[–] 6 points 6 months ago

Tante nails it again. No notes.

That he has a LinkedIn finally explains how I first heard of him. A liberal but very startup/hustle culture brained colleague shared an anti-blockchain thing on the Slack. Always wondered how she stumbled on a comm(o|u)nist tech critic, but it must've been LI.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

    Too narrow of a scope to be useful I think.

    When he talks about LLCs, the real thing he's referring to has to be capitalism. The "unaligned AI is already here, it's corporations" trope has been around for a while, and I don't think it convinced a lot of people to become socialists.

    I think you can't usefully tackle just the capitalism of the tech industry, if you don't understand the wider system around it. I mean the VC that sloshes around in tech to raise up one bullshitteer after another comes from somewhere. Real estate, mining, fossil fuels, etc.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I just watched the whole thing. She makes a consistent case.

    I felt a little called out by the being tolerant bit. I for sure haven't had great success in talking to close people about their AI use. And I was maybe a little too cold to colleagues, who tried to get ahead of the AI literacy circus with good intentions, although I grudgingly agreed that they are right.

    Maybe I don't meet enough randos to get feeling on the level of pervasiveness of chatbots. Maybe it's a personality thing; I worked myself out of depression mostly by disciplining myself and stopping to buy my own excuses, and that's kind of how I approach every problem now. That sure isn't a vibe that most people respond to.

    There was one part of my AI beliefs that wasn't adressed. Besides the "front-end" and "back-end" harms, that can be mitigated, the tech as a whole still seems trash to me. That may be boomerism setting in, but chatbots just feel counter to and displacing my positive vision for a social fabric, be it for responsible professional communities or for interpersonal connections.

    (I do buy into the use-case for a context-sensitive search engine, e.g. for walls of legalese. But the current framing of the tools is just so harmful, even that use is hazardous as seen in the anecdote.)

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago

    Reminds me, some colleague was once trying to pull up a YouTube vid in Chrome on our megafancy 8k conference screen, but it wouldn't play. He suspected it might be because YT locked down large screens because they didn't like public viewing or whatever.

    Pulled it up on my Firefox on Linux, ran fine.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago*

    Sounds kind of like the Baldur Bjarnason strategy but for your coworkers instead of your boss.

    I can see the value of someone with a critical understanding diving into the technology, so they can talk others down from the ledge.

    But you also need the social pressure to maintain some slop-free spaces. Not everyone can be asked to accomodate recovering slopaholics.

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