Excellent article on the inglorious tech titans & the damage they’re inflicting on the world: Tech companies became key players in killing our comity & stymying our politics, our govt, our social fabric & most of all, our minds by seeding isolation, outrage & addictive behavior. Innocuous boy-kings who wanted to make the world a better place & ended up cosplaying Darth Vader feels like science fiction. But it all really happened. #Techbros#GOPSabotage#TFG#Muskhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/15/kara-swisher-burn-book-silicon-valley/
Consider this:
When the U.S. Constitution was drafted human beings were entirely capable of comprehensively understanding nearly every aspect of how the world around them worked.
How to grow food. Run a business. Understand emerging topics in science, math, philosophy and the arts. The optimism running through the renaissance thinkers is not surprising.
The drafters of the Constitution were masters of their world (to often unfortunately include slaves). They were confident in their direction moving into the future because they could predict the future --- based on their comprehensive knowledge of their present.
Yes, this is absolutely the technological innovation the World wanted.
Yes thank you Tech Bros, it's worth all your whiney self indulgent social media posts.
"Yes, they want an imperial mayor because these techbro edgelords fundamentally don't believe in democracy. They don't want consensus, or oversight; they want their own strongman in place, and they want the bought to stay bought."
— jwz
Was stunned into silence when a real life Tech Bro floated this idea to me.
Hey, Robert, I have this great idea to innovate the eBook!
Me: More Trans sex?
Him, WTF? No, so, you ever read a book and you just wished the plot could change, like on a dime? What if, what if, for a fee, you could pay to have the plot completely change in a book when you wanted, when you wanted? Even better, what if we have books that randomly change the plot as you read them!
Me, Oh my dear. I guess you don't know about first drafts and Pancers, bless your heart! Tell you what? I'm a pancer, I'll let you read my first drafts for free! They have all those innovations and more! As a bonus, names change halfway through chapters and hair color changes too!
#FediBlock snarfed.org and brid.gy for bridging fediverse folks to Bluesky against their will (and in likely contravention of GDPR in the EU) with typical Silicon Valley techbro sense of entitlement:
“[O]pt in results in far fewer users, and users are critical for a bridge to be useful.”¹
PS. I just suspended (domain blocked) both snarfed.org and brid.gy from my personal fediverse instance and saw that there was already one account from one and eleven accounts on the other so my account was apparently already being bridged without my consent.
Those links are now severed and they never should have existed without my knowledge or approval to begin with.
'There seems to be a prevailing thought in the tech world that, with an idea good enough, the internet can be fixed. Everyone appears to truly believe they can create the perfect app to rival Instagram or TikTok or become the new Twitter. But they must be stopped.'
"I've repeatedly warned that AI could be used to generate non-consensual intimate imagery. This is a deplorable situation, & I’m going to keep pushing on AI cos. to stop this horrible capability & on platforms to stop their circulation."
-Sen Warner
A variety of sexually inappropriate & offensive AI images of Swift are making the rounds on X, to the disgust of many ppl on the platform.
So anyway. I posted in a local programmers FB group to ask an open-ended question, mainly because it was lacking much other than memes and downtime complaints.
In basic terms, I was looking for a simple JS @import that I could use to make dropdown menus searchable, without having to rely on jQuery or rebuild a rather complex plain HTML form in React as the scope of the issue was small enough.
Oh Oh, looks like Google Glass (or something similar) may be back.... the #techbros still think a eyeliner display can be a thing; perhaps they've been watching too much Top Gun?
Games, movies and literature have for a century and a half portrayed "Scientists" as irresponsible madmen ready to unleash doom on the world for the sake of "experimentation" while the truth is that it is the "innovators" and "tech bros" that are glorified in fiction who releases the doom.
To all the people who don't use the Fediverse because "didn't reach the critical mass" and "too little amount of users" and "10 million is a small amount" I say:
How big of an influencer are you? Who is going to reach all those millions anyway?
Large number of users ONLY benefit the giant corporations who are profiting out from the users. Which is isn't the priority for the Fediverse / social web.
“Do free work for narcissistic sociopaths, so that your customers become your friends” is the kind of take that would come from depths of the #ClassicalLiberalism#TechBros hive mind.
Oh dear, #techbros like #ElonMusk are always arguing that is great when different bits of the can talk to each other & coordinate their data its good for the consumer...
Imagine his growing horror as #Tesla 's labour dispute in #Sweden has seen #unions talking to each other and coordinating their activities... now Tesla's rubbish is not being collected by (unionised) refuge collectors...
Yes, Elon coordination is good, especially for #workers seeking better wages from #billionnaires!
Here's @jjn1 on the 'arms race' behind the expansion of #ChatGPT & other #AI bots.
As he concludes: 'Underpinning it all, though, is the real takeaway: the tech giants knowingly rushed imperfect products to market, worried that being cautious would allow rivals to dominate AI. Safety and ethical concerns took a backseat to the profit motive. Plus ça change'!
Yup, once gains the #TechBros demonstrate that the 'new capitalism' is the old #capitalism in a T-shirt & jeans
Instead of saving the planet, fixing the #technology they ruined... #TechBros, VCs... wasted BILLIONS$ on crypto, #AI, driverless cars, more delivery options... :
SV’s $445M robot pizza revolution that wasn’t. Zume Pizza: one of the biggest flops in SV history. The mobile kitchens ran into an immutable reality: gravity. Hot sauce, melting cheese, & the Bay Area’s hills didn’t mix; cheese would slide off Zume’s pizzas as they baked en route -small but laughable hiccup. https://www.fastcompany.com/90979001/zume-pizza-silicon-valley-445-million-robot-revolution-that-wasnt