theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml

I write about technology at theluddite.org

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2 yr. ago

This has been widely known for at least a decade. I worked for an Amazon competitor back in 2013, and industry wide algorithmic price fuckery, including trying to figure out if your rivals were scraping you and poisoning their data, was common and openly discussed as a normal part of business operations.

The explicit directive of our economic system is to make as much money as possible in competition with everyone else. Or course companies are going to pour resources into using any and all technological fuckery to do that.

You joke, but also, too real. If I could bring myself to do it, the blog would have real ad revenue. I'd estimate at least a few hundred USD a month, and more if I added ads to the RSS feed, though I know a lot less about how those work. I try not to think too much about it.

That sucks, but I argue that it's even worse. Not only do they tweak your results to make more money, but because google has a monopoly on web advertising, and (like it or not) advertising is the main internet funding model, google gets to decide whether or not your website gets to generate revenue at all. They literally have an approval process for serving ads, and it is responsible for the proliferation of LLM-generated blogspam. Here's a thing I wrote about it in which I tried to get my already-useful and high-quality website approved for ads, complete with a before and after approval, if you're curious. The after is a wreck.

Yes, to me , also in the US, "living the dream" is exclusively very sarcastic and means something like "is this really all there is to life." People also use "another day in paradise." Means the same thing.

don’t blow smoke up my ass (be honest with me)

alternative form: don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining

I don't agree with the other person you're talking to, but I also don't agree with this framing of "planned economy vs free market," as if planning is doomed to failure, and markets work.

It is true that previously planned economies have had problems. Planning be that way, though. Plans are hard, and when you plan things, sometimes it doesn't work out, but that doesn't mean that the notion of planning in and of itself is inherently flawed. Planning fails all the time in all facets of life, but there's only one facet of life, the economy, where we have for some reason decided that that means the concept of planning itself is broken, rather than previous plans failed.

The market is just the absence of a plan, which is a little bit of a tricky abstraction, and ends up being a bit unfalsifiable. It's got this teflon quality to it, where even when markets collapse, as they do all the time, they don't get blamed for it. Right now, we are living through the worst possible failure of an economic system -- the literal destruction of the planet. There is no greater failure mode, yet somehow, markets don't get blamed for it, and are still seen as fundamentally sound.

The dream, for me, is a democratically planned economy. True economic and political democracy. We have a lot to learn to understand how that would work, but dreaming, and then figuring out how to achieve that dream, is the stuff of socialist politics.

This is all wildly simplified, but here's my attempt to explain the simplest version of the core behavior. In general, people who own companies don't make a salary; they make a profit. Once all expenses are paid, the leftover revenue is called profit, and goes to owner.

This ownership can be sold in whole or in part to other people with money, in order to raise more money, which can be used to invest in equipment and such. Many ventures have significant startup costs, which means they require money before they can start making money, so they seek investment.

The people who invest in ventures do so in exchange for ownership of that venture, in the form of stock. This is why we call it "capitalism." The people with the money are in charge. Side note, but the term "capitalism" was coined as part of leftist crtitique of laissez-faire economics. It was meant disparagingly, to point out that this system actually just meant people with money are in charge, but I digress.

These owners can make some money owning the company, but no one would do this if they were stuck with that stock forever, because then they would be illiquid, i.e. they would never be able to access that money again. People want to be able to sell their stock for more than they bought it, which means the stock's value must grow or the company's owners will be angry and fire its CEO.

This core behavior happens at many scales. Your local property owners wants to know they can sell their property for more than they paid for it. People who invest in index funds (diversified portfolio of many stocks) don't just want to be stuck in that index fund forever, even if they are earning dividends (i.e. profit); they want to be able to sell their index funds for more than they paid at some later time. And so on.

Were it to stop growing, no one would be able to invest in new assets without taking large losses, which would mean fewer investments, which would make it impossible to finance things. No new houses, or new factories, or new stores, etc. The whole system comes to a crashing halt.

edits: fixing and adding things

edit2: Restructure a bit. One sentence was in the wrong place.

I am totally in favor of criticizing researchers for doing science that actually serves corporate interests. I wrote a whole thing doing that just last week. I actually fully agree with the main point made by the researchers here, that people in fields like machine vision are often unwilling to grapple with the real-word impacts of their work, but I think complaining that they use the word "object" for humans is distracting, and a bit of a misfire. "Object detection" is just the term of art for recognizing anything, humans included, and of course humans are the object that interests us most. It's a bit like complaining that I objectified humans by calling them a "thing" when I included humans in "anything" in my previous sentence.

Again, I fully agree with much of their main thesis. This is a really important point:

As co-author Luca Soldaini said on a call with 404 Media, even in the seemingly benign context of computer vision enabled cameras on self-driving cars, which are ostensibly there to detect and prevent collision with human beings, computer vision is often eventually used for surveillance.

