Logbook: Money
Forbes:The Secret To AI Adoption? Make It Fun.. Shut up..
You know I started reading this and I thought to myself oh forbes fuck off.
Imagine you’re the head of an enterprise organization that just dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on AI consultants. Racing to introduce artificial intelligence into your workflows, you also bought the latest pricey tools and invested in time-consuming workshops to get your people ready.
Really fun is not going to make workflows any faster you will have people fucking off in the prompts if you make it too fun. Also, if we take the title we can come up with an equal comparison. “Forbes:The Secret To drugs Adoption? Make It addictive.” There I changed to the quiet part out loud. The Factor here is as AI adaption take up and more cognitive offloading happens we are going to see individuality disappear and the LLM Borg consciousness take over. The problem with AI innovation is it removes human innovation as more people offload to an AI the idea someone had in the shower is shot down over the Borg AI saying do this not that it wont work.
Neither set out to become technologists. Instead, in 2022, when ChatGPT hit the mainstream, they felt compelled to understand it. As a professional magician and mentalist who performs for corporate events, Mike was used to acting out his thoughts and ideas. So was Sami, especially from all her creative and voice acting work. This led them to ask the question that corporate leaders reeling from staff resistance, should ponder, “What if learning this new tool could be … fun?”
This stood out to me .. A magician? The fuck? This is like hiring a baker to market a nuclear power plant. The fact we are seeing resistance is people who see their jobs being automated out of existence with no checks and balances. Are you going to have fun with a device that if you teach it well enough it automates 70% of your job and they fire you thinking they can handle the other 30%. Or for the sake of things the dreaded 1% problems that nothing is written for? If AI takes over a nuclear power plant and its by the sea and takes in water to cool the reactor and the hundred year event of jellyfish comes and suddenly the reactor has no water. AI is not going to have an answer for that even if it has geographic data.
Their first slogan captured people’s emerging feelings about this tech: “Smart people. Dumb AI.” Building on their improvisational chops, they invited attendees to partake in what may have been the first AI-powered variety show. From the start, it unfolded with the kind of energy you might find at The Moth where people swap tales on stage or StorySLAM, open-mic nights at bars and small venues that encourage audience participation and speaker vulnerability.
AI is not dumb nor is it smart. How you use AI is completely up to the user. So a dumb user can screw up things faster with AI than without. I think a better introduction of AI to a user is better done with matching their abilities with the AI , so if a user knows code and they put it into the AI and the AI spits out some refinements that is fine. but the user needs to learn what the refinements did, otherwise its lost cognitive offload. In the simplest of forms if you want to introduce a user to AI park them in front of a computer have them type whatever bullshit they can think of into the AI. Than let them feel for what the AI can and can not do.
When you set up a “show” you are not showing off what an AI can do. You are showing off what AI has been forced to do. So yes you can turn a picture of your boss into a video of him farting on whatever product you have in the works. But to sit your user down and have the AI optional for use and let them feel out AI for when they can not fathom an answer to something is better than forcing it .
It’s no secret this type of experimentation is rare in corporate cultures where the lion’s share of personnel wants the AI craze to just blow over. All those executives who have spent so much time and resources to foster adoption would do well to promote an explorer mindset over an avoider one.
The secret here is too many top level CEOS and COOs think AI is some magic machine that can replace human innovation and human intuition which is completely wrong. if Boards and Ceos treated AI as an augment innovation would go up and failures would go down. Don’t force AI but have AI optional… That way when someone needs a bit of help they can do that without leaving their station but at the same time the same user can leave their station get a coffee and make a life changing innovation rather than let AI try to reason how to innovate.
Anyways… Back to my coffee from a non AI coffeepot because if i ask AI to make my coffee it will be the collective average of the universe.
Attributions from:
Forbes.com The Secret To AI Adoption? Make It Fun
Further Reading:
Futurism.com: The Effects of AI-Generated Code Tearing Through Corporations Is Actually Kind of Funny
Well now… Site Maintenance. Time for a change..
Editor’s Note: the AI Generation is still fucking funny. The AI made a backwards PC!
My prior host… Hostgator… I’d say pour out a coffee for, but no.. they in the last 3 years have double their prices, they started pulling the same shit like BMW for heated seats and tried to sell me a story of how much overhead email takes. So you know what, its time for change.
