https://puginarug.com/

https://zombo.com/

https://www.yyyyyyy.info/

I like single purpose concept websites that don't do anything. They're the opposite of the modern internet that values engagement above all. They communicate exactly one thing once and though you never have to go back, you're always glad that they're there.

Your comment perfectly encapsulates one of the central contradictions in modern journalism. You explain the style guide, and the need to communicate information in a consistent way, but then explain that the style guide is itself guided by business interests, not by some search for truth, clarity, or meaning.

I've been a long time reader of FAIR.org and i highly recommend them to anyone in this thread who can tell that something is up with journalism but has never done a dive into what exactly it is. Modern journalism has a very clear ideology (in the sorta zizek sense, not claiming that the journalists do it nefariously). Once you learn to see it, it's everywhere

"One thing that I immediately realized about the team is how passionate they are."

🙄

This is an ad for a for-profit, publicly traded company that claims to have the solution for plastic waste, but also holds patents for said solution. Either they've found the solution, in which case, they should open source that shit because we're in a global ecological crisis, or they're exaggerating their claims and this absolute handjob of a video is uncritically repeating every single thing that the company's PR is feeding them, without consulting a single other person.

Plastic waste already has a solution, and it's a political solution. We could start by nationalizing all oil companies and banning single use plastics. Instead, we invest in a "solution" that, if it works as advertised, actually entrenches a perverse incentive for more plastic waste. Were this company to become hugely successful, they would lobby heavily against any bans of single use plastics, since it would ruin them.

This is what I call a technological antisolution:

We are asked to marvel at the shiny innovations brought to us by our technological superiors, and while we wait for them to solve climate change for us [or, in this case, plastic waste], we are given strategies to cope with the stress. Climate Change is thus transformed – or perhaps reduced – from a political problem to a technological one. I propose we name these kinds of technologies Technological Antisolutions.

A Technological Antisolution is a product that attempts to replace a boring but solvable political or social problem with a much sexier technological one that won’t work. This does not mean that we should stop doing R&D. A technology that is worth pursuing can become a technological antisolution depending on its social and political context. [...] Technological Antisolutions are everywhere because they allow us to continue living an untenable status quo. Their true product is not the technology itself, but the outsourcing of our social problems. They alleviate our anxiety and guilt about not being active participants in political change, and for their trouble, founders and investors are richly rewarded.

Yeah, it's grotesque. Doubly so when you consider that it's often public money that funds the research that they get to paywall. I've been really ragging on them lately for their role in the AI hype, too, which you can read about here and here if that sort of thing interests you.

If those same miles had been driven by typical human drivers in the same cities, we would have expected around 13 injury crashes.

I'm going to set aside my distrust at self reported safety statistics from tech companies for a sec to say two things:

First, I don't think that's the right comparison. You need to compare them to taxis.

Second, we need to know how often waymos employees intervene. From the NYT, cruise employed 1.5 staff-members per car, intervening to assist these not-so-self driving vehicles every 2.5 to 5 miles, making them actually less autonomous than regular cars.

Source : https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7kw.o5Fq.5WLwCg2_ONB9&smid=url-share

If you take it as a given that we should have giant warehouses full of computers using tons of energy while doing mostly pointless tasks during a climate emergency, then yes, it's a great idea.

The article only slightly touched on this, but the incoming LLM customer service chatbots are going to absolutely fucking suck, just like outsourcing all the call centers made customer service actually a lot worse, not because people farther away are worse at customer service or anything, but because companies created rigid systems and scripts to remove any agency from its agents. It's now common for these outsourced call centers to have an initial layer of absolutely useless positions who are only allowed to do a few things, and then they have to escalate to a "supervisor," who is clearly just an agent with slightly more privileges, and this continues recursively forever. All this does is make the call last forever, but hey, they save some money, and customers like you and me are forced to spend an hour plus on the phone any time we have a problem with any large company.

