CrowdStruck

07/22/24 • 30 min

2 Listeners

On Friday July 19, millions of Windows PCs entered a doom-loop that rendered them non-functional thanks to an update sent by a little-known company called CrowdStrike - and in this emergency Better Offline dispatch, Ed Zitron walks you through exactly what happened, why it's so bad, and why both CrowdStrike and Microsoft executives should face criminal prosecution for such a catastrophic managerial failure. These are the dark consequences of the growth-at-all-costs movement.

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Newsletter: wheresyoured.at

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline

Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at

Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron

LINKS: https://tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Previous Episode

The Academics That Think ChatGPT Is BS

In a paper released earlier this year, three academics from the University of Glasgow classified ChatGPT's outputs not as "lies," but as "BS" - as defined by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt in "on BS" (and yes I'm censoring that) - and created one of the most enjoyable and prescient papers ever written. In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by academics Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater in a free-wheeling conversation about ChatGPT's mediocrity - and how it's not built to represent the world at all.

LINKS:

Paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Michael Townsen Hicks: https://www.townsenhicks.com/

Joe Slater: https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/joeslater/

Newsletter: wheresyoured.at

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline

Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at

Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Next Episode

Rot Economics with MIT's Daron Acemoglu

In this episode, Ed Zitron sits down with famed MIT economist Daron Acemoglu to talk about the economics of the tech ecosystem, the ridiculousness of generative AI's promises, and the realities of tech's growth-at-all-costs ecosystem.

Newsletter: wheresyoured.at

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline

Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at

Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitron;

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Better Offline - CrowdStruck

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:01.719

A media Hello one, Welcome to a very special emergency episode of Better Offline. I'm at Zeitron, I'm your host, and I'm recording this from inside a closet in a hotel in San Francisco. You're very important to me. On Friday afternoon, I sat at my desk and just started writing about any clear aim or objective other than a desire to wrap my head around probably the most cataclystic technological meltdown that I've seen in my career, And of course