Honestly it’s been time for change for over 2 years with my last host, they kept increasing prices and expected the people who do not want to move or are lazy to keep paying. At the point of what i was paying they should of shown up to my house at least once a week and poured my coffee for me.
But when I got an email saying that the price of emails for me would go up if i send more than 200 emails an hour. I don’t think I send two hundred emails a year. Than another email saying you have 11 email addresses, the irony of that 3 are needed for the server itself , the rest were family emails that were used for family and 2 of them were preserved emails of dead relatives, if my dead relative is sending emails call the ghostbusters.
The thing is, Companies need to stop this act. Take a product… sell it , than raise the price. bullshit the customer saying its so expensive. we’ve all heard bandwidth costs more than printer ink since the first websites. but now we are getting back into the early mobile territory where hosts are micromanaging every part of what they originally sold. My host included unlimited emails. Now they want you to pay per so many email addresses and how many you send, What in the fucking BMW heated seat is that. The funny thing is my prior host if they wanted to reduce the overhead and save money.. Cut off the top 0.05% because that small number there likely is 50% of the email bandwidth on there servers.
But honestly… Companies need to stop micromanaging every part of the whole. They say “its cheaper” no its bullshit.. you create 5 different billing systems . you send out 4 more invoices, you no spam the regular users and push people who have legitimate uses to send more than 200 emails an hour. the factor is that 200 emails doesn’t even account for the first 0.25 seconds of a 1080p youtube video.
Give or take , in an email , The images are hosted elsewhere, the body of the text is the only part that is really an issue with sending an email. yet my prior host is making noise about email and thinks no one is going to look under the hood. They wanted 6$ to send emails a month. I could send The bill of rights, the constitution , the magna carta, the UN charter and They would not even feel the bandwidth.
So as I said pouring one out for hostgator who should know better.. If I posted the absolute braindead support I got tonight trying to say emails cost so much and worse me calling them out on the crappy server they had me on . You all would not of been surprised…
Hallucinated History:Are we on the losing side of history to AI? A historical debate.
I was thinking, and normally I would be debating some article that comes out and this time this was organic thought… Are we losing our history to AI?
I think we will, with all the generative content out there some infection of false material will become fact unfortunately. There are channels out there that are making battle reenactment and they may not pay attention to a small piece of information that gets slipped in. Down the road researchers take that small piece of information as fact. we live in a world that allows history to become transformative in the moment
Anyone can go on to wikipedia and change an article to change history in a moment.. We don’t have the hardbound check points in history anymore like the big encyclopedias anymore. We do not have the ominous set of books on our home bookshelves anymore that was the mainstay of book reports, Papers on subjects anymore. We just google…. and that is a can of worms. We can look at politics and how random things become “fact” and stick with humans no matter how many times its disproven.
The factor is that our last point in Recorded history will come down to the DVD sets of encyclopedias that were a frozen point in time. Rather this snapshot will tell us exactly what was going on to that point. Rather than the liquid historical platforms that can change in a moments notice.
Today’s AI slop might become tomorrow’s history, and that is a dangerous thing. A person wanting to profit releases tons of videos on youtube about history and does not check the content and now General Okafor of the battleship quantum now is a part of history. (if you pick up on this one give yourself a point!) So the real Aris Thorne and Lena Petrova’s of history will be blended out by fictional people that never existed.
LLM’s love injecting random names that are not really random into generative content. So at this point when these names come up we have to now question their reality. This is why some small change can infect the real history of the past and in the future change the context of the whole history. I think wikipedia should release a text version by year that is a frozen point of history, than a year later show changes to the history rather than finding the history of the document and doing a compair from there. That way at the end of the year review the many editors can research and make sure the historical value of the document stays correct.
To which end… at this point it might be a point to go to a thrift store and buy a set of encyclopedias or order yourself a 2010 DVD of Encyclopedia Britannica. Otherwise the history you thought you knew in 5 or 10 years might be changed to a degree you never knew or the thing you did was now a falsehood even though you were there at that exact spot in history.
META enshitification alert- Paywalling tech with the Meta Glasses.
