So the author’s argument is that youth have just gone to gig work instead of traditional jobs. OK, maybe true, but first of all, this is not a good thing on its own either. And secondly, we have to consider why gig work even exists, aside from being a fresh new way to exploit workers and deny them the traditional protections of the labor market. Because there is a specific reason gig work exists right at this very transitional moment in the workforce, and I’ll give you a spoiler: It exists because of AI.

Considering the author is possibly the most relevant scholar on (against?) platform work, I’m quite sure he would agree with you. The article implies that AI is deskilling and displacing workers and that’s intrinsically a bad thing.

I don’t use mastodon exactly because I don’t want to put in the labor of figuring out what content to consume. I want to be in control of the logic, but the machine should be doing it. The fediverse fails because it thinks people who want control over their feed are fine with not putting in any labor at all, basically conceding to big platforms that the only way to customize a feed is in an exploitative, invasive way, which is obviously bullshit.

the assumption is that they are not customers. They are producer on a platform, which is very different. This is more similar to office workers striking alongside riders in a food delivery company rather than a consumer boycott.

the fediverse is microscopic and the people you want to get involved politically probably stay away from it.

passive users don’t care about suppression and censorship

because there are no viable alternatives for large outreach.

That surprises me, marketing and sales being the main user of AI, I thought the back-office automation for sure was going to be by far number 1

Generative AI is a bullshit generator. Bullshit in your marketing=good. Bullshit in your backend=bad.

 > So the number 1 user is sales/marketing but it’s back office admin jobs that are most impacted?

GenAI is primarily adopted to justify mass layoffs and only secondarily to create business value. It’s the mass layoffs that drive AI adoption, not the other way around.

Most people don’t know they are allowed to dream, let alone in which direction. While this might not connect with you, there are millions of tech workers who have zero perspective on what’s out there.

Futurism.com is garbage. I think it’s quite a distorted narrative: the vetting is extremely invasive, with regular face scans and passport verifications at sign up. Then maybe a lot of shit was still going through, but this narrative suggests that these companies are not at the forefront of extremely invasive worker surveillance, which is demonstrably false given the wave of class actions and privacy violation proceedings they are subject to.

The market doesn’t reward quality.

Most people don’t study history. A lot of those that do, do want specific patterns to repeat.

Also humans don’t form their political positions through knowledge and reasoning, but primarily through relationships. If everybody around you is right-wing and you want to fit in, you’re going to be come right wing, rationalizing any knowledge of history you might have into supporting your right-wing position.

The vast majority of people I know has no cooking skills, no time to cook or no energy after work. Pretty much all the middle-class and lower-middle-class people in this group order delivery for most of their evening meals. The people who 10 years ago were eating microwaved food, now order out: it costs a bit more, but it’s definitely tastier.

that’s not how information and journalism works, but ok bro, keep believing in “objectivity” lol

Your opinions are all influenced by the outside. The distinction is just between influences you ignore/accept and influences you reject. We are not born with opinions.

The outcome is responsibility of the whole environment. This project didn’t come out of nowhere.

It’s not just who’s doing but who allowed it. If somebody murdered children in my hometown I would hold social services and mental health services responsible for that.

I live in Germany and I’m not from the USA. It has nothing to do with the USA. Many Germans do want this genocide to happen and they still defend it. It’s a daily lived experience, it has nothing to do with online discussions, let alone with Americans. Germany doesn’t have the same concept of military-industrial complex like the USA (even though they might have started rebuilding it recently), but universities do research to enable genocide, like many universities around the world.

I’m Italian, and Leonardo does the same with universities in Italy, using young naive researchers to build weapons used in Palestine or by other undemocratic governments throughout the world.

I don’t get what’s so weird to you: universities have alwasy been complicit of horrible stuff.

The word “state” doesn’t appear a single time in reference to Germany in the whole article. Germany, despite their pervasive state-oriented mentality, is not just its state. It’s the society, the people and other institutions.

Also TU is a public university, so it’s still an emanation of the state, state-funded and state-controlled.

Many of my direct friends lost their job for doing it. Look up “exposing Zalando”.

Here in Berlin it’s a regular occurrence that any exhibition, cultural or political event criticizing Israel receives at the very list a threatening call and a visit from the police. Sometimes it escalates into vandalism or violence, sometimes with getting raided by the police, sometimes with defunding if it’s a public thing.

If they silenced Albanese and banned Varoufakis, they can silence anybody.

You might have missed a lot of news about Germany. They passed a new law that suspends freedom of speech when it’s against Israel. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-passes-controversial-antisemitism-resolution/a-70715643

There has been plenty of extra-judicial retaliation, i.e. against Francesca Albanese or Oyoun, and we got close to having 4 cases of extra-judicial extradictions without an accusation against pro-Palestine protesters, which a judge eventually blocked.

It’s an elixir skeleton that runs a system of modules you can combine (just with configs) or that you can extend by adding new modules.

The skeleton does the bare minimum and the modules contain all the logic. It’s not a no-code tool (that would be astounding, but doesn’t exist yet), you still need to write some config files (flavours) or write some elixir.