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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 10th, 2024

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  • If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.

    If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.


  • The buy-now-pay-later company had previously shredded its marketing contracts in 2023, followed by its customer service team in 2024, which it proudly began replacing with AI agents.

    A few months after freezing new hires, Klarna bragged that it saved $10 million on marketing costs by outsourcing tasks like translation, art production, and data analysis to generative AI. It likewise claimed that its automated customer service agents could do the work of “700 full-time agents.”

    As Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg, “cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality.”

    Also, just want to recognize this gem:

    Though executives in every industry, from news media to fast food, seem to think AI is ready for the hot seat — an attitude that’s more grounded in investor relations than an honest assessment of the tech — there are growing signs that robot chickens are coming home to roost.

    Robot Chicken clip of Lando Calrissian saying “This deal is getting worse all the time!”






  • It’s not just Facebook, I’ve seen it a lot in ads on mobile games and a lot of them look like they’re made for social, Tik Tok and similar. A lot of them claim to be going out of business, and the one that really makes me laugh is the one that’s obviously an AI-generated old man talking about having to shut down his decades-old business making hand-crafted leather goods. If the leather goods they sell are hand-crafted I’m sure it’s coming from a sweatshop in China or somewhere even cheaper, not an artisanal workshop from a single craftsman.