My dad has been that guy! We sure ate a lottt of Silver Wok during that time 😋

Yeah if investors can’t make cartoonish returns for doing literally nothing what’s even the point of gouging customers??

People will be laid off
Spoils will be enjoyed
This great economy… it will endure
The working class will survive!

I think people miss an important point in these selloffs. It’s not just the raw text that’s valuable, but the minute interactions between networks of users people.

Like the timings between replies and how vote counts affect not just engagement, but the tone of replies, and their conversion rate.

I’ve could imagine a sort of “script” running for months, haunting your every move across the internet, constantly running personalised little a/b tests, until a tactic is found to part you from your money.

I mean this tech exists now, but it’s fairly “dumb.” But it’s not hard to see how AI will make it much more pernicious.

Man I’d be so mad if I’d built up a sweet severance, only to have to quit for better work

And they’re sticking with that name? … huh

This is called the “network effect,” so called after the Murderbot novel of the same name (recommended). It’s what makes social medias, aggregators, and service platform so “sticky.” It’s what makes platform-capitalism work.

It also makes nice things work too, ofc.

Let’s do both! I welcome our imperfect solarpunk future with open arms

I mean I hadn’t seen this until now, so thank you

Parallel means poopie

“We’ve replaced some pieces of that political machine—specifically, we have parallel media now with Elon’s Twitter, or X,” crowed Tan during a presentation at the 2023 Network State Conference. “Getting a parallel media was a key piece, and it wasn’t through voting. It was done by building.… […]

Got it so parallel means privatised. He’s a privatisation hawk.

What a tool. A cat would not even sit on his lap.

CEOs like this are aiming to indirectly rule/control others with their money

It breaks their little heads that they can have all this money and power, and yet still a random poor person has the legal right to say “no” to them.

They don’t understand why the state doesn’t work 100% just for them.

One hundred. It was like having an excuse to be a loner while also contributing to society, but by your absence from it. You got the feeling that everyone was cooped up for the good of each other, trying to ride this thing out. A beautiful hybrid lonely-solidarity: a unique feeling that will never happen like that again.

I wonder if the cost of shipping a defective item were higher if it would happen so frequently. Polluting on that scale is largely free, even though it costs us all dearly.

Like you said, we don’t have many tools other than regulation

An interesting proposition, and one I’ll be thinking about for sure. Sadly we probably won’t ever get “VC as Code” hah so none of us are safe

Thanks, McFap, I’ll try to remember that.

What sucks is that stuff ends up in the landfill most of the time instead of being recycled.

Yeah that’s the sad part. It’s such a colossal waste.

it shouldn’t bother you to destroy it.

I disagree. I think it should, and probably does, bother everyone involved. Why damage it further, when it could be sold or even just given to a refurb/repair outfit?

I mean I know why, it’s because there’s no immediate profit motive there. Maybe even the opposite. Which again, is sad.

Yeah I was talking to a friend just yesterday about how a TV isn’t really a big purchase anymore, but the houses/rents are crazy expensive. It’s kinda fucked.

Anyway my tv was $0 (from brother), about a meter across, and has a permanent green bar on the right side that only guests notice. I’m oddly proud of my shitty TV, which probably isn’t healthy, but by plan is to ride this thing until it’s unusable lol

That’s so sad

Yeah I can’t feel good about that kind of stuff anymore (it’s the same thing in my field with IaC - Infrastructure as Code). Even if I agree that these are good ideas, it all comes down to being able to treat workers like interchangeable cogs rather than people who can amass knowledge and expertise over time.

Then the dream: that you could sell an entire skeleton of a company with none of the old workers clinging to the bones, and another team of replaceable workers could just slot themselves in place and start making money for investors!

I’m not sure it’ll ever get that extreme, but it’s not ethics that is blocking it from happening, but material reality.

So yeah, fuck the docs.