I had the same reaction to that paragraph, but the very next paragraph is more compelling:

In another experiment, the authors primed CEOs’ narcissistic self-image by asking them to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the successes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison. Afterward, leaders who’d been primed were more likely to oppose working from home, compared with those who weren’t primed. This, the researchers concluded, suggests a causal link between activating ego and opposing remote work.

Even a stuffed cluck tells the right time twice a day.

The insane things is, in his mind, it’s just smart because his time is too important to waste in meetings. But only him, nobody else is allowed, and he’d be offended if anyone did it to him.

Which is, in a nutshell, the same mental gymnastics every pro-AI in the workplace person does.

This is an incredibly undeservedly positive profile for this company. So many paragraphs here look like they were written by Bending Spoons or are uncritically repeating direct claims by the company.

The company’s playbook has become clear: acquire underperforming but popular tech brands, then transform them to serve millions of users more efficiently through controversial changes to beloved products and substantial workforce reductions. It followed this pattern with Evernote and WeTransfer, and is now repeating it with Vimeo.

…

Despite often being described as a private equity firm, Bending Spoons describes itself more specifically as a company that acquires and transforms digital businesses. Having grown to a headcount of 400 to 500 employees (whom the company calls “Spooners”), its main focus is on making improvements to products and services that others have created.

“Transform them to serve millions of users more efficiently”? “Its main focus is on making improvements to products and services…”?

Awfully strange ways to say their business model is “find companies with entrenched or locked-in userbases and then turn goodwill and inertia into profit by laying off all but a skeleton crew, increasing prices and lowering services and quality.” Good thing that is totally different from what a private equity buyout does.

The US gained basically nothing

You’re forgetting, though, that Trump changed the Epstein news cycle. So since Trump doesn’t understand the difference between him and the “US,” I’m sure he’d disagree with you.

Since now four seems possible, this timeline means we’ll probably lose one of the liberal justices as well for an even 5 picks, and a 7-2 court.

Oh, for sure. Their souls are so black that Anish Kapoor has exclusive rights.

But I wonder sometimes - if they are too stupid to not understand that money isn’t happiness, does it matter? If they wake up every day in that bed of money thinking, “Oh, I’m so glad. Integrity is for those woke morons. Their tears were the perfect seasoning for my caviar, creme fraiche and blini breakfast. Truly I made all the right choices, and was chosen by God,” then does it make a difference?

I know we’re probably not even putting them in a metal box in this lifetime, but dream with me for a moment: If somehow we were able to impose a punishment on them that included the duty to feel shame, we’d probably need to teach them what shame is before they could even serve their time.

Well, which self-fulfilling prophecy should we make?

Article from 2024.

It would be nice if mainstream media reported on this thing that we already know, though, so I appreciate the reminder.

Fox News has never, from its earliest inception, been anything except explicit right wing propaganda. It’s a shame that anyone dirties their brain by watching it.

A Rolling Stone article about Fox News’s rise from 2011 is still the most complete and methodical explanation for how it started:

First, they bought an audience:

In the normal course of business, cable outfits like Time Warner pay content providers like CNN or MTV for the right to air their programs. But Murdoch turned the business model on its head. He didn’t just give Fox News away – he paid the cable companies to air it. To get Fox News into 25 million homes, Murdoch paid cable companies as much as $20 a subscriber. “Murdoch’s offer shocked the industry,” writes biographer Neil Chenoweth. “He was prepared to shell out half a billion dollars just to buy a news voice.” Even before it took to the air, Fox News was guaranteed access to a mass audience, bought and paid for. Ailes hailed Murdoch’s “nerve,” adding, “This is capitalism and one of the things that made this country great.”

Then they filtered every person in the organization to ensure right-wing bias:

Ailes then embarked on a purge of existing staffers at Fox News. “There was a litmus test,” recalled Joe Peyronnin, whom Ailes displaced as head of the network. “He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.” […] If staffers had worked at one of the major news networks, Ailes would force them to defend working at a place like CBS – which he spat out as “the Communist Broadcast System.” To replace the veterans he fired, Ailes brought in droves of inexperienced up-and-comers – enabling him to weave his own political biases into the network’s DNA. To oversee the young newsroom, he recruited John Moody, a conservative veteran of Time. […] the Chairman gave Moody explicit ideological marching orders. “One of the problems we have to work on here together when we start this network is that most journalists are liberals,” Ailes told Moody. “And we’ve got to fight that.” Reporters understood that a right-wing bias was hard-wired into what they did from the start.

And starting 2000, they were directly putting their finger on altering the outcome of elections:

But it was the election of George W. Bush in 2000 that revealed the true power of Fox News as a political machine. According to a study of voting patterns by the University of California, Fox News shifted roughly 200,000 ballots to Bush in areas where voters had access to the network. But Ailes, ever the political operative, didn’t leave the outcome to anything as dicey as the popular vote. The man he tapped to head the network’s “decision desk” on election night – the consultant responsible for calling states for either Gore or Bush – was none other than John Prescott Ellis, Bush’s first cousin. […] On Election Day, Ellis was in constant contact with Bush himself. After midnight, when a wave of late numbers showed Bush with a narrow lead, Ellis jumped on the data to declare Bush the winner – even though Florida was still rated too close to call by the vote-tracking consortium used by all the networks. Hume announced Fox’s call for Bush at 2:16 a.m. – a move that spurred every other network to follow suit, and led to bush wins headlines in the morning papers. […] “We’ll never know whether Bush won the election in Florida or not,” says Dan Rather, who was anchoring the election coverage for CBS that night. “But when you reach these kinds of situations, the ability to control the narrative becomes critical. Led by Fox, the narrative began to be that Bush had won the election.”

Since then, it’s gotten many orders of magnitude worse of course. But as they shift the Overton window rightward, their propaganda also becomes “normal,” and barely worth reporting (which accelerates the shift further, and so on).

Thank you.

And wow, all of those error-failed comments actually posted. Sorry, I’ll try to delete them. The instance has been slow.

I can’t quite tell from the page but I am assuming this aids in pre-training captioning, not in providing captions (subtitles) to e.g. video content?

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Good point. Though even when Woz was involved, he was overruled by one of the model tech narcissists, Jobs. But at least he was in the room.

I think we’ve just created an unregulated system that almost perfectly incentivizes and reinforces evil, so eventually evil is what we get.

Free market capitalism can only serve good with a tight collar and very short leash held by healthy democracy. Maybe it was a bad idea spending 40 years removing and making all leashes and collars for capitalism illegal, and handing the collar and leash to capitalism to put on democracy. But what do I know.

All good, thanks for the suggestion!

I went through something similar and am trying to recall, I think I did look and it was past the time period. I should have tried. It’s +2 years now for me.

Edit: Words.