“The way I see it is that even benign applications like that, because data that involves humans is collected by an automatic car, even if you're doing this for object detection, you're gonna have images of humans, of pedestrians, or people inside the car—in practice collecting data from folks without their consent.” Soldaini said.

Soldaini also pointed to instances when this data was eventually used for surveillance, like police requesting self-driving car footage for video evidence.

And I do agree that sometimes, it's wise to update our language to be more respectful, but I'm not convinced that in this instance it's the smoking gun they're portraying it as. The structures that make this technology evil here are very well understood, and they matter much more than the fairly banal language we're using to describe the tech.

Mark Fisher ❤️

Not a great headline (Current Affairs seems to do this a lot).

The actual argument presented is that medical debt forgiveness drives are actually harmful. It was once a kind of gimmick to both give people immediate relief, but also shed light on the industry (they reference John Oliver, for example), but now that it has become very popular, it's actively funding medical debt collectors.

"Capitalism is just human nature."

If it's just human nature, then why do we need a militarized police force to enforce order? Having workers go to a workplace, do labor, and then send the profits to some far away entity that probably isn't even there is actually very far from human nature. It's something that necessarily requires the implied threat of violence to maintain. Same with tenants and landlords. No one would pay rent if it wasn't for the police, who will use violence to throw you out otherwise.

It also frustrates me how that argument just waves away the incredibly complex and actually extremely arbitrary legal structure of capitalism. What about human nature contains limited liability for artificial legal entities controlled by shareholders? "Ah yes, here's the part of the human genome that expresses preferred and common stock; here's the part that contains the innate human desire for quarterly earnings calls."

edit: typo

I want to love Darknet Diaries, but the host has such an unexamined, lawful alignment. He tells such good stories so well, but his default interpretation is often that criminals stole from these poor, innocent companies, with no further interrogation into the human and economic systems that make this so common, or the larger ecosystem in which these companies exist and are complicit.

This is something that, in my experience, the entire cybersecurity industry struggles with. I used to do a lot of that kind of work until a few years ago, and I always found my peers uninterested in, or even incapable of, having these larger, interpretative conversations about what we're doing, what our roles are in the world, and how we can make a safer, better internet.

+1 from me too. Paul Cooper rules. He has so much wonder and such a delightful sense of scale. It's been a few months since the last one, so surely we're due for another one soon.

Thanks! It means a lot when people say nice things. I can see the server logs, so I know there are thousands of readers who presumably enjoy it, but I usually only hear from people who don't, so thanks friend! I really appreciate the note.

I post our stuff on lemmy because I'm an active user of lemmy and I like it here. I find posting here is more likely to lead to real discussions, as opposed to say Twitter, which sucks, but is where I'd be if I was blasting self-promotion. It's not like lemmy communities drive major traffic.

Isn't that exactly what lemmy is for? It's what I used to love about Reddit 10 years ago, or Stumble Upon, or Digg, or any of the even older internet aggregators and forums: People would put their small, independent stuff on it. It's what got me into the internet. I used to go on forums and aggregators to read interesting stuff, or see cool projects, or find weird webcomics, or play strange niche web games, or be traumatized by fucked up memes. Now the entire internet is just "5 big websites, each consisting of pics from the other 4" or whatever the quip is, and it's fucking boring.

So yes, I and a few others are theluddite.org. It's an independent site written by leftists working in tech and academia, mostly aimed at other people in tech and academia, but also for everyone. It's not like I'm hiding it; it literally says so in my bio. We are not professional opinion-havers, unlike "mainstream" sources; I personally write code for a living every day, which is something that surprisingly few tech commentators have ever done. That makes it possible for me to write about major topics discussed in the media, like google's ad monopoly,, in a firsthand way that doesn't really exist elsewhere, even on topics as well trodden as that one.

And yes, we post our stuff on the fediverse, because the fediverse rules. It is how we think the internet should be. We are also self-hosted, publish an RSS feed, don't run any ads or tracking (and often write about how bad those things are for the internet) because that's also how we think the internet is supposed to work.

Hey I wrote that! I'll never get used to running into my own work in my feed. I'm so glad you liked it!

That was a particularly gratifying but also very frustrating one to write. Fuck the bootlickers putting out that crap.

There are two issues. First, self-driving cars just aren't very good (yet?). Second, it will make millions of people's jobs obsolete, and that should be a good thing, but it's a bad thing, because we've structured our society such that it's a bad thing if you lose your job. It'd be cool as hell if it were a good thing for the people who don't have to work anymore, and we should structure our society that way instead.

I like technology. I think it can make our lives better, but some people, notably capitalists, often use technology to make our lives worse. When that happens, we should smash their machines.