A satirical farce in the spirit of the comic Captain Underpants
“Sooie!” yelled Lizardberg from the perch of his treehouse overlooking the mud pit on the Kauai compound. Little Sami had just wrestled a wild boar to the ground and pinned it. It was one of five tasks Sami was assigned on the smartphone Gig worker app ObeyRabbit to earn the reward 1000 likes on the social media FakeLifeGram, including Lizardberg himself and his foundation LizardBro Initiative.
A satirical farce in the spirit of the comic Captain Underpants
Little Sami, our “our aspirational data thief” was feeling distraught two weeks after the death of his father, an agent of the Stealsi. Not because his father was dead, but that there was little left to steal that was obvious and easy. Other children of the Stealsi his age had already made big steals. One kid stood in front of his TV and recorded all of the streaming movies he had access to, then uploaded it to the RatPoiGPT chat interface of the company FakeAGI.
A satirical farce in the spirit of the comic Captain Underpants
Once upon a time a small boy wished he too could steal books, art, source code, movies, corporate documents, and unpublished inventions. He dreamed of enslaving the population further to the corporate interests of billionaires. Could he too contribute to the vast surveillance that made the population obedient, simple and confused? Yes, he could…
The reason he believed he could was because it is what his recently deceased father did for a living.
Linus Torvalds at the 2024 Open Source Summit North America 2024 said about GenAI “Let’s wait 10 years and see where it actually goes before we make all these crazy announcements.”
Similarly, with tech companies the default approach should be skepticism. Let’s start with smartphones. On a recent trip to Seattle I did a three-hour walk on the waterfront near Pike Place Market.
By Daniel Schwen - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.
It is the year 2035 and the new McApple drive-through is doing brisk business at one of the busiest times of the day. A customer in an autonomous Tesla jumps the curb and slightly crashes into the drive-through speakers and hears a voice responding “Welcome to the McApple store. What would you like to order ?”
“Hey, Yo, I will take a new McIPhone with the latest McAppleIntelligence. Also give me a McRib and a McFlurry, and ‘Supersize me’”.
Remember the last time you saw a commercial for a Tomato, or Rice or Beans by themselves? The reason these commercials don’t exist is that fruits, vegetables and whole grains are a commodity product that don’t need to be sold as part of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. A McDonald’s Happy Meal has something that is technically called food, but in practice is “food like”, and includes a toy to encourage addiction.
All relationships end. In particular American Corporations have a habit of peaking, then self-destructing. For me, after spending about 40 years as an Apple customer it was WWDC and the announcement of a partnership with OpenAI. My experience with Apple over my lifetime was that I was ok paying for a premium brand that treated me like a premium customer. Even the mention of a company as shady as OpenAI instantly destroys all brand value despite any promise Apple makes of firewalls.
A good question for a CTO or CIO is to determine if they can afford to trust SaaS in the era of GenAI. Why? Many SaaS vendors often cheap or free services, but may later changes the TOS (Terms of Service) to sell the data to GenAI companies. Further if eventually deep learning approach turns out to be too expensive this data trove could be leaked as organizations can no longer afford to keep the data.
Rejecting Regulatory Entrepreneurship and Unethical Data Sourcing by OpenAI and GitHub Copilot The business model of Regulatory Entrepreneurship, i.e., they find a lucrative market, break the law, then get the law changed afterward is something I reject. As a result I reject all products from YCombinator, OpenAI and GitHub Copilot.
There are many better alternatives including AWS CodeWhisperer which includes attribution, doesn’t appear to be trained on Pirated Datasets and isn’t associated with a deeply unethical incubator YCombinator which pushes negative externalities on to the world.