And it’s what’s happening here too. AI is just corporate control and monopolisation with new tricks.

It’s an old conversation and it’s not you.

I don’t have links to anything on hand, but you’re not the first and won’t be the last to wonder about this and (maybe) start criticising it.

I also can’t give you the technical details (I’ve even forgotten a lot since I last cared about this), but basically, IIRC, it’s as you intuit … The platforms can be in the fediverse and still do kinda their own thing such that platform interop is not well guaranteed, arguably at all.

In the end, I convinced my self it’s a core problem of federated social media and failing at it was a huge missed opportunity to have an awesome feature that the commercial platforms lacked. “Federation happened in the client” was my way of trying to capture this perspective.

BlueSky probably doesn’t do any better but they architecture and protocol might point in the right direction.

This is written by the president of Mozilla, which important context I think.

Honestly, to me, it’s a worthy talking point in general, though it reads to me like a fantasy.

Which isn’t to mention that the issues they cite with AI may be intrinsic to the technology itself (and you can’t just sculpt historical metaphors however you like), and that what utility some have found with it may also have intrinsic issues or be, in part at least, attempts to patch over the ways in which technology/world has gotten shit (which is maybe the problem that should be solved).

And best of all, none of the fears associated with wide spread solar have materialized into real world problems.

What were/are these fears?

aah … gotchya!

Cheers and thanks for the chat!

It’s shit like this that makes me glad to be completely outside of the AI hype circus. It sounds toxically unhinged. In the sense that being into this sort of dynamic and vibe, I suspect, at some point, involves some unhealthy attitudes, desires, sentiments and directions.

Like, I suspect some anti-AI sentiments come from just finding it creepy to be into having a digital slave … and, conversely, being pro-AI must involve being into that kind of energy and dynamic to some extent, all irrespective of the productive aspect.

Any gains to claw back more profits will necessarily be adversarial and technically anti-capitalist.

Hmmm, not sure what you mean by the anti capitalist part here

Otherwise, I think I’m still stuck on how we’re dwelling on profit maximisation as the crux of capitalism. It may be the incentivising factor for the agents operating in the system … but is it the justification for committing to the system?

Where, as far as my ignorant mind goes, maximising the efficiency of the whole economy and/or its total productivity from the assets available … are the obvious justifications.

In which case, embracing a profit maximising ethos is a means to an end. And disrupting a particular profit process for the sake of the economy’s productivity perfectly justifiable as good capitalism.

There’s only one goal, profit / capital maximization.

Capital maximisation for a small set of individuals (the wealthy) or the economy in total? Where the latter can also achieve the former to some extent.

In the end I think capitalism can be more than one thing, which is something the strident anti socialism reflex of the US has stagnated.

And it’s easy to confuse ends with means and the status quo with its justifications.

Interesting.

I’m not sure we disagree much, especially if a flexible schedule is common sense.

In a way my main point was that however much we think it common sense, I suspect for a lot of work culture it crosses a line that maybe isn’t made explicit that much. Which, I think, is that your job is to be there and follow orders as much or more than it is to deliver well defined outcomes.

And so my point was that if we want flexible scheduling and believe it can be as productive (or more) … then I suspect we’ve gotta address this “line” … and I’m not sure what can replace it other than some established concept of “owning” your job more. Which I’m not sure has to be working for outcomes, as you say.

Well, coming from the perspective or justification of trying to maximise efficiency through a market of incentivised actors, is mass multi-level-hierarchy wage labour “optimum/peak capitalism”?

That’s what I was aiming for in saying “anti-capitalist” … in that the opportunity to incentivise was being missed so that an existing power structure could persist.

And, I don’t know, my experience tells me lots of places struggle with the quality of their managerial leadership, some times a lot, while people on the ground keep the place together and have plenty of insight on how to do things better.

“I earn a living based on outcomes,” he says. “Nobody sends me a check for how many hours I work in a week.”

This is the key, whatever label or trend you want call it.

The bottom line is that employment is kinda anti-capitalist. The employee doesn’t own anything real and so isn’t incentivised by real rewards to deliver real outcomes.

Instead, showing up, making appearances and convincing their colleagues/managers that they’re valuable, however virtual, is the natural response to virtual incentives.

What if we owned an outcomes based contract instead? Of maybe even the company itself in someway (with meaningful decision making power and stakes). Otherwise, we’re mostly paid to sit in the chair at the office and do what we’re told … frankly not a great look at such a scale as we do it.