I swear every time I turn around, Meta is doing something stupid because they think it will make them money. But this time they are taking an off the shelf tech and paywalling it. Passthrough or active audio.
Owners of Meta’s AI glasses have been told they must pay a monthly fee if they want full access to a feature that was previously free. Users will have to shell out $19.99 every month to use “Conversation Focus”, which uses the microphones on the glasses to make it easier to hear people you’re talking to, for more than three hours a month.
The fact they are attempting this is just a cash grab like charging monthly for heated power seats.
Meta says those who hit the “free monthly usage limit” will have to wait for their free hours to refresh each calendar month unless they subscribe.
As humans we are making steps back in technological advances, We are headed back to the days were we only make calls after 6pm to use “Free Minutes” and it’s fucking stupid. Meta is seeing how much they can deconstruct tech to see how many parts we will pay for and how many parts they can profit from.
Meta’s plans to test “premium” subscription experiments across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were first revealed in January. The firm later confirmed its tests would include trialling paid access to expanded AI features, including those on its smart glasses.
The fact that Meta has fired tens of thousands for their AI experiment and AI engagement features is a dumpster fire everyone saw coming. But on the meta glasses they have the chip built in to handle all of the audio, they just installed a meter on it so they could charge for it. Bose, Beats, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple all have the same damn thing, its called Transparency mode, Aware, active mode!
Meta is just trying to get your hard earned money for an already established technology. If Bose, Beats, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple Paywalled this tech, there would be digital lynch mobs. Even worse is…
The company says subscribers to its Meta One Premium tier will be able to use Conversation Focus for up to 15 hours each month.
What.. the.. fuck.. this is truly back to the old mobile days where you paid through the ass and waited for nighttime to make calls. 15 hours?? Good luck if you depend on these if you are deaf, or autistic. What fucking morons. The fact that this feature started as free than went to Fee could be seen as a violation of the ADA… This is a massive greed maneuver, first put the tech out .. Then pull it away. The people that need this tech will pay up in a moment.
It reminds me of netflix, When they first started they chirped up and down “no ads” , “no ads Ever!” than they started injecting small ads in the beginning of shows, Than the tile ads started, Then they jumped the shark with a paid NO AD tier and the price has been skyrocketing since.
Meta here is doing the same thing except with a piece of tech that lives on your body, and moreover they are messing with people who maybe for the first time in their lives have been able to go into a public environment with this. The neurodivergent folks need someone to speak up for them. The deaf should be enraged over this.
Meta’s Glasses have been problematic enough with people finding video of themselves online without their permission and worse.
Women have complained of being filmed without their knowledge or consent – with some only discovering they have been covertly filmed after seeing videos of themselves online.
The sad thing is META’s ai could be used for good and if a person has found their videos online they could make META AI delete the persons face as soon as its recorded using AI , but they won’t do that they would rather make money off engagement and keep doing stupid shit.
I think of it this way, If these glasses worked for an autistic child at school, than, you rip away a child’s focus after 3 hours meaning less than one day of school a month is covered. You have just destroyed that child. The glasses are noninvasive compared to earbuds… If you try to force someone who is neurodivergent to wear Earbuds, most neurodivergent kids will remove your finger before you shove something directly in their ear.
My final thoughts here is while META is using AI to do stupid things like making fake engagement should not be removing engagement from the disabled from the world at large. They should focus to make the world a better place and not use the SaaS to enshitify day to day living.
Attributions from:
BBC- Meta glasses wearers hit with paywall to use built-in feature
Allbirds Newbird Smartbird AI what’s next flipthebird?
Allbirds has an identity crisis again.
I wrote about a shoe company trying to jump in on the AI gold rush some time ago, Now they are trying the same trick again to secure more capitol because half of the time no one is paying attention.
Two months after its unexpected artificial intelligence rebrand, Allbirds is changing its name to Smartbird and appointing a new chief executive.
This is crazy for one. you are playing a shell game and hope no one notices. People on apps such as robinhood will notice this and not be told this is a company that changes it name more than Prince.
As you can see here All… New.. Smartbird AI is trying to repeat the same gold strike they made in april. While it creates a pump and dump which it did. This is still a company that wants to go 100m in debt and try the capex game when right now do they even have a product. This company is operating on farts and butterflies right now.
