News / tech
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1 min read
The Fat Kitten That Fooled the Whole Timeline
Read more . . . →In late May, Mistral renamed its chatbot Le Chat — French for “the cat” — to “Vibe.” The fans mourning the cat did what the grieving do online: they built a replacement. Le Chaton Fat. Franglais for “the fat kitten,” an oxymoron with a face. It started in Mistral’s own community, hit X around June 11, and within hours actual machine-learning researchers were asking out loud if it was real. Cody Blakeney posted, dead serious, “Can someone tell me if Le Chaton fat is real or an amazingly elaborate joke?” No weights. No API. No model card. It never hit...
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Salesforce Replaced the Engineers. The Salespeople Are Fine.
Read more . . . →Salesforce didn’t hire a single engineer last year. Not one. Marc Benioff — $145 billion company, personal net worth north of $10 billion — stood up and told the world that AI handles the coding now, so why pay humans to do it? Productivity’s up 30%, he said, clearly pleased with himself. Zero new engineers in fiscal year 2026. That’s the headline he volunteered. That’s the thing he thought was worth bragging about. But here’s what he made sure to mention in the same breath: sales is booming. Nearly 20% more salespeople hired. Because someone still needs to walk into...
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1 min read
Record Profits. Fire the Measurers.
Read more . . . →Cloudflare posted record revenue last quarter — $639.8 million, up 34%, best quarter in the company’s 16-year history — then fired 1,100 people. Twenty percent of the company, out. CEO Matthew Prince needed a word for these people, so he invented one: “measurers.” Accountants, auditors, middle managers, legal. The people who make sure the company doesn’t eat itself from the inside. Gone. Prince and his co-founder insisted this wasn’t a cost-cutting exercise. It was the “agentic AI era.” They released a statement so thick with future-speak it barely registers as English. The stock dropped 24% after the announcement — Wall...
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1 min read
$725 Billion for AI, Severance for Everyone Else
Read more . . . →Coinbase just fired 700 people — 14% of its staff — and CEO Brian Armstrong described it as “building an intelligence, with humans around the edge.” Humans around the edge. You’re no longer a worker. You’re a decorative border on a product. Big Tech collectively committed $725 billion to AI this year — Amazon $200B, Microsoft $190B, Meta up to $145B — while burning through 80,000 workers in Q1 alone. Human salaries are the one cost flexible enough to cut fast enough to fund the buildout. Oracle made workers train the AI that replaced them. Not as a metaphor. They...
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Zuckerberg Laid Off 8,000 People to Pay for Servers
Read more . . . →The number is $135 billion. That’s Meta’s AI infrastructure spend this year — Zuckerberg just raised the forecast again because apparently $115B wasn’t enough silicon for the guy who already owns your attention span. To cover the difference, he’s cutting 8,000 employees starting May 20, plus cancelling 6,000 open roles. Fourteen thousand positions, gone. Meta posted record profits last quarter. The budget isn’t tight — the priorities are. He told them at a company town hall. To their faces. “The layoffs are a direct consequence of the AI budget.” The company restructures into AI “pods,” which sounds like a sci-fi...
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Jack Dorsey Fired 4,000 People and Called It Innovation
Read more . . . →Jack Dorsey laid off 40% of Block’s staff — 4,000 people — and told the world it was because of AI. Said the business was strong, profits were up, growth was good. Just… didn’t need those people anymore. Specifically didn’t need the policy team. Specifically didn’t need DEI. Fascinating which roles the machines replaced first. Here’s the part that should make you furious: he then went on record saying most companies are “late” and will make similar cuts within the year. He turned a mass firing into an industry announcement. A roadmap. Every CEO in America now has their script...
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Thank You for Your Years of Service
Read more . . . →Thirty thousand people woke up at 6 AM to an email signed by nobody. The future of work is getting fired by a distribution list.
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