While it may seem to be a smart money move, it can result in a costly productivity and innovation lag for the economy.

Lmaoooo

“I know you want to make things last and have a habitable planet to live on rather than destroying it in the name of short-term profit gains, but… have you thought about the economy?!? DID YOU CONSULT THE ECONOMY BEFORE YOU CONSIDERED TRYING TO LIVE SUSTAINABLY.”

Reminds me of something I heard in passing (cannot find a source atm, so take with a grain of salt) about an LLM that was trained on slack messages and would say shit about how it was going to do something and then not actually do it.

But it’s very believable, this kind of thing, when you understand that LLMs are mimicking the style of what they were trained on. I’m sure I could easily get an LLM to tell me it will go build a plane right now. Doesn’t mean it can go build one. LLMs are trained on the language of beings with physical forms who can go do stuff in RL, but the LLM doesn’t have that so it will learn what is functionally equivalent to being a bullshitter in the human case.

Fair enough.

I read through, but am not finding any detail info on what kind of workers these were that were fired. The wording is:

Today, we will begin reducing our workforce by more than 13,000 employees across the organization, and significantly reduce our outsourced and other outside labor expenses.

But I’m not sure if that means some of what counts as the 13k are outsourced and/or contract workers, or if that’s in addition to the 13k.

That said, I’m doubtful that most or all are engineer types, especially the more smug ones. The most experienced, which are also the most well-off financially and can contribute to them being the most smug politically, are also the most valuable and it’s why they get paid the class-consciousness-distorting money. It’s the ones on the lower rungs, including non-engineers in CS roles and the like, who are going to most easily have a business case made for firing them.

No disagreement here. But then, people like us have awareness on imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, etc. They may be polling a fair amount of dissatisfied liberals.

According to the poll:

Canada remains the top preferred destination for younger American women looking to leave, with 11% of those in the years since 2022 mentioning Canada as their top destination, ahead of New Zealand, Italy and Japan (all 5%).

I guess probably Canada because of proximity. The others seem more random as top choices. But I spose if they were polled in a way that listed limited number of countries, that could have skewed it too. I don’t know how exactly the poll was structured. The details at the bottom indicate the way it was conducted (via Landline and Mobile Telephone for 2024 US if I’m reading right) but there doesn’t seem to be information on what all questions they asked.

The main question referenced in the article is:

Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move PERMANENTLY to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country?

But presumably there is a missing followup question to ask about what country if someone says they would like to move.

The “race” part makes me think of the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. And in that analogy, China (and more broadly, AES states) are the tortoise and the US (and more broadly, capitalist states) are the hare. AES states plan carefully, pace themselves, work their way through together. Capitalist states “move fast and break things” and then burn out systems and people.

I would love to see someone organize and put anti-imperialist questions to every representative in the country. Bet you only a fraction would entertain the questions and of those who do, few would sound like they agree.

As much as I like putting a spotlight on how little they act like representatives, this does have a partisan slant. I could easily see liberal democrats watching this and going “see, the problem is republicans.” Instead of “our ‘representatives’ are war-mongering imperialists.”

Like even Bernie Sanders, known for being one of the most reformist reps in the government (not that that means much since the standards are so low), failed to have the right narrative line on Palestine.

If people could see how thoroughly their representatives fall into step with war-mongering and empire, it may give more of them pause about the legitimacy of the system as a whole.

I’m inclined to think the reason is that too many people now associate “AI” with “slop”, so AGI is the favored buzzword to make AI sound like it’s going to places of unimaginable potential, instead of hitting the ceiling of infrastructure limitations that could take decades of careful research to overcome and which won’t be overcome simply by throwing more environment-eating data centers at the problem.

In a word: grift.

They’re in deep and AI being a specialized tool that gets reduced in environmental cost over time will not suit their desires for industry dominance. Luckily, China exists and we’re not dependent on these western capitalist grifters to define the entire landscape of large-scale AI.

Still, he added, “If you want to be a tech company you don’t get to say no let’s check out of this race.”

Capitalists see everything as race. A race to the bottom, the white race and racial supremacy, racy imagery and how they can profit off of it.

It also contributes to a kind of illiteracy of code in laypeople. I see this sometimes in the way video game players talk about a game’s code, being like “the spaghetti code teehee” etc., as if this explains every bug and design problem in a long-standing codebase. Since the code is hidden, it’s hard to correct them. Maybe it really is spaghetti code. But odds are its problems are more complex than that. And if modding communities tell us anything in games where modding is feasible, it’s that players are perfectly capable of fixing or creating workarounds for some bugs, even when constrained by the limitations of modding. And the company is just kinda mediocre at actually addressing issues. This is one of the annoying consequences of it - the NDA’d nature of everything means companies can hide behind “development is hard” narratives to excuse their institutional failures.

Open source not only furthers knowledge, but also enables some degree of accountability.

The conception of “white” as a race literally would not exist without the institutional power that made it so. It has everything to do with power.

