#Tech for Business

[coderower]

How CRM Software Development Can Optimize the Performance of Your Business

Discover how CRM software development can enhance efficiency, boost sales, and transform customer relationships for your business.

Customer connections are essential to corporate success in today’s competitive commercial world. Software for customer relationship management, or CRM, enhances and streamlines these connections. Businesses use CRM software development to boost performance, customer happiness, and operational efficiency. This article highlights the benefits of CRM software development for your company’s…

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

*raises my hand to ask a question* what if we collectively refused to refer to AI as 'AI'? it's not artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence doesn't currently exist, it's just algorithms that use stolen input to reinforce prejudice. what if we protested by using a more accurate name? just spitballing here but what about Automated Biased Output (ABO for short)

[teaboot]

YOOOOO CHECK THIS SHIT OUT I FOUND BATTERY-OPERATED AM/FM RADIO HEADPHONES

I’M NEVER USING WIFI DATA SPOTIFY ITUNES YOUTUBE MUSIC APP SHIT OUTSIDE MY HOUSE EVER AGAIN

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"A bid to break up Alphabet Inc.’s Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.

The move would be Washington’s first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft Corp. two decades ago. Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

Regardless, the government will likely seek a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of its case against Google. If the Justice Department pushes ahead with a breakup plan, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google’s web browser Chrome, said the people. Officials are also looking at trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, the platform the company uses to sell text advertising, one of the people said.

The Justice Department discussions have intensified in the wake of Judge Amit Mehta’s Aug. 5 ruling that Google illegally monopolized the markets of online search and search text ads. Google has said it will appeal that decision, but Mehta has ordered both sides to begin plans for the second phase of the case, which will involve the government’s proposals for restoring competition, including a possible breakup request.

The US plan will need to be accepted by Mehta, who would direct the company to comply. A forced breakup of Google would be the biggest of a US company since AT&T was dismantled in the 1980s."

-via Bloomberg, August 13, 2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI and the fatfinger economy

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in WELLINGTON TODAY (May 3). More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Have you noticed that all the buttons you click most frequently to invoke routine, useful functions in your device have been moved, and their former place is now taken up by a curiously butthole-esque icon that summons an unwanted AI?

https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes

These traps for the unwary aren't accidental, but neither are they placed there solely because tech companies think that if they can trick you into using their AI, you'll be so impressed that you'll become a regular user. To understand why you find yourself repeatedly fatfingering your way into an unwanted AI interaction – and why those interactions are so hard to exit – you have to understand something about both the macro- and microeconomics of high-growth tech companies.

Growth is a heady advantage for tech companies, and not because of an ideological commitment to "growth at all costs," but because companies with growth stocks enjoy substantial, material benefits. A growth stock trades at a higher "price to earnings ratio" ("P:E") than a "mature" stock. Because of this, there are a lot of actors in the economy who will accept shares in a growing company as though they were cash (indeed, some might prefer shares to cash). This means that a growing company can outbid their rivals when acquiring other companies and/or hiring key personnel, because they can bid with shares (which they get by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet), while their rivals need cash (which they can only get by selling things or borrowing money).

The problem is that all growth ends. Google has a 90% share of the search market. Google isn't going to appreciably increase the number of searchers, short of desperate gambits like raising a billion new humans to maturity and convincing them to become Google users (this is the strategy behind Google Classroom, of course). To continue posting growth, Google needs gimmicks. For example, in 2019, Google intentionally made Search less accurate so that users would have to run multiple queries (and see multiple rounds of ads) to find the answers to their questions:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Thanks to Google's monopoly, worsening search perversely resulted in increased earnings, and Wall Street rewarded Google by continuing to trade its stock with that prized high P:E. But for Google – and other tech giants – the most enduring and convincing growth stories comes from moving into adjacent lines of business, which is why we've lived through so many hype bubbles: metaverse, web3, cryptocurrency, and now, of course, AI.

For a company like Google, the promise of these bubbles is that it will be able to double or triple in size, by dominating an entirely new sector. With that promise comes peril: growth must eventually stop ("anything that can't go on forever eventually stops"). When that happens, the company's stock instantaneously goes from being a "growth stock" to being a "mature stock" which means that its P:E is way too high. Anyone holding growth stock knows that there will come a day when those stocks will transition, in an eyeblink, from being undervalued to being grossly overvalued, and that when that day comes, there will be a mass sell-off. If you're still holding the stock when that happens, you stand to lose bigtime:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

So everyone holding a growth stock sleeps with one eye open and their fists poised over the "sell" button. Managers of growth companies know how jittery their investors are, and they do everything they can to keep the growth story alive, as a matter of life and death.

