Jun 10, 2024

I Do Not Recall

Tech companies are totally on top of what people want. French protestors push back against more road. Elon Musk would like a few dollars. The US says the ICC are the bad ones.

Listen to today's episode on the Stuff Keeps Happening podcast

Tech Companies Are Totally In Touch

Tech companies—famous for doing only the things that are absolutely necessary—are somehow finding themselves goofing left and right like its some kind of competition.

First off, Microsoft announced "Recall," a new feature of Windows 11 which records and saves everything you ever do on your computer, then feeds that into an AI, so that you can ask it to find something for you. Given that Microsoft is not quite synonymous with "user trust," the announcement did NOT go well.

Immediately, security researchers (and… everyone) were like "the fuck are you thinking?", while other researchers already made an open source tool to hack and extract data from the Recall system.

Microsoft has since backtracked a bit, and is now saying you'll need to enable the feature, and that they'll encrypt the data. Problem solved!

Bonus Microsoft thing before moving on to the other blunder: Intel and Nvidia are pushing "Copilot+ Windows" computers, but turns out the computers don't actually have the AI features yet, they're just branded as "will be able to use the AI features when those are ready." That thing that NOBODY ASKED FOR.

But after all that, Adobe said, "hold my beer," as they popped a new Terms of Service agreement in their software which stated that Adobe can "analyze your Content [...] using techniques such as machine learning in order to improve our Services and Software and the user experience."

Pictured: A great idea that they totally thought through

People got big mad, rightfully so. But worry not: we already have the "no, its not as bad as you think, let us clarify: it is exactly as bad as you think, but don't worry about it" blog post from Adobe in response to the extremely valid criticism.

Just One More Lane…

There's always room to expand roads! Just cut away some of this useless "nature."

1,600 cops were deployed to quell a protest against a roadway expansion in southern France. The protestors were pushing back against the project due to its environmental impacts ranging from farmland to local aquifers. According to the protestor groups, about 7,000 people showed up to protest despite the state banning the demonstration.

The state labeled the protestors "radical individuals" who performed "extremely violent attacks with catapults" and who have "clearly come to cause damage with no link to the issue," which is funny because the protestors were very clearly protesting the issue they were protesting.

The state also claims there were only 1,600 protestors, which would then mean they deployed one cop per protestor. A solid look.

A few people were injured, one of whom was a cop who was hit with a molotov.

Musk Wants Money

Apparently Elon Musk needs about $50 Billion to be motivated to work. It's like nobody has any work ethic anymore.

Elon Musk has been trying to get an absurdly over-inflated pay package for years. It has wavered in value with stock prices, but sits around the $50,000,000,000 mark. Thasalotta zeroes.

The pay package from Tesla has already been shot down once by a judge, who noted that the plan was: "the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets by multiple orders of magnitude—250 times larger than the contemporaneous median peer compensation plan and over 33 times larger than the plan's closest comparison, which was Musk's prior compensation plan"

And yet, Musk still wants it. Another vote for the package is coming up, and Musk has been rallying his base. He referred to shareholders who disagree with the compensation package as "oathbreakers," which is honestly fucking weird.

Separately, the chairperson of the Tesla board wrote a letter to shareholders encouraging them to vote for the compensation package, arguing that this payout is necessary to keep Elon Musk motivated.

But weird: investment firms aren't super into the idea of paying Musk $50 Billion to keep tweeting or whatever, with multiple major firms advising against the pay package. Maybe they just don't yet understand how important it is to keep Elon Musk motivated?

Diggin' in Our Heels

Last week, Israel bombed a school in Gaza, killing 33 civilians, most of them women and children. Israel went back and forth between claiming Hamas was there, and otherwise being like "uh, we don't know anything about civilian deaths, idk what that is." They yet again used "evidence" which was them pointing at a photo of the target and saying "we think Hamas was there!"

The US response? Calling the ICC the bad guys.

The US House of Representative passed a bill that would sanction the ICC over the fact that the ICC is seeking the arrest of Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Two major notes about this:

The bill is not going to become law, this was largely symbolic, and is dead-on-arrival in the Senate
This bill was passed with a large majority voting in favor (247-155), with Republicans and Democrats alike voting for it
I said two things but here's a third: the first two points are likely feeding into each other. This was a "safe vote" for representatives to signal where they stand without actually being tied to the obvious international fallout should the bill get passed

Netanyahu is also scheduled to speak before a joint session of congress on July 24th, because what the United States does in 2024 is try to sanction the International Criminal Court and invite genocidal heads of state to speak at our nation's capitol to elected officials who refuse to listen to their constituents.

What a real country.

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