Problems: the company at current has the most employees its ever had since its reformation.. 1… the CEO Nadia Carlsten. So by technicality they have the most filled seats in their employment and at the same time the least amount of employees they will ever have.
Former professional soccer player Tim Brown and renewable resources expert Joey Zwillinger founded Allbirds in 2015, seeking to build sustainable shoes from natural materials. The company launched its debut shoe a year later and quickly transformed into a household name.
The thing is allbirds had it right and so wrong at the same time and instead went on a miner 49’er adventure to find more money. There shoes were a hit , the problem was they did not innovate in the shoe market and just ran off there brand. They could of made new shoes and stretched there profit margins out for the long game but instead they chased the dragon. They wanted instant Gratification and it still shows they are at the same thing by chasing AI , having 0 product, In the end when the AI bubble eventually deflates they are going to have zero product and a shit ton of Nvidia product that has no use , because while AI is constantly upgrading old graphics cards do not. so whenever they enter the market they are essentially already obsolete by the time they become operational.
By the time that smartbird AI comes to realization , they have no idea of what AI Dumpster fire they are moving into. Plus given the market they are entering at a high premium due to Ram prices.
But I am willing to guess that SmartBirds AI is going to rename at least one more time while the company is dumped around and keeps raising Possible capital to make there AI gold rush maybe real.
Anyways, I spotted this while having my morning coffee and laughed at the absurdity of the birdity of the Bird bird bird is the word..
Attributions from:
Me: We are seeing the .com Bust and the Gold Rush playing out in real time. April 16, 2026 Coffeecommander.net
cnbc: Allbirds continues AI pivot with name change and CEO hire, sending stock soaring Jun 17 2026 CNBC.com
(Frankenshoes Followup) Salomon X ULTRA PIONEER MID with Carhartt Insoles
Shoes are an occasional topic here and I have had a few posts with shoes but this one has to be the strangest follow-up. I had Solomon X ULTRA PIONEER MID shoes and the insoles wore out fast which sucks but, as someone who doesn’t drive I expect these things. My normal go to shoes are Merrell or Salomon, Merrell are the go to war boots that survive just about everything, Solomon are the light weight shoes you do the million mile march in and they keep going.
But sometimes insoles do wear out , and they make life horrible. They are the inner base of the shoe that makes your day horrible or they make the many steps on your feet not feel like you are playing the drums with your feet. The insole was wandering around the shoe making pain in my feet. I deal with a lot of pain in my feet on the day to day as i am prone to muscle spasms .
Salomon – with their lightweight shoes, they somehow do cut the divide of weight and utility perfectly. They do not fall apart , they last for years. After buying these in early winter I wore these day to day as the traveling shoe. they manage to stay warm in winter and do not leak .. But I did notice the insole starting to shed its lining. A week ago went on a quest to replace the insole with preferably the insole that belongs with the shoes. Merrell does it I figured a higher end Mid would do the same.. No. I looked for an hour and kept falling back to the Carhartt Insite Technology Footbed CMI9000 Shoe Accessory. After Two days they shipped in and I was initially worried they would not fit.
They fit well into the shoe, they had a raised arch to comfort the arch, i put them on and thought this might cause pain and instead i decided to press on and see how it went. After a day the arch relaxed into the Mid , The insole more or less perfectly formed into place. while it adds a bit of weight the comfort level definitely went up.
Mentally… when you do something like this, it feels like using a Toyota part on a ford, Which to the average person would seem like a mortal sin. But the secret here is what the industry tries to make you not pay attention to, That parts can be used on other manufacturer parts within reason.
So when you do the math, I am taking an insole meant for people who do construction all day where weights and tolerances need to be at the top, than place it into a shoe that balances high impact and survivability . Conventionally i just took the best of both worlds where repeated day to day use has a base that is form fitting and comfortable to the point of repeated usage plays out to a higher degree.
While this only a week into this, One could hope this is a force multiplier and a message to a both companies. Carhartt makes boots to survive the Armageddon Salomon makes shoes to climb the armageddon, there is a convergence that both companies are missing here….
