#Uber#RideHailing#GigEconomy#BigTech#Lobbying#SiliconValley: "Meanwhile, Uber has a long record of using deceptive actions to avoid regulatory oversight, most notably through a program called Greyball. In Boston, Las Vegas, and a host of European cities, it deployed a mock version of its app on the phones of unfriendly city officials to make it falsely appear that the service was not available. In some cities, it investigated passengers’ credit card accounts to help determine if they were government officials.
Where state legislatures or courts do not deliver for Uber, it turns to the ballot box. In 2019 California passed a law making companies responsible for proving that their workers were independent contractors, which opened the door to reclassifying them as employees. Uber and other gig economy companies responded by pouring $220 million into a ballot initiative, Proposition 22, which it billed as a defense of drivers’ rights. “Protecting the ability of Californians to work as independent contractors throughout the state using app-based rideshare and delivery platforms,” it stressed, “is necessary so people can continue to choose which jobs they take, to work as often or as little as they like, and to work with multiple platforms or companies.” In fact the proposition would exempt app-based workers from nearly all labor protections, including paid sick leave, retirement benefits, and workers compensation. It passed, though a group of drivers have contested its legality in the California Supreme Court. Its success is still a troubling sign of Uber’s political clout. In Massachusetts, Uber, Instacart, and Lyft raised $43 million in 2022—and $7 million so far this year—for copycat ballot initiatives."
If you want to understand how startups and venture capital work, go to 26:24 on the recording of my talk “Excuse Me, Your Unicorn Keeps Shitting In My Back Yard, Can He Please Not?” from 2016:
#AI#TESCREAL#SiliconValley#BigTech: "So there's this long tradition of consulting people who use technologies to find out what they need, and to find out why technology does or doesn't work for them. And the big message there was that technologists are probably more ill-equipped to understand that than average people, and to see the industry swing back towards tech authority and tech expertise as making decisions about everything, from how technology is built to what future is the best for all of us, is alarming in that sense.
So we can draw from things like user-centered research. This is how I concluded the paper, is just pointing to all the processes and practices we could start using. There's user-centered research, there's participatory processes, there's... Policy gets made often through consulting with groups that are affected by systems, by policies. There are ways of designing technology so that people can feed back straight into it, or we can just set in some regulations that say, in certain cases, it's not acceptable for technology to make a decision.
I think some of what we have to do is get outside of the United States, because some of the more human rights oriented or user-centered policymaking is happening elsewhere, especially in Europe."
#BigTech#SiliconValley#Antitrust#Competition#DigitalPlatforms: "Treating platform corporations as surrogate states leads to multiple interesting follow-up insights. Lehdonvirta criticizes competition policy-based solutions to the problem of platform power. If the digital platforms’ core source of value is the provision of governance services, how exactly would increasing competitive pressures or government-enforced deconcentration benefit societies? Among the most fascinating follow-up insights is Lehdonvirta’s take on the political power of platforms. The literature on platform power has—rightly—been focused on the extremely successful ways in which these businesses were able to enlist consumers and users into political-economic alliances against public regulators and incumbents (Culpepper and Thelen, 2020; Adler, 2021). Lehdonvirta’s take is not incompatible, but slightly different. In important ways platforms have become the institutional infrastructure of core swaths of the economy. While the book does not engage with the recent literature on financial systems, its account takes the recent debate about the infrastructural power of business to a new field. Even more striking than in financial markets, however, cloud empires are not just providing the ‘fuel’ to govern markets effectively but have themselves become essential components of the institutional fabric of commercial life today. It is this infrastructural role that helps to explain why there is very little public surprise when platforms feel entitled to maintain embassies in ‘foreign nations’."
@ben They’re not yours, they’re theirs. Jeff Atwood thanks you for your free labour. (I’m kidding, he doesn’t. Feel grateful he even allowed you to contribute in the first place, serf.)
