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community weblog
Once a year, my communications team makes me use these words
Davos phrase book [FT; ungated]
Related: An entrepreneur's 13 hours in Davos jail: 'The food was phenomenal'
posted by chavenet on Jan 23, 2026 at 11:03 AM
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Scott Adams may be gone, but the last shovelful of dirt has yet to be piled on his brand of mild, toothless status-quo office snark
posted by Jon_Evil at 11:26 AM
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From the "jail" link:
The next morning they bring this guy named Chris, a technical expert. He says, "Come out here, explain your tech." I do my pitch. I say, "Look, I'm not a very good hardware engineer, but I'm a great user of AI." I was one of the top users of [AI coding tool] Cursor last year. I did 43,000 agent runs and generated 25 billion tokens.
We open my machine. Chris and I go line by line through the code. I don't know the language that the code was written in because it was written in AI, so Chris actually explained the code to me. They come back and they say, "You're free to go. You can take all your stuff with you, but you're banned from Davos between now and 6 pm on Friday."
We are truly in the stupidest timeline.
posted by signal at 11:42 AM
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I like the text exchange over whether this was a publicity stunt or not. I mean, it wasn't, but of course now it is!
posted by chavenet at 11:47 AM
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q.v. orbit, nuke from
posted by gottabefunky at 11:59 AM
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i can't fathom how much cash must be sloshing around being soaked up by these absolute sponge headed fraudsters, not a day goes by that I don't see some variant of headline "blah blah blah vibe code blah blah blah company valued at X billion blah blah initial funding rounds of XXX hundred million"
Its just a lottery. Run for and by the dumbest most craven idiots on the planet.
All these moronic CEO's are gobbling up so many talented young minds and putting them towards this effort when we have an entire ecosystem to fix and a world full of suffering.
Its a very strong argument that these people, the people they employ, current living humans, and the future of humanity and all living creatures great and small would be better served by taxing these people into a sensible tax bracket.
In the future I propose that if you make/own/have/earn a billion dollars you are put in jail for the rest of your life. You don't get a higher tax bracket, or have to pay a fee, if you hit a billion you are put in jail for life, and its up to you to avoid this. Your billion dollars is confiscated, and lit on fire, no one gets it, it doesn't go anywhere, we just erase it from the global economic system. Any company worth more than a billion is immediately broken up into companies worth less than a billion, and share holders are fined 10,000 dollars per share they own in that company.
For everyone/company below that billion dollar threshold, they are taxed at 100% for every dollar you own/earn/make/have over 10 million (American, or whatever the global currency is at the time). Anything that requires a billion or more in capital to do anything is nationalized and run as a non-profit for the benefit of citizens.
Seriously are we really going to let these absolute knobs ruin the biosphere...for this shit! Lets just put a knife through the heart of this absolutely foolish system, destroying the power of the capitalist so completely that they will never darken our doorstep again.
posted by stilgar at 12:10 PM
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Just to follow up, the 'jail' idiot was trying to sell "a verification device to fraud-proof money transfers", without understanding its code or in fact being able to code at all...
There are not enough � emojis in the known universe.
posted by signal at 12:44 PM
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I like the text exchange over whether this was a publicity stunt or not. I mean, it wasn't, but of course now it is!
I wonder if this publicity will help or hurt this soft-headed eejit? I'd like to imagine anyone reading this article, who was also looking to invest, would absolutely take a pass on a company hawking a vibe-coded anti-fraud device whose "inventor" used it to land himself in jail, but I also know we live in a truly ridiculous timeline.
At least they included a photo of the moron so we know what he looks like. Yes, of course he looks like the picture found next to the dictionary definition of "white tech entrepreneur."
I don't know the language that the code was written in because it was written in AI
My dude, AI is not a language. What you meant to say was, "I don't know what language the code is written in because I didn't write it."
posted by axiom at 1:43 PM
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Oh, my Dark Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre etc...
posted by signal at 2:13 PM
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That..."device". I might make and use something sloppy like that on my own workbench, but, like sweatpants, I wouldn't be caught dead with it outside of the house.
posted by Artful Codger at 4:28 PM
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Yeah, the other article that I've run across on that dude who got arrested for the... whatever the hell it was, just gets better as you go along: 'I'm very stupid': SF tech founder jailed in Davos for bomb-lookalike device. The vibe coding and the admission that the device doesn't work and he's pitching some sort of vaporware is...
I suppose this is the natural progression of the fact that if you yell at enough engineers that they have to do the impossible, some of them will manage to do that, but the people who profit from it didn't have any expertise in the tech, just inherited money and the ability to yell.
posted by straw at 4:44 PM
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To me it looked a lot more like a guitar pedal than a bomb at first glance, but I guess that's why my job doesn't involve keeping powerful people safe.
posted by clawsoon at 4:57 PM
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In the future I propose that if you make/own/have/earn a billion dollars you are put in jail for the rest of your life. You don't get a higher tax bracket, or have to pay a fee, if you hit a billion you are put in jail for life, and its up to you to avoid this. Your billion dollars is confiscated, and lit on fire, no one gets it, it doesn't go anywhere
This but they also get a badge to wear outdoors: "Winner!"
posted by biffa at 5:09 PM
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I guess that's why my job doesn't involve keeping powerful people safe.
It's not particularly sophisticated; they just assume any unattended object is a bomb.
posted by Mitheral at 9:31 PM
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