"At this point, it doesn’t matter if tech executives and VCs believe their own hype and wild claims about what’s next for AI — though I firmly believe that they genuinely buy into the things they’re preaching and chugging their own kool aid — because they’ve made the grand pronouncements, they started their cults, and they promised a future of AGI-powered wonder. They sold equity to investors who give them billions every year, and those investors now expect steady double-digit percentage returns."

A fun (and hopefully concerning) take on the AIification of everything.

Obviously the causation can’t be explained here, but there is unsurprisingly a correlation between employee happiness and company performance.

The question then becomes: does a company with happy employees perform better, or do better-performing companies treat their workers better?

The question of "pride" in relation to the employee/employer relationship comes up a lot in internal surveys, in my experience. This paper seems to seek to take a fairly technical approach to understanding the importance and impact.

It does raise the more general question though: what does it really mean to be proud of your employer?

The Mozilla Foundation has released their latest annual report -- covering the time up through December of 2022 (Mozilla's reporting always lags by one year) -- and something peculiar leaps out of the data:

• The compensation of the Mozilla CEO has skyrocketed (by millions)
• While the Mozilla revenue drops
• And the Firefox Marketshare takes a nosedive
• While, at first, this seems ridiculously lopsided... perhaps it actually makes sense.

"The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself."

A rant that's pretty much about how money-grabbing idiots are slapping AI on any old shit. We all know who they are.