As always piracy is a symptom not the problem. People pirate when a) they don’t have enough money or b) the experience for paying customers is significantly worse than for pirates, or c) the price of services far exceeds their perceived value. Piracy was down for a while because Netflix and Hulu were relatively cheap (or free), ad free, and the economy was doing OK so most people had a little disposable income.

Now that we’re in a recession that’s starting to look like it might turn into a depression and Netflix and Hulu (and others) have cranked the prices of their services up and stuffed them full of ads, yeah I’m not in the least surprised to see piracy surging. Every time you turn around there’s another email from some service letting you know they’re raising prices another couple bucks a month, and a bunch of people cancel their subscriptions and start sailing the high seas.

Translation: please keep pouring money into the bubble

Don’t even need to turn it off, it literally can’t do anything without somebody telling it to so you could just stop using it. It’s incapable of independent action. The only danger it poses is that it will tell you to do something dangerous and you actually do it.

My power company recently contacted me with an “exciting offer” where instead of billing me based on my energy usage they’d just bill me based on what my average usage was previously. I politely declined. I think I’ll keep paying based on something measurable instead of vibe based billing.

Thinking about investing in new AI IPOs?

Not even remotely.