Removed by mod

File under “some problems have easy solutions but would upset a handful of rich people”, or maybe “…but would upset unqualified idiots”

Corporations shouldn’t be allowed to buy each other

Has no one been pointing out to management that even firms like Microsoft are backpedaling on using AI?

Management doesn’t listen to low level people who actually do work. I think this is part of Ed zitron’s “Business Idiot” thesis. Upper management is so far removed from how things actually get done, they are in all measureable ways idiots

Sometimes they also have selfish or stupid side goals, too. Like, the rumor is the company gets a tax break for people going into the office. So now they make people go into the office, even when most of their team is remote. Climate criminals all, but they’re removed from the consequences.

Upper management are fools. Middle management just wants their paycheck, and maybe to rise high enough to become a business idiot themselves.

That’s kind of like “no one goes there anymore - it’s too crowded”

I mean, the one I’m at is mostly doing a hiring freeze. Management is frothing at the mouth over using AI. But there are currently a lot of people working here, some full time and some under dubious “contractor” arrangements.

and I am constantly telling them that in the workplace situation, to not be afraid or hesitate to act on something.

This really depends on the workplace. I’m at a megacorp and trying to fix anything is far more pain and work that just not.

Like I could try to convince them to move off of python3.9 because that’s old and well past end of life. But I need to explain that to my boss, the business lady, some other manager, “the audit team” (whoever the fuck they are), and then grapple with how they have 5-10 years of code and not a single line of automated test coverage.

There’s no reward.

The book “dying of whiteness” has a whole section about this. They interview a lot of people who are survivors of gun suicide and find that for political reasons they don’t want gun control, even as they admit their loved ones are dead because guns made it so easy to die. One of them even privately says she agrees, but would never say so in public.

I’m out of the loop now, but when I was younger there was a weird divide between the youth/young adult stuff, and adult.

The adult stuff was a lot of traditional “sit and listen to a talk”.

The youth was a lot more hand on, interactive. “Let’s start a bonfire, write down our fears, and throw them into it”. “We got people from the community to teach how to make instruments out of junk”.

I really liked it when I was younger, and met a lot of kids who were very cool.

Maybe I should see what’s on offer around here. I don’t want to go to a “service” but I miss the community sometimes.

I’ve known some cool unitarians. The org can collect a lot of upper middle class white people, but it’s also the first place I really learned about LGBT rights in the 90s (I’m getting old) and other social justice stuff.

Police should be held individually accountable

That’s like using a machine to lift weights at the gym for you.

I have wondered about that. What kind of range can you get DIY? I guess if you did fire something they could try to do physics to figure out where it came from, but you’d hopefully be long gone by then.

Ooh a Unitarian. Don’t even have to be Catholic. I used to hang with unitarians. Some good folks there.

If the “geniuses” who run these tech firms spent less money lobbying politicians and instead offered to pay for the college tuition of every student who successfully graduated from the local high school, they would probably get a very different reaction from the public.

Yeah , they could do a lot with their wealth. Unfortunately they are stupid and selfish. They’re playing a dangerous game and eventually they’ll roll for guillotines.

Not scared enough

Velocity is not helpful if you’re not pointed in the right direction, and even if you are pointed in the right direction it’s not useful if you overshoot your destination.

I made this metaphor at work but management is not interested.

Giving an incompetent team AI is like giving a child a chainsaw. Maybe he’ll chop wood faster but that’s probably not all that’s going to happen.

Zitron’s point that management are stupid is really important. They don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t do any work!

You laugh, but this is genuinely how the majority of managers and executives think and act, and now they have a special chatbot that can fart out functional-enough prototypes to convince a Business Idiot they can do anything, because executives and managers do not regularly do much work. As a result, they have little idea what work looks like other than when they look over your shoulder, which is why they wanted you back in the office, and their distance from production is why the same people who were anti-remote work are now aggressively trying to shove AI down your throat.

We are ruled by the worst fucking people.

Good. Fuck amazon. Fine them harder.

We really should stop letting companies buy each other. In fact we should split the big ones up.

He’s lying. Or bullshitting. Whatever you call it when people say shit without any regard for the truth. Typical conservative slop.