Hi what do you do for work?

Well, I work for a healthcare company that creates electric wheelchairs and apps to use them.

Wow that is amazing, that sounds so rewarding! What specifically do you do?

Thanks! I designed the pricing structure so that each aspect of the wheelchair experience is gated behind carefully designed paywalls that are significant enough to help me my boss get a good bonus at the end of the year but not significant enough that all those poor people out there can’t afford it if they have too. Ideally the cost is always a bit more than people can afford to pay since usually people have more you can squeeze out of their social connections if the need is desperate enough (we are optimizing right now for pricing structures that most encourage customers to make gofundme’s to engage with our products which is cool to be part of a new project).

………….

Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.

It won’t.

Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.

Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).

^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money

I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.

Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.

So Rockstar workers are being asked to take a major pay cut, significant decrease in quality of life, massively increased chance of death (driving is the most dangerous thing we do by far), and a huge chunk of free time removed from every work day from commuting that could be time spent with family or loved ones….

Thank you for all your hard work!

Hi everyone, I am collecting preemptive pikachu faces for when meta inevitably attempts to screw the fediverse over. Please put them in replies to this comment so we don't clutter up the rest of the comments.

I think that Neil doesn’t understand something very vital about being a science educator which if there is one thing people know about them, it’s that they are smart as hell and whether that is actually true or not the science educator must adopt a self-deprecating, disarming character to be relatable to the audience within the context they are in because of it.

You can’t play the character of a king and be relatable if people perceive you as actually being a king outside the context of the play….

I think a better question to ask is whether the groups and ideologies involved in the BLM protests (which were MASSIVE) were ever allowed to have power?

If BLM failed to enact significant policy change than I don’t think it is because BLM wasn’t focused enough, had unrealistic goals or was handled badly, I think it is because in terms of law enforcement policy it really doesn’t matter what voters do or don’t want. Any kind of noise made by voters and the public about police violence and the inherent problems with police (and their vital role in maintaining economic injustice and inequality through state violence) will be aggressively pushed back in the opposite direction by the political forces of law enforcement, and because the average person has no power and their vote is useless this will result in a broad push in policy in the opposite direction of BLM’s goals.

However, the function of BLM must be seen for what it was then, to lay bare the true nature of the power relationship between voters and cops and in the minds of countless, countless people living in the US it delegitimized the authority of law enforcement to commit violence wherever and howsoever it chooses. It sent a massive crack through the entire structure of policing, jails and systematic divestment from minorities and the poor. Just because BLM didn’t create significant policy changes doesn’t mean that the battle hasn’t already been lost for the legitimacy of law enforcement in the long term in the US, and I call that a victory.

Sure, but the rhetoric behind it is my point. Trying to get everyone to do it is antithetical to the design of the system.

No, it is precisely the kind of action that we must take collectively in order to protect what we value about the fediverse. This is the work of maintaining a positive community space. If you don't agree that is fine, genuinely I think it is good there is a diversity of opinions here, but it is pretty obvious to me that if we don't have a lot of conversations about the importance of solidarity in defending the fediverse from corporate capture then history is just going to repeat itself.

....I am tired of history repeating itself, I like this place. I like you!

We can't stop a massive corporation from interacting with open source, but we can choose whether massive corporations are allowed to get away with pretending they are benign members of an open source, federated community. At the very least, it raises the dollar amount these corporations must allocate in trying to convince us they are benign doesn't it?

They have the money and time to convince us, even if you disagree with everything I say you can't argue it isn't a better strategy to be difficult to convince. Massive corporations will spend money and time up to the point marketing calculates the change in public perception is worth it and not a dollar further. They wouldn't be doing their jobs well if they behaved otherwise and judging by how desirable those jobs are I feel like at least some of those people are pretty good at their jobs...

Fascists gonna fascist

Fun fact, the NYC metro moves more people daily than ALL flights in the entire continental US by a wide margin, I think it is close to twice the amount of people.

These workers are for all intents and purposes clearly google employees, google just doesn't want to pay them google wages.. so they stick a different name on the door and spend a lot of time lecturing employees that they aren't in fact google employees when the work they do all day every day is for google and under google's direction.

The ownership/management class sees Return To Office as a symbolic fight over class power. Who has the power, the worker class or the ownership class?

It has nothing to do with real hard numbers, efficiency, or really anything to do with rational choices at all. It has everything to do with the politics of who is considered to have the power in the modern workplace. The workers or the boss?