So my not so closing thought here is, Sometimes instinct of doing something may not be enough but sometimes taking the gut feeling leap of “this might work” sometimes pays off in kind. So if you need extra miles and extra comfort this frankenshoe experiment shall continue…
Weird things to do with shoes , review- (Carhartt, Insoles with Insite® Technology, CMI9000)
Every now and then you need comfort in shoes, and being like me, I was feeling something in my shoes and the insoles were wearing out and a somewhat new pair of shoes. I do not tend to wear sneakers, due to no ankle support. I wear waterproof hikers year around just about because most time hikers support the arch and makes it easier to walk, as I do have disabilities.
But for the insole to self destruct in only less than 8 months of owning a shoe is pretty bad even though that The Solomon X ULTRA PIONEER MID is a Fantastic shoe. So looking around amazon I saw many insoles, most looking like pure foam and on stuff that is foam I need to use care in selecting a insert, because too much foam like sketchers is an easy path for me to fall on my face.
Given that Solomon does one bad thing here, They do not sell replacement Insoles for their shoes and that should be considered sin. Because a high end hiker that does not support their own brand force the user down the planned obsolescence route is ridiculous.
So I went with Carhartt Men’s Insite Footbed CMI9000 Insole, I figured the look the part. It took a day or two to get them and you know what.. they fucking fit. what surprised me is the amount of arch support. I know these are likely for carhartt boots but, I am willing to science it up for science.
So give or take this Franken-shoe or Dr Solomon and Mr Carthartt hide.. Test will be interesting.. Usually shoe companies do not play nice with each other. so given the fact that these solomon shoes that cost over 179$ and having a insole that died in months. Im willing to give the Carhartt insoles and chance and see what happens. who knows in a week I could be bitching my foot hurts. But you know what , if it works lets see..
I’m giving this a rating of a review in progress…
Enshitification of Shrinkflation- Brought to you buy Gatorade.
So I was at the market, and I went to get some Propel packets. I noticed that the box has changed and that struck me as odd, and I looked at the packaging. They decided to shrink the package and make the product less useful.
The left package is the new package. The right is the package the old.
Here’s the thing they are priced more expensive for less product.
They jacked the price and made less product. they made it look like you were getting more in the individual packet by making them larger. But if you look at what they did they removed stabilizers so the shelf life is less . By Reducing it to 8 packets you lose 20% of the Product.
So thank you Gatorade for making me give you some haterade and making your product more shitty. Hype up on Vit b and enshitify the rest.
Attributions
My Local store
Gatorade – Making stuff Cheap shit because someone wanted to save a dime.
Propel Water -I thought this stuff was supposed to be Zero Calories…
So an update: the new formulation tastes like salt. So at this point Propel is salt water now..
Coffee and prices. Does it add up.
There have been so many articles today with coffee in mind. One was the Price of coffee is down. Jim Roemer a Meteorologist Is asking if coffee prices have bottomed
Have the Fundamentals Affecting Coffee Prices Bottomed for Now.
However, Brooke DiPalma Senior Reporter asks another question and it leaves the reader confused if you commonly look at news for coffee.
Coffee prices keep rising, and chains like Dutch Bros are swallowing most of the costs
Right now if you look at the spot commodity price there is a seperate story here. Jim Roemer, Likely sees that crops last year were affected by multiple things at once. Tariffs, Crop Failures , Weather issues. Jim is likely a better man to see this because his titles are vast. He Pluralist that can read both sides of the story. If you line up his skills Meteorologist, Commodity Trading Advisor, Principal, Best Weather Inc. & Climate Predict – Publisher, Weather Wealth Newsletter and Climatelligence. If he starts talking about markets I am likely to listen.
Now the fast food coffee prices are skyrocketed, Starbuck stopped selling coffee and is doing the $9 coffee “Experience” , the Coffee sellers of the drink are testing the markets of seeing how far they can press the price of the cup of coffee to the person. Its bullshit, I don’t want an experience, I want a coffee that’s it . No experience.
But these companies want a SAAS(shit as a service) , they want you to come in and “experience” a coffee rather than drink a coffee. Honestly, they are protecting their profits because prices have gone down, When the tariffs hit they burst priced the coffee and claimed tariffs, if anyone has done their homework tariffs are not an issue at this point. The coffee crops at this moment are 100% better than last years.
