"Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation"

[hzulla@infosec.exchange]

@tante

There's precedent.

A German City Is Paying Its Alcoholics in Beer to Clean the Streets

On October 1, the German city of Essen will launch a program that incentivizes the homeless, addicts, and alcoholics with beer and cigarettes in exchange for their aid in cleaning the city square.

VICE (www.vice.com)

[ainmosni@social.ainmosni.eu]

@tante Hype is a flat circle?

[christiemalry@jorts.horse]

@tante desperate to find any way of turning their white elephant into money, id love to see how many people have actually paid a cent upfront for it

[flomaraninchi@pouet.chapril.org]

@tante
Whaaat?

[meeoo@toot.community]

@tante but is it compensation if you spend all of it on your job?

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@hzulla ewwww

[koehntopp@infosec.exchange]

@tante
"Silicon Valley is buzzing" has become an antipattern.

I've gone through the dot com bubble in the 90s - hard. It was way less weird back then, though.

[hzulla@infosec.exchange]

@tante Cynical snark aside, there's a rich history of abusive employers paying their addicted workers with the drug as part of their compensation, e.g. mining companies. It's a concept that's been around for centuries.

[fred@social.fthevenet.eu]

@tante

AI tokens emerge as a new component of tech salaries, alongside traditional pay elements.

JFC!! It's 19th century mill towns all over again! How is it even possible for anyone not to see through that bullshit instantly?!?

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@nihkeys more is always better as we know.

[icejam@indieweb.social]

@tante Looking at the headline I thought this was another "UBI paid out in company scrip" story we all heard during the crypto era but this is so much dumber than that.

[coleenwalter@mastodon.social]

@tante This is a weird idea. It reminds me of the company script of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

[mark_f_lynch@mastodon.ie]

@tante today is the 70th day of 2026, the year is only just short of one-fifth done, and that is already one of the most depressing things I can imagine, brought to life by fucking AI bros . Any chance we can fire up the large hadron collider again and see if we can fork a new timeline, because this one is a complete bust

[lrhodes@merveilles.town]

@tante "He added that usage per user is growing much faster than overall user growth, a sign that AI compute is becoming even scarcer and more valuable."

Or a sign that the entire market for AI compute depends on the outsized consumption of a comparatively small cohort of "whales."

[wim_v12e@scholar.social]

@lrhodes @tante The agentic AI workflows likely act as attractors. They use orders of magnitude more tokens than ordinary queries.

[spanghero@ioc.exchange]

@tante Ironmasters and mine owners, 2026 style.