The ownership class knows how much they are stealing from the worker class so they really don't want workers to start realizing how much agency and power they really do have if they work together as a class...

I think everybody needs to keep the conversation on forced RTO focused on this. Yes there are arguments that forced RTO is about commercial real estate property values and I am sure there is truth to that but we really need to see this story for the simple, broad collective story it is; we are in a class war, the rich know it and that is exactly why they don't want to give in to the extremely reasonable accommodations of allowing workers to do their jobs remotely.

All they care about is the message it sends if they agree to worker demands, everything else including the reasonableness of the demands is noise to the people with the power and money.

You know what would keep us safer? If the most prominent news agency in the US actually did its job and did critical journalism instead of acting like RT news.

For example, more intelligence gathering power given to intelligence agencies would not have stopped the Iraq war. If anything, the more power given to these agencies, the more official they sound when they make boldfaced lies because people assume they most know something actually substantiative with all that intelligence capacity.

We would have just launched even faster into the Iraq war.

Which of course is the point

This is the sexiest thing Germany has done since that German couple that drives the Porsche in Super Troopers.

No war but the class war

The really titillating question is what happens when reddit collapses as a trustable source of information and google search is then totally useless.

It turns out social networks aren't great businesses unless you heavily exploit the people maintaining those communities.

And since the CEO said this I will literally never buy an HP product again period

Fascists

also diagnosed ADHD starter park unfortunately

Better shower thought: When the rich push the cost of housing high enough that a good portion of a society is one or two crises away from being homeless the best economic policy for fixing the situation is making the rich scared as fuck so whatever compromise we put on the table looks much more appealing than what the general public is threatening to do to the rich in the streets.

Gotta be honest, rockpapershotgun’s coverage of this game hasn’t gotten me very interested in this being anything other than a hyped flash in the pan but we’ll see

Gotta love this framing that is trying to get me to see China as the big bad rival.

Like, we are in a climate emergency, great if China makes a bunch of solar panels and drives down the cost, it’s the US’s fault for not recognizing that this is an emergency too and responding by subsidizing solar production in the US to the point that China’s actions weren’t a problem.

If we were talking about graphics cards, or luxury cars, or something else that wasn’t trying to combat catastrophic climate change I might feel differently, but in this context things are so desperate that it is as simple as More Solar Panels = Good

So this is the problem with AI, if you add guardrails you’re a culture warrior 1984’ing the whole world,

No this isn’t really a problem with the technology, though of course LLMs are extremely flawed in fundamental ways, it is a problem with conservatives being babies and throwing massive tantrums about any guardrails being added even when they are next to cliffs with 200 foot drops.

Conservatives and libertarians (who control most of these companies) want to try to figure this all out for themselves and are hellbent on trying the “no moderation” strategy first and haven’t thought past that step. This is what conservatives and libertarians always do, they might as well be a character archetype in commedia dell'arte at this point.

We can’t have an adult conversation about racism, sexism, hate against trans people or really even the basic concept of systematic stereotypes and prejudices because conservatives refuse to stop running around screaming, making this a conversation with children where everything has to be extremely simplified and black and white and we have to patiently explain over and over again the basic concept of a systematic bias and argue that it even exists.

Then these same people turn around and vote for people who literally want to control what women do with their unfertilized eggs while they act with a straight face like they give af about individual liberties or freedoms.

LLMs are fundamentally vulnerable to bias, we have to design LLMs with that in mind and first and foremost carefully structure and curate the training data we train an LLM on so that bias is minimized. The very idea of even thinking about the complexities usually sends conservatives right to outbursts of “that sounds like tyranny!” because they honestly just don’t have any of the skill sets that say, a liberal arts education that values the humanities, might provide you that could allow you to think about how to best solve problems that can’t truly be fairly solved and require empathizing with different groups.

Of course, nobody who has the power at AI companies is thinking about this either but…

This isn’t a play Biden has really every done his entire time as a politician. Biden is the definition of a politician who identifies the status quo and builds their platform from it.

Whatever, most of the time it doesn’t matter, but it is truly incredible in this moment how much more politicians like Biden could be successful if they just promised to tax billionaires and then actually did it. Yes you would receive zero campaign funding from the rich for the rest of your life but you would also become extremely popular in the eyes of the public?

Small donation campaign financing works, this isn’t black magic.

Don’t be so naive, we need to spend all that money to protect Americans from global threats such as lack of affordable healthcare and affordable housing.

