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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2024

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  • Forgot to say: yes AI generated slop is one key example, but often I’m also thinking of other tasks that are often presumed to be basic because humans can be trained to perform them with barely any conscious effort. Things like self-driving vehicles, production line work, call center work etc. Like the fact that full self drive requires supervision, often what happens with tech automation is that they create things that de-skill the role or perhaps speed it up, but still require humans in the middle to do things that are simple for us, but difficult to replicate computationally. Humans become the glue, slotted into all the points of friction and technical inadequacy, to keep the whole process running smoothly.

    Unfortunately this usually leads to downward pressure on the wages of the humans and the expectation that they match the theoretical speed of the automation rather than recognise that the human is the the actual pace setter because without them the pace would be 0.






  • There’s definitely something to this narrowing of opportunities idea. To frame it in a real bare bones way, it’s people that frame the world in simplistic terms and then assume that their framing is the complete picture (because they’re super clever of course). Then if they try to address the problem with a “solution”, they simply address their abstraction of it and if successful in the market, actually make the abstraction the dominant form of it. However all the things they disregarded are either lost, or still there and undermining their solution.

    It’s like taking a 3D problem, only seeing in 2D, implementing a 2D solution and then being surprised that it doesn’t seem to do what it should, or being confused by all these unexpected effects that are coming from the 3rd dimension.

    Your comment about giving more grace also reminds me of work out there from legal scholars who argued that algorithmically implemented law doesn’t work because the law itself is designed to have a degree of interpretation and slack to it that rarely translates well to an “if x then y” model.




  • I feel like generative AI is an indicator of a broader pattern of innovation in stagnation (shower thoughts here, I’m not bringing sources to this game).

    I was just a little while ago wondering if there is an argument to be made that the innovations of the post-war period were far more radically and beneficially transformative to most people. Stuff like accessible dishwashers, home tools, better home refrigeration etc. I feel like now tech is just here to make things worse. I can’t think of any upcoming or recent home tech product that I’m remotely excited about.





  • I don’t really understand how it’s possible to both not store data in plaintext, but also be able to siphon off some of it in plaintext. Like is this technically possible in the way they suggest it? We shoot off the plaintext before it gets to our storage servers?

    Like at some point that means the communication is not encrypted right? But if you’re using https and all good normal security standards that should never be the case from the moment it departs your terminal?

    I have a small amount of knowledge about this but it’s the dangerously small type so any illumination would be appreciated.





  • I think it’s definitely worth distinguishing between different classes of workers in Silicon Valley. It’s hard to talk about tech ideology in a fully encompassing way because there are for sure dissenting voices. I think to some degree you can say it is the intersection of tech and wealth ideologies but there’s definitely people that aren’t wealthy that also espouse similar thinking so… tricky!

    I adopt the handy framing of Silicon valley as a mindset rather than a place to help with this. There’s a great photography book called Seeing Silicon Valley by Mary Beth Meehan that is all photos and stories of the precarious workers that don’t necessarily work in tech. I keep it out in my office to remind me that silicon Valley is not just the rich assholes.