There’s a difference between being useful and being a usefool.
A usefool is someone who launders their legitimacy to benefit corporate interests for short-term gain. They do so even if, ultimately, it’s against their own interests and those of others in the longer term. (1/3)
I love how folks still think people farmers like Google have a trust problem.
In 2024!
They don’t have a trust problem.
They are untrustworthy.
And they’ve always been untrustworthy. It’s just that your friends happen to work there and your agency gets scraps of work from them sometimes and maybe they sponsor events you speak at that you’re even still questioning this. And, by doing so – still, even today – helping legitimise them.
#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."
Has anyone written about how textual generative AI feels strangely close to toxic masculinity in some respects? The absolute confidence in everything stated, the lack of understanding of the consequences of getting that confidence wrong for important questions, the semi-gaslighty feeling when it “corrects” itself when you call it out on something. It so often feels like talking to someone one would despise and avoid in “real life.” I’m curious if anyone did some writing on this.
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.
I'm truly, deeply alarmed at how the tech industry is trying to insert itself in every human interaction, getting between humans in every possible relationship, and they think that's "better" while absolutely destroying everything that makes society work.
The answer is MORE human-to-human interaction not LESS. FFS.
(screenshot from a substack that landed in my inbox, but you can see this same ethos everywhere, including strained attempts to portray chatbots with "theories of the mind")
#BigTech#SiliconValley#Dystopias: "By attaching the new product to a popular speculation, especially one with built-in dramatic tension, the founders can elevate a buggy, unproven, or partially conceived technology into the cultural firmament, even if only briefly. It’s a cheat code, a way of getting us to relate to a future that’s already been culturally prototyped, and it can be quite successful. To wit: The day after admonishing tech companies for using Her as a benchmark for their products, Roose dedicated his column to explaining how AI’s ‘Her’ Era Has Arrived — thus further entrenching the link between OpenAI’s aspirational technology and its attendant useful dystopia in the public consciousness. Hell, my own story about the grim origins of the metaverse probably made Facebook’s deeply lame Horizons VR product seem orders of magnitude cooler than it turned out to be.
Even if consumers aren’t aware of all of the dystopian reference points these founders and companies are pushing, they probably should be aware of the narcissistic, us-against-the-collapsing-world mentality that is active behind them. And we shouldn’t merely mock the tech set for using dystopias as marketing materials — we should try to stop them from creating them, too."
#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.
Google's working on a way to speed-up data transfers when setting up a new phone: APK Teardown (www.androidauthority.com)