Speaking of Jeff Atwood, isn’t he the guy helping fund Mastodon now? 🤔
Update: been told Jeff left StackExchange a while ago so please substitute whichever Silicon Valley tech bro is currently running it.
「 In fact, crypto is not like the internet at all. The internet was useful for real work from its first days before it was even called the internet, and people recognized its power and potential at every step. There were no bros telling everyone within earshot that it would definitely not suck if you gave it another 13 years 」
I like how social media and news sites call it your "feed". Makes me feel like a farm animal getting fattened up for slaughter so I can be divided up and sold piecemeal to advertisers.
“A lot of times, it’s being asked to provide a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist with a tool that you don’t want to use,” independent software engineer Kolman told CNBC.
The Microsoft AI engineer said a lot of tasks are about “trying to create AI hype” with no practical use. He recalled instances when a software engineer on his team would come up with an algorithm to solve a particular problem that didn’t involve generative AI. That solution would be pushed aside in favor of one that used a large language model, even if it were less efficient, more expensive and slower, the person said. He described the irony of using an “inferior solution” just because it involved an AI model.
A software engineer at a major internet company, which the person asked to keep unnamed due to his group’s small size, said the new team he works on dedicated to AI advancement is doing large language model research “because that’s what’s hot right now.”"
#Tesla#SiliconValley#LayOffs: "The Supercharger team did something incredible: build the only successful and liked fast-charging network in North America, which is critical to EV adoption.
Firing the entire team because the head was pushing back on the number of layoffs is ridiculous, especially if the plan is still to grow the network. Tesla needs to grow the network since it is currently onboarding other automakers on it. Even if Tesla sees its own sales slowing down, the Supercharger network will need a capacity increase.
Everyone I talked to at Tesla says that it is a complete mess. Contractors for most ongoing Supercharger projects lost their point of contact at Tesla. Again, many suspect Tesla will try to rehire some of the workers fired.
Tesla has hiring inefficiencies leading to layoffs and layoffs inefficiencies leading to new hires.
#SiliconValley#Billionaires#Libertarianism: "The big idea: “Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle.” Normal people define that as the imperative of seeking to prevent and contain certain potentially civilization-ending potentialities like nuclear holocaust and pandemic. Andreessen, conversely, calls precaution “perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime … deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.”
What ought be embraced in its stead, naturally, is markets, because “they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.” (The opening of markets, as all students know, having everywhere and always been the most peaceful pursuit known to humanity.)
What stands in the way of the recognition of this so self-evident truth? Ideas like “sustainability,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “social responsibility,” “tech ethics,” “trust and safety,” and “risk management,” which must be eliminated—“with extreme prejudice.” According to the logic of the piece, I suppose, this must happen in order to nip in the bud the armies we can expect the avatars of ethics and responsibility to raise any day now.
Basically, the manifesto is an argument, dressed up in the raiment of morality, about power: Andreessen and people like him should get to make decisions to reorder life as we know it without interference from anyone else. Which will be quite relevant to know for the saga ahead, once you see the style of moral judgment this most powerful of human actors displays behind closed doors." https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andreessen/
There is a urgent need for populist movements invested on real participatory democracy. Real Democracy is what we need to fight Capitalism's tech zealots.
#Tech#SiliconValley#Plutocracy#SanFrancisco#Authoritarianism: "Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.”
“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.
Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who’s attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherfuckers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision."
#SocialMedia#AdTech#Platforms#BigTech#SiliconValley: "This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you."
On some level, it's hard to even suggest we use these apps. The term "use" suggests a level of user control that Meta has spent over a decade destroying, turning Instagram and Facebook into tubes to funnel human beings in front of those who either pay for the privilege of visibility or have found ways to trick the algorithms into showing you their stuff.
