This episode provides a sharp reality check on how AI is cannibalizing the workforce to fund its own skyrocketing infrastructure costs. It effectively exposes the brutal trade-offs corporations are making as they pivot toward an increasingly expensive and geopolitically fractured future.
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Deep Dive
The Level1 Links with Friends Show May 27 2026: Meta Momfluencers Muddle MurmursAdded:
Hello everybody. Welcome back to Links with Friends. Today is May 27th, 2026 and we're doing business and social for your hump day >> and it's come to the point where I've just started creating a new section in the beginning. It's the layoff section.
>> In it into it is going to lay off 3,000 employees to refocus on AI. If you depend on in it for any of their products, there's never been a better time to look at alternatives.
>> And this one's less tech adjacent, but this quote was just too juicy not to put in here.
>> Stand chart to cut over 7,000 jobs, boost AI to replace, and they quote, lower value human capital. They really, really dug themselves a huge hole. The quote from the executive was amazing.
This is standard chartered. I think even Monty Python has made fun of these people. Hey, I want to put that on a t-shirt.
>> Low value human capital.
>> Yeah, that would be a great t-shirt.
>> Don't let me forget that. That actually probably would be good.
>> So, there was a big backlash to that, but he's probably insulated from anything that could really bad could get happened to him there. I think those stock price went down just a little bit.
But actually, the investors love it when you replace jobs with AI.
>> Yeah. I mean, they they're like, "You just said the quiet part out loud, which we can't publicly be seen condoning, but we do agree that you should do that."
>> I I love the way that that's described because the first time I encountered that was when when in one of the Walmart shareholder calls, the executives were describing the uh elderly greeter thing.
is like we we basically do this as a public service because these elderly people for whatever reason don't have enough income and so like we just pay them to be a greeter. It's like the government gives us a break for hiring older people because that's a requirement because we're a larger company but it's basically just charity.
There's no value to us except for ticking the box and it's it's basically charity and it's >> haven't there been studies that like loss prevention actually kind of helps with that too.
>> It's asset protection. He was lying in that call. That's an asset protection thing.
>> I mean, I'm sure that they love being able to give them like a very small paycheck cuz it's just old people on retire >> and the PR of it. They love the PR. It's a win-win for that for sure.
>> But it's exactly the same kind of thing.
It's just like >> now you would maybe lose some of that PR if one of those guys gets tackled by a shoplifter and breaks a hip or something.
>> Yeah.
>> I don't think >> it's the risk you're willing to take if you're a Walmart.
>> I think they tell them not to engage.
Just, you know, report. Uh, but here is maybe a little bit of a win, especially if you were on the uh, you know, collective bargaining side of things because they put their foot down and it was a big risk and it paid off. Samsung workers will get an average of $340,000 for bonuses as the AI profits soar and they really, really, really walked up to the last possible millisecond. Including like the South Korean government got involved and said, "If you guys all strike, it's illegal." They're like, "Don't care. We're chasing that money."
>> I imagine some of the upper tiers skew that average quite a bit, but that bonus, if you look at the average in the local currency they put on there, which is it gets into the trillions, like the exchange rate is so crazy. That bonus is going to be more than most of their annual salaries.
>> Wow.
>> Wow.
But I mean, but because the profits are so amazingly huge.
>> It's hard to be on Samsung's side there because it is literally like you should be paying your workers if if everybody's doing well. Like there's no reason not to.
>> And Seagate, uh, you know, they were asked, "Hey, the chip crunch, what are you doing to to fix that to make it better in the future?" And they basically said, "We need all of your money now. Now is what's important."
Seagate Sparks memory selloff as CEO says it would take too long to build new factories.
Yeah, it takes I mean a precision mechanical instrument. It's it's like mechanical hard drives are on their way out. It's like a wheat threshing machine. It's like oh should we build more wheat threshing factories as everyone starves and it's like there's not enough wheat. Sorry. I think some of this might also be though that it's like I'm not sure if this mania is going to continue. Seems like there's a lot of things that could happen that we could fall off a cliff and I don't want to be holding the bag when that happens.
Meanwhile, I can print money.
But they're not the only ones printing money because Nvidia is printing and the denominations of those bills that it are printing just keep getting larger and larger.
>> Nvidia's memory cost so 485%. Latest AI systems now cost 7.8 million to build.
Memory comprises 25% of the total cost.
and Reuben GPUs are a mere $50,000 a piece. Yeah, I was at I was at Deltech World and they were showing off there like eight GPU systems and it's like how much is this? And it's like you don't want to know. You you got to go you got to go talk to your rep >> and that is having lost a major market.
