there’s an argument that this is just the targeted ads bubble that keeps inflating using different technologies. That’s where the money is coming from. It’s a game of smoke and mirrors, but this time it seems like they are betting big on a single technology for a longer time, which is different from what we have seen in the past 10 years.

I understood your message very clearly. It’s sad to work for most companies. It’s the default and it’s completely preposterous to suggest they want to work for TikTok specifically. It’s what was available to them. Pitying striking workers makes no sense. There’s nothing to look deeper into.

they want severance pay. Don’t shame workers for trying to make a living, you scab

It’s Germany, they have labor rights that they want to uphold. This is a so-called “warning strike”, to signal that there will be collective legal action if they get fired without abundant severance pay.

Basically TikTok doesn’t want to negotiate with the union and the union is showing that there’s support for collective legal action instead of a 1-on-1 dismissals that would cost the company way less. The company has an interest in negotiating because it’s quite sure to lose the legal battle.

Here “replace” doesn’t mean “being able to do the same job”. It means you get fired. Automation in most fields never even tried to get close to a level of quality comparable to what a human can do, but it was enough to displace a majority of workers.

The author is a machine learning engineer, so he’s perfectly aware of the limits of whatever is called AI. The point is to make those limits irrelevant by lowering the expected level of quality, as it happened with textile, food, and so on.

Most people don’t know they are allowed to dream, let alone in which direction. While this might not connect with you, there are millions of tech workers who have zero perspective on what’s out there.

There’s plenty of neo-nazis in the Free Software movement. It’s “Free Software”, not “Free People”

it’s source available, and most of the code is public, but you cannot contribute or fork

it’s not open source

The market doesn’t reward quality.

The vast majority of people I know has no cooking skills, no time to cook or no energy after work. Pretty much all the middle-class and lower-middle-class people in this group order delivery for most of their evening meals. The people who 10 years ago were eating microwaved food, now order out: it costs a bit more, but it’s definitely tastier.

that’s not how information and journalism works, but ok bro, keep believing in “objectivity” lol

Your opinions are all influenced by the outside. The distinction is just between influences you ignore/accept and influences you reject. We are not born with opinions.

The outcome is responsibility of the whole environment. This project didn’t come out of nowhere.

It’s not just who’s doing but who allowed it. If somebody murdered children in my hometown I would hold social services and mental health services responsible for that.

I live in Germany and I’m not from the USA. It has nothing to do with the USA. Many Germans do want this genocide to happen and they still defend it. It’s a daily lived experience, it has nothing to do with online discussions, let alone with Americans. Germany doesn’t have the same concept of military-industrial complex like the USA (even though they might have started rebuilding it recently), but universities do research to enable genocide, like many universities around the world.

I’m Italian, and Leonardo does the same with universities in Italy, using young naive researchers to build weapons used in Palestine or by other undemocratic governments throughout the world.

I don’t get what’s so weird to you: universities have alwasy been complicit of horrible stuff.

The word “state” doesn’t appear a single time in reference to Germany in the whole article. Germany, despite their pervasive state-oriented mentality, is not just its state. It’s the society, the people and other institutions.

Also TU is a public university, so it’s still an emanation of the state, state-funded and state-controlled.

Many of my direct friends lost their job for doing it. Look up “exposing Zalando”.

Here in Berlin it’s a regular occurrence that any exhibition, cultural or political event criticizing Israel receives at the very list a threatening call and a visit from the police. Sometimes it escalates into vandalism or violence, sometimes with getting raided by the police, sometimes with defunding if it’s a public thing.

If they silenced Albanese and banned Varoufakis, they can silence anybody.

You might have missed a lot of news about Germany. They passed a new law that suspends freedom of speech when it’s against Israel. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-passes-controversial-antisemitism-resolution/a-70715643

There has been plenty of extra-judicial retaliation, i.e. against Francesca Albanese or Oyoun, and we got close to having 4 cases of extra-judicial extradictions without an accusation against pro-Palestine protesters, which a judge eventually blocked.

fuck underpaid workers trying to unionize? Ok, scab.

the logic that sending messages alters political reality is part of the overall problem. Politics is a conflict of forces, not a conflict of ideas or opinions. A license is as powerful as the will of the state power behind it to enforce it. Otherwise, it is powerless.

If you want to make sense of the political world, I invite to move beyond the idea of “taking stances” or expressing positions as a political act, and reason instead of what incentives and powers you’re altering with your political actions.

What you describe just does not play out in real life: neither on a micro scale nor on a macro scale.