• 5 Posts
  • 310 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I want to second this, and go further with a hot take: I liked Graber’s answers a lot.

    I think skepticism of her and the entire artifice of VC and big tech is totally warranted. But a lot of people in this section seem to basically say, ‘no matter what she says I don’t trust her and I’m certain that BlueSky will be another bad actor.’ And I think that’s an overly simplistic take.

    It’s true that there are no trustworthy CEOs. You shouldn’t trust Graber. It will always be a mistake to pin hopes of good management of a platform on the magnanimity of any business leader. However if we want to see a new era of decentralization but are honest about the fact that most users are more likely to join big, corporate-styled platforms (in the short term, at least) then the ideal platform is one that attempts to build their business model around portability.

    It’s totally true that BlueSky isn’t there yet. But they’re basically building a set of escape hatches for users. Cory Doctorow talks a lot about how restricting users from leaving a platform is a key requirement to enshitify. So if BlueSky uses a protocol that at least has the potential for this, they’re creating an incentive structure that really does serve a purpose. They may later on try to reverse course. But at least for now, they’re doing the thing that gives users and the third party developers the best chance of escape if things go bad. And that is exactly what I want to see from a big tech platform.







  • Also: this article omits serious context about what the IDF does with the information Microsoft is describing!

    Over a year ago, 972 wrote an explosive expose on IDF ai targeting. It’s all pretty blunt. A general name Yossi Sariel wrote a book describing how AI could automate industrialized killing, and these plans were put into practice to deliberately target civilian infrastructure when entire families were sitting down to meals. The tools included Lavender, which composed target lists that pretty much included any male over 14 and Daddy’s Home, which tracked targets generated by Lavender and generated strike plans when it determined that the target was at their home.

    There’s no good reason why the Independent left this out. A general literally wrote a book about this, and it’s been a year since this information came out.

    https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/


  • Agreed. It’s so wildly incongruent with who he is. All bark, no bite.

    Also: wishing violence against Trump is to me the greatest evidence of hopeless neoliberal confusion.

    Don’t like him? Offer an alternative. I don’t want Trump dead, I want Medicare for all, a child tax credit, and a 30 hour work week. That’s what gets rid of fascism: a new democratic social contract. Folks who focus on Trump have lost the plot.



  • I think this post is a cope.

    You might be 100% right. But that wouldn’t change the fact that you’re focusing on the individual in a story about trends, and I think you’re doing so because doing so is a way to avoid engaging with the larger point of the article.

    Tech work isn’t safe. No work is really safe these days. It doesn’t even matter if AI can do your job well. It is just a facet of a project to devalue labor and disempower laborers. And that project is going really well! No matter how good you are at your job, none of us can “merit” our way out of that project.

    I’m great at my job, and my job is very AI proof. But that doesn’t protect me from the fact that my company is looking for ways to gigify the work and hire contract workers from among highly paid laid off scientists and engineers to take over little easy parts of my job. They’ll concentrate the hard parts, of my job and yours, and reorganize it until it’s as modular as possible, and raise our workloads without increasing our pay until they can make it hard enough to say we’re not doing it fast enough.

    No chatbot will replace me in the next 10 years. But my company doesn’t need them to in order to limit my bargaining power! They’re fostering an ecosystem of abundant cheap, fungible atomized workers so they will never have to bid for your labor or worry about you being irreplaceable.

    All of us need to get wise to the con. We need universal incomes, universal services, universal healthcare, universal housing. We need a guaranteed safety net that is high enough that everyone has the ability to turn down bad jobs. Even the people you think suck at their jobs.

    You cannot escape this by dismissing any laid off worker as too slow to keep up. Because this is a team event. And the bosses are on the other team.



  • I don’t think that’s true.

    I don’t think livestreaming your whole life is healthy or desirable, but I don’t see finding friends who are cool with it to be an obstacle. There are plenty of other Twitch streamers at the very least who are down with this stuff. And she lives in Austin. Why not have a couple of buddies to go on jogs with or play basket ball or cook with? I just don’t see how that would be hard to do.

    I don’t feel like this article answered my questions well.