Notices by Danilo Campos 🇵🇷 (danilo@hachyderm.io), page 3

the real talk for me is that all the braying about putting a cw on “American politics” makes me want to use masto less and Twitter more 💁🏻♀️

the biggest manufacturer of world-ending guns is on the verge of a fascist takeover and you want it tidily labeled so you can ignore it

A fundamentally unserious culture

@mattly bingo!

It’s simply a World That Can’t Be, for important reasons that no amount of optimism can overcome

I think of The West Wing as speculative fiction, no less fantastical than interstellar travel or a post-scarcity economy.

It’s a What-If about America: what if the empire were as benevolent and high-minded as the propaganda insists.

What if our leaders were gripped more by principle and service than self interest.

This is a valuable thought experiment, but I’ve often worried that the work was misinterpreted as an unrealistic blueprint for behavior in our much less principled universe.

AI responses on LinkedIn are actually a damning admission about what's so sick about its culture.

LinkedIn is a venue for performing our capitalist utility. In practice this means:

- Agreeableness
- Enthusiasm for the missions of others
- Conformity to norms
- Compliance with expectation

And LinkedIn has looked at the problem and said "there's no reason a robot can't do this.”

@mattly it's ACTUALLY enraging on a level I haven't felt with a technology product in a very long time

@mattly big fan of the part where I can’t actually select the room I want to control and it ignores all my inputs thereto pertaining

That’s what really gets me

you watch all these movies, read all these stories

it’s always an accident that the computer fucks us

it’s always “SHIT, despite the best of my intentions, there was an angle of this I did not consider, and it was from there that humanity was destroyed”

but the Silicon Valley guys are like “let’s make that one dystopia we saw, I call being the rich guy”

just a deep lack of imagination
https://mastodon.social/@alexcox/112459995825352581

the weirdest thing that has taken place in my life was reading valleywag throughout the aughts

with its excellent reportage of subjects the regular tech press wouldn’t touch

learning about how all these posturing tech guys were pretty sad and pathetic, and mostly winners of a random lottery

and now almost two decades later

these same pathetic guys are OBSCENELY powerful and wealthy

and still pathetic in ways the press remained reluctant to talk about!

such a POWERFUL inoculant against ever taking the “power” in tech seriously

and at the same time a deceptive one

these guys still won

won HUGE

and my assessing them as pathetic, however accurate, failed to prepare me for the fact that they would win anyway

is there a word for the grief of seeing the bad guys win?

asking for the whole fucking fediverse lmao

An ongoing pattern in the AI march:

- the hardware efficiency improves
- the software efficiency improves

So I continue to argue that energy consumption as a PRIMARY criticism of AI is going to be unpersuasive, as incentives drive down the energy costs with time, and all critique of the energy costs is just as applicable to conventional cloud computing, which we have already accepted into our social bargain

(and which underpins every single tech salary)

so instead:

https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous

Just this week, OpenAI launched a new model that's cheaper to operate

Google announced a new chip that's 5x the efficiency of their previous data center processors

so the longer this goes on the clearer it becomes we can't just recycle the cryptocurrency bullshit playbook on AI because the economic incentives are fundamentally OPPOSITE between these two computing approaches

meanwhile, AI poses unique harms that a superficial critique will not address, especially in the face of people USING it

@mattly to be clear this is postage stamp-scale Black Mirror, nothing real (merely technical possibility awaiting economic and political forces)

the endgame of enshittification is the day when Microsoft Teams includes a remotely auditable process and filesystem monitor

which Microsoft gives to businesses for free under X seats

and in exchange for the free control, Microsoft gets to let any IP rentier who needs a boost next quarter come pick your staff's pocket remotely

of course they would split the spoils

the compuserve of business SaaS vendors layering on yet another coat of paint to their Landlord’s Special of a product
https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/112366823504961632

every atlassian product

@mattly enraging, I hate how powerless the whole equation makes us, I had something similar for an office I rented UNDER FALSE FIBER PRETENSES

by far the coolest part of a NAS paired with fiber is that clients can upload things straight into your house

no cloud nonsense, just the bigass files I want available at local speeds

*Curb Your Enthusiasm theme*

(ht: @gaberivera)

So the CFPB has Lambda School and Austin Allred dead to rights as scammers

Allred, noted crook, is not allowed to do anything like student lending for ten years

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-takes-action-against-coding-boot-camp-bloomtech-and-ceo-austen-allred-for-deceiving-students-and-hiding-loan-costs/