Technology – Complaint Hub

I had the idea for a gas generator first

Neither of these articles does a good job explaining, because journalism is dead, but this is the way I thought we should be bridging the gap between gas and electric cars while we build out charging infrastructure.

Ford is ditching its all-electric version of the F150 because, I suspect, the type of person who wants a huge expensive pickup truck ALSO wants it to make vroom-vroom noises to own the libs.

What I think Ford is doing, and what I think has been a great idea all along, is a fully electric drivetrain, as those are efficient and low-maintenance, along with a gas-powered generator to recharge the battery if you’re somewhere it’s not possible or not convenient to plug in. This makes so much sense while we’re still a country with gas stations everywhere but not a lot of car charging stations. A gas-powered generator can be optimized to produce electricity – I bet it’s a TON more efficient that way than having the gas run the engine and ALSO make electricity.

It’s too bad Ford had to struggle through weak Lightning sales in order to get to this point, but here we are. They should have hired me to consult.

AI remains unprofitable, largely useless

There’s just one problem with this master plan: OpenAI doesn’t have the money to pay for it. For example, OpenAI is committing to pay Oracle $60 billion in capex investment annually for five years. For reference, Meta, one of the most valuable and profitable companies in the world, which brought in $164.5 billion in revenue in 2024 and ended the year with a free cash flow of $52.10 billion, plans to spend $72 billion in 2025 building data centers. OpenAI, on the other hand, is on pace to bring in $12.7 billion this year, expects to lose $9 billion, predicts its losses will swell to $47 billion by 2028, and doesn’t expect to break even until 2029. How can OpenAI plan to spend five times what it brought in?

The AI Ouroboros at The American Prospect

So if you’re trying to follow along, you have three companies. Nvidia makes computer chips. Oracle ~~fleeces the federal government by making it impossible to move to cheaper, modern infrastructure~~ provides cloud architecture. And OpenAI ~~makes software that lies confidently~~ makes software that lies confidently.

OpenAI has grand plans but no money. Oracle is desperately trying to modernize itself before people figure out it’s a dinosaur. Nvidia actually produces useful things. So OpenAI is going to pay Oracle to host their data centers so they can convert more scarce natural resources into false information. Oracle is buying tons of Nvidia chips. And Nvidia is pledging money to OpenAI to try and make all this happen.

Imagine you create three companies, A, B, and C. A pledges $100 billion to B. B pledges $100 billion to C. And C pledges $100 billion to A. No one has any actual money, but you now have three hundred billion dollar companies, and the stock market will manifest the value.

Cryptocurrency is not money

One easy way to tell that cryptocurrency won’t ever be real money is to see how Venmo talks about it. I got an email not long ago from them about crypto.

If it were real money, the email would have bragged about how using crypto meant my Venmo transactions were faster and more secure! They would have mentioned on the INTERNAL deck that it was cheaper, too, but they won’t share that with customers because they would absolutely not pass those savings on.

What did Venmo ACTUALLY send me? A plug to invest in crypto. They want as much of your money managed in the Venmo app as possible, that’s how they make money (this makes sense, I’m not arguing they shouldn’t do this).

But if crypto was really a good way to move money around, either Venmo would be using it, or another company using it would have come in already and eaten their lunch. ACH is archaic. Instant transfers like Zelle are implemented so poorly that I suspect most of their day-to-day is dealing with fraud. If the crypto-pushers were right, this would all go away.

If you want to invest in an unregulated, unsecured magic bean, be my guest. There are definitely opportunities there. But you have to go in knowing it’s very risky, and that’s the part people usually skip over.

Google hacks

You remember how Google search used to be awesome? You could put in the randomest thing and it would find it for you? There was even the button to go straight to the first result because we were THAT SURE it would be what we wanted?

Then the SEO Wars and AI killed that, and now even searching directly for a company by name because you forgot their phone number brings up absolute garbage.

Yesterday I was looking up the number for Aspen Hill Plumbing, who I use all the time. They’re good over email and I loathe the phone, but I needed to get a hold of them immediately.

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Google not only showed me an ad for a competitor first, they also USED THE NAME OF THE COMPANY I WAS LOOKING FOR. This is absolutely not okay. Showing the competitor first because they bought a competitor’s name as a search term is slimy but totally accepted nowadays. But presenting one company as another? I’ve never seen that before on a reputable website.

Then this morning I saw this.

And you know what? It fucking works.

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You don’t even have to spell the profanity right.

I think what we need now is a “Let Me Google That For You” for the AI Era – you type your search term, and it adds profanity and returns you the results you’re actually looking for.

Take my content, please!

As someone who does not make a living creating content, I WANT my content used to train LLMs. Go on, Open AI, slurp up EVERY LITTLE MORSEL. Get every last pearl of wisdom from my dumbass blog.

Read my thoughts on compact flourescent lightbulbs from 2006 so you can quote that back to a high school student writing a research paper.

Or how about this FLAMING hot take on Al Gore? So profound.

Even better – read every last word of my wine blog, completely generated by a Markov chain (precursor to modern LLMs) trained on Wine Spectator reviews. That’ll be real helpful for some dingbat trying to impress a girl he just met.

Everyone involved here is wrong

While 1) banning the resale of legally purchased tickets should be illegal and 2) TIcketmaster totally deserves this, I wonder if anyone told them that every time the barcode changes it’s a separate felony charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?

By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS.
https://www.404media.co/scalpers-are-working-with-hackers-to-liberate-non-transferable-tickets-from-ticketmasters-ecosystem