Y Combinator Supports AI Startup Dehumanizing Factory Workers

It is violent, but intent is everything.

Blowing up a building because you're a mobster, and you're "sending a message", is different from a demolition crew doing the same to make way for a new building.

You should really rethink what you're saying. An act is a wholesome, contextualize thing. It does not live in a vacuum.

By your measure, a sexual predator grabbing a woman's vagina and a doctor examing a female patient are identical.

This is a broken mental map of the world.

What is the right response to a boss who accuses a worker of not meeting the boss' expected productivity criteria?

Assume that both the boss and the worker believe that their productivity expectation and result are fair, respectively. It is obvious that they will never see eye to eye.

In my opinion, it is for the worker to become more detached, not less, to treat the employment as temporary, to not invest one's expectations into lasting employment. All else is beside the point.

The observation has strong parallels to the notion that true organisational values are identified by what is rewarded or punished, rather than written "mission statements" or "statements of values". As was noted on a recent Complexity podcast episode (Santa Fe Institute, highly recommended), one of the challenges of language is that whilst it makes communications more powerful, it also hugely facilitates lying.

I remember the organisational observation making the rounds ... maybe a decade ago (I recall it probably being on Google+ back when that was A Thing), and though this all but certainly isn't the original, it's strongly similar in sentiments:

Company values are invisible – what's rewarded and punished shouldn't (2023)

https://www.fearlessculture.design/blog-posts/your-culture-i...>

And of course HN had a similar submission 8 years ago, though w/o discussion:

"Culture Is the Behavior You Reward and Punish" (2017)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13751865>

https://jocelyngoldfein.com/culture-is-the-behavior-you-rewa...>

Similar notions are that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with (of questionable veracity, though fairly high popularity), see: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/08/08/five-people/>.

There's the notion that a person, particularly a creative person (artist, musician, author, programmer, experimenter/tinkerer, tailor, soldier, spy, wups, wrong espionage meme) is what they can't not do.

Going back to G+, an observation I'd had on follow + blocking behaviour there was that social network landscapes are defined by the pathways along with information flows with greater or lesser impedence. G+ had a fairly strong block in which a block action (unilateral or reciprocated) meanth that neither party could directly see or interact with the others' content, at least whilst authenticated to the system. (The fact that logging out permitted visibility of otherwise public content meant of course that "blocking" was not an effective mechanism for preventing some adversarial relation from finding out what you were posting so long as that activity was public.

But both in terms of blocks by/against myself, and between other accounts, there was an interesting and somewhat fractured state of discussions particularly in what I've termed "salon" threads: a reasonably gregarious host, with diligent thread hygiene, who tended to attract a broad range of participants and lively discussion. The blocking actions would tend to segment that discussion in ways I still find fascinating.

Which is unrelated to the original comment and observation, though it comes up in context, at least here and now ;-)

Ditto.