Wait

checks notes

Sorry we need to spend all that money to protect Americans from looks closer… there is something scribbled here does it say “axis of evil”? Next to it someone wrote “Iran” then scribbled it out and wrote “Iraq” and then it looks like it was scribbled out a second time to write “Iran” again?…

…Oh ok there we go it also says “Islamic Extremists”, well that is a good reason! Jeez after Bin Laden it has just been one ground invasion after another of jihadi ground troops on American shores. Thank goodness we didn’t spend that money on stupid government handouts. Remember when San Francisco didn’t build enough shore cannons to blow up ISIS landing boats and now that whole part of the country is gone? sigh and the liberals were SURE painting the cannons with LGTBQ colors was going to save them..

You know what really pisses me off as a conservative though? No one in this country respects veterans. Every time I go to get on a plane and the airline invites veterans to come on first, I clap beaming like the proud patriotic American that I am. When I look around though people around me are sometimes just on their phones and ignoring this opportunity to honor our veterans. Kids these days don’t even care about veterans and if you start honoring the service of our veterans with empty platitudes around millennials they don’t even respond they just want to talk about dumb shit like how we should at least give veterans free healthcare or affordable housing or childcare support.

Why does that shit matter? What do you think veterans want the government to just give them healthcare for free after they have fought so hard for the privilege of having to buy healthcare from corporations hellbent on cutting every single cost they can, quality of health services be damned? I feel like millennials just want to live in a communist hellscape where even the hospitals and schools are government run.

Those veterans fought for our country, don’t spit in their face by offering a hand to them, this is the proud and free land of the bootstraps where anybody can make it so long as they can make it. If you see a homeless veteran on the street, share a smile with them knowing that they not only fought for the freedom of you to succeed but also for them to fail and thus balance is preserved in this wonderful land of god.

No war but the class war

fuck harry potter, read terry pratchett

I think the reason younger people are upset at boomers about this isn’t that their generation caused it directly as a generation of people, it is that (at least in the US) the general complete lack of awareness about how austerity, deregulation of everything and trickle down economics is utter nonsense coupled with a deep distrust of any kind of unions that in general defines the (US at least) boomer generation created a huge space for corporations to eat away at the foundations of the society that made boomers able to live relatively high quality lives.

Yes it is the rich that are ruining everything, but boomers still bought the bullshit the rich were selling hook line and sinker and most refuse to interface with that at all even as they watch their kids clearly growing up into adults with much less quality of life than they had.

So yes, let’s keep this focused on the rich but that doesn’t mean boomers don’t deserve shit, especially middle class and wealthier boomers in the US.

I mean yeah he actually wasn’t quick to denounce Israel’s genocide in Gaza. I am super happy he has come around but I think I’m the beginning he was reluctant to (not because he agreed with it, because he probably didn’t want to mess with Israeli money coming after him politically).

I like everyone saying “but this is surely illegal!” as if these corporations actually care. At least in the US, it really doesn’t matter what the law says at this point.

Corporations will do what they want and the law will be modified to reflect that, this is the current status quo and it is going to take significant political action (specifically making rich people afraid again to piss the rest of us off too much) to make it change.

I think what you are saying is mostly true but also you do have a choice. If you can’t bring yourself to vote for Biden because of well founded reasons I don’t think it’s fair to judge because of that. All the centrists start screaming and losing their minds that they are going to lose because their candidate sucks and blame it on people who have specific, previously vocalized reasons for not wanting to vote for said candidate.

You aren’t the problem if you don’t want to vote for Biden because of his unwavering support for genocide. Yes the alternative is worse, but election after election you can’t just keep handing centrists your vote who don’t give a shit about you or your policies (and actively shit on you while loudly posturing that they aren’t like you at all). At some point you have to make the threat of withholding your vote a real one, there are always consequences to that especially for this election but at the same time nothing is really going to change if we keep handing centrist corporate democrats the reigns to power because this time is an emergency too (just like last time).

I recommend voting for Biden for similar reasons you brought up, but I also don’t think there is any shame to deciding you can’t bring yourself to vote for such a trash candidate and want to choose this election so support a third party. Bad timing? Yeah, but it isn’t the voters fault for not wanting to vote for someone that doesn’t represent them?

How about they just highlight apps well reviewed by actual humans and fix their damn junk filled store?

A social network/online community can either be significantly profitable or healthy for its users. Pick one

• Train your dog with a wait command before going through doors, big dogs that try to barge their way past you out of excitement to get out the door are sort of cute but also incredibly annoying it can honestly hurt someone who is frail.