They are still swimming in money. Nvidia says that it has largely conceded in chi China's AI chip market to Huawei and Huawei doesn't have products product the Huawei products are about two to three generations behind.
>> This was probably after the 5090 thing, right?
>> Probably a little >> clenched a fist as he releases this press release.
>> But it didn't hurt him.
>> Nvidia post another record quarter reveals 43 billion of holdings in startups. He's got so much money that he was like, "What am I going to do with this $43 billion?"
Let's just throw darts.
>> One of them's bound to return something.
>> Well, it's I No, I I took it as like the circular investment. You know, the whole we'll invest in you, which you immediately use to buy GPUs from us.
Like, we'll give you an IOU for a billion dollars that you can only use to buy a billion dollars worth of GPUs from us. And it looks good for both of us.
That's what I got. That was my takeaway, >> especially for his bonus.
>> Yeah.
>> And we do have some new hardware that is releasing, but they are releasing with some eyewatering price tags.
>> Microsoft launches Surface Pro 12 and Surface 8 laptops with Intel chips and a poultry 8 GB of memory.
>> You want to go all the way up. You want the big SSD and all the RAM, get ready to spend about $5,000.
That doesn't seem fabulous.
And we have the big IPOs that are creeping up. Uh the SpaceX one kind of got a little bit of water poured on it, but we have learned that they do have plenty of income to consider in the future.
>> The Reuters headline is anthropic nears its first quarterly profit and has agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for computing power.
A casual billion dollars a month.
Can we can we put that on autopay?
>> Can I use my credit card for that so I get points?
>> Like does the banking system even like it's like you gota you got to have special handling for that at the bank?
>> And I usually don't like to put these pie in the sky like future tech stuff in here, but wouldn't this be amazing for our current issues if we could get something like this? Laserdriven Spinronic memory device switches a thousand times faster than DRAM, nonvolatile, and uh it's 40 picos seconds while most while generating almost no heat. Yeah. Can I get that in a DDR5 package, please?
>> That feels like room temperature superconductor, right? That feels like that promise that we had a couple of years ago.
It would be amazing. A >> sorry, something went wrong on our end.
That's interesting because this was the Oh, >> it's a sad dog.
>> This was the announcement that they are cancelling all of the Kindles 2013 and prior.
>> Yeah.
>> End of life. You can't use them anymore.
>> AI has already cracked them, so you can just use them as an e-reader now.
>> So, they must have they didn't want this out there anymore, huh?
>> Yeah.
>> Interesting. Well, I mean, you think it had to do with somebody figuring out the encryption because like they really thoroughly destroyed the encryption.
Like it was the books come in segments and they figured that out and then it's like TLS signing and they figured that out and so now you can just use them as you don't you don't have to depend on Amazon's ecosystem. You just load whatever you want on them. So actually they're probably more coveted than they were previously.
>> Yeah.
>> Now they're better than the new ones.
>> Maybe that's why they want to keep them.
I was like, "All right, send them in."
And here is uh the future. Like, you know, if we look at all the various industries that we've had problems with, ISPs, uh, television, social media stuff. Let's count the times that it got better when there were giant mergers.
>> In the comments, please tell us the times that giant mergers made things better.
>> Next Era Energy and Dominion Energy to combine. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday creating the world's largest regulated electric utility business in North America's premier energy infrastructure platform.
And it says that it's benefiting customers. I doubt that.
>> Yeah, but this is from Next Era Energy.
>> Uh, you know what? This is a press release.
>> You know what was on the table from a government regulation standpoint? They were willing to agree, it seemed, on a cap on the kilowatt hour cost for residential customers. Guess what didn't make it into the final agreement.
>> Shocking.
But here's something else that's shocking. Here's something that did make it or at least it seems like it's going to. I think maybe by the time you see this, these will be in people's hands.
>> The headline is Trump's gold T1 phone will start shipping this week. The thing that they missed is that you remember the promise of made in America.
Not so much.
>> It will be made of mostly of American parts. It might not be assembled in America.
>> I love it when it's you see that too with other products where it'll say designed in America.
>> Made of international materials in an international factory, but designed in America.
>> Oh, I don't have a picture of it here, but it comes with a gold USB charging cable.
>> Oh, >> so everybody knows.
>> Classy. I'll have to keep an eye out for that at the uh the uh uh restore the thrift store >> just Yeah, there's there's several thrift stores around us.
>> Why do you want a lowquality USB cable?
>> Yeah. I mean, it's just like how long does it take for somebody to be like, "Oh, I don't want this." And then just it's gone.
>> And uh you should be saying, "I don't want this." If you own a TV that you bought at Walmart, >> the head the headline, which I think misses the point a little bit, is yearslong fight over users right to tweak smart TV software heads to trial.
