AI succeeds is the world where every book published is a fake field guide to mushrooms, or a recipe book for shaving cream. And it's like... I dunno, after 4 years of happily proclaiming that this is the thing we're going to sell, why have these guys never considered that fraud is bad, actually. Is fully automated luxury gay space fraud really so enticing?
The bit about how the Bitcoiners won because the number went up is beyond parody.
I skimmed most of it once I had an idea of where this was going, and 13000 words of tone policing is just insanity. "The EA guys are great because they use moderate language and Gerald cackled at how Scott Star Alex had his life ruined by the extremist non-moderates at the NYT."
Looks like this is a follow up to this article from February: https://time.com/6590155/bitcoin-mining-noise-texas/
Over the summer, the company agreed to construct a 24-foot sound barrier wall on one end of the property at the cost of $1 to $2 million. But while the wall reduced sound in some areas, it actually amplified it in others. “To be honest, the complaints have gotten louder for us since the mitigation efforts,” Constable John Shirley says.
Amazing. "We spent some money and made things worse, so I guess we're stuck."
Back in Granbury, the discomfort caused by the plant is causing some consternation for a region that largely prides itself on being pro-industry and anti-regulation. “I agree with people having the right to own a business if it’s not illegal or amoral,” says Granbury resident Wolf. “But when you’re harming a group of people, there needs to be some type of remedy.”
quoted in full without commentary.
This seems incredibly shortsighted even in their own framing. The SEO spammers who care about being on top of Google the most are the ones generating fake AI websites en masse, so wouldn't this just cause immediate AI inbreeding?