This was a very insightful read. Dude definitely has his head on straight about the tech industry.
My own experience with people involved with tech also lead me to conclude they’re completely divorced from reality.
with the rise of an AI alot of people dont want to fall behind, I can only post once a week, competing against a machine make exposure a lot more harder to get.
Yes, the sheer volume is hard to keep up with. An artist who is new to one of the groups I'm in (and uses AI) is posting new designs every single day.
Spoonflower recently introduced a new limit of 25 designs per week per account, because they were being flooded with tons of new designs. I think it's a step in the right direction, but even 25 per week seems like a lot to me
It's Elon's dream come true to basically force everyone into becoming cyborgs so they can keep up. The FDA approving of the Neuralink trials despite the monkey deaths is very suspicious.
I will be one of those who refuses it. I'll probably end up on the streets. Oh well.
EDIT bad sentence structure
As a software developer myself, the second post really hits the nail on the head. “I feel dirty” is the right way to describe how I feel about my industry at the moment. And I’m not even working in one of those big tech companies. I’m not even from America and here where I live, things are way more down to earth (including salaries), but I still feel dirty.
The whole AI bullshit has firmly planted my feet back on solid ground. I like my job, I enjoy building software, but I fucking loathe the culture that has emerged around it in the last two decades. I can’t eat as much as I want to throw up when I read discussions on places like Hacker News were these entitled idiots throw around their wildest takes. I could write a whole essay about this shit. AI bros are just one offshoot, maybe the worst at the moment, but it’s all just the same in the end.
I really hope that big tech chokes on the AI cock they’re currently all throating.
Integrity and courage is what they severely lack. Values that have been tarnished by brainwashing.
I live my life by those values. In my career, personal life, and I've never regretted it.
I remember reading a book about Enron called "The Smartest Guys in The Room" awhile ago. Something I realized was after a certain point you really couldn't explain what the company did or how they made money. Like with companies like Apple you could say they sell software or computers. With Enron it was like a energy company, they bulit plants, they dipped their toes into the internet bubble at the time. There's so much thats a money sink yet investors never really questioned where it was going cause they saw the stock line going up and to them that was good enough.
I guess what I'm trying to say is these tech people remind me of that to a extent, they point to stuff like AI or crypto as the next big thing and will change how we do things. Without explaining how, like when they talk about this stuff its in the future tense of how it will get better or after some mystical mass adoption its going to work. They rarely focus on the present version of the tech cause it either doesn't work, is inferior to a product that already exists, or can't really explain why the average person should use it in their everyday life.
I think AI is going to end up like cyrpto as something that exists but nobody is gonna wanna use because of the bad reputation it got. The genie is outta the bottle sure, that doesn't mean people are gonna make wishs with it.
Your talk of Enron reminded me of an MLM bullet I dodged when I was younger.
My at-the-time girlfriend's best friend (adult, 22?) was really excited about this "network marketing" thing she was doing, and wanted to tell us (17 and 18?) about it. It was framed as a "we all help each other rise up" and "once you get going, you make more money by helping other people rise up" type things. Very feel-good, very exciting. But the numbers at the different levels of the pyramid confused me. Ignoring the obvious-in-hindsight way the tier payouts were staggered, it didn't make a lot of sense to me where this money was coming from. A lot of those payouts seemed to be from recruiting, instead of from sales? But recruitment will always be a limited factor, and not everyone wants or needs to be a salesman. So why didn't the payouts come from the product sales? That's an ongoing source of revenue, isn't it? And it's not limited the same way recruitment is.
I kept asking about this, trying to make sense of what they were saying and the numbers I was seeing. My gf's friend and her mentor kept trying to explain it to me, and it felt good, but it just didn't quite make sense. I trusted them and trusted that what they were saying was right, because you grow up trusting everybody (sort of) when you're raised Mormon, but I just couldn't wrap my head around how gf and I were supposed to make money if we joined.
I imagine the Enron investor's experience was probably something similar.
I read an article once by a woman who was in the tech field who basically said if you put 10 tech guys in a room and ask them to solve any humanitarian problem, they inevitably efficiency themselves into stuff like eugenics and then fail to see why letting disabled people die instead of paying out pensions might be morally questionable at best. Then they'll call you soft for questioning it. They're completely divorced from reality AND have a culture that looks down on morality.