No headline, the smart TV manufacturer shortcuted their own R&D costs by using open- source software. The agreement when you use open source software licensed in this way is that you give up the modifications you make so that it will benefit the ecosystem the way that you benefited by taking the open source and not developing your own thing. They did not do that. This is headed to court now because Vizio sucks.
>> But the judge has already made one ruling and it feels like he might not understand the situation.
>> No, he doesn't. And Vizio is going to lean on that.
>> And also that's Walmart. I mean, >> yeah, >> those lawyers are very good. So, Walmart doing something wrong. Yes. Walmart could be dumping spent uranium into the the local high school's water supply and the judge would be like, "Well, I don't know if Walmart's doing it."
>> No, they just put that in the Great Value Foods.
>> Just, you know, the palonium, >> sprinkle a little bit.
>> That literally happened with the shrimp.
>> I don't know if Walmart's responsible for that.
>> I personally did it.
>> Last week, we talked about Disney, you know, the happiest place on earth going hard into facial recognition. And it did not take long for a class action lawsuit.
>> Disney sued in California over facial recognition technology because they don't call it out enough. Apparently the there there is an entrance that doesn't use facial recognition, but it's not really super well marked according to the lawsuit. And we'll see how this goes.
>> They said the signage was like a a head and shoulder silhouette with a no smoking cross through it, but then surrounded by brightly colored Mickey's.
And that was how you're supposed to understand that's the no that's your iconography.
>> Here's an accessibility note chat or just a general design note.
>> An icon should never appear by itself.
You should always have a label on it so people can understand >> what that icon means. If it's not a common icon like a star or something.
>> I have a suspicion that the Disney designers are not at fault here.
>> Yeah. They were probably told make this big.
>> That's an IRL dark pattern. Yeah.
>> And uh yeah, this one uh I don't know why I put this in this section rather than the the data center block that we had in government, but here we are.
>> Proposed AI data center denied after massive public push back.
>> I don't even remember where this was.
There's so many of these. Oh, Idaho.
This was in Idaho.
A >> come on, bro.
>> You got to go back. Is this a payw wall alternative that broke?
>> What happens is it doesn't load and then it gets caught in one tab is not loading.
Uh >> wait, is this >> Oh, >> my work chat. It might work.
>> Was this the Oh, >> I don't even know what that is.
>> Again, show showing us a a picture of a plane on a runway.
>> I think it was another data center article though. It was kind of, you know, copy paste. And then this one to wrap them all up.
>> Power prices in the Eastern US spike 76% thanks to AI data centers. Also, thanks, it's not just AI data centers. Like this is Yes. Also, but if you follow this program for a long time, you'll remember like three or four years ago, I was complaining when they were we have three power plants in our area that originally were fired with coal. And the plan was to retroconvert them to fire with natural gas because we've got an ungodly amount of natural gas. and the hippies shut down the pipeline that went through Pennsylvania. So, it's we have even more natural gas now than we did before.
>> Have you seen You'll love this. Uh have you seen the argument about almonds?
>> Oh, yeah. Almonds use more water than a data center.
>> Like it's not even close.
>> Yeah, they're a very water intensive crop.
>> And in my mind, I was like, that's not a genuine argument because probably a lot of that water goes back into the ground, right? No, it aspirates through the almond trees.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> So, it's the same as using the evaporative cooling. Your almond water goes up and goes somewhere else.
>> There's been a lot of controversy about that for a long time cuz they grow almonds in very hot and dry places and it's like we can't waste water. Like if you're going to grow almonds, they need to grow in another part of the country.
But for some reason, we only put them like in the southwest.
>> Here's where that gets really crazy and I you know, maybe my numbers are off, but I really did try to look into this because I was like, where's where's the catch here?
Golf courses are also ahead of data centers. Golf courses are 8% of almonds.
We are just putting all of our water into almonds.
>> It doesn't make any sense to me. I think the other one that's like a crazy water crop that like probably too much water in those dry places gets routed there.
It's I think it's alalfa.
>> Oh yeah.
>> A lot of those farms.
>> What do we need that for?
>> Is that livestock?
>> I think so.
Uh, also that was one of the breakthroughs with um sprouts uh bean sprouts and some of the other things is the artificial because then you're able to recapture all of the water that's lost to the atmosphere and it's like oh yes be now we can do uh it's a bean bean shoots, bean sprouts and like the um the other stuff that's like a seaweed almost but it's just you just end up with the long sprouts because those use an ungodly amount of water >> and but if you grow them artificially not inside it works it. It's It's a lot better and and that works really well.
