This is an incredibly undeservedly positive profile for this company. So many paragraphs here look like they were written by Bending Spoons or are uncritically repeating direct claims by the company.

The company’s playbook has become clear: acquire underperforming but popular tech brands, then transform them to serve millions of users more efficiently through controversial changes to beloved products and substantial workforce reductions. It followed this pattern with Evernote and WeTransfer, and is now repeating it with Vimeo.

…

Despite often being described as a private equity firm, Bending Spoons describes itself more specifically as a company that acquires and transforms digital businesses. Having grown to a headcount of 400 to 500 employees (whom the company calls “Spooners”), its main focus is on making improvements to products and services that others have created.

“Transform them to serve millions of users more efficiently”? “Its main focus is on making improvements to products and services…”?

Awfully strange ways to say their business model is “find companies with entrenched or locked-in userbases and then turn goodwill and inertia into profit by laying off all but a skeleton crew, increasing prices and lowering services and quality.” Good thing that is totally different from what a private equity buyout does.

Good point. Though even when Woz was involved, he was overruled by one of the model tech narcissists, Jobs. But at least he was in the room.

I think we’ve just created an unregulated system that almost perfectly incentivizes and reinforces evil, so eventually evil is what we get.

Free market capitalism can only serve good with a tight collar and very short leash held by healthy democracy. Maybe it was a bad idea spending 40 years removing and making all leashes and collars for capitalism illegal, and handing the collar and leash to capitalism to put on democracy. But what do I know.

All good, thanks for the suggestion!

I went through something similar and am trying to recall, I think I did look and it was past the time period. I should have tried. It’s +2 years now for me.

Edit: Words.

Yeah, the article cites that as a control, but it’s not at all surprising since “humanity by survey consensus” is accurate to how LLM weighting trained on random human outputs works.

It’s impressive up to a point, but you wouldn’t exactly want your answers to complex math operations or other specialized areas to track layperson human survey responses.

Management: “No, that doesn’t work, because employees spend so much time doing the actual work that they lack the vision to know what’s good for them. Luckily for them I am not distracted by actual work so I have the vision to save them by making them use AI.”

A related question: What is the least random Mario Party? We often end up playing this when friends come over since I guess I’m the only one who feels like it’s too random for anyone to meaningfully “win.”

Not to rain on anyone’s parade or anything, I’m glad you all and others have fun with it, I just would like to see if there’s a version that’s more like it’s a game of skill than chance.

Or maybe I just want WarioWare…

This isn’t really showing what the display is like. It apparently can adjust viewing angle on a per-pixel level, so for example only apps and notifications you set will have limited viewing angles.

Here’s a story with a better leaked visual: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-S26-Ultra-display-may-have-more-tricks-up-its-sleeve.1214117.0.html

Frankly I think it’s still a bit gimmicky for privacy (why not just do the full screen, which you can do with a $10 polarized screen protector to all phones already), but it’s legitimately neat tech.