A friend of mine explained why it’s important to his kids: they can’t chat with a group of their friends.

Why? Because parents don’t want to install WhatsApp or other group chats due to legitimate concerns about scammers, pedophiles, and other child predators. SMS chat fills that gap, but it breaks horribly for groups bigger than 10 people. Hence if some kid is on Android, they break their chat. Given the penetration of Apple devices, it’s the kids with Android who are considered at-fault. “Just get an iPhone!”

Welcome to anticompetitive practices targeted at your children.

As is typical, this science reporting isn’t great. It’s not only that AI can do it effectively, but that it can do it at scale. To quote the paper:

“Despite these models achieving near-expert human performance, they come at a fraction of the cost, requiring 100× less financial and 240× lower time investment than human labelers—making such privacy violations at scale possible for the first time.”

They also demonstrate how interacting with an AI model can quickly extract more private info without looking like it is. A game of 20 questions, except you don’t realize you’re playing.

Tech has been in aggressive growth mode since 2008 because the Fed was handing out free money (interest rate lower than inflation). That allowed investors to dump money into tech businesses in hope of rapid business expansion, which in turn makes the business more valuable.

The free money dried up. Now these tech businesses are going to find out if they’re sustainable.

I’m not familiar with that YouTube channel, but the story absolutely repeats itself. A business will eventually die if it cannot turn around its finances and cannot raise money.

They may have cut themselves. Usually high level cuts are announced as “leaving for an amazing opportunity” or to “focus on family” or similar. That happens a month or two later after a deep layoff round and reorganizing. We’ll see if these recent layoffs included executives by Q1 next year. Watch LinkedIn if you’re that curious.

Still, it’s unfair to the lower levels, including line management, because they don’t get that option. It’s a “thank you for your service” and a boot out the door.

Note: not all tech companies are like this. Gumroad is an excellent example of a very open and ran-differently business.

Q3 just ended. These layoffs are because the books are not looking good. Everyone is hurting with inflation and higher interest, tech being particularly vulnerable to high interest rates.

I can only hope the execs cut correctly. A second round of layoffs at a company can destroy morale enough to sink the company. Who wants to continue working at a place that fired your close peers, wondering if you’re next?