But no, no, the the power production like we shut down the power production here because the margins weren't enough.
It was like we're not using enough power. It doesn't make sense. And they were going to shut down two of the three power plants and some crazy Bitcoin miners stepped in and prevented one of the power plants from being shut down, which is insane. Um and but the the plan with private equity was always to reduce the capacity of the power grid to shoot up demand. Well, congratulations. We also have data centers now instead of Bitcoin. So, >> this one I thought was like a fun, you know, just story to wrap up the the section with, but uh apparently this is controversial.
>> Colossal Biosciences is growing chickens in a 3D printed artificial eggshell. So, I was wrong. It's not Cintow first.
>> It's going to be polyhen or something.
>> They haven't crispered the chickens at all. They've just taken them out of their native eggs. very carefully put them into these eggs and they did hatch.
>> It is somehow less suffering for the chickens as well. Like this is probably more ethically okay.
>> Well, the idea here, I mean, that doesn't really gain anything like farm chickens >> because they're taking them out of a Well, but they're not creating the chickens. These are chickens that are henorn.
>> Yeah.
>> They're just experimenting what they want to do.
>> This is the same company that came up with the direwolves. Remember that?
>> Well, the same scientists who were poo pooing these chicken eggs are like, "Those aren't direwolves. Those are dogs mixed with something weird.
>> It's a Jurassic Park argument where it's like you've you've spliced in different types of DNA to get what you're calling a dinosaur.
>> So, what these guys want to do is they want to start doing the same thing with extinct birds that are huge >> because you have to transplant into an egg. We can't do it. They don't have eggs big enough, like not even an ostrich. So, they want to build giant eggs and put six foot birds into them.
Michael Kiteon was just a visionary with all this stuff. Don't you know what happens when you put frog DNA into the into the dinosaur? You get dinosaurs that can breed willy-nilly.
>> Plus, we're we got another Ebola threat.
So, I bet his sales are huge, right?
>> Yeah. Well, he's he's dead, but I'm sure his family Yeah.
>> And Google has once again decided that you are you've been given too much pleb.
It is time to scale back. Google accused of pushing free for life G Suite users onto paid plans. Now this is this is a plan that has not been available for almost a decade. But a long time ago if you were using your the Google suite like the business suite for your family like if you registered a family domain which I think was actually one of their marketing campaigns. I remember like it was like >> family domain.
>> Yeah. It was like family or it was like you would register your last name and everybody in your family would have an email address at your last name whatever and uh so Google is saying oh you're using this for commercial purposes and they're just summarily turning it off which is great some real businesses also experienced that this week railway we might have a story about that later. So they're what they're saying is what the people who are complaining are saying is they sent me an email and it's like oh we've detected business activity and they're like this is just pictures of my grandma. What what's the business?
>> Don't worry >> selling these online.
>> Don't worry Google will literally just delete everything that you own without any kind of notice.
And if you feel maybe just a slight tremor, you know, just a little bit of rumbling in the earth this week, it could be because the thermostat in hell has been turned way down.
>> Microsoft surprises with its first ever Linux distribution, Azure Linux 4.0. You can run it under the Windows Subsystem for Linux or in Azure, as the name implies.
It turns out they're also running SQL Server on a lot of Linux because it runs better on Linux than it does on Windows.
L.
>> They pointed out that this was sort of like a little like just thrown out to the end of a a presentation some guy was giving at one of the Microsoft events.
They called him back on stage. They're like, "What did you just say?"
Everyone just kind of zoned out for a minute. I was I mean this is I I thought Microsoft had done something like this a while back that they had tweaked something to run better in Azure to run Linux better in Azure but maybe maybe not.
>> Well, I think this is just they're giving it out as a distribution.
>> Yeah. And unfortunately Anna's archive is probably going to be pretty much done because they have gotten everything they wanted and that was because Anna or whoever is behind Anna never shows up for court. and it's archive hit with a 19.5 million default judgment and a global domain takedown order. This is where you could uh download lots of books and scientific journals and all sorts of fun stuff. However, I would also point out to the UK, in the UK, they have Ofcom and Offcom is harassing American companies and they're trying to shut things down. So, like the template here for, you know, like Anna's archive might be okay in certain copyright jurisdictions, didn't show up for court, whatever. It's like, "Oh, just shut it down. Kill it off the internet." That is Offcom's plan.
