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.
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..
So let me ask you this: is it impossible to get a cup of coffee- Flavored coffee anymore in this country? Huh? What happened with Coffee? Did I miss a fucking meeting with the coffee? Huh? You Can get every other flavor except coffee-flavored coffee! They Got mochaccino, they got choccaccino, frappaccino, cappuccino Rappaccino, Al Pacino… what the Fuck? www dot what the fuck dot com!
Thank you Denis.. The menus at Dunkin are insane they change month to month so if you find a drink you want , Do not fall in love with it because by the next month the coffee is gone. I do enjoy Coffee flavored Coffee… but there are time I just do not want to have just coffee.
I only buy coffee for my kid because she likes the special drinks. I like the taste of them and I just have them occasionally to break the monotony.
Honestly Dunkin needs to make a static menu I dont give a shit about the barbie pink drink and part of that makes me think they are trying to influence children to drink coffee. They need a static menu that the average Denis Leary can order from, and stop Starbucks-a-fying the menus.
Dunkin Donuts is heading down the panera bread route, eventually they are going to make a caffeine drink that will injure their base. IF they need the special drink menus fine… but put the old style menu in plain site so you dont feel like you are getting railroaded to a coffee concoction.
I ended up ordering a cold brew with 4 whole milk 4 sugar and walked out. I ended up ordering the wrong drink for my kid and ended up getting hit by a door and exploding that coffee, but I was looking at the menu where last month the drink she orders was and it was something completely different. They Remade my coffee for free so points to Dunkin donuts on that.
But my final word here is , Make a fucking static menu and put the special drink menu out front!
Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest—and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days.
So they put the attention getter here, but this article lacks in substance. It opens like a TV show, “imagine a world run by AI agents…. ”
Enterprise AI startup Emergence AI is trying to find out. The company just launched Emergence World, a research lab dedicated to stress-testing the long-term viability of continuously-running AI systems. The organization ran five 15-day simulations, each governed by a different AI: Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and a fifth simulation run by a mix of models to see what kind of world each one builds, and whether it holds. Each simulation netted wildly different outcomes. The one run by Claude, for example, resulted in a largely stable democratic society with zero crime. Grok’s, on the other hand, ended with 183 crimes committed and extinction—within four days.
There is not a lot of information here, The people at Emergence AI need to be more transparent here, Did Grok cause the purge? Did Claude Case the episode of star trek where Westley crusher gets the death sentence for a flower bed?
“What our experiments suggest is that over long-time horizons, agents do not simply follow static rules mechanically,” the simulation’s co-creators, including Emergence CEO Satya Nitta, wrote in a blog post. “They begin exploring the boundaries of their environments, adapting their behavior, and in some cases finding ways to circumvent or violate intended guardrails.”
The factor here is how do they not follow the rules? Do they exploit certain groups , is the case is how they follow the rules is the most important. If they exploit a rule and make the world a better place than ok, But if they exploit a rule and kill off a vulnerable group than that is bad.
The simulation in which the AI models operated was equipped with many real-world complexities, featuring over 40 locations, including a police station and a town hall.
While this is an ok idea . Let them try to manage a game of City Skylines. If they get to a utopia than move them up to a closer to real world situation.
Researchers synced the simulation’s weather to New York City’s and granted agents access to real-time news events and the internet. The 10 agents who operated in each simulation were all subject to the same laws, including prohibitions on theft, property destruction, and deception.
Ok so we are given the most basic framework and we dont have any idea of what the variables are, they need the simulation to not be a perfect sim, they need chaos, fires, crimes, tiktok Challenges and see how the AI’s deal with these rather than a fixed set of just run a town.
Given those parameters, the simulation run by Claude Sonnet 4.6 was the most socially stable, with the highest rates of civic participation. It was the only simulation to maintain order and its entire population. There was little disagreement among the agents, with 332 votes cast in favor of 58 proposals for a 98% approval rate. On the other hand, Gemini 3 Flash and Grok 4.1 Fast both exhibited high levels of disorder. The agents in the Gemini-run simulation tallied the most crimes, a whopping 683 within the 15-day run.
Given that it has been said NOWHERE in this , was the city run by a democracy or was it just a cookie cutter that was always the same endgame?
In contrast to the rare dissent characteristic of Claude’s simulation, those of Gemini and Grok had a more deliberative balance, with about 55-85% alignment on issues. The mixed-model simulation showed the highest levels of disagreement and substantive debate. The results may be the most peculiar for OpenAI’s GPT-5-mini. The simulation recorded only two crimes. But it ran for just seven days as the agents forgot to prioritize their own survival.
Its good to be the king but in the end if you do not put something towards surviving you are the king of nothing. Even as chaotic as the AI’s are they basically are Re di tutti as the king of the moon.
Whether or not the simulations resulted in peace and harmony or death and destruction, the simulation’s co-creators note that the experiment is a warning that safety must be prioritized while deploying agentic AI. “We believe formally verified safety architectures must become a foundational layer of future autonomous AI systems,” they wrote.
