Schadrach

Always has been.

Not always. It has been for longer than we’ve been alive, but stock originated as a way to fund merchant voyages - you paid a share of the costs and got a share of the proceeds (in merchandise or in the sale value of that merchandise) when the ship came in.

Literally the origin of the phrase “your ship has come in”.

Then people started speculating over the future value of and trading those shares while the ship was still at sea, then the concept got generalized beyond merchant voyages, etc and here we are where it’s more like the art market where things are worth whatever someone will pay and that value isn’t necessarily tied to anything concrete.

There’s no algorithm to be played in the fediverse.

There presumably is. Some metric decides visibility on the feeds. That algorithm not being based on corporate profitability doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Basically they figured out a way to train AI to recognize Reddit threads going viral and/or predict which ones will, among those which ones will also rate highly in Google results and which will tend to be used as sources by the biggest LLMs and to post in those threads about your whatever you want to generate attention for. So overcomplicated way of automating advertising. Optimized posting to convince LLMs to talk about whatever you want to advertise.

I’ve always said that SEO was always going to happen, Google is at fault for the search optimized and the best result for what the user is asking for not being the same result. We’re now going to start seeing either LLMs sell whatever this tactic gets used on or essentially a sort of adblock being built into LLM training and search APIs to keep it from working, to make LLMs less likely to fall for native advertising/astroturfing.

That’s literally what caused bitcoin mixer services to exist where you throw some amount of BTC in an account with them, tell them how much you want paid to whom, and then it takes all the transactions for a certain (usually random) time period and plays a shell game with them, passing funds from account to account in various amounts and resulting ultimately in the right amount going from you to the target via multiple intermediaries. Slow because it involves a lot of transactions, but the idea was to make it hard to trace exactly who was paying who, beyond being able to know that one or more of the user accounts were paying some amount to one or more of the destination accounts.

Over the last 5 years or so, law enforcement has been shutting down several such organizations for money laundering, being illegal money transmitting businesses or things along those lines as appropriate to the jurisdiction.

Even without them, with good opsec it can be hard to tie a BTC wallet address to a human person, which is the point of anonymous payment.

To be fair, I find the idea of a government outsourcing IT needs to entities under the sovereignty of foreign governments kind of fundamentally problematic to begin with.

So AI is a nice new technological tool in a big toolbox, not a technological and business revolution justifying the stock market valuations around it, investment money sunk into it or the huge amount of resources (such as electricity) used by it.

Specifically for Microsoft, there doesn’t really seem to be any area were MS’ core business value for customers gains from adding AI, in which case this “AI everywhere” strategy in Microsoft is an incredibly shit business choice that just burns money and damages brand value.

It’s a shiny new tool that is really powerful and flexible and everyone is trying to cram everywhere. Eventually, most of those attempts will collapse in failure, probably causing a recession and afterward the useful use cases will become part of how we all do things. AI is now where the internet was in the late 80s - just beyond the point where it’s not just some academics fiddling with it in research labs, but not in any way a mature technology.

Most gaming PCs from the 2020s can run a model locally though it might need to be a pruned one, so maybe a little farther along.

Wouldn’t make a difference. We’ve got him for a bare minimum of at least another year and six days. Otherwise it would count as a term for Vance. They’ll Weekend at Bernie’s his bloated corpse for a year if they have to for that.