Photuris

I remember when the internet was largely Usenet, IRC, interest-specific web-based discussion fora, and Blogs.

Life was much better back then. I really fucking hate it here in the future.

Lemmy / Fediverse is an ember of the old internet, glimmering in the dark. I hope it holds, and turns into a spark rather than snuffing out.

Same. 13 years, and I posted that Elon Musk is a criminal, and that we should be punching Nazis. Got banned for “inciting violence.”

That’s how I got banned.

After 13 years and a very high fake internet points score.

Also Elon Musk can eat shit.

Reddit is cooked. I wouldn’t waste your time with it anymore.

When Nazis game the system and try to dismantle the rule of law, the ethical thing to do is to start breaking the damned rules and fighting back.

Just ask O. John Rogge how it’s done.

I agree that it’s pathetic. I’ve never been a fan of virtue signaling.

In the other hand, “main” is easier to type than “master” (or “trunk,” for that matter). So I’ve made peace with it.

You scoff, but this is exactly the future CEOs and upper management absolutely want.

Why? Because labor is too expensive and “entitled” (wanting things like time off, health insurance, remote work, and so on).

They will do everything they can to squeeze labor and disempower the bargaining capability that knowledge workers have.

Why do you think Microsoft has been trying to screengrab everything that knowledge workers do? To train their models to do that work instead. Why did they just lay off thousands of workers and direct something like $80 billion towards AI investments?

You know why.

Quality doesn’t matter. Income minus expenses matter. You are an expense. They will do everything they can to replace you as soon as they catch even a whiff of economic viability (or even before), because even if it’s more costly right now, it can drive down labor costs by putting the squeeze on employees.

And that is the point.

Point 3. is what I’m getting at. They desperately want to unload expensive developers, so bad. They’ll try it, and keep trying it, even as products suffer, in the hopes of driving down labor costs.

That’s a fool’s errand

Of course it is.

They’re still gonna do it.

For now.

But when a mid-tier or entry level dev can do 60% of what a senior can do, it’ll be a great way to cut costs.

I don’t think we’re there now. It’s just that that’s the ultimate goal - employ fewer people, and pay the remaining people you do employ less.

The point isn’t to increase employee productivity (or employee happiness, obviously).

The point is to replace most employees.

In order for that to happen, LLM-assisted entry-level developers merely need to be half as good as expert human unassisted developers, at scale, at a lower aggregate cost.

The solution to guns is to ensure that only the state can ever have guns.

Why? Because the state will never be taken over by bad actors who seek to destroy democracy and institute autocracy.

The well-meaning liberal-minded and just people in power today will be in power tomorrow and forever, so we can always trust them to have all guns, hold the cryptography backdoors for all consumer electronics, hold the reins on banking, have sophisticated mass surveillance capabilities, curtail free speech and open protest, and so on. Because they’ll never use their power to intimidate rumblings of labor unionization, clamp down on people advocating for Palestinian people, disproportionately imprison brown people and immigrants for infractions that white people walk away from consequence-free, and so on.

And they’ll certainly never use their far-reaching powers to dismantle democracy and implement fascism. That’ll never happen, because it can’t happen in the West anymore - so don’t even worry about it.

Why must we trust the state so much? Because terrorism must not win, and we’ll never ever change what the poorly-defined word “terrorism” means on a whim based on current perceived political enemies or anything.

It’s good to practice, because one day you may need to shoot fascists.

I cancelled my Audible subscription and stopped using Amazon entirely.

Eat shit Bezos.

Rednote 小红书 is much better than TikTok anyway, obvious propaganda and all.

Productivity will go up, wages will remain the same, and no additional time off will be given to employees. They’ll merely be required to produce 4x as much and compensation will not increase to match.

It seems the point of all these machines and automation isn’t to make our individual lives easier and more prosperous, but instead to increase and maximize shareholder value.

I miss Usenet.

BTW, does anyone remember Google Wave? That was actually a pretty neat idea, so of course they killed it.

“Yeah, dude, I wasn’t asking ChatGPT, I was asking you!!”

That guy is weird af.

You think they guy who writes code to make Xbox games work, or the woman who does data analytics in R and Excel to optimize cloud hosting traffic shaping rules (or whatever), is the same as ICE and the SS?!

Jesus Christ. Climb out from under your rock and go meet some real people doing real things, and do some real things of value yourself. Maybe learn how to make something with tech. Maybe learn a little bit of code, I don’t know.

I work in tech. I am not rounding up my Hispanic neighbors for ICE, nor am I building spyware infrastructure for Palantir. I write code to help doctors and nurses do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. But fuck me I guess for trying to earn a living by providing some value. And fuck Microsoft employees for writing code to allow people to play video games or whatever.

Oh, fuck you.

People need an income, and they work hard to provide for their families.

Tech employees are people, too. And many of them spent years perfecting a very difficult set of skills that the market is quickly deciding isn’t as valuable as it once was, because their corporate employers regard them merely as resources to be exploited and then discarded at the first opportunity. That sucks.

It sucks whomever it happens to, be it warehouse workers, truck drivers, call center employees, retail and customer service employees, or office knowledge workers. Just because a person had made a pretty good salary doesn’t mean they haven’t still be exchanging their precious time for dollars like the rest of us, grinding away their life at a job rather than spending quality time with their loved ones and persuing their own hobbies and interests.

Seriously, fuck you dude.