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bd barone

@bdbarone.bsky.social

42 followers 360 following 40 posts

scifi/humor writer and lapsed tech designer | naarm, australia

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bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 1d

My latest thing in @mcsweeneys.net! www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hi-...

Hi, I’m an Early 2010s Tech CEO

I wear the same T-shirt every day, and I have a relatably unkempt haircut. I remind you of the smart kids from high school, so I give you hope that...

www.mcsweeneys.net

5 23

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 1d

My rage knows no bounds.

McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 1d

"I support things like civil rights, access to education, and medical research. You could never imagine me sitting in the front row at the inauguration of a far-right ruler who promised to destroy those things."

Hi, I’m an Early 2010s Tech CEO

I wear the same T-shirt every day, and I have a relatably unkempt haircut. I remind you of the smart kids from high school, so I give you hope that...

buff.ly

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 1d

My latest thing in @mcsweeneys.net! www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hi-...

Hi, I’m an Early 2010s Tech CEO

I wear the same T-shirt every day, and I have a relatably unkempt haircut. I remind you of the smart kids from high school, so I give you hope that...

www.mcsweeneys.net

5 23

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 2d

The best thing about Miller is that no matter how much power he gets he'll still look someone slapped a shitty 2015 Instagram filter on Gollum.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 2d

The biggest problem for the big AI players is their complete and utter well-poisoning: they announce their dogpiss products are ready for primetime, people use them as if they're perfect, the products shit the bed — and then people just don't trust it ever again.

It is very funny, though.

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bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 3d

I said “cosmic horrors”, not “a bunch of weird-ass dweebs”!

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 3d

A place of pens, paper, and unimaginable cosmic horrors.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 3d

If basically no one went to prison for the whole subprime mortgage thing, no one will for the AI bubble, I'm afraid. That doesn't mean crimes aren't being committed, and I'm sure there's a class action or two against folks like Amodei for their wild lies— I mean, predictions, but that will be it.

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bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 7d

I just used GPT5 to summarize a few documents for me. It hallucinated an extra document that didn't exist. After like 7 minutes of "thinking," it still fucked up.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 7d

What do you mean “start”? This shit is literally being sold to the Trump admin at a discount.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 7d

ai use case

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 11d

Yep! It’s not like you can push out an emergency patch at 2.00 AM. In complex cases, you need to retool an entire production workflow.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 13d

I think the only Mag7s that *can* pivot to robotics are Google, Apple, Nvidia and Amazon. Tesla will probably benefit, but they've kinda already shot their robotics wad.

But Meta and Microsoft are cooked.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 13d

They probably will. The problem will be in private money: it's exponentially harder to rapidly spin-up a robotics startup than it is a GPT or Sonnet wrapper startup. You can't just magically wish into existence the entire manufacturing pipeline needed for complex, physical stuff.

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bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 14d

meta? more like maga? (that a joke about tech and current events)

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 15d

Has anyone actually asked ChatGPT or Claude if it wants our jobs? I barely want my own job, let alone an ethereal, all-knowing super-intelligence.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 15d

Rare that you’ll find me nodding along to a new Bane drop finance.yahoo.com/news/800-bil...

An $800 Billion Revenue Shortfall Threatens AI Future, Bain Says

OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year and prioritizing growth over profit, but it does expect to be cash-flow positive by 2029, Bloomberg has reported. The biggest tech firms including Microsof...

finance.yahoo.com

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 15d

I worked in tech in the SF Bay for years. It's striking how well this captures the dichotomy there: half the people are trying to live in AR shitospheres; the other half are bird watching.

Sarah Lyons @citymystic.bsky.social · 16d

open.substack.com/pub/houseofm...

Wrote about the radical act of returning to one's body in a digital age designed to detach us from them.

You Don't Need to Log off, You Need to Become Sensual

The digital world the wealthy are creating is designed to detach us from our bodies

open.substack.com

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 16d

"For $200 a month, Claude can do a low-stakes thing you barely care about (organize inbox) and make more work for you by hallucinating meeting invites with people that don't exist ('1:1 with Sparrow Gordon IV @ 8:63 AM Tomorrow, Feb 32nd')"

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 16d

Next week from Tylenol™️: "We now make Tylenol with paracetamol, which is an autism-free version of acetaminophen!"

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 17d

I went through a phase of reading Sci-Fi & Fantasy Magazines from the 70s and 80s. It's amazing how much the art matched the writing. Maybe it's just pseudo-nostalgia, but feels like we lost that along the way.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 17d

Reversion to the Mean Girls (2025)

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 22d

I led training and RLHF work at Google. It takes thousands of people each rating thousands of conversations to get an LLM to write a passable limerick, so teaching Claude to navigate complex software is exponentially more complex—and may not benefit from RLHF quite as much.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 29d

No, senates make laws. But in this case, as I said, it’s not about legislating laws — it’s about interpreting existing ones.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 29d

It's not really in Newsom's hands. This isn't an issue of legislation; it's about the law.

bd barone @bdbarone.bsky.social · 29d

If they did leave CA, Google and Meta would gladly hire all the engineers that don't want to sell their homes and uproot their families to relocate to Florida or Texas.