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AI is making CEOs delusional

They say it's not an income tax. They say it's an "excise tax on the privilege of earning income." I made a little video to explain how that works. 🎵 If you still don't get it after watching... well, that's sort of the point. #WAleg #SB6346

just picked up this bad boy. can't wait to write some software with it

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@sarahgooding @hnletter Thanks for the kind words and being a subscriber from nearly the beginning!

Huge shoutout to @kale for 784+ issues of the @hnletter. Still the best way to stay on the pulse of what is happening in tech, and more importantly how people feel about it. 15+ years of excellence and still going strong. 💌 Check out the latest issue: buttondown.com/hacker-newslet…

Jack Hughes' social media post after scoring the game-winning goal in the gold medal game 🇺🇸🇺🇸 What a day for American sports fans 🙌 (via jackhughes/IG)

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

Pretty much

@pafuncio_og @Talor_A @hamedmp Yes :) buttondown.com/hacker-newslet…

@Talor_A @hamedmp This one, right? Just to make sure I don't subscribe to a spam one (found this on Google, so you can understand my suspicion). hackernewsletter.com

this is one of the most remarkable technical blog posts I’ve ever read

Very few of us know the people at the tip of the spear. We can make the biggest impact by uniting against the handle, making that behavior far more taboo than it is now.

These papers are fascinating, but my favorite thing about them is they aren't PDFs! They're glorious mobile-friendly web pages with interactive diagrams. I hope everyone else who publishes papers takes note, this us a much better way to share research #dives-multilingual" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attributi…

Alaska’s Passive Aggressive Map of the United States

@jasonfried I called it. 😀 In general, I've never seen general messaging changes for a successful/useful product change anything. I imagine some of that is due to the various "touch points" with the product before they get there? x.com/kale/status/18…

Ok... Results are in and they're ultimately statistically insignificant. Over about 100,000 visits to each variation, "A" won, but by fewer than 100 signups over the next closest variation. Ultimately the order was A, B, C, but again, the margin was exceptionally slim and statistically insignificant. We're rolling with "A" full time for now, but will test additional variations soon. Will also likely test very different opening styles so we're not just comparing words, but also comparing presentation. Thanks for playing!

@jasonfried I would bet zero difference between them.

Everything else on the home page remains the same, which of these three messaging variations leads to the most signups? Variation A "Wrestling" Variation B "Sets you free" Variation C "Get somewhere" We've run one test, and are running another to verify. What's your bet?

Good day to remember just how big that green tree is

🎥 Us Against The World #StingEm 🐝

@austinlouisray I thought you meant the gas station for a second, but I think they're only on the west coast. 😅

been going to Tesoro a couple times a week for six years now and i suppose i’m gonna keep on doing that for as long as possible tbpfh

Here’s a Timelapse of the whole light show, drone show, fireworks and big fog and smoke show from last night in #Seattle. Happy New Year 2024!!! #spaceneedle

I'll second that. I was on the phone with my boss and HR getting the news about being laid off 11 years ago when Ben happened to email his yearly check-in to see if I was interested in joining Mailchimp. Needless to say, I didn't really pay attention to the rest of that call.

@DataNeel @samsquantchhh Watering + Workout? 🤔

@samsquantchhh Unfortunately, some of my plants are way too big for this to work (two 4ft birds of paradise, one 7+ foot fiddle leaf fig)

question for your plantheads why is it that basically no good looking indoor pots come with trays for collecting water?