Yes! This nuance captures more of today's reality -- esp. the "tainting", which others have also noted (e.g. Emily Bender's "Information Oil Spill")
2,374 karma · joined January 27, 2018
I recommend you look up Eric Sadin's "The Injuctive Turn of Technology".
It provides a succinct (and disconcertingly accurate) framework for looking at the trajectory of technology vis-a-vis ordinary people / end-users.
FWIW, academia has off-the-charts levels of "wtf" that newcomers will point out, though it's even more ossified than corporate culture, and they don't hire consultants to come in and fix things :)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
Wanting to maximize profits by squeezing work out of less-fortunate people, efficiently, and at scale.
IMO, this is more likely.
Speculation on my part, but this evinces the kind of tech-focused education that I personally know to be pervasive in India. The curriculum omits any "history of technology" or "ethics in innovation", so at best, these founders are missing a core part of "humanistic" learning.
At worst... well, why go there? They're from privileged backgrounds, and mere ignorance is enough to explain this kind of short-sighted "innovation", without adding malice into the mix.
You could own an NFT of the yarn instead! Oh wait, that's no longer in vogue? I'll show myself out now.
I do like your idea though -- it reminds me of William Shatner donning boxing gloves and "fighting" to get you the best deal on priceline.com (gosh, I just checked and that's from 2016!!)
It makes not an iota of difference whether somebody "was chosen by the people" (the Felon), or not (the Husk).
We can all plainly see what's going on, and there isn't any need to steelman it, or contort ourselves to deduce what pretzel logic might cause Felon/Husk to choose these particular actions.
However, I'm old enough to recall when America was convinced by Rumsfeld et. al. to send US soldiers in harms way -- over 4000 of them died in Iraq -- for some obscenely lucrative oil contracts.
That qualifies as "die en masse", and it was over some really flimsy pretext, which was later proved to be completely false.
Kinda-sorta like how car factories were repurposed to produce military aircraft during World War II.
I think it'll be ironic if things come to that -- NVidia unable to get fresh silicon, and scads of them sitting around, powering LLMs... we could see amazing shenanigans where certain folks cut deals (cough graft cough) to get to keep most of their gpus, while others get liquidated, and implode.
I keep everything in a single folder, as plaintext Markdown files.
Even if my own software breaks someday, I can always ingest these into a flavor-of-the-month indexer (though I think sqlite + fts plugin goes a long way) and carry on.
Some (not all) of my personal systems are unforgiving in this regard.
Thank you for pointing out this "Best Practice" explicitly!
> It hijacks their moral framework, because they have invested a lifetime in believing certain tropes and terms and what (I as an atheist) would call sappy horseshit, which nonetheless imbues meaning into all aspects of their daily life. They don't suspect that the attack on their dignity will come disguised as an appeal to their faith.
Being human: allowing ourselves to be vulnerable.
Also being human: the wolves among us will find such humans and prey upon them.
We really are animals, after all.
What you wrote sounds a bit "out there", but, like Margaret Atwood's work, it's actually not too far away.
> Who is vulnerable? Who is immune?
I'm reminded of Hiro Protagonist (living in a storage unit), or Ready Player One protagonist (living in some impoverished mobile home stack) -- these are the "vulnerable".
As for "immune", it's the people who "control the supply":
https://www.cnet.com/culture/all-the-ways-people-freaked-out...
P.S. Like all real-world examples, we have an exception -- Felon Husk, who gets high on his own supply, making him simultaneously victim and perpetrator.
FWIW, I've gone down the rabbit hole of flat-earthers to try and understand what the appeal is (spoiler: it's often some variant of "if the Earth were a ball hurtling through space, that would be too terrifying")... maybe I should just stay away from this one :D
That's the second time I've read this phrase on HN this week (earlier, it was in reference to the ad-supported Internet).
The race-to-the-bottom of zeroing out people's empathy to grab fractions of a penny (at scale) also reminds me of the Malthusian trap (aka "rats on the island") in slatestarcodex's "Meditations on Moloch". Whatever little nooks exist where some micro-pennies can still be found, will be farmed (at scale).
Peace to you as well, and to your family!
We all need to "poop" at the societal level
That is one of the more "zen" things I've read recently. Thank you!!
Their greed is being leveraged to have them dismantle their own nation -- no need for military action.
What happens afterward might surprise these rich plutocrats, but I personally won't be surprised by it.
It might rarely be admitted openly, but it sometimes is alluded to... e.g. Eric Schmidt's Stanford talk where he said:
"I want to say that if your product becomes popular, you can hire a bunch of lawyers to sort everything out. If no one uses your product, don’t worry -- no one will care that you stole someone else’s content."
I was like GP, and worked on fulfilling side-projects for years (after family goes to bed).
Like you, I'm beginning to see that it isn't working well any more. Though I've built some very useful things for myself, being productive in this all-but-invisible manner still leaves much to be desired.
There are definitely people that thrive in such environments (like Chris).
FWIW, it's an office workplace, not MMA, so one shouldn't need to be a "finely-tuned fighting machine" to do the job.
Perhaps one can extrapolate that the author is hinting at another dark truth -- the higher up you go in the hierarchy, the more MMA-like this will be. Therefore CEOs are, by definition, distilled psychopaths (like the Felon and the Husk in the White House right now).