This is not it. Services are bad because month by month year by year, capitalism demands that they produce endless growth. When there's nothing legit left to strip down then they start taking out the floorboards.
Exact same thing as shrinkflation; make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. And then the next year, and the next.
Delivery services/couriers have been having to deliver more packages faster for less money YoYoYoY.
> make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year.
That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value.
It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as long as stock increases in value no one cares.
Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a company is to serve its shareholders and lampooned the idea that business has any responsibility for, and I quote, "providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers."
And Trump has already suggested that he will use military force to take Greenland. Ofc it was "if required" but it's a guarantee anyway given Greenland doesn't fucking want to be a U.S. state, same as Canada and everywhere else.
Because rather than let me and my team focus on building the guts of something that works well, my employer was insistent we build PoCs of cut-down concepts that don't make any sense at all.
Like using AI to fill in a form. Instead of a proper autonomous agent (which was the project's goal).
Now that AI is "mainstream" and big bubble big money big career/promotion options for management I expect much more of this behaviour going into 2026.
I'm not surprised; large companies are like...large cities or towns. I've been at several companies as they've grown from small to medium, medium to large and essentially the same thing happens every single time.
Knives come out, people are smiling but not with their eyes. Meritocracies crumble into cronyism.
Look up VLA models; that's essentially plugging the guts of a language model into a transformer that handles joint motion/vision. They get trained on "episodes" i.e. videos from the PoV of a robot doing a task, after training you can ask the model things like: "pick up the red ball and put it into the green cup" etc. Really cool stuff.
I didn't really have a problem with the spoken sounds when learning in school - we were also required to take Maori lessons as well and a lot of the sounds are shared. Quite interesting really.
Edit: actually the only one I ever had an issue with was one of my homestay's names "Ryouhei"...that Ryou sound...it's like the Y stops me from rolling the R properly, so odd.
Exact same thing as shrinkflation; make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. And then the next year, and the next.
Delivery services/couriers have been having to deliver more packages faster for less money YoYoYoY.
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