The thing is prices spike and than they feather fall downwards where the corp earns huge profits to the unknowing. The thing is … If even 5% of people even followed the commodity markets and mass messaged Starbucks and said “Hey . why are you charging so much for a coffee when the markets have gone down 25%” it would have CEOS and boards cringing in their seats on social media.
To which end even the home coffee has come up in price but not nearly as bad as the “cup”.. at $18 dollars a container its gross, The prices have stayed up since the tariffs hit and has not gone down by much more than a few cents. It’s all bullshit and another SAAS to force the consumer base to follow and eat the prices. I do understand the swing in contract prices and often they are delayed but, even this far along the prices should have dropped.
I am not going to drop 10$ for 2 coffees when I can just brew a whole pot at home.
Attributions from:
Yahoo Finance: Coffee prices keep rising, and chains like Dutch Bros are swallowing most of the costs
Trading Economics: Coffee Spot Price
Bar Chart: Have the Fundamentals Affecting Coffee Prices Bottomed for Now?
Buy Now: pay later gas is a bad idea..
National Gas Tax suspension to fuck you over later, they are looking to suspend the tax.The current tas is at 18.4 cents a gallon. Notice the wording suspend. Not stop, likely they are going to not collect it and than raise it to 36.8 cents to make it back . Basically they are just giving you a defered loan.
President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are proposing suspending the federal gas tax amid soaring prices at the pump caused by the war with Iran.
The gas tax is currently 18 cents per gallon, and gas prices in the U.S. are about $4.50 per gallon on average.
Voters are souring on Trump’s economy ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, and high gas prices are only adding to consumer discontent.
This is a deferment of 112.4 million a day!
Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday that he would “reduce” the tax, shortly after saying in an interview with CBS News that he wants to pause the tax “for a period of time.”
“I think it’s a great idea,” he said in the CBS interview. “Yup, we’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in.”
Sure, the Administration will defer it till the next election and blame the democrats when a billion dollar bill is due back at the pump. People have no idea how much this would affect the national infrastructure system, all of the bridges, other things that would fall into disrepair due to federal funding being frozen due to this.
Trump cannot declare a gas tax holiday alone, since Congress has sole authority over taxation. But several Republican lawmakers on Monday floated suspending the gas tax, which clocks in at 18.4 cents per gallon, the same amount it’s been since 1993.
This is unlikely to pass, but this gas lay-away plan will hit the pumps when you least expect it.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on Monday said he would immediately introduce a bill to suspend the federal gas tax in a post to X. And Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said she would be “introducing a bill in the House to suspend the federal gas tax in light of Trump’s recent remarks.”
“American families need this relief on gas prices. My office will be working directly with President Trump to ensure we deliver this win for the American people,” she said in a social media post.
This is not relief, this is Gas HELOC plan. It will come back with interest later, because the 112.4M a day gains no interest, It is just a payment plan that is put back on the national debt. The other thing is if you look at the highway Adminstration, the infrastructure money will run out just before the election and who over gets the handoff on “The roads are falling apart” will be the media screaming for months.
Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla “American families need this relief on gas prices. My office will be working directly with President Trump to ensure we deliver this win for the American people,” she said in a social media post.
This is not relief. its like a fart with the gas prices.. By holding the fart you save current environment because it seems not to stink, but it when comes to release and if you try to force it (collect the federal gas tax deferment) it gonna stink like when you are sick and can’t hold it anymore, and you try to let a little out and you shit yourself..
Gas prices in the U.S. currently sit at about $4.52 per gallon, according to AAA’s national average, approaching the highest recorded average price of $5.02 in June 2022. Slashing the federal gas tax would bring that down to roughly $4.34 per gallon.
This is just is a credit card at the pump, you save 18 cents at the pump and by the time the next time it comes to collect the taxes you’ll have to pay 36 cents because of interest.
In the end with a 14 gallon tank you save $2.58 and you can maybe afford cheap gas station coffee, that you have to pay back later. It’s a sham if they defer costs.
While the bill has not been filed yet. this is my thought on a gas tax moratorium to delay or defer gas taxes, in the end it will effect more than saving on your gas.
Attributions from:
CNBC: Trump, congressional Republicans float suspending federal gas tax amid Iran war