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Anton Dieckhoff

@antondieckhoff.bsky.social

Reporter bei POLITICO Pro Gesundheit Themen: Langzeitpflege, Krankenhäuser und Public Health

29 Posts97 Follower308 Folgt
Rutger Bregman@rutgerbregman.com · 7mo ago

It's that magical time of year when private jets descend on a Swiss mountain village to discuss climate change and poverty! Anyway, here's my annual reminder. I'll stop posting this when they stop avoiding the real issue: their own massive tax avoidance 💰

Annika Joeres@annikajoeres.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Man hat sich an diese Nachricht so sehr gewöhnt. Aber diese Macht der Milliardäre, diese Ungleichheit, befeuert größte Probleme - Rechtsruck, Klimakrise, US-Autoritarismus, allgemeines Misstrauen. Und sie ist kein Naturgesetz. Also?! www.zeit.de/gesellschaft...

Reichtum: Vermögen von Milliardären legt laut Oxfam-Bericht rasant zu

Die etwa 3.000 Milliardäre auf der Welt wurden seit 2020 um 80 Prozent reicher. Die Hilfsorganisation Oxfam sieht ihren Einfluss als Gefahr für die Demokratie.

zeit.de

Anton Dieckhoff@antondieckhoff.bsky.social · 7mo ago

I don’t think that‘s true. AI has not become that important. A lot of people who want to make money off of it are saying that it is but i feel like most people can still do every part of their work without ai - just slower.

Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app · 7mo ago

talking about AI as a bubble doesn't make sense. AI/tech has become integrated into critical social/financial infrastructure means fall of AI = fall of these institutions. just like govnt's bailed banks during the financial crisis, they will do same with AI so long as AI remains social infrastrctr

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com · 7mo ago

This dearth of ideas isn’t just found in the world’s largest tech companies, but in venture capital, which went from making bets on nascent technologies to funding growth-focused companies with the explicit goal of dumping them via M&A or onto the public markets. www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/

In fact, most of the show felt like companies doing madlibs with startup decks to try and trick people into thinking they’d done anything other than staple a frontend on top of a Large Language Model. Nowhere was that more obvious than the glut of useless AI-powered “smart” glasses, all of which claim to do translation, or dictation, or run “apps” using clunky, ugly and hard-to-use interfaces, all using the same LLMs, all doing effectively the same thing. These products only exist because Meta decided to blow several billion dollars on launching “AI glasses,” with the slew of copycats phrased as being “part of a new category” rather than “a bunch of companies making a bunch of useless bullshit nobody wants or needs.” These are not the actions of companies that truly fear missing the mark, let alone the judgment of the media, analysts or investors. These are the actions of a tech industry that has escaped any meaningful criticism — let alone regulation! — of their core businesses or new products under the auspices of “giving them a chance” or “being open to new ideas,” and those ideas are always whatever the tech industry just said, even if it’s nonsensical. When Facebook announced it was changing its name to Meta as a means of pursuing “the successor to the mobile internet,” it didn’t really provide any proof beyond a series of extremely shitty VR apps, but not to worry, Casey Newton of Platformer was there to tell us that Facebook was going to “strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse,” adding that the metaverse was “having a moment.” Similarly, Futurum Group’s Dan Newman said in April 2022 that “the metaverse was coming” and that it “would likely continue to be one of the biggest trends for years to come.” Three years and $70 billion later, the metaverse is dead, and everybody acts as if it didn’t happen. Whoops! In a sane society, investors, analysts and the media would never trus…All the while, the largest tech firms have continued growing, always finding new ways (largely through aggressive monopolies and massive sales teams) to make Number Go Up to the point that the media, analysts and investors have stopped asking any challenging questions, and naturally assumed that they — and the financiers that back them — would ever do something really stupid. The tech, business and finance media had been well-trained at this point to understand that progress was always the story, and that failure was somehow “necessary for innovation,” whether or not anything was innovative. Over time, this created an evolutionary problem. The successes of companies like Uber — which grew to quasi-profitability after more than a decade of burning billions of dollars — convinced journalists that startups had to burn tons of money to grow. All that it took to convince some members of the media that something was a good idea was $50 million or more in funding, with larger funding rounds making it — for whatever reason — less palatable to critique a company, for fear that you would “bet against a winner,” as the assumption would be that this company would go public or get acquired, and nobody wants to be wrong, do they? This naturally created a world of startup investment and innovation that oriented itself around the growth-at-all-costs nightmare of The Rot Economy. Startups were rewarded not for creating real businesses, or having good ideas, or even creating new categories, but for their ability to play “brainwash a venture capitalist,” either through being “a founder to bet on” or appealing to the next bazillion-dollar TAM boondoggle. Perhaps they’d find some sort of product-market fit, or grow a large audience by providing a service at an unsustainable cost, but this was all done with the knowledge of an upcoming bailout via IPO or acquisition.