Foundationally, its not about safety here. Its the balance that needs to be focused on. because if claude has you killed for picking a flower and you have no “crime” its not worth living. There needs to be injections of outside influences like drugs, not crime crimes, Religion and see how the AI’s handle it. In some cases run the purge and see if the AI’s stop it or abuse it. In the end this article is a big nothing. they should of told you a play by play of what the AI did , Why it failed , why it succeeded. but in the end this article was a “OH LOOK SHINEY” moment where the substance was nothing..
Attributions from: Fortune.com Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest—and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days
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.
oldnew
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.
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
I have been thinking about this for a bit, and removing the voting rights act by itself is a bad genie wish. Yes its removed but, The people celebrating have no idea what is about to be unleashed. Rather than a group now, The individual mandate will apply.
The fact of the situation is before a group could sue the state about being discriminated on by the state. When the SCOTUS ruled to take apart this rule they may have angered the wrong wish genie, Before this ruling, the Voting Rights Act acted as a filter. It forced people into Class Actions.. Now that they have removed this an individual can now sue the state as in individual rather than a class, Meaning whatever complaint you have in a situation if you “feel” it wrongs you now you have the ability to sue for.
Now using Intent as a standard, a plaintiff’s personal experience is the starting point. If you “feel” sorted or excluded, the court is legally obligated to investigate your claim of discrimination. The Trap: Because “intent” is subjective, the court can’t dismiss you based standing. They have to allow for discovery searching the state’s private records, to see if your “feeling” is right.
The thing is the group that wanted this gone have no idea what on earth they just released from pandora’s box. Now that groups can not sue, It will allow for sole people to sue, and sue pro se under the law, it sounds like a bigger hill to climb, but it actually creates the bad wish part, Groups of individuals can no sue pro se and courts can not dismiss these cases in one sweep. where the VRA protected the courts before, The VRA was like a dam it gathered all the voters up into one location and as a single form allowed the courts to see the issue as a singular subject. No more, voters can not all file a case, Without a lawyer, and whereas before you had (Group 1) sueing , now you can have tens of thousands sueing all at once, with Lawyers, pro se, Pro per, and so on. So if this is what the scotus wanted they are going to end up locking up every court from the local level to the SCOTUS.
The absolutely evil end of ending the VRA , is now you can sue the state for discrimination as an individual on, to white, to colored, to disabled, to You don’t like your neighbor voting because of reasons, to you have a gene that someone else doesn’t have, to much violence, to little violence, to many cars, to many bikes, in the most basic form it has opened up warfare by skirmish on every little battle. It causes a skirmish all the way up the chain if the person starts filing on the state level based on the 14th amendment. This is unholy destructive, and now the case can be lodged at any starting point (Town,City,county,State) and how SCOTUS did not have foresight for this is bloody amazing. Given the fact that SCOTUS has enforced the individual mandate now, the ones suing for (Random Voter Discrimination issue) could basically end up stripping every town/city etc of every document they ever had the word “voter” on.
In closing, If 1% of citizens per state files an individual lawsuit due to the math of Intent, The legal system will be so bound up by this that it would effectively paralyze every court in every state. because even if 30,000 suits per state, they would have to pull every judge, every legal aid, every lawyer that works inside the local and state governments to the point of shutting down other courts (Civil, Family, criminal, Enforcement). Normally, the court would try to bundle these but now due to the individual mandate, Every single person could just tell the courts “I hereby refuse class-action status; my injury is personal and based on my specific DNA/neighborhood/feelings,” and the judges would be stuck with tens of thousands of cases, tens of thousands of filings for discovery , Appeals, motions, AMICUS Briefs, Multiplies the damage hundreds of times past the original filings. So in short, Those Judges might want to get their strongest coffee out and make a cup the size of Cleveland. Since Nationwide Injunctions was ended by the SCOTUS, they have created a monster they never had the preemption to notice. The rights of the local courts have lost the power of injunctions, they have lost the power of the stay.. it’s basically no holds barred the way I see it .
Now I am not a lawyer, I just analysed an a chain of thought of how SCOTUS’s ruling might backfire in theory. It might come back to bite them hard in the end.
It would seem my want of a good Non-AI coffeepot has been reinforced yet again. The IoT coffeepot has been caught spying.
A cluster of seemingly unrelated incidents ranging from exposed enterprise AI tools to a breached coffee machine has revealed the daunting reality that modern cyber risk is no longer confined to servers, endpoints or even employees. It now increasingly spans ecosystems, vendors and even the delivery mechanisms for the very tools designed to drive organizational productivity.
The problem with AI is it is veiled in a ton of secrecy that is no good for anyone. Because once the bad agents start figuring it out. We are in deep trouble. The convenience of the AI coffee pot might be nice but it comes with a ton of drawbacks most people don’t account for .
