The Tragedy of the Commoner by Hugh Howey

This might all sound theoretical, but it’s actually what’s happening all the time. Every company is trying to increase profits, which means doing more work with fewer costs. Driving down costs means keeping wages as low as the market will tolerate and hiring as few people as required to do all the work. But every company also relies on all the other companies to pay great wages so there are consumers with dollars to spend. Walmart and Amazon might think they are in the business of selling widgets, but they are really in the business of generating wages. Their value to shareholders is measured by profits, but their value to the economy can be measured in how much in wages they inject into the system.

I did not know that Ford paid more wages for his workers and reduced their working hours.

This is the frustrating thing I have with how everyone is behaving wrt AI. Who will buy things when AI is doing everything? Who will buy these services if no one has any money to spend?

Here’s the thing: Walmart and Amazon would be idiotic to do anything other than what they are doing. Overpaying would be suicide. Hiring too many workers would be suicide. There’s zero incentive to do either. What both of them NEED, while they both fight to prevent with union busting, is MANDATED HIGHER WAGES. They both would benefit from a federal minimum wage hike to $30 an hour. It would increase consumer spending. Their profit margins would decrease, but SO WOULD EVERYONE ELSE’S, so there wouldn’t be a better place for investor dollars. In fact, the only way to prevent this gradual gutting of the middle class and the destruction of these business models seeking greater efficiency is for the government to rescue them with higher minimum wages.

Meta’s own AI was exploited to hijack Instagram accounts by Emma Roth

Meta’s AI support chatbot helped hackers hijack Instagram accounts, as reported earlier by 404 Media. In a video shared on Telegram, a hacker shows how they could take over an account by asking Meta’s chatbot to switch the email associated with someone else’s profile and then reset the password.

As more of our world moves to agentic AI stuff, this is both sobering and scary. Also, it was not really as much a hack as asking the Meta bot, hey this is my account, change my email. And it did it.

The AI Bubble — No One's Happy by No One's Happy

The buyers have not learned to manage and the sellers have not learned to price, the two failures meeting in the middle and being reported, in the aggregate, as demand. The buildout is being sized against consumption figures that include their own inefficiency — and the revenue projections required to justify it assume this inflated consumption will grow, not contract, as teams mature and architectures stabilize.

Nvidia announces RTX Spark as ‘the most efficient PC chip ever built’ by Sean Hollister

“This is the most efficient PC chip ever built,” says Nvidia senior director of product management Mark Aevermann — without sharing so much as a single statistic or chart to back that up.

I just loved this turn of phrase.