Even more fitting is the part of the story where a collective of uploaded lobster minds are involved. I wonder if that was an inspiration for the "OpenClaw" name somehow or just pure coincidence.
One of the robots ("moravecs" (amazing)) in Dan Simmons' Ilium was also crustacean formed: Orphu of Io (and his friend Mahnmut. Beat Charles to that particular weird coincidence-to-be by plus or minus a year!
It's not quite as memorable or as strong a theme as Accelerando laid down. But still quite a serendipity, imo.
I would feel the same about anyone working in augmented/virtual reality who hadn't read "Rainbows End" or watched any number of XR-focused anime.
What do you mean, you can't come up with anything to do with these devices? What do you mean, you're hiring webdevs to make another Snap filter? If you're on the cutting edge, I would expect that your knowledge base includes niche, related texts.
It was a pretty prominent work of the singularity subgenre. At least I remember it being the first one featured in this Popular Science article about the future of science fiction:
There is a similar experiment where a famous violinist plays in a subway station. Nobody really notices or appreciates him and his music.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw&ra=m
I just did a quick check: a 2022 Macbook pro M1 with 1tb and 16gb ram goes for 1119 euros on eBay. A new M5 mbp with the same ram and disk is 1899 euros, so 709 difference. And you get a whole new machine not just a cpu upgrade.
Yeah, they hold up their value amazingly well. People keep mentioning biodegradability of Framework, but in Macbook world it's basically a non-issue if your old machine is still usable.
On the other hand, if something fails out of the warranty, this is where you win with Framework.
Because they are indeed still cheaper? I'm not sure what you're getting at with your question. You can look up values for older Macs if you just don't want to believe it …
Why wouldn’t I want to “believe it”? Isn’t that the premise my entire question is based on? I’m not sure what you’re getting at with your misdirection.
The main difference could be that you have an existing code base (probably quite extensive and a bit legacy?). If the llm can start from scratch it will write code “in its own way”, that it can probably grasp and extend better than what is already there. I even have the impression that Claude can struggle with code that GPT-5 wrote sometimes.
An interesting fact about the early GTA games is that they owe their success to a bug. The cop cars were supposed to behave nicely like in every other game, but due to a bug in pathfinding they just drive straight into the players car. So at least to some extend the whole billion dollar franchise owes its success to a bug:
https://medium.com/@bdunn313/the-psycho-cop-bug-de9121335cf9
After reading through the other comments about bending spoons and reading yours again: the bending spoons CEO is technically telling the truth! They intend to run the acquired companies forever. After cutting most of the staff, but he didn’t say that part of course.
I wouldn't even say it's "technically" the truth. It's just the truth. Nothing in the statement even comes close to implying that there wouldn't be layoffs. Hell, one of the quotes even mentions "focus", which if anything is a euphemism or hint for downsizing in these kinds of statements, not the opposite.
"excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"
There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.
Maybe "unlock even greater focus for our team" means to unlock their focus to find other jobs but it's quite perverse. I agree with the OP, that "Words no longer appear to mean things"
> There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.
What? Just because a statement says "we're excited to do X" doesn't mean they're not also planning to do A, B, C, Y and Z.
I'm not defending the layoff. It just seems weird to interpret the statement itself as somehow being misleading about a subject that it literally didn't mention.
There's letter and spirit of the word. You're arguing against the spirit of the word because the letter of the word is technically impossible to prove as a lie right now.
We call this lawful evil logic for a reason. It's how you empower stuff like Jim Crow laws (or the current US administration in general. "Well he isn't going to actually invade a NATO ally, he's just saying he wants Greenland. I want a Ferrari!")
You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! :-)
Those words weren't truth. Truth would have been to state the intent to fire employees in order to maximise profit. This was always going to be the outcome, and it was expected, why not just state it clearly?
Again, when truth becomes a grey area that is to be manipulated for maximising profits that benefit a minority of privileged individuals, we should be concerned and at the least, not normalise it with "its just business".
I don't like layoffs, but if the statement in September said "we are going to lay off most of our talent in January for blah blah blah corporate mumbo jumbo", it'd suck but I'd see nothing wrong with it. The employees get a 3 month warning to plan around, and the company can do whatever it wants from there.
A reasonable person, when told "Company A is buying and will operate Company B," would interpret that as "all of Company B" including its assets, liabilities, cash, property, patents, AND employees. They would not think "Well, ackshually, they're just buying the corporate entity itself, which doesn't technically involve keeping the employees..."
If "reasonable person" means "someone with literally zero experience reading any business or acquisition news whatsoever" then I agree with you. Hell, the OP literally begins the announcement with, "As expected."
if corporations only exist to make the rich richer, maybe it's time to eat the rich. Corporations' outward goals used to be to satisfy their customers. That may have never been the internal case, but it isn't even pretended to be so nowadays.
Severely downsizing the company isnt a good vibe to a customer. I'd definitely be migrating off Vimeo if I did any serious business with them.
Any reasonable person who has paid attention to business news over their lifetime would not be surprised to see layoffs following a corporate acquisition.
