dawg i chatgpt'd the license
cured a lot of people's imposter syndrome!
*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•
What a week for Business Hero™ Elon Musk. He got to take a break from personally door-knocking Pennsylvania voters to throw a spite party across from the OpenAI headquarters and show off some goofy looking cartoon taxis, and it only cost him four top execs and 8% of Tesla’s stock price!
Worth it tho to see robots finally addressing society’s thorniest, most intractable problems: Looking cool af while pouring us a beer. sick.
Why, you may ask, have we been blessed with such splendors of the future? A colleague explains:
Tesla’s status as the most valuable car company in the world was once based on Mr. Musk’s claim that the company would sell 20 million cars a year by the end of the decade … more than 10 times as many as Tesla sold last year.
Lately, as sales growth at Tesla has slowed, Mr. Musk has stopped emphasizing that goal and instead staked the company’s future on self-driving technology.
👍
While we’re at it, how about an update on Musk’s great hyperloop dream, first proposed 12 years ago? So far it exists as a handful of tunnels under the Vegas convention center where some humans with Teslas ferry people around (but only people who are part of a conference). Its also attracting lost and confused Uber drivers who have to be escorted out.
👍
While we’re still at it: Cybertrucks are “too big and sharp” for European roads.
In other news
This week I was scrolling Hacker News. Heard of it? Picture a 1960s Paris cafe filled with all the great postmodern philosophers of the day—a Forum Romanum, really—except now picture it if the cafe is a bare bones all-text Internet message board and the philosophers are all start-up bros.
Anyway recently, the bros were debating the PearAI open source kerfuffle, which I cannot be bothered to rehash here except that it involves a YC founder responding to some accusations of bad behavior with the iconic defense, “dawg i chatgpt'd the license,” and also “we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal.”
👍
In conclusion, this Hacker News comment is now the main lens I plan to use to analyze all tech news going forward:
One positive outcome is that this might have cured a lot of people's imposter syndrome.
Thanks, dawg!
Important Business Matters
Startup everyone’s into: Energy stocks are the new proxy for buying A.I. stocks.
Startup everyone’s over: Threads is lame. It’s okay to admit it. This is a safe space. And here’s a great explanation of why news online sucks right now.
Reason to go on living: When A.I. takes over and has no use for humans, it will simply demand we stack our meat sack bodies on top of one another in 10-story human towers for its own entertainment! (These photos are amazing and terrifying.)
Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: Twitter only takes down non-consensual nudity when its a copyright violation. 😒
Latest crush: Walmart’s in-house meteorologist.
Latest heartbreak: Funding for women founders is evaporating and A.I. mania is encouraging tech to backtrack to its bro-tastic past.
Latest thing the kids are into: Little Free Blockbusters
Latest thing the criminals are into: Withheld for Privacy.
Latest things the Business Heroes™ are up to:
Abandoning and unwinding their DEI programs for small businesses.
Trying to curb junior banker hours to just 80 a week (lol come on, impossible).
Prioritizing AI over climate goals, cause, according to Eric Schmidt, “we’re not gonna hit those anyway.”
It was a different time
This week’s throwback link truly has nothing to do with anything. Did you know that the week Lehman Brothers collapsed, in 2008, Best Buy acquired Napster? I sure didn’t!
a dall-e summary of this newsletter:
“retro aesthetics and futuristic tech debates”
*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•the end•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•
Thanks for reading, buddies! If you enjoy EGTttHoB™ please forward it to all of your BFFs. There's also a "like" button you can hit somewhere on this email.
If you are a new reader and wondering, wtf this is, well, welcome. Here is slightly more information.