White as a concept of race derives from the institution of white supremacy. An institution of power which designates certain people as “white” and others as “non-white”, and then it designates white as superior and everyone else as inferior. This is why you can’t be racist against “white” people. Because there is no institution of power based on designating people as white and then treating them as inferior; it’s just the opposite.

You can be rude to a person who is considered white. You can exclude them from things. You can even carry prejudices around about them (and if you do, it’s probably because you are dealing with them being the oppressor on a regular basis). None of those are the same thing as the oppressive experience of systemically enforced, institutional racism that “non-white” people experience on a daily basis.

Do you see the difference? One is having a bad day. The other is being gunned down by a cop because your skin was the wrong color and you get no justice for it. One is some people may not like you because of what they’ve learned to expect from dealing with you. The other is being enslaved by you and treated as subhuman. One is occasionally you may not get special treatment because of reform attempts to even the playing field for people who are treated as subhuman. The other is having to work extra hard in everything just to get seen, much less seen as anything resembling an equal.

There is no comparison. Some people who are considered white get confused somewhere in this and go “well my life was hard too!” Which is beside the point. The institution of white supremacy does not ensure that every “white” person has an ideal life. But it does ensure that a lot of non-white people live very short and traumatized lives as an exploited group of people, treated as subhuman. You can be white and still have a shit life. You can be non-white and somehow, despite everything, manage to have a relatively good life. But if you’re non-white, you are a special target for exploitation, specifically, if not a target of being murdered just for having the wrong skin color.

I could go on. It’s night and day difference.

He’s got a point there. I’m going to try looking at media that way too. Let’s see, the story of Adam and Eve is a metaphor for me taking a shit. I start out with the temptation to take a shit. When I actually take one, I am cast out of the land of needing to take a shit for taking one and left to walk the Earth, having taken one. Snakes squeeze things, so the snake represents the squeezing of muscles to evacuate my bowels of fecal matter.

It’s also a narrative that was lied about and warped heavily by israel since day one. Pretty sure it’s been confirmed that they fired on their own people Hannibal Doctrine style, but it’s made out as if all of the damage was caused by Palestinian resistance fighters.

Is he trying to play both sides?

“Yes, Cuba and Venezuela are run by evil commie dictators that need to be taken down but our embargo on Cuba is bad.”

I think it’s the old “liberal pacifism” shtick. “The oppressor is bad, but the resistance forces using violence to resist the oppressor are also somehow bad because they use violence.”

No amount of softly condemning the USA’s deplorable actions right after tearing into AES countries is going to change people’s minds.

Exactly. It confuses the issue and puts the oppressed in a position where they are only ever allowed to be a victim, never a self-determining group who is capable of defending themselves.

I think it’s more a thing of the limelight. If he doesn’t lick the boot, he gets shut out of the capitalist media sphere, which makes it hard to get any electoral traction. And people like him are willing to sacrifice principles (if they ever had them) in order to get elected. They just either don’t take into account, or don’t care, that by doing this, they neutralize the effectiveness of their own political platform.

Bernie Sanders wasn’t even radical and he got shut out and misrepresented to a huge degree.

The full quote from the article is even worse:

" I want to be clear on where I stand. I believe both Nicolas Maduro and Miguel Diaz-Canel are dictators. Their administrations have stifled free and fair elections, jailed political opponents, and suppressed the free and fair press. And yet, our federal government’s long history of punitive policies toward both countries, including extrajudicial killings of Venezuelans and the continuation of a decades long blockade of Cuba, have only worsened these conditions. Democratic socialism is about dignity, justice and accountability. And above all, it’s about building a democracy that works for working people, not one that preys on them."

“Democratic socialists” are some of the most annoying people in western politics because not only are they not socialists in actual practice, they by definition of the moniker make it sound like there’s a version of socialism that is not democratic. They throw under the bus international socialists specifically, and more broadly, countries that are self-determining in the face of imperialism, in order to win some points with a largely already-ignorant population to get minor capitalism reform electoral victories. When they do succeed at all, they only further entrench the miasma of pain that is mass political illiteracy.

Hey, I just thought of a more accurate meaning for the CIA acronym. Colonial Invasion Agency.

UNC administration placed Dwayne Dixon, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, on administrative leave on Monday, effective immediately. The decision follows reports of Dixon’s alleged affiliation with “Redneck Revolt,” an organization that describes itself as an “anti-racist, anti-fascist, community defense formation.”

“The University continues to reaffirm its commitment to rigorous debate, respectful engagement and open dialogue in support of free speech,” the statement reads. "There is no place for or tolerance of inciting or extending sympathy toward violence of any kind within the UNC community.

I know the US is bad, but it still surprises me sometimes the extent of how pathetic its institutions are. They are taking the centrist thing (https://thenib.com/centrist-history/) a step further and pretending to be the centrist, while actively siding with the fascist. It’s basically gaslighting at this point.