Linked List: August 8, 2026

Saturday, 8 August 2026

Tariq Panja, reporting for The New York Times:

The five men should have been in a celebratory mood. FIFA had just pulled off a World Cup that broke records on a number of fronts. Its spectacular culmination, the final, was a day away from kickoff.

But their mood was anything but jubilant. The men, a group of top directors known as the FIFA bureau of the management board, had been summoned to a hastily organized meeting at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan, according to three people familiar with the discussions speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks were private. The directors had until midnight to sign off on a plan that threatened to change soccer forever and would almost certainly lead to a major schism among the sport’s leaders.

The project purported to sell a 20 percent stake in FIFA to a group of investors led by Joshua Kushner, the brother of President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Such a move would put into private hands a portion of the World Cup, an event that has been run and controlled by FIFA, a nonprofit in Zurich, for 96 years.

I don’t know what’s dumber — this stupid corrupt scheme to privatize the World Cup, or me, for not assuming from the start that the Trump family was involved in it somehow.

Maybe ‘Steal Underpants by Blowing a Fortune on AI Tokens’ Is, in Fact, Not a Good Business Plan ★

Joseph Cox, writing for 404 Media (paywalled, sans gift links, alas):

Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio. [...] It also undercuts the narrative that superpowered engineers generating mountains of code are behind the AI boom. In many cases it is non-technical staff burning through tokens for non-specialized tasks. [...]

At one point in the meeting, Kwak and Eduardo Salamanca de Diego, senior manager of product management at the company’s Center for Advanced AI, start presenting about what is described as “token ops.”

Kwak says he knows people aren’t using slides these days, but he has some. As he appears to be preparing to present, Stuart Henderson, Accenture’s client group lead, interrupts. He jokes he hopes Kwak didn’t just convert a PDF into images and then into Markdown files. “I’m learning that’s one of the big token chewers,” Henderson says. “Turning PDFs into Markdown: is that right?”

That’s when Kwak says that’s what Accenture’s own data shows.

My impression of consulting giants like Accenture (McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte, KPMG...) has always been that they are very good at looking smart but in fact very bad at actually being smart. The idea that they’re spending serious money on AI tokens to turn PDFs and PowerPoint decks into Markdown only makes me think I’ve overestimated the median intelligence of the people who work there. I really thought Markdown couldn’t get more successful but this takes the cake. I love it that my little baby is helping burn these companies’ cash. This is so stupid it hurts to think about.

Markdown is something you start with because it’s easy to write and universally readable. You write Markdown and use that to make slides — like, say, with iA Presenter — not the other way around.

(Via Simon Willison.)