@gmthor @catsalad @xkcd @LinuxAndYarn you don't actually want over-the-air updates, which can easily become hostile. You want hardware and software that's built in a way that makes it possible to fix.

Company HQs and whatever lairs their boards inhabit should have burned when the first thing marked "no user-serviceable parts inside" hit the market.

@neurovagrant @404mediaco intentionally taking time off is praxis.

@VulpineAmethyst Disability wrath is fully justified, so you can get where some of the confusion is coming from.

@sidereal I continue to be astonished that people don't understand that most people in the IT industry are contractors, so that when a company talks about their employees, they're talking about a minority of their actual employees.

Duolingo replacing contractors with AI means they're firing most of the people that work for them.

“Duolingo spokesperson Sam Dalsimer stressed that ‘AI isn’t replacing our staff’ and said all AI-generated content on the platform would be created ‘under the direction and guidance of our learning experts.’ The company's plan is still to reduce its use of non-staff contractors.”

I am tired of this kind of gaslighting all day every day around every single issue.

When people say “don’t replace your staff with AI” they don’t want to hear “don’t worry, we are only replacing CONTRACTORS with AI, not full-time staff.” You just made everyone in the room roll their eyes so hard.

Obviously what people want is not poorly done work. They want work done by actual humans. Don’t try to turn this into another capitalist shell game. Fuck off with this shit

@Viss @neurovagrant @apodoxus if a shodan-like thing isn't already up, it very soon could be.

@neurovagrant I don't believe in prophecy, but E. M. Forster's _The Machine Stops_ is about as clear an understanding of technological processes over time under capitalism as I've seen so far.

@neurovagrant that statement remains true with the word "surveillance" elided.

the wealthy elites will literally destroy the world rather than suffer one second of inconvenience, and that is why they should not exist.

@neurovagrant only on weekdays that end in Y. The most recent version of Windows I used regularly was the then-cutting-edge Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and I nevertheless know this.

@CorvidCrone @sidereal that, and the kinds of folks such an environment draws to it. It's not a coincidence that Seattle and its surrounds are a tech hub.

There is no AI company that I'm aware of that is making more money than they're spending. This whole industry is severely lacking in what my grandfather would call "going concerns."

The fact that so many resources, and so many people's time is wasted on this technology which has still not been demonstrated to make money for anyone is embarrassing for all of us.

I remain unconvinced that "ethical AI" is even possible because it's like.

This shit just isn't very useful. The hypothetical ethical version would still lack utility. No one needs a computer that makes crappy pictures.

@sidereal omg omg omg this is incredibly cool!!!

@VulpineAmethyst that this was a problem known 30 years ago and just as easy to solve then gets me looking to the political economy to explain what's going on. The purpose of a system is what it does, and all that.

@arclight the fun kids use the verb "externalize" because there are actors in the picture. The noun-ification of a lot of these verbs is a strategy whose principal purpose is to hide those actors and to shield them from any possibility of accountability.

@sidereal cops are cops are cops, and that very specifically includes the ones in the hi-vis vests.

@sidereal there've been a few brief occasions when, for reasons I can't really come up with, liberals decided to permit a diversity of tactics, even if they didn't ever embrace that as a strategy. I guess it's fine to be nice to them when and if they do. A lot of people are understandably skittish around them because liberals have a back-stabbing tendency when they again feel comfortable, i.e. way before most of the rest of us could feel there's even a lull.

@burnoutqueen anybody who's actually accomplishing anything is welcome to contest the assertions made here with their own. I note with interest that that's not what you're doing.