I suggested I’d probably be interested, and I am. I have to explore my thoughts on profit motive and owner class vs. working class. We don’t see entirely eye to eye, but there are a lot of layers to unpack and I’ve been at this reply off and on for some time now. I drafted a much more detailed response, but it’s undergone several full-draft rewrites, and I think I need to just do my thinking offline and this thread will be long dead before I come back around to it.

Anyway, I do appreciate your response.

I said vaguely. I’m not a communist or Marxist and recognize the limits of my understanding.

The difference between owning the means of production and sharing ownership with investors feels meaningful but not diametrically opposed. Without the investors, the workers would STILL have to weigh their ownership stake against working conditions and determine what is in their best interest.

I agree that bonuses being outside the workers control makes them not great overall, however in this case the bonus isn’t cash, but a stake in the company which again ties the payment to future performance. Not in a way the workers can directly control, but there is always going to be friction between what workers deserve to be paid for their work and what customers are willing to pay for the product. Ordinarily that friction serves to make investors fabulously rich and the workers largely get exploited.

Anyway, I said vaguely and I stand by it. If you want to go in depth on your views of capitalism and Marxism, I promise to read and likely be fascinated. But I think you read that with a lot more intent than I originally meant to impart. I probably should’ve just left that bit out, knowing Lemmy users.

I wouldn’t have expected it to. There are both cynical and earnest interpretations of that. Cynically, they are avoiding pissing off AIPAC. Earnestly, the American electorate as a whole isn’t moved by the plight of Palestinians.

I’ll leave everyone to their own choice of interpretations, but you don’t have to morally agree with the latter to feel it is true. Both could be true.

Here and I was reading it as “They are getting $400k, per Chip, employee of Samsung.”

Seems like a good thing. Aligning workers and shareholders seems reasonable. And it even seems vaguely lefty, with the workers having a bigger stake in the means of production and all. Valuation might go down, and if there is a global recession most of our 401ks will go down, too. I don’t see any disproportionate downside.

You either meet people where they are, you find a strategy to move the people, or you lose. None of that is on the people. Your blame changes nothing. It’s wishful thinking — you go into the election with the voters you have, not the voters you wish you had.

The voters are basically the same every election. Yeah they evolve over time but not quickly. You can’t blame populace for being exactly who they are.

They weren’t enthusiastic about Kamala, and if you ask me it has everything to do with the economy and approximately fuck all to do with anything else. But you can’t fault the people any more than you can fault the tide when there is a flood.

They are going to enshittify so hard trying to get their money back… it’s too bad, too. I use ChatGPT a fair bit for various things. But eras end and this could herald the end of it being useful to me. At some point I was always just going to set up my own local AI on a server here at home. Hopefully hardware prices can recover a bit before I feel compelled to move on from ChatGPT.

Hey well at least typos serve as a marker that everything is human written. You know, for all the comments about how AI is fancy autocorrect, why the hell is autocorrect still such fucking garbage??? Just do the things with the damn thing already!

Can confirm. I use AI quite a bit, including writing stories where I have editorial control (that’s a dumb decision, she does the other thing!). The best AIs might be able to manage one short passable chapter, but it’s going to be shot quality without massive amounts of hand holding and rewriting.

It can be entertaining in a choose your own adventure sense where each page really only needs to be barely coherent and minimally cohesive with the other pages. I sure as hell wouldn’t pay $25 for an AI-penned book.

Claude Code outperforms Codex (by how much seems to vary by benchmark and month to month, but ranking seems consistent). It has been the gold standard for over a year which is forever on the AI time scale. This doesn’t surprise me at all.

ChatGPT is probably much bigger with middle managers who spend all day trying to get AI make them sound smart or polite or get it to write business documents.

That’s what we call job security, I suppose.

You clearly know more about this than I do. I understand the anodes are zinc, but you have to use materials that are going to feed on the zinc rather than visa versa. I honestly don’t know if that’s a meaningful limitation or not. I just know about boats and how to delay the water from destroying the hull.

Saltwater is one of the harshest terrestrial environments for a data center other than maybe lava. Pressure, oxygen, and sodium ions make the ocean extremely corrosive to metal structures.

You could be right about the first part, but I take issue with the second. Ships in seawater usually need sacrificial anodes so corrosion eats those instead of the hull and fasteners. I’m not sure how that would affect heat exchange, maintenance, or long-term reliability. It would definitely limit the materials you could use.

Maybe this will push people to quit, finally. Or to subscribe. I don’t know, I used Twitter a tiny bit back the day, but I left and never looked back when Elon bought it. Just like when Reddit dropped their API support. Recognize when a platform is trying to enshittify and get out because you’re the product, not the customer being served.

Are you asking how you would confirm without your phone or asking about someone stealing your credentials or impersonating you?

To the first I’d ask how do you confirm identity if someone steals your wallet? But also, I’d probably be able to confirm with my watch as well.

To the second, my phone would be a brick before they ever got it unlocked.

How many people do your think they employ? Because I performed seconds of painstaking research and came up with 80k, so I divided $40B by 80k employees and I get $500k/worker.

They could afford to give everyone a 25k raise and it would be 20 years before it cost them a dime.

That doesn’t seem like a smart business decision.

AI:

AI researchers are the worst. Some of them, anyway. Asking an AI about itself is just inciting it to write a fiction that matches the context it is given. It cannot think, plot, plan, feel, expect, want, need, hate, love, or respect people. It doesn’t have any ability to query its own mind because it doesn’t have one, but it will happily invent fiction about its thought process (not unlike humans in that respect).

There are certain positions I would probably be very good at from a technical perspective that I avoid because I know my myself. I could never work for the CIA or FBI for example. I don’t want to know their secrets because they could have me weigh a duty to execute my job and protect my family against my duty to humanity. I don’t know which principle I would betray, if grappling with it didn’t kill me first. Some might think that’s an easy choice but the personal cost is extreme — look at Snowden.

No, keep me far away from that shit. Let me grapple with intellectual problems all day long, but moral quandaries paralyze me.