>> Well, they got it, too, because in the past and his archive was just like, "Huh, lol. Here's the new domain." And they just kept doing that. And so now this ruling is that the companies, the registars, and even Cloudflare have to support this, which is feels like a bit of overreach, right?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
And if it's not overreach, I assure you that Ofcom will be coming to make it much more plainly obvious that it is in fact overreach or if you don't think it's overreach, they will make it plain that it is. And there's a lot of talk about how evil our tech executives are these days. You got, you know, like Sam Alman and Zuckerberg, and they are just like, you know, textbook monsters. But Nintendo was like, "Ah, we've got to get this number one spot back. What are we doing here, guys? will >> taking aim at PAL World Mobile. Nintendo is trying to obtain a touchscreen specific patent on monster capturing and thus far failing, but this is patent after the fact so they can harass Pow World. Like >> they got rejected. We did a story I think like a month or two ago where their their claim was rejected and they're like, "We're not going to stop though."
>> But that was just for the Power World Power World game that exists now. Power World Mobile is coming out >> and so they're trying to get ahead of that by saying that capturing monsters on a touchcreen totally different than >> and if they use a control scheme that is even remotely similar to something we did then we're going to court over it.
>> Here's one that honestly this is just you know like just a little refresher for you. We already know this.
>> Send this one to your parents >> but uh Gizmodo did a pretty good like rundown of it. The dark patterns keeping you from opting out of data sharing are darker than ever. Study finds it's time to deploy my AI assistant to go and opt me out of everything. This is when I >> except it won't work because it it also works for the tech companies.
>> I'll remind you of the story where I actually jumped through all these hoops and it took me like a better part of 45 minutes and a couple of phone calls to get out of the meer data sharing and they stopped giving me coupons.
>> They punished you.
>> Punishment actually. Um, in certain states that would be illegal. California, I think, has made that kind of thing illegal.
Like you can't >> Is that true in Kentucky? Do you think our lawmakers here even >> I don't think it's true here.
>> Yeah.
>> Our lawmakers don't ever think about coupon.
>> We're too rich for that.
>> And the social media section is, you know, they're kind of bare bones these days because it's all about AI. But we do have Meta who's doing stuff with AI.
>> Before mass layoffs, Meta reassigned 7,000 workers to focus on AI. This is a This is not really a social media story.
It should have been at the beginning of the program with the the layoffs.
>> Well, but these people are not being laid off.
>> Oh, they're being removed. Yeah, >> they're still laying off 8,000 people.
And they also the Zuckerberg call for the with the 8,000 people that were being laid off was leaked and it is it's how we for humanity.
>> I think we already did the story about the 8,000 like a couple weeks ago, right? They announced it. It happened this week, but there's no need to rehash that. We knew that was coming. Thought they were going to change their mind. Uh but we also have some fallout from, you know, these recent uh congressional hearings and stuff where the tech CEOs have to admit and they lost the court cases. Meta lost the court cases. So now they got to improve their image. How do you do that?
>> Meta deploys mom influencers to counter child safety criticism. This is another prong of a two-prong attack on this sort of thing on the internet. But this is all about building Meta's defense. So the whole when you need to submit your ID online, meta is behind that because it gives them an affirmative legal defense on whatever it is they're doing to children. This is prong two of that defense.
>> There's part of me that almost felt like it was a little not to quote better because at least in this instance if it was a post that was about how great meta safety controls were, it was tagged as like meta partner which is not what they usually do. They just quietly pretend that's real. But >> how long until one of these gals kids gets Robloxed and we get a headline about that? I was like, "Oh, well, >> maybe that wasn't so good."
>> No, that was Roblox. That wasn't >> Yeah, it wasn't Meta, not not Meta's problem.
>> Ad X is desperate desperate for you to sign up and start paying them, and they are going to make your situation uncomfortable until you do. X announces significant restrictions to free accounts, but I didn't I didn't saw this restrictive.
>> This is like crazy people Twitter.
>> Yeah.
>> Like it was like you can only send 500 tweets a day and I'm like is that a problem for anyone? Like >> my favorite one is changes to account email four per hour.
>> Is this are these like ones Elon came up with cuz he sent so many tweets he was like this would really annoy me.
>> Maybe it's like uh click farmers somehow.
>> Oh, maybe a bot I guess. But >> I'm not sure how that would be used, but that's just a it's a weird one. I think if you you could change it to four per year and most people would never know.
>> I uh I follow a gardening magazine on Twitter and I happen to like login and I just saw a post from them and it was about like investing in crypto and I was like, "Oh, this has been hacked, hasn't it?"
>> Garden Garden Design magazine, invest in crypto. I was like, "Wait, what?"
They got got. Anyway, that was our last story for this section.
>> We've got so much nonsense in the nonsense section for Friday.
>> Tell us how many times you've changed your password on your Twitter account below.
>> Bye.
>> The password, it's the email.
>> Oh, yeah.
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