16 Comments
Mar 6, 2023Liked by Ed Zitron

Another great read, Ed. Can't pledge to support because my wife just got laid off at 7 months pregnant (lol tech industry) and we're tightening our expenses, but know that if I lived in a dual-income household you'd have my support.

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So, Salesforce bought Tableau? That explains why our BI tool became Tableau, a notable downgrade (in both performance and usability) from the Oracle tool we had before. Our senior executives are ex-Salesforce and suddenly all our tools are being ported to the Salesforce platform.

Why do I dislike Tableau? Because it is so slow that it feels like it is running on a Commodore VIC-20 in a closet with a 300baud modem connection.

Nothing like setting a filter and then waiting 10 minutes before it errors out that you are trying to access too much data and barfing

Sorry, this bugs the hell out of me

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Reminds me of my 1st job out of college. I was given the chance to plan my YOY growth and was told it had to be >10%. I did a quick review and saw it had grown 15% the previous year & 20% the year prior. So, using my Econ degree to said, “that’s 38% growth in 2 years! Surely, it’s going to less that 10% this year - 50% growth in 3 years!” I was told if we don’t plan 10% growth, we’ll miss our growth targets & wont get bonuses. That was the year the company declared chapter 11 and had to reorganize. We realized 30% revenue losses.

Unfortunately, no one learned that lesson & companies still demand 10% YOY growth ad infinitum.

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When I was forced out of Slack in 2018, I was devastated.

Took long enough for that silver lining to appear, but wow, has it ever.

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Great insight and commentary. Worth reading everything Ed writes

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Excellent article! I want to recommend Douglas Rushkoff's Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, that goes deeper into the myth of perpetual growth

https://rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/

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I enjoyed reading an article that looks behind the generative AI hype.

On the other hand, I think it would be a mistake to say that generative AI is all hype. I do think that it added (next to nuclear war, climate change, biodiversity loss and democratic decline) to the great dangers our civilization has to urgently address.

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I'm not sure you're helping by referring to ChatGPT as "AI" when it's clearly not. Every couple of weeks I go back to try something new on it and almost invariably I get frustrated by its egregious inability to reason. (Today I started out asking it to write a sonnet about programming in the style of Shakespeare; after pointing out that it didn't scan the conversation devolved into an argument about what iambic pentameter is where it would, in the same response, quote the correct definition from Wikipedia and then give its own definition inconsistent with that, mostly reversing the stresses on the iambs but occasionally giving a yet-different-again incorrect definition. It was very good at apologising for its error before it spat out the exact same wrong definition again and again.)

I am pretty sure at this point we don't have to worry about what is essentially a super-duper Markov chain generator becoming sentient and taking over the world; I'm just hoping that won't cause people to ignore the very serious informational grey goo risk that these generative systems do pose.

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Let's also not forget the way Salesforce conducts their trainings. I've seen them glitter through and ask me about my thetan levels (or something close to it) when I showed an aptitude for their CRM (not bothering to ask if I had ever used a CRM before or even used their CRM).

If I wanted to earn my way into the Salesforce fold, it costs X amount, but then I can level up and include all my friends to get the pyramid version where I can be close to someone who was close to someone who sent an email to the CEO once.

They even had a huge footprint here in Scotts Valley at the 1400 retreat where they would send people to get "leveled up" by the zen Meditation and whatnot.

AI is merely the door to the Eldritch Horror that is Larry, the chartered accountant to the abyss. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

Now, if Salesforce did art generations to allow you to mock up your customers while you mock them with ten tendril fingers, then I am all game for the cult.

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