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#siliconvalley

7 posts7 participants0 posts today

theguardian.com/technology/202

#SiliconValley seems to have finally wised up to the fact that trying to lure consumers through actual good products is for losers. They now have only two ideas - force-feed consumers to rip them off directly and sign ginormous contracts with governments to rip off taxpayers (aka consumers).

The Guardian · xAI announces $200m US military deal after Grok chatbot had Nazi meltdownBy Nick Robins-Early

Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor

It is the tech oligarchs, not young radicals, who have turned against the system that made them.

liberalcurrents.com/marc-andre

"Andreessen and the tech reactionaries were not betrayed by 'American-hating communists' backed by the 'Democratic machine;' they simply could not be content to be merely rich."

Liberal Currents · Marc Andreessen Is a TraitorIt is the tech oligarchs, not young radicals, who have turned against the system that made them.

Gizmodo: The Hidden Cost of OpenAI’s Genius. “According to a recent report from The Information, OpenAI revealed to investors that its stock-based compensation for employees surged more than fivefold last year to an astonishing $4.4 billion. That figure isn’t just large; it’s more than the company’s entire revenue for the year, accounting for a staggering 119% of its $3.7 billion in […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/12/gizmodo-the-hidden-cost-of-openais-genius/

ResearchBuzz: Firehose | Individual posts from ResearchBuzz · Gizmodo: The Hidden Cost of OpenAI’s Genius | ResearchBuzz: Firehose
More from ResearchBuzz: Firehose

The Register: Folks aren’t buying the PCs that US vendors stockpiled to dodge tariffs . “Total PC shipments in the US will increase by just 2 percent this year, thanks to Trump’s tariffs and little appetite from consumers for spending on ‘big-ticket’ items, despite the looming end of Windows 10 support.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/09/the-register-folks-arent-buying-the-pcs-that-us-vendors-stockpiled-to-dodge-tariffs/

ResearchBuzz: Firehose | Individual posts from ResearchBuzz · The Register: Folks aren’t buying the PCs that US vendors stockpiled to dodge tariffs | ResearchBuzz: Firehose
More from ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Labour is selling the nation out to the Tech Bros without even a vote on the matter.

Quislings and Appeasers to fascists and fascist enablers.

They want our Youth dangerous and isolated, they want Fascism on every phone screen and Labour isn't going to stop them

theguardian.com/technology/202

The Guardian · UK government’s deal with Google ‘dangerously naive’, say campaignersBy Robert Booth

"The intoxicating buzz around artificial intelligence stocks over the last few years looks concerningly like the dot-com bubble, top investor Richard Bernstein warns.

The CIO at $15 billion Richard Bernstein Advisors wrote in a June 30 post that the AI trade is starting to look rich, and that it may be time for investors to turn their attention toward a more "boring" corner of the market: dividend stocks.

"Investors seem universally focused on 'AI' which seems eerily similar to the '.com' stocks of the Technology Bubble and the 'tronics' craze of the 1960s. Meanwhile, we see lots of attractive, admittedly boring, dividend-paying themes," Bernstein wrote.

Since ChatGPT hit the market in November 2022, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 have risen 54% and 90%, respectively. Valuations, by some measures, have surged back toward record highs, rivaling levels seen during the dot-com bubble and the 1929 peak.

While Bernstein said he's not calling a top, trades eventually go the other way, and the best time to invest in something is when it's out of favor — not when a major rally has already occurred."

businessinsider.com/stock-mark

Business Insider · AI stocks look 'eerily similar' to the dot-com craze, CIO warnsBy William Edwards

"In May, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University released a paper showing that even the best-performing AI agent, Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, failed to complete real-world office tasks 70 percent of the time. Factoring in partially completed tasks — which included work like responding to colleagues, web browsing, and coding — only brought Gemini's failure rate down to 61.7 percent.

And the vast majority of its competing agents did substantially worse.

OpenAI's GPT-4o, for example, had a failure rate of 91.4 percent, while Meta's Llama-3.1-405b had a failure rate of 92.6 percent. Amazon's Nova-Pro-v1 failed a ludicrous 98.3 percent of its office tasks.

