anachronist @ anachronist @midwest.social

Posts

9

Comments

518

Joined

2 yr. ago

Hacker news is full of people LARPing as corporate crisis management officers, or counsels for the defense. Every post you get about "company caught grinding up babies to fuel forever-chemical cancer machine" will get a ton of posts by people arguing that actually it's a net positive for the world and how could anyone be against such amazing innovation?

Unfortunately, then they can legally terminate you for refusal to work.

I don't think they're being fired for "refusal to work". There is a concept of "job abandonment" but one 9 hour period wouldn't count. Typically you need several days of no contact/no show before you have considered to have abandoned your job.

This is more about at-will employment: Google has a right to fire an employee at any time for almost any reason, or for no reason. There have been people getting fired for posting pro-Palestine content to linkedin, which is completely legal in the US.

This isn't a story of "employees overstepped a line and got fired" this is a story of "there is no line, companies can fire employees for almost anything and definitely for their political views regardless how respectfully they are expressed."

Also going on strike is basically the definition of "organized refusal to work"

I think they're trying to kill a large fraction and force the rest across the border to Egypt, so they can take Gaza for themselves. They feel a lot of time pressure so they're doing whatever they can do to get the situation on the ground as bad as possible as quickly as possible. They want to go in and shoot up Rafah but they're under too much pressure to slow-walk that. So cutting off all aid and letting famine "do the job" for them makes sense from their twisted worldview.

I think just like with USS Liberty the "screwup" was leaving survivors. I think their intent was to kill everyone then blame Hamas, not letting any journos get too close to the burnt out vehicles.

At first it felt like the IDF was speedrunning the war on terror. They had their Abu-graibs on pretty much the first day. Now it's clear that this always was a campaign of hate from the very beginning. Their purpose in Gaza is to terrorize the civilian population.

Nobody was surprised when the Russians immediately started torturing and murdering civilians in Ukraine. But we are shocked that the IDF behave exactly the same way because -- quite frankly -- we were lied to about the nature of the Israeli state.

This is the definition of late-stage capitalism. Capitalism starts out by finding useful things that improve lives for at least some people (potentially by ruining it for others). For instance, it invents assembly lines to make manufactured goods cheaper but in so doing makes the worker's job dull, repetitive, stressful, and robs him of his agency. This is early stage capitalism. Things are getting worse for some people but broadly better for many.

But then later on capitalism runs out of things to improve. You can only invent the assembly line once. You only get that boost when you implement it. So you have to come up with something else. Maybe you computerize things. But eventually you can't wring any more profits out of production and profits must go up, so you have to take them out of the customers. You roll up all the competing firms into a monopoly and then start jacking up the price, slashing the quality, etc. This is late-stage. It becomes more and more parasitic and the snake eats its own tail.

I guess they decided to lean into it.

This isn't even remotely true. This is specifically what the DOJ is suing over: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39780312

I think OJ single handedly killed the Bronco as a car anyone with self-respect would own.

The image of that white Bronco rolling down the highway in the slow lane with a long procession of cop cars behind in second gear was one of the most iconic images of the 90s. You couldn't have picked a worse getaway car.

More of a fart reel than a sizzle reel.

The basic message was "stop resisting" because AI is "inevitable." I think it's telling that this is the message the industry is going with.

Well now all we need is internet connected chargers with dodgy security...

"You know what would be totally sick? What if we made our building's roof into a matrix of inverted metal parabolas?"

Don't mind us Canada, just keeping an eye on things.

Clearly the police are anti-semites. /s

We're not ready because we're using concepts like "raising" to describe the creation of a probabilistic word sequence generator.

Don't anthropomorphize the algorithm.

I don't think Jack Ryan would have won. Obama had already won a crowded and contentious democratic primary and was a really strong candidate. Ryan, on the other hand, wasn't a very good candidate and was kinda floundering even before the divorce scandal. This was at a nadir for the Republicans in Illinois because it was after the Ryan/Licenses for Bribes scandal and before Blagojevich. Most of the Republican A-tier had been indicted or had their careers ruined (including Fitzgerald who Ryan was trying to replace) and they were running B-tier candidates.

Interestingly a lot of gyms now refuse to charge a credit card and insist on providing ACH access to a bank account, because the credit card has more consumer protections on it.

I assume the real main selling point for Windows 11 is the inescapable constant nagging you get when you try to stick with WIndows 10.

Wikipedia gets something like $150 million in donations annually. Firefox absolutely could have done similar numbers back when they had a massive userbase, and it would have given the users a feeling of ownership. Instead they decided to be funded almost entirely by the technology monopolist.

The purpose of Mozilla is to kill Firefox. That's what Google is paying for.