Capitalist job replacement isn't a one-for-one. So long as it makes more profits to do it, they will, even if it makes the service suck. When I have a problem, I need a person with some understanding and agency to resolve it on the other end. LLMs don't know anything. Even a semi-fluent person with no admin privileges is so much more useful than an LLM. These companies are going to fire all these workers and make customer service an absolute fucking nightmare.

tl;dr capitalism uses computers backwards

Upvoting for good faith engagement, even if a little frustrated. I encourage other leftists here to do the same.

The situation you describe is capitalism working smoothly. Marx himself spoke highly of aspects of capitalism many times. The problem comes when your company's owner, who has the power to abuse that ownership, does.

By analogy, monarchies are bad, even if your king is good. You can have a fair, just, wise philosopher king. It sounds like you're lucky in having a good job with a reasonable owner, but your owner could sell to a private equity company tomorrow, who will lay you off, outsource your job to lower costs, bill out the same rate even when lowering the quality, and pocket the difference. They'll do this for a few years until the brand's value has been mined, then they'll scrap your company and sell it for parts.

Socialists like myself argue that because the system can be abused, it inevitably wil be abused. It's a structural argument, not an argument about each specific case. We argue that democratic control of our jobs is a good thing, in the same way that we got rid of kings to replace them with democratic control is a good thing, because we think that system is more just and fair.

This is all wildly simplified, but here's my attempt to explain the simplest version of the core behavior. In general, people who own companies don't make a salary; they make a profit. Once all expenses are paid, the leftover revenue is called profit, and goes to owner.

This ownership can be sold in whole or in part to other people with money, in order to raise more money, which can be used to invest in equipment and such. Many ventures have significant startup costs, which means they require money before they can start making money, so they seek investment.

The people who invest in ventures do so in exchange for ownership of that venture, in the form of stock. This is why we call it "capitalism." The people with the money are in charge. Side note, but the term "capitalism" was coined as part of leftist crtitique of laissez-faire economics. It was meant disparagingly, to point out that this system actually just meant people with money are in charge, but I digress.

These owners can make some money owning the company, but no one would do this if they were stuck with that stock forever, because then they would be illiquid, i.e. they would never be able to access that money again. People want to be able to sell their stock for more than they bought it, which means the stock's value must grow or the company's owners will be angry and fire its CEO.

This core behavior happens at many scales. Your local property owners wants to know they can sell their property for more than they paid for it. People who invest in index funds (diversified portfolio of many stocks) don't just want to be stuck in that index fund forever, even if they are earning dividends (i.e. profit); they want to be able to sell their index funds for more than they paid at some later time. And so on.

Were it to stop growing, no one would be able to invest in new assets without taking large losses, which would mean fewer investments, which would make it impossible to finance things. No new houses, or new factories, or new stores, etc. The whole system comes to a crashing halt.

edits: fixing and adding things

edit2: Restructure a bit. One sentence was in the wrong place.

The point of the post is to talk about it because I care about the internet and don't want it to be filled with generated trash.

Unions are never the solution in and of themselves. They give workers the power to do something about problems together, no more no less. The alternative is to not have any power and maybe ask politely.

Extremely based.

Waymo was less enthusiastic about the practice. A spokesperson said that the cone protest reflects a lack of understanding of how autonomous vehicles work and is "vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways." Waymo says it will call the police on anyone caught interfering with its fleet of robotaxis.

You can tell the cops work for capital because Uber has made a fortune operating illegal taxis throughout the entire country and cops have never done a goddamn thing about it, but put one fucking cone on a car and Waymo feels confident the cops would use violence to stop it from happening again.

If Waymo gets its way, the roads are just going to be fully of buggy, barely-functioning autonomous cars, and every time they hit a pedestrian, the cops will arrest the pedestrian for being "disrespectful."

edit: the more I think about it, the funnier it is. Waymo is supposedly "testing" their technology. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how testing works. If your car can't handle real-world conditions, you don't get to call the cops on the real-world conditions. Putting a cone on the hood of the car is actually a great example of the kinds of weird, one-off things that happen to drivers all the time, often called the "pogo stick" problem. A serious engineering organization would realize that, realize how good humans would be at responding to this anomalous situation, and take it for the humbling experience it should be.