When we warn the real threat of AI is how it’s used against people in the present, not the fantasies that some day computers might think for themselves, this is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about: health insurers using AI to deny care.
The thing about #tech#layoffs that people who haven’t been through it often don’t understand is that morale never recovers. The employees who remain will never have the same relationship with that company, bosses or peers.
Watching people you respect pack their stuff and crying on the phone with their spouses is something that never goes away. When I survived a layoff in my 20s I became a “do exactly what the ticket says” person. I stopped suggesting ideas, providing feedback, believing anything a manager told me.
If you are a company considering layoffs, especially a profitable company, you should approach it as “this department will have 100% turnover”. The second I got another job offer I left that company and six months later nobody who had been there at the time of layoffs remained.
Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.
We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.
Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.
But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.
And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.
Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.
Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.
We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.
We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.
Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.
You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.
We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.
By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.
By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!
"I deleted keys generated by our TV for 5 straight minutes. 5 Minutes of like 200BPM clicking. I restarted. Everything worked again. I laughed so hard I cried. I felt like I'd solved a murder."
The Hyperloop was never meant to be built. Elon Musk admitted it was all about fueling opposition to California’s high-speed rail project so it would get canceled.
He never planned to improve transportation; he just wants to keep people trapped in cars.
The Luddites weren’t backward technophobes. They saw factory owners using tech to degrade their livelihoods and they fought back — first by trying to negotiate, then writing to Parliament, and finally smashing the machines.
As workers today organize and strike over bosses using digital tech to upend their industries, there’s a lot we can learn from the Luddites’ story. I was thrilled to dig into it with @brianmerchant!
The master tapes have been found by the ReBoot Rewind documentary crew and they need our help with finding a working D1 tape deck to digitize them.
Crossposting this from Facebook:
🚨THE MASTER TAPES EXIST AND WE NEED YOUR HELP🚨 THIS IS NOT A DRILL🚨
Hey you, YES YOU! We have some good news to share!
For years, there have been rumours circulating about the status of the original PAL D1 masters of ReBoot and whether they still exist. After visiting Mainframe Studios yesterday to take a look through their ReBoot archives, we’re happy to confirm that the masters are all here, for every episode of the show!
Getting a proper digital transfer of the D1 masters is high priority item for us. It would mean having the entire series in the best possible picture and sound quality, presented as accurately as the day it was rendered. There’s also a library of additional ReBoot content (animation tests, toy commercials, Electronic Arts video game footage, IMAX content) that is currently stuck on the D1 format and we need to preserve it for the future. This would obviously benefit the documentary but ultimately, it would benefit the fans the most!
Here’s where we need help. We need a working D1 tape deck to capture all these tapes. Mainframe hasn’t had one for years. We haven’t been able to find anyone in Vancouver, British Columbia, or even all of Canada that has one of these tape decks. We’d greatly prefer buying or renting one of these decks so that the tapes can be captured locally, without needing to ship them.
If anyone has a lead on where we might be able to get one of these decks, please contact us!
Yesterday Justin Trudeau revealed that agents of the Indian government murdered a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil. When Canadian Sikhs went to post about it on Facebook, the platform removed their posts as a violation of Indian law.
NEW: Food prices in Europe have been soaring. Earlier this year, the Austrian government said it would build a price database to let people compare costs at different supermarkets. It said this would take months to make and only include a small number of product categories.
Within 2 hours, @badlogic had built a first prototype, pulling the data from supermarket's websites, and open sourced the project. Now Heisse Preise lists 177,000 products from 10 chains.
The transparency has allowed prices to be compared: and the results appear to show supermarkets are watching each other and adjusting their prices based on others. The competition authority is investigating and already said new laws should make supermarkets publish proper APIs with full item data
Hi Fediverse! We're a collective of international workers at Red Hat organizing for fair working conditions.
We'll be using this platform to discuss a range of issues in our industry, strengthen solidarity between tech workers, and dispel myths when it comes to unionizing.
“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”
Google’s vision for the future of search shows how generative AI is all about increasing corporate power.
Instead of sending you to different websites, Google has scraped the open web to generate plagiarized answers to keep you looking at ads on Google. We need to stop being distracted by AI hype and fantasies about intelligent machines, so we can push back on the real threats before it’s too late.