But mass sell-offs aren't just bad for the company – it's also very bad for the company's key employees, that is, anyone who's been given stock in addition to their salary. Those people's portfolios are extremely heavy on their employer's shares, and they stand to disproportionately lose in the event of a selloff. So they are personally motivated to keep the growth story alive.

That's where these growth-at-all-stakes maneuvers bent on capturing an adjacent sector come from. If you remember the Google Plus days, you'll remember that every Google service you interacted with had some important functionality ripped out of it and replaced with a G+-based service. To make sure that happened, Google's bosses decreed that the company's bonuses would be tied to the amount of G+ activity each division generated. In companies where bonuses can amount to 90% of your annual salary or more, this was a powerful motivator. It meant that every product team at Google was fully aligned on a project to cram G+ buttons into their product design. Whether or not these made sense for users, they always made sense for the product team, whose ability to take a fancy Christmas holiday, buy a new car, or pay their kids' private school tuition depended on getting you to use G+.

Once you understand how corporate growth stories are converted to "key performance indicators" that drive product design, many of the annoyances of digital services suddenly make a great deal of sense. You know how it's almost impossible to watch a show on a streaming video service without accidentally tapping a part of the screen that whisks you to a completely different video?

The reason you have to handle your phone like a photonegative while watching a movie – the reason every millimeter of screen real-estate has been boobytrapped with an icon that takes you somewhere else – is that streaming services believe that their customers are apt to leave when they feel like there's nothing new to watch. These bosses have made their product teams' bonuses dependent on successfully "recommending" a show you've never seen or expressed any interest in to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/15/the-fatfinger-economy/

Of course, bosses understand that their workers will be tempted to game this metric. They want to distinguish between "real" clicks that lead to interest in a new video, and fake fatfinger clicks that you instantaneously regret. The easiest way to distinguish between these two types of click is to measure how long you watch the new show before clicking away.

Of course, this is also entirely gameable: all the product manager has to do is take away the "back" button, so that an accidental click to a new video is extremely hard to cancel. The five seconds you spend figuring out how to get back to your show are enough to count as a successful recommendation, and the product team is that much closer to a luxury ski vacation next Christmas.

So this is why you keep invoking AI by accident, and why the AI that is so easy to invoke is so hard to dispel. Like a demon, a chatbot is much easier to summon than it is to rid yourself of.

Google is an especially grievous offender here. Familiar buttons in Gmail, Gdocs, and the Android message apps have been replaced with AI-summoning fatfinger traps. Android is filled with these pitfalls – for example, the bottom-of-screen swipe gesture used to switch between open apps now summons an AI, while ridding yourself of that AI takes multiple clicks.

This is an entirely material phenomenon. Google doesn't necessarily believe that you will ever want to use AI, but they must convince investors that their AI offerings are "getting traction." Google – like other tech companies – gets to invent metrics to prove this proposition, like "how many times did a user click on the AI button" and "how long did the user spend with the AI after clicking?" The fact that your entire "AI use" consisted of hunting for a way to get rid of the AI doesn't matter – at least, not for the purposes of maintaining Google's growth story.

Goodhart's Law holds that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." For Google and other AI narrative-pushers, every measure is designed to be a target, a line that can be made to go up, as managers and product teams align to sell the company's growth story, lest we all sell off the company's shares.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

Image: Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Index_finger_%3D_to_attention.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

--

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[abdquffa9]

❗️🇵🇸🍉 Please don't skip❗️🍉🇵🇸

This is my little niece 🫂

An indescribable scene, this little girl is trying to get food to feed her younger siblings,❗️❗️ and she is sad because she did not provide them with the appropriate amount, is it the fault of these children that this happens to them? And can the world watch these scenes and remain silent?

Can you stand by us and support🍉 us? Please 🙏🙏do not ignore this appeal🙏🙏🙏🙏🍉🍉🍉🍉🇵🇸

Donation Link go found me ⬇️⬇️

PayPal donation link 🇵🇸 ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

✅️ Vetting Done ✅️

My campaign vetted by

@a-shade-of-blue ;September 21 link vetted

@autismswagsummit : link vetted

@dlxxv-vetted-donations :

link vetted

@commissions4aid-international :

link vetted

@ibtisams : link vetted

@magnus-rhymes-with-swagness: link vetted

@tododeku-or-bust ; link vetted

@collgeruledzebra : link vetted

@gazavetters my number verified on the list is ( #67)

My brother's and sister account

(@ahmadquffa)

(@mumenquffa)

(@shahdquffa)

