ah. they’re saying the quiet part out loud now. that’s great

Microsoft has a new pitch to persuade businesses to spend money on artificial intelligence–powered services: If you use them, you won’t need as many employees.

The potential of AI to replace human workers is an old idea, but one most companies have avoided bringing up explicitly, for fear of suffering reputational harm and political attacks. But as tech companies try to overcome customer uncertainty about the value of AI, they’re becoming more direct about that possible benefit.

[…]

Typically, “these companies won’t say there’s job replacement because it looks bad for their reputation and image, and they don’t want to spark an outcry,” said Lisette Espín Noboa, a researcher at the Complexity Science Hub, a Vienna-based tech policy think tank.

In its new pitch to customers, though, Microsoft is also touting its own savings on labor costs thanks to AI. The company says that using technology from OpenAI, it built internal tools that help salespeople automatically generate customer lists and perform cold outreach, and it separately built a tool to help customer support agents send automatically generated responses to customer questions, allowing them to handle more cases.

Microsoft executives say these tools are a reason the company has maintained its sales growth rate despite laying off 10,000 people last year, and the executives have been encouraging salespeople to use that example to entice customers, according to three current sales employees.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-new-sales-pitch-for-ai-spend-less-money-on-humans

#ai

oh hey its bandcamp friday in 20 hours
what an excellent time to point critters towards our bandcamp page…………….
currently there’s just a bit of bailey’s ambient stuff but expect more to show up there Someday.

https://bestiarysys.bandcamp.com/

today’s reading: Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?:

It’s possible that consumers are happy to have the most minute details of their lives surveilled and monetized in return for seeing ads they might want to click on. This is a hard theory to test, because very few people even know they’re making the trade. However, one organization recently tried to find out. After the European Union’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect in 2018, a Dutch public broadcasting agency started prompting all visitors to its website to choose, in a clear and straightforward manner, whether they wanted their data shared with advertisers. The result? Ninety percent opted out, and the agency abandoned behavioral advertising altogether. (A Google spokesperson notes that all users can opt out of personalized ads, and that Google has long prohibited personalized advertising based on sensitive information.)

All things considered, "openly murdered someone in midtown Manhattan and made a clean getaway" is a pretty strong argument for bikes being the best mode of transportation.

Self-explanatory.

thinking today about this Iceland Socialist Party quote: "What do you think it is worth to keep tens of thousands with a gnawing fear of income, to make it impossible for thousands upon thousands to use their talents, will, creativity and thirst for life to improve their lives and enrich society?"

hell we put shit we DO need in piles. we put shit we think we need in piles?? really we just like piles. the entire concept of a silo is just a pile with reinforced sides so we can make it higher. a quarry is just a reverse-pile so we can create piles out of the stuff we take out. a warehouse is just a pile with labels and shelves. factories take piles and turn them into more piles. a conveyor belt is a horizontal pile

My cuban coworker just hit me with the “my phone is slow can you clean it for me” move but in spanish and I’m like “damn this shit really does transcend every barrier”

protip everyone: if you ever heard anyone talk about electronic voting, whether positively or negatively (but primarily negatively) and they never once mention brazil, their argument is hot garbage and should be thrown straight into the trash.

this post was brought to you by: brazil has been doing country-wide electronic voting for longer than I’ve been alive and the fact that foreigners (primarily americans) think it’s some kind of novel untested idea makes me want to scream.

ten percent luck
twenty percent skill
fifteen percent concentrated power of will
five percent pleasure
ten percent pain
twenty-five percent reason to remember the name
five percent magnesium
two percent caesium wire
three percent mineral oil to prevent metal fire
one percent fats
point eight percent crab
one point three percent distilled essence of gab
point five percent perspiration
point four percent agony
one percent traces of elements such as antimony

so I got a new router for wireless PCVR use (the old one was a huawei with stupid firmware that captive portals everything to its admin page if it detects no connection ._.)

…and now that I’m not limited by the stupid fw, I could test out PCVR on linux with Envision (using wivrn) and wlx-overlay-s

I am happy to report that Shit Works

(arch linux, awesomewm on x11, tested with h3vr on GE-Proton9-5)

The ongoing death of Twitter, many people’s (entirely reasonable!) unwillingness to use the Fediverse, and Bluesky’s (much less excusable!) lack of locked accounts sure make venting online about things of a personal or private nature a bit difficult, lmao.

… …hopefully, our efforts here will, in the medium term, result in something that’s at least as good for that use case as Cohost was. I’m really hoping we can turn this into something that’s, like, at least “thousands of people” kind of serious, but in a way that’s sustainable.

yeet

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#gaming #halo #haloinfinite
also ignore the audio desync

We are supposed to be a democracy, but our mass media has been almost criminal in neglecting the real controversies of our time, preferring instead a mundane sort of pap which ultimately is more dangerous than any opinion because it only serves to stifle thought. In the atomic age, the last thing we can afford is a powerful, thoughtless, and sheeplike “democracy.”

- Phil Ochs, 1967

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#reading #alyazareads

The smollest cat everr

workin on something

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#sketch #furryart (probably the quickest i've sketched something in a while! this maybe took me 15 mins or so, which isn't that fast but it's fast for me so it counts)

terraform (derogatory)

Resident Evil? You mean landlords?

thanks to a helpful fediverse post that shared a blogpost teaching how to run godot games natively on mac I might decide to buy Webfishing. what a relief. it's been upsetting me as a proud fishing fanatic to be UNABLE to play a good fishing game. now I can correct this grievous error.