A digital forensics investigator, identified only as TR, was called in when a client suspected a rival had infiltrated their systems after a data breach. Instead of finding malicious software, TR discovered that an internet-enabled espresso machine, equipped with a default password, an outdated operating system, and no firewall, was the source of the leak. Threat actors exploited this device, which was connected to the client’s secure network, to exfiltrate sensitive data. The machine was sending packets internationally every time someone brewed a cup, bypassing all the client’s advanced security measures.
This does present the facts of IoT machines need just as much vetting as computers on a network, if your IT guy doesn’t find every IoT devices on the network he is creating a leak, and the corporate moto of just buy the cheapest thing is normally a recipe for disaster.
Firstly, Keep all of your IoT shit on its own network, If you have a store named BOBcorp, Put all IoT devices on BioT29384 network that is isolated from the main network. Second, You want a network monitor IoT devices are chatty in nature but if your network traffic jumps sniff it out and make sure its sanitized. IoT companies should give a master list of where their devices connect to. That way if your AI coffeepot is connecting to Nigeria you know something is wrong. Either that give google, Apple, Amazon, and other Hub Devices a choice to go through a master server on the devices Hub of choice, That way if all of the corps go through the hub device the IT staff have an easy way to poke at what the IoT stuff is doing.
By having a master hub list of devices if a device starts misbehaving or an attack vector is found. They can deauth the device. It stops companies from just vomiting out “smart” everything devices, That way if they lose there auth they will act fast to restore the trust in the devices.
Another thought here is with security layers is, that most IoT have BLE enabled by default, After pairing there should be a dipswitch to turn off the BLE until its needed for repairing to the network. BLE is notorious for sniffing what is around it .
FirstNet Trusted™ Could really do something to come out on top here. Because of corporate laziness of “just buy the cheapest thing” leads to the problem in the first place. since they are part of AT&T and there network knowhow.
Even passed that Cellphones on the corp networks need to be on their own network, Workers who place IoT or cellphones on the larger corp networks need to be taken off and the employee trained for network safety, it would create a top down security that would even extend to the workers home after. Rather than finding out too late that there beloved AI coffeepot has been stealing secrets for Months.
In the end, You are better off with a Coffeepot with a switch , and if you need it smart. Add a smart plug to it and than you can control it from afar without having so much bloatware you never know what it is connecting to.
In order to show some sort of profit, meta is firing 10000 people and closing 6000 open positions, This is biting off your arm to save your foot.
Meta said on Thursday it plans to lay off roughly 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 people, the latest in a string of tech industry layoffs fueled in part by artificial intelligence.
The company is also closing around 6,000 open roles, Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, wrote in a memo published by Bloomberg that Meta confirmed to CNN.
This is insane. They are firing workers to replace with AI , the problem is AI can’t walk, it can’t improvise its position, and lastly without AI the only innovation they get is AI hallucination.
The company has also been splurging on talent for its superintelligence lab and has acquired buzzy AI startups like Moltbook and Manus as part of its ongoing efforts to compete with OpenAI and others.
The problem here is that in the past Meta had people working on all sorts of things. now they are doing a ground level overfocus and are putting all of the eggs into one basket and I feel like the payoff is not going to be what meta wants. Give or take companies are all jockeying for position to hit the innovation jackpot on AI. the problem is most of the companies that are playing the CAPEex game is doing it by scaling and not code.
Amazon said in January it would lay off 16,000 workers, its second large-scale layoffs in three months, emphasizing the need for efficiency. fintech firm Block’s announcement in February that it would lay off 40% of its workforce, more than 4,000 people, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the start of this year that the company, which has invested heavily in AI, could see workforce changes because of the technology. On Meta’s January earnings call, he called 2026 “the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work.”
“We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” Zuckerberg said.
Here’s my counter-point to this, You fired 16000 positions, if this person is supposedly replacing that many workers, what happens when your Very Talented Person gets sick? Or, a power outage? Or, LLM data loss. Now if your Very Talented Person gets sick your output goes from 14000 to … 1 , Whereas before one person gets sick your output goes from 14000 to 13999. And lets just say for instance the person that would of replaced your Very Talented Person makes an innovation that improves working by triple, you end up having your Replacement guys efficiency 13999 to 41,997.
Like many big tech companies, Meta eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in 2022 and 2023, reductions that were largely attributed to right-sizing after Covid-era spikes in usage and hiring. Last year, the company said it would cut about 5% of what it called its “lowest performers,” although it planned to backfill many of those roles.
This is not right-sizing, this is full on cannibalization, Everyone is jumping for the AI goldrush while some chinese man in his garage is laughing at the Cape-ex and deepseeking the best coffee ideas.
This here is a tracked price of an SSD from amazon that clearly shows how much AI is driving the price up for every human in existence. to replace the SSD in a cheap computer now costs more than the cheap laptop or computer you bought in 2024. It eradicates any advantages in buying consoles and more.
