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Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

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Better Offline. Yeah. Let's not all right. Now in the last episode, we talked about an unfortunate affliction affecting people in tech

where they're prone to spouting these inane, meaningless platitudes.

And then the other affliction affecting people in the tech media where they nod

along and say, huh, make sense to me.

The thing is, if we actually care about tech, it's upon us to actually challenge these charlatans.

We don't have to be mean or rude or harsh. We just have to say, what does that mean or what exactly

do you mean? This is the pro-tech position. It's not about being a hater or a cynic or whatever. It's an essential quality control mechanism that's been sorely lacking, especially in the AI bubble.

The problem is that bullshit is a scarily effective mechanism by the shameless and the cynical, and it's managed to bamboozle so many, especially in the media, where the job is, at least in theory, to do the exact opposite

of not only reasonably and saying, oh, that sounds good to me, mate. Let's say the media,

not the actually good people, who I mentioned by name in the last episode, but Slavish Licks

Bills like Kevin, Ruse, and Casey Newton actually want these companies to build powerful AI and

believe they're smart enough to do so,

say that somehow looking at their decaying finances, the lack of revenue, the lack of growth,

and the remarkable lack of use cases, they still come out of it and say,

sure, I think they're going to do this.

The problem with bullshit, like Nadella's word salad buffet and Altman's whatever the fuck he does,

...