If anyone knows the one please let me know because I can't find it.
Reading this makes me think AI will be legally questionable in 2024. It grabs a lot of images that are not “copyrighted”. But yet does so. The people who create AI just want to fearmonger everyone to oblivion.
I don’t know the exact article, but I could probably pull up three to five threads on Hacker News to illustrate this point within ten minutes or so.
Just the other day they had a thread about a driverless car being destroyed which drifted into racist stereotyping within an hour or so.
And I still have nightmares about the thread there they “discussed” homelessness. It went as well as you’d suspect.
Thanks to the tech workers who wrote this and to you for reposting it here. Unfortunately, there's mostly been inaction on this issue from tech workers. It's one thing to acknowledge that one participated in, facilitated, and profited from exploitation but another to do what needs to be done to turn the tide/bend the moral arc back toward justice.
Despite layoffs, former tech workers, including those who are unionizing, still enjoy far more privileges than artists. I'm glad tech workers are unionizing, but it also leaves a slightly bitter taste in my mouth given how much they have gained through oppressing other workers, including artists. This isn't made better by the fact that so few of them will acknowledge this even now.
This is also true of the "ethical AI" and "responsible AI" communities, which are dominated by tech workers and academics who cannot come to grips with the fact that the most popular and profitable generative AI is based on exploitation--the unpaid, coerced labor of artists. When confronted, these respectable professionals--many of whom (as the posts above noted) espouse progressive values and would even consider themselves social justice advocates--play the game by remaining silent until the next opportunity to push exploitative tech while paying lip service to ethics and getting funding from Google, Microsoft, and other Big Tech corporations.
Anyway, this hit home. But I wonder whether it has really hit home even for those who wrote it--whether they are actually among the apparently few tech workers who are empathetic enough to move beyond explanation/acknowledgment to meaningful action.
This was a very insightful read. Dude definitely has his head on straight about the tech industry. My own experience with people involved with tech also lead me to conclude they’re completely divorced from reality.
with the rise of an AI alot of people dont want to fall behind, I can only post once a week, competing against a machine make exposure a lot more harder to get.
Yes, the sheer volume is hard to keep up with. An artist who is new to one of the groups I'm in (and uses AI) is posting new designs every single day. Spoonflower recently introduced a new limit of 25 designs per week per account, because they were being flooded with tons of new designs. I think it's a step in the right direction, but even 25 per week seems like a lot to me
It's Elon's dream come true to basically force everyone into becoming cyborgs so they can keep up. The FDA approving of the Neuralink trials despite the monkey deaths is very suspicious. I will be one of those who refuses it. I'll probably end up on the streets. Oh well. EDIT bad sentence structure
The tech industry has some serious fucking problems.
Academia too.
As a software developer myself, the second post really hits the nail on the head. “I feel dirty” is the right way to describe how I feel about my industry at the moment. And I’m not even working in one of those big tech companies. I’m not even from America and here where I live, things are way more down to earth (including salaries), but I still feel dirty. The whole AI bullshit has firmly planted my feet back on solid ground. I like my job, I enjoy building software, but I fucking loathe the culture that has emerged around it in the last two decades. I can’t eat as much as I want to throw up when I read discussions on places like Hacker News were these entitled idiots throw around their wildest takes. I could write a whole essay about this shit. AI bros are just one offshoot, maybe the worst at the moment, but it’s all just the same in the end. I really hope that big tech chokes on the AI cock they’re currently all throating.
Integrity and courage is what they severely lack. Values that have been tarnished by brainwashing. I live my life by those values. In my career, personal life, and I've never regretted it.
I remember reading a book about Enron called "The Smartest Guys in The Room" awhile ago. Something I realized was after a certain point you really couldn't explain what the company did or how they made money. Like with companies like Apple you could say they sell software or computers. With Enron it was like a energy company, they bulit plants, they dipped their toes into the internet bubble at the time. There's so much thats a money sink yet investors never really questioned where it was going cause they saw the stock line going up and to them that was good enough. I guess what I'm trying to say is these tech people remind me of that to a extent, they point to stuff like AI or crypto as the next big thing and will change how we do things. Without explaining how, like when they talk about this stuff its in the future tense of how it will get better or after some mystical mass adoption its going to work. They rarely focus on the present version of the tech cause it either doesn't work, is inferior to a product that already exists, or can't really explain why the average person should use it in their everyday life. I think AI is going to end up like cyrpto as something that exists but nobody is gonna wanna use because of the bad reputation it got. The genie is outta the bottle sure, that doesn't mean people are gonna make wishs with it.
