Snobmaxxing
tech layoffs, everything is TV, be a snob, and a good foodie YouTube channel
Hello everyone! Welcome to another issue of Endnotes. I don't know where we are going, but I promise to get us there as fast as possible. If you need to get in touch with me, please reach out over at Mastodon. I am not armed.
This week, we have:
Tough week for tech layoffs
It's a weird time to be working in tech, and this past week was particularly tense. Coinbase announced in a post on X that it is laying off 14% of staff because "AI is changing how we work." Two days later, Cloudflare announced it was firing 1,100 workers to "define how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era" (lol).
SaaS company Freshworks also announced it is cutting its staff by 11%, joining Atlassian, which did the same last month. And this week, GitLab announced it is cutting staff by 7%—again, due to AI.
It's hard to tell if any of this is real. Many of these companies were already flagging, with the CEOs looking for some way to juice the stock price, so jumping on the AI hype-train is surely at least part of the plan here. I don't think it's useful arguing over whether "AI" is actually ready to take over software development tasks from humans. Leadership at these companies wants to believe it is, and led by the likes of Block, Spotify, Amazon, and Meta (which have also laid off staff, supposedly because of AI), we are all going over the cliff.
Will it work? Well, it didn't work for Klarna, which cut its workforce nearly in half by replacing its customer support staff with AI and then had to hire everyone back. It also didn't work for Duolingo, which announced it was going "AI-first" last year, and now user retention (and the stock price) is in free fall.
Yeah sure, it might! Anyway, I like Mo's take on how to survive the layoffs. I have nothing to add. Things suck. Good luck out there, everyone.
Everything is TV now
One point I keep seeing in the debate over kids and social media is that if you take away their smart phones or kick them off social media platforms, where are they going to connect with their peers? Especially for marginalized kids who are LGBTQ+ or neurodivergent, where will they find community if not on "the internet"?
But I think this badly misunderstands what "the internet" is now and how kids use it. This isn't the same internet that GenXers and Millennials came up with. This isn't Web 2.0, not really. Social media isn't social anymore. You don't see what your friends post on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, or X. Instead, you get served a stream of content by an algorithm. You can nudge that algorithm, but you're not so much joining and interacting with a community as you are channel surfing.
Essentially, Silicon Valley has turned "the internet" into TV, and that's how most people experience it.
They stare at a handful of channels (apps) on a rectangular screen (now vertical instead of horizontal) while content made by strangers washes over them. The major difference is that now, they do it alone, plus the TV watches back, collecting tons of data on viewers and their habits.
In theory, you can still post, but increasingly, people don't, especially kids and young people, because unlike their Millennial parents and peers, they understand that unless you are trying to make a job out of the attention economy, "going viral" is actually a very bad thing that you want to avoid at all costs, not something to be happy about or pursue.
If you want to find the kids, they are in semi-private group chats—on Discord servers, WhatsApp, in the DMs. They are also in games like Fortnite and Roblox. That's where they build community, stay in touch with their friends, and live their digital lives.
I don't think there's any way to keep kids off the internet—especially the kids who are interested in the real internet, beyond the handful of apps. Nor do I think we should. Kids will always find the most unexpected and delightful ways to circumvent whatever roadblocks the adults kludge together. Like water, you can't stop them.
But I do think that, like water, they can be directed and channeled, and there's a role for the public sector to play in that. When I was growing up, no one would have argued that infinite Saturday morning cartoons were essential for children's social development. The best television for kids actually came from the public sector: broadcasting rules that required educational content and balance, funding for public broadcasters, regulations on advertising during children's programming.
The internet we grew up with is gone. In terms of what most people use today, that internet was replaced with a worse version of television that offers little social benefit and has had tremendous costs. It's bad for all of us, and I think it would be hard to argue at this point that it has any irreplaceable benefits for kids.
A time for snobs
Doing things is hard. Knowing things is hard. Expertise takes dedication and time. You have to sacrifice. You have to spend years of your life with your face in books, or a paintbrush in hand, or fingers on the keyboard. You make mistakes, you get frustrated, you're bad at it, you're bad at it, you're bad at it, then one day you're not bad at it. You're better than some people. Then you're better than most people.
But now they are telling you all your hard work and expertise don't matter because "most people" can prompt a large language model and get a simulacrum of an expert, and because their brains have been completely smoothed out, they think that makes them the expert.
Fuck that. Be a snob.
Be a gatekeeper. Tell them why their thing sucks. Mock them for using a large language model. Shame them. Shame them. You worked for this. They didn't. The thing they extracted from the billionaire plagiarism machine is mediocre and insipid, and they are a smaller, dumber person for using it.
I guess we could hem and haw about What All This Means, and lots of people want to do that because (let's be up front) there's a lot of money in AI, and you're not supposed to be rude to that much money.
But people like you and me, all we have is our dignity and the hard work we put into learning the human things we do for other humans, both our hobbies and our professions. Using AI is the equivalent of scooping your brain out with a melon baller and I refuse to pretend it is not. We've used our brains to learn things, and we still have our brains, and we should be snobs about it.
Like the kids at the University of Central Florida commencement when some business lady called AI "the next Industrial Revolution":
They spent four years studying arts and humanities. They spent four years developing judgment and expertise in a whole range of human endeavors that are essential to the health of our liberal-humanist civilization. And this business idiot stands on a stage in front of them and says, "actually, we can do that with matrix multiplication." lol no you can't. You dullard.
Be like the UCF students. Be a snob.
A good YouTube channel
Let's look at something nice. I love cooking and I love eating, and along with that, I love watching people cook and eat. El Cocinero Fiel is a Spanish guy from Tarragona who makes videos about local restaurants. In Barcelona, he has focused on joints serving traditional Catalan cuisine, with footage of the preparation and the result.
Here's one of my favorites. I've been to Bar Bodega Gol several times and it is excellent.
I love his videos because they are short, elegant, and focus on the food. The restaurants often let him film in the kitchen, so you can see the cooking process and the recipes. Also, the restaurants he selects are very good but not pretentious, so every time he drops a new video from Barcelona, I add the place to my list of places to try.
He's now branching out to cities beyond Spain, including Warsaw and Vienna. Check him out!
Links
- A beautiful essay on teaching creative writing in times of AI.
- Chrome now downloads a 4gb large language model to your PC and there's no way to stop it or remove it. More from Tom's Guide.
- Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?