Crawl is one of my favorite rogue likes!

One of my friends who is in no way a coder knows the vim navigation from crawl now

A world there python ran in the browser instead of javacript would probably be a whole lot better.

I love this idea. Do you mind if I promote it with some queer folks I know?

Myself I’m pretty straight and don’t have a website, but maybe one day.

If a feature is useful people will use it, be it AI or not AI.

People will also use it if it’s not useful, if it’s the default.

A friend of mine did a search the other day to find the hour of something, and google’s AI lied to her. Top of the page, just completely wrong.

Luckily I said, “That doesn’t sound right” and checked the official site, where we found the truth.

Google is definitely forcing this out, even when it’s inferior to other products. Hell, it’s inferior to their own, existing product.

But people will keep using AI, because it’s there, and it’s right most of the time.

Google sucks. They should be broken up, and their leadership barred from working in tech. We could have had a better future. Instead we have this hallucinatory hellhole.

Is that the thing that colors parts of the UI based on your background? Because I despise that.

I don’t want things to change color. I want the UI to be predictable and stable, so I can use it without distraction.

I’ve been saying for years that focusing on self driving cars is solving the wrong problem. The problem is so many people need their own personal car at all.

Sadly, they make a ton of money from AWS (amazon web services). A large portion of the internet relies on it. It’s difficult or impossible to avoid using any amazon services. Like, you use a website and their backend uses s3 and rds. No way for you to know, much of the time.

I avoid shopping on amazon anyway, but the problem is wider spread.

I haven’t thought through all the scenarios and edge cases, but generally spying on the public seems dicey and ripe for abuse. Especially if it’s just like “the public, all the time, whenever we feel like it,” instead of “ok we got a warrant signed by a judge to investigate Joe Bombguy”.

I don’t think the current government is capable or interested in making sound decisions. I don’t think the public is capable of electing a better government. For profit orgs don’t have the public’s best interest as a priority. So this is bad

Well, every republican idea is a bad one so that follows.

Though the details of the Bezos wedding are highly guarded beyond the rumored $10-million budget

Ok so I’m not going to say that we all need to eat dirt so long as anyone is worse off than we are, but that’s a lot of money that could be spent on anything else.

I’m not christian but camel through the eye of a needle, man. You can’t be a good person when you’re sitting on that much wealth, and Bezos isn’t even trying.

Aren’t great on… median? Majority fall below some arbitrary standard of “decent”?

will humanity ever learn to stop acting like dumb angry monkeys?

Seems unlikely.

As to your broader point about the tools themselves not being bad, the root problem remains capitalism, or “a few people have unaccountable power over many”

I feel like the current AI stuff has been net negative. It prompted layoffs and hiring freezes, but then didn’t produce quality results.

The most important thing for people, and by people I mean all of us at times, is in-group belonging. None of us are immune to that. We look to our peers for cues on how to behave and what to believe.

Some people consider like scientists and experts in-group, and trust them. Some don’t.

This need for in-group cohesion is more important than facts and figures. It’s more important than the text of some book.

So when all your friends and family are saying that Christianity means one thing, it’s unlikely you’re going to disagree.

Ownership will abuse labor as much as it can. Sometimes to make more profit. Sometimes for murkier reasons. I think some management are just stupid and they’d hurt the company to follow their unfounded feelings.

Labor should organize.

Right, humans are bad about that kind of thing. I think it has to do with Dunbar’s number? The monkeysphere? It’s hard for us to model a lot of people as full people in our head, especially as they’re more removed from us.

Like you probably don’t really think about the garbage man as a fully fleshed out guy with hopes, dreams, a favorite band, a love that got away, and all that. When you have some absolutely rancid trash, you probably just throw it in the can and forget about it. But if it was your mother or best friend that was going to have to deal with it, maybe you’d be more careful. Wouldn’t want the bag to rip and spray maggots all over Mom.

That’s fine. That’s all of us.

But I think there’s degrees. Shades. Like you mentioned cell phones. Most of us accept the out of sight horrors that go with them. But, like, some people are absolute assholes to wait staff. Just treat the waiter like shit, are rude to the coffee shop people, whatever. I think most of us recognize that as bad.

Somewhere between those two points I think is “I’m going to build software to spy on people”. Personally, I think that should be ok the far side of the line. The not okay side. Why? A bit of self preservation, a bit of ethics, and a helping of “I don’t want to contribute to bad things happening to people, even ones I don’t know”.

This post is getting long. I think you’re right that it’s not as simple as “doesn’t care about other people” but I think that’s a factor.

He was a pretty smart guy, so I’m pretty sure he understood the ramifications. This isn’t like a plumber working in a building that happens to house an evil company. This was directly working as a high ranking software developer at a shitty software company.

Palantir is pretty awful. I knew a guy who took a job there, a bunch of years ago. When he said where he was going, I asked “But what if they work on something really shitty? Like spying on people?”. He was like, “Meh”, with a big shrug.

He was friendly and kind to the people around him, but I guess he just didn’t care about anyone he didn’t know personally right now.

I’ve already posted this a few times, but Ed Zitron wrote a long article about what he calls “Business Idiots”. Basically, people in decision making positions who are out of touch with their users and their products. They make bad decisions, and that’s a big factor in why everything kind of sucks now.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/ (it’s long)

I think a lot of us have this illusion that higher ranking people are smarter, more visionary, or whatever. But I think no. I think a lot of people are just kind of stupid, surrounded by other stupid people, cushioned from real, personal, consequences. On top of that, for many enterprises, the incentives don’t line up with the users. At least wikipedia isn’t profit driven, but you can probably think of some things you’ve used that got more annoying with updates. Like google putting more ads up top, or any website that does a redesign that yields more ad space, worse navigation.