Meanwhile, a recent report by Gartner, a tech consultant firm, predicts that over 40 percent of AI agent projects initiated by businesses will be cancelled by 2027 thanks to out-of-control costs, vague business value, and unpredictable security risks.

"Most agentic AI projects right now are early stage experiments or proof of concepts that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied," said Anushree Verma, a senior director analyst at Gartner.

The report notes an epidemic of "agent washing," where existing products are rebranded as AI agents to cash in on the current tech hype. Examples include Apple's "Intelligence" feature on the iPhone 16, which it currently faces a class action lawsuit over, and investment firm Delphia's fake "AI financial analyst," for which it faced a $225,000 fine.

Out of thousands of AI agents said to be deployed in businesses throughout the globe, Gartner estimated that "only about 130" are real."

futurism.com/ai-agents-failing

Futurism · The Percentage of Tasks AI Agents Are Currently Failing At May Spell Trouble for the IndustryBy Joe Wilkins

“The modern-day system of colonialism and sharecropping being constructed by the new East India Company that is Silicon Valley isn’t uncouth or stupid enough to put people in physical shackles. It doesn’t want to own your body, it is content with owning your simulation. And yet, as we have already seen, the more data they have about you – the higher the fidelity of your simulation – the closer they are to owning you.

If this doesn’t sound like democracy, it is because it is not. Surveillance Capitalism isn’t compatible with democracy.

The system we live in today can best be described as a corporatocracy; a feudalism of corporations.

Ours is a neo-colonial age of multinational monopolies.

A digital imperialism, if you will.”

– Me, The Nature of the Self in the Digital Age, 2016

ar.al/notes/the-nature-of-the-

#BigTech #SiliconValley #colonialism #technology #feudalism #imperialism #corporatocracy #capitalism j12t.social/@j12t/114798595701

ar.alAral Balkan — The nature of the self in the digital age

@Remittancegirl

Yes, though I think they're related in that traits can be innate or acquired.

I think we're all vulnerable to that, some are lucky not to be, or lucky enough to be forced to wake up and see it.

Good to hear *your* voice.

I watched an old episode of #SiliconValley last night where Gilfoil created an AI chatbot of himself to avoid tedious interactions. Very funny, and not at all funny now we've reached this point. Plus, begins with Richard addressing Congress and nailing it.

“International Business Machines, and its president Thomas J. Watson, committed genocide by any standard. It was never about the antisemitism. It was never about the National Socialism. It was always about the money. Business was their middle name.”

– Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust

The more things change…

huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocau

#IBM #Holocaust #BigTech #SiliconValley #Google #Microsoft #israel #genocide #apartheid #settlerColonialism #capitalism #neoliberalism #complicity infosec.exchange/@onrust/11477

HuffPost · IBM's Role in the Holocaust -- What the New Documents RevealNewly-released documents expose more explicitly the details of IBM's pivotal role in the Holocaust.

"In her work on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt already warned that totalitarianism flourishes when reality is replaced with a fictional narrative, when facts are drowned in floods of misinformation, thus erasing the boundary between fact and fiction. In this context, AI becomes a tool not for truth or enlightenment, but for totalitarian oppression. Through echo chambers and targeted micro-propaganda, A helps sculpt ideologically engineered realities in which authoritarianism is masqueraded as patriotism.

Tech kings like Elon Musk, once heralded as visionary innovators, increasingly flirt with authoritarian leaning politics. Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) shows how well-known platforms can become playgrounds for far-right ideologies and – indeed - coups. Empowering and normalizing extremist voices, increasing polarization, and framing criticism as censorship, they promote fascist narratives cloaked in the language of liberty.

The role Musk played in the Trump administration also shows how Big Tech is increasingly bolstering a techno-authoritarian vision where corporate power merges with nationalist, fascist-leaning politics."

ieet.substack.com/p/democracy-

IEET’s Substack · Democracy in DangerBy IEET