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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • People who think you need to have optimist outlook of the future to be able to somehow manifest that into being are fucking idiots. I can enjoy my life, while being pretty hopeless about the future for human race, while still trying to do whatever I can to try to make things better.

    If you can’t do whatever you believe is right, because you are “pessimistic” about it working the way you want, then in my opinion you have fundamentally flawed view of the life as a whole, and probably don’t know how to deal with negative emotions in a healthy way.

    “We act because we have values, not because we know that our actions will definitely succeed”

    -Jem Bendell.

    And on topic of resiting tech, I work in IT and have more versatile tech skills than most people I know. Show me something that works and is useful, and I won’t resist it just because it is new. But if you keep trying to sell me bullshit disguised as progress, than I will always tell you to fuck off.

    If your AI product doesn’t get mass adoption because of my negativity, then it is a shit product.

    Comparisons in the article are also stupid. Sure I don’t like coal used over nuclear, but nuclear is also kinda overhyped tech, that has been given so much benefit of doubt, but failed to deliver. Sure there has been some people who are irrationally afraid of it.

    “Countries such as India, Brazil, Mexico and Thailand have run from vapes – outlawing them, while permitting traditional tobacco cigarettes for 1.8 billion of their citizens. Better unsafe than sorry.”

    Not a cigarette fan, but harder to ban those at this point, but with vapes it is still doable, and if not to protect peoples health, then maybe to avoid e-waste from disposable vapes.

    “In the US, Robert F Kennedy Jr runs from vaccines towards natural herd immunity – although he might be having second thoughts now that the risks have become less abstract.” Sure use antivaxxer idiot as an example of a tech critic, instead of anyone credible.

    Same with 5G, sure there are conspiracy theories about it, but how about just asking wtf we need that fast internet for everywhere? For my phone use past 50 megabytes it doens’t really make any difference if it gets faster.

    “Stories that don’t make us forget that brain chips can liberate paraplegics, robot dogs can protect us from landmines, AI can prevent super bugs and VR can connect us rather than cut us off from reality – even if their vibes are “a bit Black Mirror”.”

    This last sentence really revealed the author as a tech bro. -Superbug thing is overhyped, they had used same AI for previous similar study, giving AI extra context that made it easier to solve that. Still impressive, but not representative of AI as a whole.

    -VR is the rich kid of tech, always given money and second chance and always fails to deliver anything useful.

    -Robot dogs and landmines, really? How about police using robot dogs to target protestors? Much more likely scenario for most people, and we already have used robots to defuse bombs for a long while now.

    -Brain chips might liberate paraplegics and then company goes bust or stops supporting the product, re disabling that person. Has already happened with other tech meant to help disabled people. If I had to choose between neuralink (or anything from Musk) and being wheelchair bound for rest of my life, I would still take the latter.

    I always consider both good and bad sides of tech, but most of the tech we are hyping now seems to come more down than upsides tbh.

    /rant but this article really annoyed me.





  • Lol everyone probably fantasizes about such thing sometimes, but even if you weren’t caught, it’s not worth it to personally be bitter like that.

    Just got laid off and could had done the same. Except I don’t have to. Internal systems are so bad and undocumented and I was like only IT specialist there who could use linux, and so many things related to core businesses were just basically behind me.

    The kill switch has made it self. Funny how I would have written more documentation if I ever was given the time.


  • Well maybe, micro work is really dehumanizing and cognitively rough. I hear some US inmates do work at McDonalds and if I had to choose between that and microwork, and if time I spent working was the same with both options, I would take the fastfood job any day. At least have done that before irl so I know what to expect.

    I’m ADHD in IT job, and my mind would explode if work I did with computer was just unskilled datasorting job.

    But I do know US inmates have basically slave conditions. But I read a book about microwork and it sounds like psychological torture to me. Like what they do in Severance.

    (Work without worker is the book)




  • TBH I felt this was bit superficial. No concrete examples, I don’t really think adoption curve outside tech people will be that fast to agents, doesn’t really go into how using agents to manipulate people would significantly differ from using non agent chatbot for same end.

    I’m still worried how AI agents could be used to do evil, just that I don’t feel any better informed after reading this.

    Curious to hear any thoughts on this.