#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#BigTech#SiliconValley: "Company documents obtained by Vox with signatures from Altman and Kwon complicate their claim that the clawback provisions were something they hadn’t known about. A separation letter on the termination documents, which you can read embedded below, says in plain language, “If you have any vested Units ... you are required to sign a release of claims agreement within 60 days in order to retain such Units.” It is signed by Kwon, along with OpenAI VP of people Diane Yoon (who departed OpenAI recently). The secret ultra-restrictive NDA, signed for only the “consideration” of already vested equity, is signed by COO Brad Lightcap.
Meanwhile, according to documents provided to Vox by ex-employees, the incorporation documents for the holding company that handles equity in OpenAI contains multiple passages with language that gives the company near-arbitrary authority to claw back equity from former employees or — just as importantly — block them from selling it.
Those incorporation documents were signed on April 10, 2023, by Sam Altman in his capacity as CEO of OpenAI."
A female computational neuroscience and machine learning expert took to X at the weekend to describe a “dark side” of the startup culture in Silicon Valley.
Sonia Joseph alleged that a culture of sexual coercion has taken hold of San Francisco’s community housing tech scene, with “heavy LSD use” and “sex parties held by mainly male tech and entrepreneurial elites that involve mock-violent role playing with female participants.”
In particular, “early OpenAI employees” were referenced by Joseph, as well as their friends and “adjacent entrepreneurs.” Salon has more.
「 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 」
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.
«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.
>“[#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.
#STS#SiliconValley#Technocapitalism: "In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley technocapitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and generates extreme income inequality in order to expand its reach. In Romania, dreams of privatization updated fascist and anti-Roma pasts and socialist-era underground computing practices. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways Romanians are resisting Silicon Valley capitalist logics, where anticapitalist and anti-imperialist activists and protesters build on socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations. Attending to the violence of Silicon Valley imperialism, McElroy reveals technocapitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic and geographic growth." https://www.dukeupress.edu/silicon-valley-imperialism
#SciFi#ScienceFiction#SpaceExploration#Mars#Capitalism#SiliconValley: "If you listen to the libertarians pushing the notion of space settlement, you could be tricked into believing that Mars is some kind of distant paradise-in-the-making that we need only seize and remake for our species. As the crises escalate here on planet Earth, the solution isn’t to do all we can to make a world that works for all, but to find a new frontier that will magically cure all of our ills. Except there isn’t an ounce of truth in those stories.
Mars is no backup planet. It’s a hostile world where humans can’t breathe without technological assistance, can’t walk freely on the surface without a space suit, and would have to live far underground to avoid developing cancer from the radiation on the surface since the world has no magnetosphere. As Zach and Kelly Weinersmith explain in A City on Mars, the soil on Mars is toxic and not as easy to clean as boosters of space settlement like to suggest. There’s also very little research on the social and biological considerations of long-term habitation in space, particularly reproduction and child rearing in a hostile environment that lacks the gravity we’ve evolved to live with. And that’s before considering the legal questions that people like Musk pretend don’t exist.
There’s no future for humanity in space — or at least not for such a long time that it’s pointless to make sacrifices to try to realize it in the present. Intergalactic travel and adaptation to different planets seems easy in science fiction because the challenges can be ignored or explained away so as not to get in the way of the story — and there’s nothing wrong with that. Science fiction’s job isn’t to predict the future, but to use an imagined universe as a setting to probe the problems of the present." https://disconnect.blog/what-if-we-never-live-on-mars/
Oh look! I have a pre-Google map of Sunnyvale! Look at that giant undeveloped land at Wolfe and Homestead! Maybe someday someone will put a duck pond there. Can someone give me directions to Leonard Ave? It's not coming up on Apple Maps. #Sunnyvale#SiliconValley#mapping#gis#maps#history
I've been playing with the #WindowMaker version of #Debian recently, just to remember the old, good #NextSTEP, #OpenSTEP era. I used to have a #NeXTStation but I sold it locally for $300 just before I left US for Greece. It could probably fetch thousands on eBay, but I didn't want to deal with shipping such a heavy item.
Ah, I miss the old #SiliconValley. Back when there was actually room to innovate in ways that were revolutionary, and not just additive.
California Forever, the billionaire-backed effort to create a new community from scratch in Solano County, has begun collecting signatures to try to put its initiative on the November ballot. Here’s our look at the promises by the company, and how they would affect county and state taxpayers.
Rebecca Solnit wrote: “I don’t know whether these #billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 & used their wealth to undermine its diversity & affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets & push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.
By producing such extremes of wealth, tech is returning us to a kind of feudalism, with a few powerful figures accountable to no one. Here’s #ElonMusk, the world’s richest person, who invited in misinformation, disinformation & hate, providing a platform for extreme right-wingers, racists & #conspiracy theorists, while also using his #Starlink#satellite technology first for & then against the Ukrainian military in their conflict with #Russia. ” #SanFrancisco#SiliconValley
In @parismarx latest Disconnect update he highlights Chris Person's two questions people should be asking everytime the Silicon Valely techbro people churn out the latest "greatest" thing, like that shiteous video stuff: " how much energy is used to churn out this sludge (my words) and what dataset is the model trained on" #ai#SiliconValley
Apple has very publicly told you to go fuck yourselves with its malicious compliance. What you do next will decide whether malicious compliance is acceptable in the EU or not.