He’s pretty hated by his neighbors if I remember correctly. He started an illegal school on his compound and his neighbors have attempted to get it shut down, but he’s too powerful for even the people in his vicinity. I can’t imagine what a less empowered individual could do.

Not to be a doomer, I’m just at a loss. We need class solidarity on a level we’ve never had before.

In the striking memo, the tech giant noted that the ethically-fraught feature should ideally be launched “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

Great article. Per usual, meta is a horrible company filled with horrible people who make the decisions.

I don’t really eat at fast food places with kiosks, but when I have had the occasion I actually prefer it too. Because I don’t eat at these places often I am generally unfamiliar with the menu and the kiosk tends to have it organized with pictures which are helpful if I don’t know what a “crazy burger” is. It also makes me feel less rushed since I don’t have a human on the other end who has to wait for me to decide or to tell me what’s in a crazy burger or whatever. Especially because a lot of places don’t seem to display their full menu anymore. Not sure what’s up with that.

I pass an anti data center yard sign quite regularly that is featured right next to a pro trump yard sign. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

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They’d be better off with the cash that they could choose to invest or spend as they please and they would be much better off if companies were not able to extract that amount of wealth in the first place. Then they wouldn’t have to threaten a strike to get compensation. They weren’t just gifted this. The union had to fight for it. Additionally, stock valuations change and they have a vestment period and restrictions on selling. If you read my comment as an indictment on compensating employees and not the system in which they exist then I’m not sure you’re engaging in good faith.

I appreciate your response and openness too. I will also sometimes write full responses just to delete them, so I understand that struggle.

I doubt I have a unique perspective to offer, but if at some point in the future you do have a thought or question about this you’d like to share with me, I’ll be around.

Stock is better than nothing, but the equivalent in cash would be better for sure. They can then invest it how they see fit if so desired and unlike company stock there’s no vesting period or restrictions on selling. I’m glad the employees are getting something, I just think it’s important to realize that this is better for the company than paying cash bonuses and is not really similar to owning the means of production in any meaningful sense.

Lmao. They have to pay for NOT listening.

According to the complaints, this service did not, in fact, listen in on consumers’ conversations or use voice data at all—nor did the service accurately place ads in customers’ desired locations. Instead, the service the companies provided consisted of reselling—at a significant markup—email lists obtained from other data brokers.

I was responding less to the lefty comment and more to the idea that aligning workers with shareholders is a good thing (“reasonable” per your comment). If you don’t subscribe to left-wing ideas, and sit more in the lib territory (non derogatory in this instance) of the spectrum, I can understand why we would disagree on that.

Generic leftist drivel below:

The profit motive is inherently exploitative of the working class. In my opinion, any attempts to align the working class with the profit motive is just a way for the owning class to dismantle class solidarity. Not to get too into theory, but this is where the idea of and disagreements regarding the petite bourgeois often come in. There is a concept of a managerial class who does not necessarily own the means of production, but profits based off of exploitation of the people beneath them. A lot of people consider this its own class, or at the very least class traitors, but what it really is is just working class people who the owning class has convinced to promote the interest of the owning class. If the owning class can divert a large enough portion of the working class into that sector then there is not much hope for change. You often hear about blue collar and white collar workers, but discussions of people who explicitly do not have to work don’t come up as frequently. You’re seeing more people talk about billionaires nowadays though, and if enough white collar workers realize that they are much closer to blue-collar workers than the billionaires I think we would be in a much better place.

Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but owning stock in a company is nothing like owning the means of production and all this does is give the company a pretext of making employees work against their class interests. An employer might mention that a strike would decrease stock value and scare a worker into staying in poor working conditions despite a strike being better for them for gaining long term benefits. Also, bonuses are a bad form of compensation in general because they often are dependent on decisions outside of workers control and in this case come from AI demand. Now those workers feel as though increasing prices, increasing AI use, and decreasing the number of employees all leads to them personally benefiting. All of these are against the interests of their own class.

I was never a heavy GR user because it felt like homework for reading, but I used to really enjoy reading user reviews on books I particularly disliked. Some of the reviews were more well written than the thing being reviewed. It makes me so upset that amazon is now profiting off of the dedication of the GR community.

I think part of the issue with moving from physical media as a form of software distribution is that people ship buggy software all the time. In addition to making more money via subscription, the company can ship updates whenever it wants. This often means that 1.x may have bugs still present in 1.z, but 1.z has features not originally included in 1.x. At a certain point you’re maintaining several versions of your product to test bug fixes, since 1.x users still deserve the bugs fixes but technically shouldn’t have the 1.z features. Better companies would be able to handle that, but nowadays bug fixes get extremely low priority since they’re spending a lot of dev time trying to attract and retain users with shiny new features, so that means active development on older versions for longer. Obviously the subscription revenue is also generally appealing.

Thank you for the great suggestions!

Gotcha. If you have any experience interacting with groups that would have a chapter in most metro areas, feel free to let me know. Where I’m from originally we had some really active groups, but since moving to my current city I’m having difficulty finding something that seems to make a difference. I’d like to do mutual aid focused stuff rather than more mainstream charity work, but the charity work tends to be more impactful.

Does your group have chapters? If so, can I ask what group it is? I’ve had difficulty finding a mutual aid group that has a real impact. They do things, but the lack of structure and organization makes it seem functionally useless. The people are all pretty cool, but it mostly feels like a waste of time.

I think there’s some confusion around the title. Google found that someone was using AI to identify exploits. Google itself is not announcing that AI made something that has a zero day exploit.

Seems like the exploiter was using Google’s AI to try and find exploits and that’s probably what alerted them.

Came to see your comment and saw an archive link (thank you for your service!). You were entirely correct. What a nothing burger of an article.

I’m hesitant to click on a link and give traffic to an article written to sell me a popsci book about something well know to the scientific community for a while, but if anyone does take the bait, please let me know if there’s anything novel here other than a “quirky” anecdote about someone lying to their intimate partner so they feel sick.

The original Bloomberg article is quite informative.

California was the only state in Bloomberg’s review that did not use advertising trackers, having removed them last year after being informed of the security risk by nonprofit news organizations CalMatters and The Markup. A separate Markup analysis of 19 state sites last year also flagged data exposures in several states that later changed some of their settings.

According to Edwards, one reason so many websites continue to share sensitive user data is that website operators deploy tracking tools without fully understanding how they work. “The onus is on them to do it safely,” he said. “You can’t protect something that you don’t understand.”

If anyone has looked into Google ads at all, the first thing they try to get you to do is install a bunch of trackers on your website. In order to do that you have to check a box that says you have a privacy policy which discloses certain information. If you try to tell them you do not have that and do not want to do tracking they will outright lie about what they are getting you to do. They tell you to just check the box and that it doesn’t matter and then will tell you that it doesn’t track anything. One would hope that the people doing these sites for the government would know better, but they may also just not care. They may just be using a standard SEO suite and no one bothered to mention that maybe they shouldn’t on either the government side or the company side.