Sundar Pee in your Eye

I recently read Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book about working at Facebork. Among many other revelations (like, her boss pressuring her to describe the blood coming out of her vagina from a post-birth hemorrhage - something so awful I wonder why in the hell I’m even telling this other story) she said everybody there constantly let Zuckerberg win board games. So in addition to everything else wrong with him, that pale-to-the-point-of-translucent tiny man gets to think he’s amazingly good at board games.

To her credit, Wynn-Williams kicked the shit out of him at Settlers of Cataan and then even pointed out to him where he fucked up.

vowing to hold off on any future layoffs

He didn’t say anything about holding off past layoffs. Get ready for some retroactive shitcanning.

I just read her book. Holy shit are the Facebook execs vile people. Just to pull one turd from the pile, her boss there was Joel Kaplan, the dude who worked for George W. Bush and was part of the “Brooks Brothers Riot” in Florida in 2000. Wynn-Williams had had a baby that caused an embolism; she had something like 25 blood transfusions and was continuing to bleed for months afterwards. Kaplan would conduct one-on-one online meetings with her in his underwear and pressure her to describe the blood coming out of her vagina.

And that’s just one example of the personal vileness of these people. They also manage possibly the most evil company in world history.

I’m all into tokenmaxxing except that means more money for AI companies.

My dad died last fall and when I called the funeral home we had chosen to come collect the body, the answering service I got was AI. It had a weird accent that wasn’t from anywhere on this planet, strange background noises also not from this planet, and when it read back my dad’s name for confirmation, it said “Bob common name Smith common name?” Like, what in the actual fuck. I should have just hung up and called a different funeral home but I was too shocked by what I was interacting with.

For good measure, their funeral director (who just happened to have the same last name as a character from The Sopranos) kept cracking jokes during our meeting with him, completely ghosted me for a week, and then finally delivered the urn with my father’s ashes in it at 8 PM the night before his interment ceremony. Naturally enough, he left it on my porch and split before I could talk to him.

It is so much fun living in the future.

It’s a fact!

I am actually chickenless and male and I hate life. My name is a Kids in the Hall reference.

Ah yes, Raymond gripping hands with James.

We had a zoom meeting with my elderly mother’s investment adviser recently and expressed our concern about the AI bubble. He of course said he didn’t think it was a bubble; his main argument was “these CEOs are smart people and they’re legally obligated to preserve the financial health of their companies so they wouldn’t be going in for anything that had the potential to be a bubble”. Conveniently ignoring all the other bubbles in history when the CEOs were “smart people”.

I felt sorry for you until you mentioned the Browns. Now I feel really sorry for you. Browns Bros Untied!

Where I live now (Philly suburb) there used to be a local bakery which was beloved, but their landlord raised their rent on them and they had to shut down. The location then sat vacant for about 7 years. I’m no finance wizard, but how does it make any sense to go from whatever their rent was previously to zero fucking rental income? A couple of months ago a fucking Wonder finally opened there, so maybe that explains it – no real business can possibly compete with a company burning through venture capital.

The new GoBlo Yourself.

Corporations hire masses of people to create the illusion of growth. Then they fire masses of people to create the illusion of competence. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

I really wish they’d had the balls and/or the legal power to keep calling it FruityLoops.

a sudo-academic platform

There is no escaping Linux here.

“The board” is mostly just CEOs of other companies. All they have to do is vote for each others’ absurd compensation packages, no smartness required. It’s a true circlejerk.

In my 25 year career as a programmer, a majority of my coworkers did that kind of stuff just by showing up.

8000 people with experience running social media

Is it that hard? As a programmer, I’ve never seen anything on Faceblerk that made me go “wow! How did they do that?”

I kind of agree it’s a multiplier.

It’s definitely a force multiplier, it’s just that the factor after the X can be less than 1.0.

which famously can vary by 4 orders of magnitude

That’s why “Hiroshima” is now a unit. We’re lucky “Tsar Bomba” isn’t.