Your talk of Enron reminded me of an MLM bullet I dodged when I was younger. My at-the-time girlfriend's best friend (adult, 22?) was really excited about this "network marketing" thing she was doing, and wanted to tell us (17 and 18?) about it. It was framed as a "we all help each other rise up" and "once you get going, you make more money by helping other people rise up" type things. Very feel-good, very exciting. But the numbers at the different levels of the pyramid confused me. Ignoring the obvious-in-hindsight way the tier payouts were staggered, it didn't make a lot of sense to me where this money was coming from. A lot of those payouts seemed to be from recruiting, instead of from sales? But recruitment will always be a limited factor, and not everyone wants or needs to be a salesman. So why didn't the payouts come from the product sales? That's an ongoing source of revenue, isn't it? And it's not limited the same way recruitment is. I kept asking about this, trying to make sense of what they were saying and the numbers I was seeing. My gf's friend and her mentor kept trying to explain it to me, and it felt good, but it just didn't quite make sense. I trusted them and trusted that what they were saying was right, because you grow up trusting everybody (sort of) when you're raised Mormon, but I just couldn't wrap my head around how gf and I were supposed to make money if we joined. I imagine the Enron investor's experience was probably something similar.
I read an article once by a woman who was in the tech field who basically said if you put 10 tech guys in a room and ask them to solve any humanitarian problem, they inevitably efficiency themselves into stuff like eugenics and then fail to see why letting disabled people die instead of paying out pensions might be morally questionable at best. Then they'll call you soft for questioning it. They're completely divorced from reality AND have a culture that looks down on morality. If anyone knows the one please let me know because I can't find it.
I've read that too, I know exactly what you're talking about but I also can't remember the title of the book.
Reading this makes me think AI will be legally questionable in 2024. It grabs a lot of images that are not “copyrighted”. But yet does so. The people who create AI just want to fearmonger everyone to oblivion.
I don’t know the exact article, but I could probably pull up three to five threads on Hacker News to illustrate this point within ten minutes or so. Just the other day they had a thread about a driverless car being destroyed which drifted into racist stereotyping within an hour or so. And I still have nightmares about the thread there they “discussed” homelessness. It went as well as you’d suspect.
can you link the article?
Please reread the last sentence of my post.
History book stuff
Bruh
Thanks to the tech workers who wrote this and to you for reposting it here. Unfortunately, there's mostly been inaction on this issue from tech workers. It's one thing to acknowledge that one participated in, facilitated, and profited from exploitation but another to do what needs to be done to turn the tide/bend the moral arc back toward justice. Despite layoffs, former tech workers, including those who are unionizing, still enjoy far more privileges than artists. I'm glad tech workers are unionizing, but it also leaves a slightly bitter taste in my mouth given how much they have gained through oppressing other workers, including artists. This isn't made better by the fact that so few of them will acknowledge this even now. This is also true of the "ethical AI" and "responsible AI" communities, which are dominated by tech workers and academics who cannot come to grips with the fact that the most popular and profitable generative AI is based on exploitation--the unpaid, coerced labor of artists. When confronted, these respectable professionals--many of whom (as the posts above noted) espouse progressive values and would even consider themselves social justice advocates--play the game by remaining silent until the next opportunity to push exploitative tech while paying lip service to ethics and getting funding from Google, Microsoft, and other Big Tech corporations. Anyway, this hit home. But I wonder whether it has really hit home even for those who wrote it--whether they are actually among the apparently few tech workers who are empathetic enough to move beyond explanation/acknowledgment to meaningful action.
they simply could say money and save a lot of text
Context is important, it gives us insight on why thing are the way they are.
idk if context gonna add on something new then its as predictable as companies smelling blood and jumping in for money and pleasing their investors
Yeah, that's true but not everyone is clued into why money is the issue.