It's the direct result of The Rot Economy, a growth-at-all-costs mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where tech companies profitably punish users as a means of showing the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means twisting platforms from offering a service to driving engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram's case, meant finding the maximum amount of interruptions that a user will tolerate before they close the app." https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/
Mastodon becoming a US entity with a neoliberal board of directors and the goal of growth über alles is the issue here folks, not whether Eugen and company are compensated for their work. Of course they should be and well too. Or is that a privilege reserved only for the mediocre yes-people at the Googles and the Facebooks of the world?
If, on the other hand, maybe we’d like more folks to contribute to the commons and maybe not even be captured by Silicon Valley how about this radical idea: Fund them so they can live (at least as well) as any mediocre yes-person at a mainstream tech company.
Co-founder of Twitter joins new Mastodon board of directors. Right, so federating with Threads wasn’t a mistake. This is just the direction Mastodon is going. Oh, well. Another Mozilla emerges.
Does sci-fi shape the future? Tech billionaires from Bill Gates to Elon Musk have often talked about the impact of novels they read as teens, from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" to Iain M. Banks' "Culture" series. Big Think's Namir Khaliq spoke to authors including Andy Weir, Lois McMaster Bujold, @cstross and @pluralistic about how much impact they think science fiction has had, or can have.
« Quel rôle les grandes firmes technologiques américaines, qui s’exportent massivement dans le monde tout en ayant leurs sièges localisés dans la célèbre #SiliconValley, jouent-elles dans le carnage qui a cours actuellement dans la bande de #Gaza et qui est perpétré par l’armée #israél|ienne ? »
«J’ai demandé à ChatGPT: imagine que tu es Alain Damasio et que tu veuilles écrire sur l’eau»
Le célèbre auteur de #sciencefiction a parcouru la #SiliconValley pour écrire son premier essai: un texte vertigineux qui propose une forme renouvelée de technocritique, à la mesure du basculement engendré par les IA. Rencontre dans les Alpes.
»#SiliconValley: "Und plötzlich waren die Techmilliardäre die ‹Bad Guys›" @parismarx produziert den Podcast «Tech won’t save us», der sich mit der US-#Digital-#Industrie auseinandersetzt. Marx zufolge ist die Radikalisierung des #Tesla-Chefs #ElonMusk bezeichnend für den Rechtsschwenk der Branche, und auch der Aufstieg #China's spiele dabei eine Rolle.«
>“[#Opensource#AI] is really fundamental because it allows everyone to seize the technology, to diminish the fear of limited understanding or of not being qualified to use AI,” says Remi Cadene, head of robotics at #HuggingFace in Paris
>Open-source AI firms are meanwhile offering a better alternative to #SiliconValley.
What kind of person prefers human extinction over continued existence? There are a few obvious suspects. One is the “philosophical pessimist” who argues that the world is full of so much human suffering that the nonexistence of our species is better than continued existence. Another is a certain stripe of radical environmentalist who claims that humanity is so destructive to the biosphere, that only our extinction can save what remains of the natural world.
Then there is a third group of people who aren’t bothered by the possibility of human extinction, and indeed some hope to actively bring it about in the coming decades. They represent a more dangerous and extreme form of pro-extinctionist ideology that is fairly widespread within Silicon Valley. In fact, some of the most powerful people in the tech world are members of this group, such as the co-founder of Google, Larry Page." https://www.truthdig.com/articles/team-human-vs-team-posthuman-which-side-are-you-on/
#AI#GenerativeAI#BigTech#SiliconValley: "The heart of the problem is that generative AI is not really designed to address actual social problems. We urgently need the expertise of social scientists to be able to make much-needed collective decisions about the future of generative AI that we want; we can’t leave it to business, markets or technologists. We need to turn to these experts to understand our social or collective problems and the challenges we want generative AI to address. We then need to work out whether – not simply how – artificial intelligence can contribute to finding viable solutions, and then getting AI companies to focus on producing those solutions." https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-generative-artificial-intelligence-is-simply-a-waste-of-our-time-and/
Google's working on a way to speed-up data transfers when setting up a new phone: APK Teardown (www.androidauthority.com)