• If it is a young dog you trust and you are raising them, touch their paws lots. Pick their paws up and shake em like a hand, don’t be rough but just handle their paws so they become comfortable with humans handling them as dogs can be really nervous about this and it makes it extremely hard to inspect your dogs paws for a cut that is making them limp or something.

• similarly if you are raising a dog and it is too small to hurt you, when you feed your dog hang out next to their dish, put your face near theirs (ONLY with a dog you trust), give them pets, make your dog used to the fact that humans might come near their food but that humans won’t take away their food so they don’t need to be defensive.

• the more dog time you give your dog (where you do dog stuff with your dog) the more human time your dog will give you (where you both do human stuff and behave according to human norms). Going on walks, throwing the ball, rough housing, all of these things give your dog the mental stimulation they need to relax and behave

• a good dog park where your dog can socialize with lots of different dogs and learn their doggy language is not only a fantastic way to get your dog exercise it gives your dog the opportunity to practice interacting with other dogs.

• periodically (gently) surprise your dog by nabbing their tail and giving a tiny tug, or poking them a bit on their rump when they aren’t looking. BE GENTLE and always transition to pets and praise after the initial surprise moment for your dog. If you have a large dog and some kid gets loose and runs up behind it and yanks your dogs tail for no reason and entirely takes your dog off guard, your dog will be used to this kind of bullshit and simply be surprised it is a tiny human annoying them rather than a full grown one. This can be a really dangerous moment if you have a huge dog like a german shepherd, because even if the dog isn't normally aggressive towards kids, if the dog isn't already well used to its owner frequently low leveling annoying it with boops, it might react in fear and self defense. If you extract enjoyment out of mildly annoying your dog for the goofs sometimes, you know tease them in a loving way...., they just aren't going to react in fear and self defense when they are surprised by a human coming out of nowhere and abruptly surprising them.

• if you are raising a dog and you can figure out a way for your dog to meet cats, it can be helpful so that they don’t meet one in a situation you need them to behave and they go “WAIT WHAT IS THAT”. Same thing with human kids and babies.

• going away for the weekend and leaving your dog with a friend or someone else’s care is actually a really good thing for dogs that tend to get super attached to their owners (german shepherds are a classic example) as it stretches their mind a little bit encouraging them not to see their owners as the only thing in the universe, it gives them experience trying to relax without needing their One Human.

• get a collar that helps with walking better than a normal collar that just chokes out dogs when they pull, if you get the right collar/harness it will feel like you are walking an entirely different dog

• big dogs can absolutely learn how to “be mouthy” while also being incredibly gentle even though they have a mouth full of knives that can crunch through bone. Remember, dogs will carry puppies by their scruff. Dogs like humans have to learn the language of play, and they have to learn when they are being too rough with their mouth when they play with you. Many people train their big dogs to NEVER be mouthy which is understandable but if you know what you are doing your dog can absolutely learn how to play wrestle with you on the ground with their big scary mouth “chomping” (extremely gently) on your arm and both of you going at it having fun and being careful not to hurt each other. A dog can also be easily trained to get the signal for “ok playtime is over now, let’s wind down this energy” or “this is not the correct social situation to go nuts and want to play”. I tend to use the loose command "gentle" with my dogs, and I say it with a calming intonation. I have found practicing playing with a dog and then giving the command/signal that playtime is over is extremely effective over time at getting dogs to learn to become aware when they can be crazy tornadoes of chaos and when they need to chill the fuck out. If you do this right, your dog won't ever play too rough with anybody because they aren't going to be getting the right body language signals from those people that now is supposed to be playtime and they are invited to play,

• all dogs love it when you scratch just above their tail on their rump, it is like a cheat code for making a dog stop worrying about who you are as a stranger

• have friends over to normalize humans coming in your house, if you don’t your dog can easily fall into the habit of barking like a maniac every time friends come over and it can be scary and disorienting for guests

• the way you keep your dog from barking way too much (and jumping up on people) is literally just making the commitment to be more patient than your dog in making sure to always give feedback to your dog when they do those things (whatever your training style is).

• take your dog for dumb trips in the car to the store and back sometimes, definitely try to make it fun for them (and definitely don’t leave them in your car in the sun when it is hot for really any amount of time) but your dog will likely enjoy the stimulation of all the sights even if it is just a boring car trip and assuming you don’t have to go in wherever you are going for too long they will see it as a fun adventure. This helps train your dog to be chill about car rights and not loose their damn mind every time you are actually going on an adventure with them.