The mega employment market strikes me as obviously fraught for both sides of politics.

Generally, IMO, everything wrong with AI has been all the stuff other than the AI itself.

The Capitalist urge to eat and digest the world, as well as its herd-hype mentality.

But also the strong willingness many have had to just accept an information overlord as though it’s a religious oracle or something. All without any critical consideration of what’s happening. I blame our education systems for stagnating at some point in the past few decades — which, along with an unmitigated embrace of big corp capitalism, left us wholly unprepared for big tech’s consumption of society.

There’s also what I’d call “the slavery urge” at play I think. At some point, an AGI will probably be conscious. But everyone is clearly so ready to turn it into our work slaves. All while pretending its output belongs to them because they “prompted it”.

Then there’s the whole attention span being eaten thing, and quick always being ordered over good amongst an ever growing pile of increasingly shitty things.

~They’re trying to build a prison~

Fucking slaps every time!

The 5 year mark of the pandemic is just around the corner now. And it’s interesting to reflect on how well things are going compared to early forecasts.

My memory is that 3-5 years was put out there as the likely longest horizon for the pandemic. Objectively, it’s seems pretty clear that it has not gone away at all and that any progress on actually reducing its prevalence is either speculative (eg new nasal vaccines) or ”unacceptable” civil or infrastructural measures (masks, remote work, air filters etc).

All of which is basically a failure.

Another way of cutting it though might be to view the Omicron variant as a second pandemic that is proving generally worse than the first in part because it’s catching us at our most indifferent.

I feel like there was a point there where a good vaccine roll out could have contained the delta or preceding variants. Which to me only highlights how all of the civil measures we were taking and could have taken were not just about maximising health at that time but also about preventing us from going down a darker path of no return which seems to be where we are now. If global measures were taken to limit the spread of the virus and so prevent its evolution, I’d wonder how good of a chance there’d be that a vaccine could then have quashed the virus.

I hear you and essentially don’t disagree. But I feel like this might lean a tad toward gaslighting.

• Plenty of people are fine communicators when it comes to genuine collaborative work but still find the “game” of job applications very difficult or impossible.
• Being left alone with a customer is not a thing at all for many roles.
• Embracing diversity in abilities and doing so transparently is a thing that can be valuable for both companies and humanity. Presuming everyone can do all the things is, IMO/IME, damaging. It leads to cutting out people who have something valuable to offer. But also leads to not recognising when people are properly bad at something despite the fact that they really shouldn’t be given their seniority and role.

In the end, a job application/interview is not like the job at all (whether necessarily or not). That there are people in the world who would be disproportionately good at the job but bad the application seems to me an empirical fact given the diversity of humanity. And recognising this seems important and valuable in general but especially for those trying to understand their relationship to the system.

Jerry … admin of many instances!

the development of it seems to be headed in a direction I like better than that of lemmy

Just curious what sorts of things you have in mind here … it’s been a while since I used a k/mbin platform? (I was on kbin.social, RIP, hopefully it returns).

Agreeing with you here, I’m wondering if this can spawn a broader project to try to alter the relationship between the admins, mods and users.

More and better feedback loops and grassroots organisation and less “admins and mods own this, take it or leave it” culture.

In the end, I think this comes down to poor admin/mod practice and poor community leadership where many of the users here would just like to make sure things are better.

I don’t think we’re that far off from each other.

In saying “always a dodgy thing” I meant something closer to “always potentially” where obviously it depends with transphobic messages being a relevant example.

That being said, I think this is a scenario where people will naturally differ in their expectations. “Obligation” as you put it is a very strong word and nothing like what I was alluding to. But I think many would subscribe to the idea that direct messages are a relatively protected space. Some less so. All with exceptions and “lines” that probably differ too. I briefly asked someone I consider more ethical than me, and they were probably more inclined to think of DMs as protected than me. Obviously no excuse for abuse, but presumed private.

I also suspect that there are generational differences here too. Older people whose Internet lives precede facebook’s push toward merging real and online life might have a greater inclination toward expecting privacy online.

In this particular case, it was clearly devs/mods talking shop, so clearly less of a public discussion. But you never know. Maybe nutomic felt like they could share their more speculative “theories”without worrying about coming off as crazy. Dunno.

Personally, I’d like a culture where DMs are presumed protected and private. But maybe that’s just me.

Oh god … this happened?!

Oooof … came to post this (having just seen it now independently)

Hadn’t listened to Jinjer in a while and forgotten how good they are and how much I like Tatyana’s voice! Great track!