@90-ghost @el-shab-hussein @nabulsi @sar-soor @sayruq @queerstudiesnatural @appsa @communistchilchuck @fairuzfakhira @neptunerings @just-browsing1222 @appsa @akajustmerry @feluka @marnota @annoyingloudmicrowavecultist @tortiefrancis @flower-tea-fairies @tsaricides @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @vivisection-gf @belleandsaintsebastian @ear-motif @animentality @kordeliiius @brutaliakhoa @raelyn-dreams @troythecatfish @violetlyra @the-bastard-king @tamaytka @4ft10tvlandfangirl @troythecatfish @skatehan @northgazaupdates2 @northgazaupdates2 @baby-girl-aaron-dessner @friendshapedplant @mangocheesecakes @commissions4aid-international

[bacchuschucklefuck]

space sweepers but they're delivery people and are at no point on screen through the entire movie

[stars-obsession-pit]

What do you mean my “secret identity”? (DP AU)

Danny never cared to try to keep up a secret identity. Well, he did consider it at first, but then he decided it would be pointless. Ghosts would be able to tell anyway, and presumably his parents must have noticed immediately.

True, he never went around announcing that he’s the half-ghost vigilante, but he never saw a need to. Surely it’s more than obvious enough.

Even if they ignore the words of the ghosts who know, his appearance is still a dead giveaway. His body and voice barely changed aside from his hair and eye color. He wears a full-body suit like the Fentons and uses their tech. Hell, he even goes by nearly the exact same name! “Danny Phantom” may as well be a homophone of “Danny Fenton” even before you consider accents.

…so why do so many people seem to completely ignore the connection?! They could just be pretending so as to not give away the ruse, but that really isn’t necessary for them. Danny doesn’t care, and it’s not like revealing that they know would negatively affect the average person’s life at all (unlike with Danny’s own parents, who might lose business if other ghost hunters stop trusting their work).

[themilfking]

Simply boycotting Israeli products is no longer enough. The boycott should extend to every product in the supply chain that's been touched by Israeli hands.

Not just for ethical reasons but for your personal safety.

[technoplanet]

NTT DOCOMO D253IWM

[avelera]

It's a really small detail, but I just love how Arcane shows that Jayce has a standard superhero body with eight-pack abs and shoulders broader than a house and then actually takes the time to show you how he got like that.

They take the time to show him working in his family's factory/forge, as a blacksmith, and show that he still does it today even as a scientist to custom make hextech items but also sometimes just to blow off steam. And sure we could quibble about whether that would be enough of a workout for the body of an Greek god that he ended up with, but still, I really appreciated that not every guy or girl in Arcane is jacked with muscle just because it's Hollywood normal.

They take the time to make sure every character has a body type that makes sense for them (even as most of the protagonists are very physical fighters so, y'know, the muscles do make sense) and it doesn't stop there, because when someone has a lifestyle (scientist/academic) that makes us wonder how they're that jacked, they take the time to show how it actually makes sense for him.

[sweerlyc]

dantey wallpapers (og art, by me too)

[theambitiouswoman]

How To Network 🤝📱💬

Have a Plan: Because everyone is important, it's really important to know what you're good at. Before you go to any networking event, figure out what you're good at – like things you can do well, what you know, and the people you know. Plan what you want to talk about, especially how you can help others, either now or later on.

Start with Who You Know: Talk to people you already know, like friends and colleagues. Ask if they can introduce you to others.

Go to Events: Attend conferences, seminars, workshops, industry meetups, and social gatherings related to your field of interest.

Use Social Media: Make profiles on websites like LinkedIn or Instagram to meet people in your niche online.

Elevator Pitch: Create a concise and engaging intro that highlights who you are, what you do, and what you're seeking. This way you can make a strong first impression.

Ask Good Questions: When you talk to someone, ask questions that show you're interested in what they're saying.

Provide Value: Networking is a two-way street. Offer your expertise, assistance, or connections to others whenever possible. When you start paying attention to what people can do, you might see that one person could help another person. Try to introduce people who you think have something valuable to share. When you make these good connections, you're helping the networking event go well. This will help you establish a good reputation and create strong relationships.

Say Thank You: After meeting, send a message to say you enjoyed the talk.

Follow up & Follow Through: If you said you would talk to someone later, make sure you actually do it and let them know you're still happy to help. If you promised to introduce one person to another, take a moment to make that introduction.These small things really matter to people, and just one introduction could make someone's life better.

Meet Different People: Don't just talk to the same kind of people. Meet people from different jobs and places.

Never dismiss anyone as unimportant: Don't think someone is not important just because of their job title. They could know important things or have helpful friends you wouldn't know about if you didn't give them a chance.

Join Groups: Be part of clubs or groups related to your work. You can meet more people there.

Be Yourself: Just be you. Don't pretend to be someone else.

Learn New Things: Keep learning about your interests. It helps you have better conversations.