61–70 of 566 posts
As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation
That's what's making its employees miserable ????!
As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation
> As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology is not a good-only or evil-only thing. You have use cases that are beneficial and you have use cases that is not benefical. The technology in by itself isn't what makes things worse. Even many thousand years ago, humans used weapons to bash in other humans…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia. LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how w…
Nobody had to legislate Free software into existence in order to protect us. Wise people saw the need and did something of their own accord. We are still free to do this!
It might be possible to organize all that with volunteers and some paid work, but how in practice? Stallman seems kind of out of the game at this point and there is no Linus Torvalds figure neither for this, as of now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia. LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how w…
The State are the people and the people want tech billionaires because they want the same chance at being that (tech) m/billionaire. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires; I cannot get around that issue toward collective action, toward myself contributing to an answer. I'm stuck. I can't unsee its truth =/. The individual will choose enrichment. We all will.
It is just that peoples preference dont matter as billionaires have disproportionally more power.
> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make…
> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make…
Not that I disagree with you, but I’ve heard of such tactic being used in some orgs at both Google and Microsoft as well. It seems like a common conclusion from a management that wants to push for AI adoption. I doubt it’s super effective, but we’ll see how it turns out.
Edit: and if you question that, you are a troublemaker to add to the list
As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation
I believe that any kind of partial automation is going to make the job more soul-crushing. Ford style assembly lines made the work of the factory workers more miserable. Partially automated cashier did the same thing. I don't think there is any point in trying to resist automation, as the efficiency benefits are too important.
> Ford style assembly lines The ones with 10 hour shifts and mandatory overtime? Yea, I don't think it's the _line_ that's making them miserable. > Partially automated cashier did the same thing. I've not once heard anyone in the service industry make this complaint. > as the efficiency benefits are too important. You can squeeze every last drop of productivity from your employees. In the short term this may even evi…
The whole innovation was about making the jobs as simple and repetitive as possible so humans would basically work like robots.
Once you're there, having removed any agency and freedom, pushing the hours to the limits of human exhaustion is just one logical step.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One attempt was open source. Or perhaps libre software? I guess it is not a success since only one of these looks mainstream.
It is curious how successful AI developers have been in trying to redefine "open source" as "the binary is free to download"
I'll go further and say that it accelerated getting us into this mess we're in today.
The OSI is owned and controlled by the tech titan hyperscalers who benefit from free labor.
Useful "open source software" always gets encrusted by the big titans that then build means to control the tech, and then the means to control us. And just to rub salt in the wounds, they rarely compensate the original authors.
Android is Linux, right? Then why can't we install our own software? Why does it spy on us? Open source is so great, right?
95% of humans will never own a phone that gives them freedom. And we enabled that.
Everything we as tech people own is also getting locked down. We're going to have to start providing our state ID to access the internet soon.
But OMG, Year of Linux on the Desktop 2012!!12
Pretty soon you won't even be able to use your Linux. Everything will be attested.
Open source hasn't stopped power from accruing to the titans. It's accelerated their domination.
People rush to defend Google and Amazon when you criticize how they profit off of Redis, Elasticsearch, etc. The teams that build the tech aren't becoming wealthy, and most of the bytes flowing through those systems are doing so behind closed source AWS/GCP/Azure offerings.
These companies then use their insane reach to tax everything that moves. Google owns 92% (yes, 92%!) of URL bars and they tax every search, especially searches for other companies' trademarks. They do even better - they turn it into a bidding war. Almost nothing that exists in the world today can make it to you without being taxed by them.
If they don't like your content, you just disappear.
Mobile platforms have never been ours. We can't install what we want. We're soon going to be locked at the firmware level to just Google and Apple and forced to use their adblocking-free, tracker-enabled "browsers" (1984 telescreens). Any competition can't get started due to the massive scale required, meanwhile Apple and Google tax everything at 30% and start correlating everything you do, everyone you talk to, everywhere you go in their panopticon.
"Open source" was wool pulled over our eyes so that we happily built, supported, and enabled this.
Open source should be replaced with "our proletariat users and small businesses can have this for free, but businesses listed on any stock exchange cannot commercialize this ever unless they pay out the nose for it".
"Source available" / shareware is peak. Give your users the thing, and the means to maintain it after you're gone, but tell Google et al. to go away.
"Fuck you, pay me" as the artists frequently say.
But also, let's stop giving the Death Star free labor.
(edit: I'd love a feedback sampling of the heavy downvotes. OSI purists? Goog employees? Surely MIT/BSD fans and not anyone who follows Stallman.)