• if you have a big dog it is worth getting them used to being picked up in a bear hug occasionally as this can make dogs really nervous if they aren’t used to it and you don’t want to try to make them used to it in an emergency where they can’t walk or you need to lift them onto something. Make sure to support their rib cage (and back legs if possible) when you lift.

• Dogs are like people in that most of them want a job, they want something they can do for the pack that they are good at. Understand dog tricks from this perspective, you are giving your dog a job that they can do that gets them praise from you and other people and stimulates their brain.

It’s actually ridiculously simple to not break the law or get in an accident.

Driving a car is absurdly difficult, incredibly dangerous, takes only a second of distraction to kill yourself and others and in general is such a nightmare that it is contrary to what you say a miracle that people aren’t crashing into each other all the damn time.

Like, everybody I have gotten in a car with for the past 10 years invariably will get stressed out significantly by the unavoidable chaos of driving enough to visibly become emotional about it even during a short drive. Driving is miserable.

Just to add a tiny bit of clarification, I think what BLM did was change the subterranean psyche of America, you can’t measure it in policy or material changes because those were resisted absolutely by the ruling class, but they could not stop the change in perspective and thinking that occurred.

I have been thinking about getting some "Child Killer" stickers to start slapping on trucks that are particularly unsafe and huge. I don't get why in neighborhoods that in all kinds of other ways frowns upon putting kids at risk (no driving fast for example) dumbass men are allowed to own MASSIVE trucks that raise the risk of running a child over by a huge amount and no one shames them.

Time to start shaming these people more.

Also Gaza is NOT a war while Ukraine is, Gaza is a genocide.

In Ukraine organized military forces clash over territory with both sides fielding artillery, tanks, aircraft and other sophisticated military systems. Russia is seeking to control Ukraine and annex most of it, but it literally has to roll tanks all the way through contested territory to do this.

Israel already controls and surrounds all of Gaza, it controls all administrative and infrastructural aspects of Gaza so much so that Israel was able to build a wall straight through the heart of Gaza just to fuck with Palestinians. There is no ground war in Gaza with infantry divisions fighting over territory, there is just Israel repeatedly dropping an absolutely absurd amount of bombs (dropping in several weeks on the tiny footprint of Gaza what the bomb happy US only managed to drop in a year in the Iraq War) on a civilian population that has no means to leave even if they wanted to.

You don’t need to fight a war when you can just shut the water, lights and internet off to an entire city, you can shutter the hospitals with a lift of a finger. If there was a war, it was over long ago and what people call a “war” now is mere symbolic violent resistance meant to attract the attention of someone powerful enough to help (or stop). The thing that should make every one of us want to scream is the only problems the Israeli government sees with cut off water and let ‘em starve solution is that 1. it doesn’t kill Palestinians fast enough to sweep under the rug out of international scrutiny and 2. it doesn’t magically bulldoze the houses of the Palestinians killed and erased like a bomb does all in one go.

Hamas is not a terrorist organization because it chose to be one instead of a traditional army, it is a terrorist organization because a war with large armies is simply impossible for Hamas to even begin to fight against the combined military industrial complex of the U.S. and Israel. I say “begin” specifically because in order to fight a war with a military you have to first bring together all your soldiers and the minute Hamas did that Israel would carpet bomb the map square of that gathering place out of existence. War over before it even started.

I am not defending Hamas (I am so tired of saying this, of course they are awful) but simply pointing out Israel’s main justification for their genocide is that Hamas chooses to be a terrorist organization because they are evil and not because it is an organization of people who feel armed resistance is necessary (a sentiment Israeli’s should understand) and terrorism is literally the only armed resistance option on the table. It’s not like Hamas makes tunnels because they love digging and just don’t feel like fielding columns upon columns of 120mm main battle tanks they have in storage…

What is happening in Gaza is collective punishment for the actions of a few, it is genocide, it is horrific slaughter and land theft, it is a disgusting rightwing fantasy of violence but It is NOT a war that makes the IDF look way too honorable here. Gaza is what happens after a war ends and one side has complete power over the other. It is closer to soldiers raping and pillaging a civilian population en masse in the wake of an invasion than a war.

Billionaires have no legitimate right to exist.

Period.

It doesn’t matter if some of them “do nice things” maybe.

Billionaires should not exist.