Tech has always been breaking social contracts. It’s how we roll. We did the same thing with taxis and travel accommodations to name a few.
We hid our “we know better” hubris under the term “disruption” because the reality (breaking everything) was a little too unsettling for us.
We ignore laws and regulations where we know better of course. Don’t you love having a homey place to stay while travelling that has just a few weird rules, a small to-do list and stays spotless thanks to that cleaning fee?
And look at all the good we did! A whole new world of slaves (oops gig workers - sorry!)
And of course we’re doing it again with information and content. We should be in charge of monetizing all your work because you’re not responsible enough to do it right. It furthers our need for power and control. Oops we meant to help make the world a better place (We keep doing that, sorry.)
> Tech has always been breaking social contracts. It’s how we roll. We did the same thing with taxis and travel accommodations to name a few.
It is not how I roll and it never has been. I don't and won't make things that are responsible for putting people out of work; I make things that make their jobs less shit. I won't make choices that make things more dangerous or less ethical.
This is a choice you can make. Beware of sitting back and saying "we" when you could be in a position to say "you".
It's possible to do no deliberate evil, to avoid using euphemisms for firing people, to avoid fire-at-will culture. It's also possible to fight against major ethics lapses and immorality.
At the best — highest-paying, most dynamic, most fun — job I ever did, I probably did more good in the relevant industry in one afternoon by writing down my concerns, printing a resignation letter, making both my employer and their client aware it existed and offering to sign it, than I've ever managed since. (You can maybe only do this once per working lifetime; use it wisely)
Even the project I worked on that I was sure would put dozens of identifiable people out of work didn't, because we found a way they could use the product to continue their original tasks until their existing contracts expired/they moved on/they retired and their team could be scaled down through gentle non-replacement.
One of the earliest things I was taught about system design is that sometimes even jobs that appear to an outsider to be noisy, exhausting or miserable give people purpose and meaning; you have to look people in the eye when you talk about things that could eliminate their job role. You don't replace a job that doesn't need replacing. And you have to look at the things they do with care and duty and make sure your systems do the same.
If you come from a corporate culture that treats this as anathema, you should work to change it or quit.
It’s possible yet many simply don’t do it. How many rounds of mass, unnecessary tech layoffs do we need to see? We literally just went through a phase of companies scrambling to bring people back because they were too eager to lay them off for AI promises.
Silicon Valley excels at two things: building moats and firing people.
Somewhere at the very beginning of my career, the second year I think, I was part of the team that visited a location of the company we were selling our SaaS solution to, in a branch that was back then still dependent on Excel sheets.
The owner of the company lead us to a large open office with about 30 people working in there, mostly women, and whispered to us that he expects he'll only need three of them after subscribing to our product.
That's when I realised the brutality of what we are doing, and the sales guy I was with realised we should be charging significantly more.
As much as it would suck to be one of the 27 unemployed, I don't think the answer is to throw away our calculators and start doing our bookkeeping by hand again. I don't think you need to feel too bad about this. The accountants didn't all disappear when Excel showed up; they just got to work on the more interesting parts of the job, instead of rectifying arithmetic.
We could create economic systems that prioritized workers over immediate profit.
In this case, a system that aided the displaced workers in finding new positions and acquiring skills that are not simply doordashingfor rent (and still counting that as 'full employment').
In this latest disruption, highly skilled workers are being underemployed in low skill labour and we all lose out. PhD and JD to baristas and uber driver economy.
The federal funding and employment disruption alone will take decades to fix, if ever.
Anywho, you should notice when you participate in creating a massive disruption in many people's lives (to create super-profit for a couple of already wealthy men).
You are never just following orders, don't close your eyes to what you are doing with your life.
And before you 'what about' me. I have refused orders and lost jobs because of it.
My only regret is not organizing with other workers beforehand.
Heck, a good start would be ensuring displaced workers still get food and shelter as long as we want.
Those coal miners? They carried the industrial revolution. We should be treating them as retired heroes when we replace the plant with a solar field, not as disgraced losers!
There are many things that could've happened to those 27 people. The company might've decided to reinvest savings into expanding business, and shift those 27 into different roles. Or may have just plain fired them. We can't tell in every case.
But it is worth remembering that the latter is a probable outcome, and that is what our business is, overall. Automation. As in, automating work so it doesn't need people to be done.
And you didn't say "cool, after they are no longer needed for this task, what other exciting oppurtunities will you be able to employ them pursuing that will grow your company?"
I once built a product that optimized waste. I was so proud of myself, it was going to save so much money. Did a site visit to a beta site and was talking to staff. One woman asked me if I knew what happened to that waste. I answered no. She told me it was bagged up and sent to third world countries where it saved lives. That is how I killed people to save money. Yes, if you are dependent on that waste it is very precarious. Doesn't change the reality for the people who it no longer went to save. I don't know the lesson to take from it. Still haunts me. Saving the money kept services in underserved communities in the US and touched tens of thousands of lives. But it also cost lives. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I've just accepted that there is no action which has the intended effect in full.
Kinda like how entropy forces mechanical energy to not be transferred in full to the form desired. Electrical to light? Some transfer will be heat. Optimize to be more light than heat? Light bill goes down, heat bill goes up in winter.
That's a disconnected parallel from real choices that have much more drastic effects. I don't think what you did was wrong, but it did have unintended consequences. Every new technology brings opportunities for both good and evil intents too, but the outcome is judged by those effected, regardless of the intent of the agent.
Yeah, small city I grew up in there are no longer taxis. Used to be a semi full time position for 1-2 people, so any night you could get a taxi if you arrived by train or needed to get home from somewhere. Most nights operated of course on a loss, but made up for on the volume during some weekends or periods of the year (like winter holidays). But then when the taxi monopoly broke down, more people started to compete on the lucrative weekends. Good in the start, quicker to get a cab and price decreased. But then the original cab drivers couldn't sustain the new lower income, and got other jobs. No one wants to be up night to Wednesday for perhaps two trips, so now it's impossible to hail a cab most days.
And the relevance here is how this disruption played out. Will the same happen to open source? See it already for instance in how AI makes some maintainers burn out. Where will it lead?
I live in one of those little towns now where Uber isn’t always available because no one is logged on, and it was a nightmare to get a cab pre-Uber in little towns like this. You’d call, and were lucky if anyone picked up, lucky if the wait was less than half an hour, and lucky if they showed up. And the price would be 2-3x what Uber is. So yes, it’s lame that sometimes Uber isn’t available, but it didn’t replace a great situation either.
Oh, and there are still car services you can schedule in advance, just like before.
Yes, we in tech. Even going back decades, email technology was a huge disruptor. Professionals used to have secretaries to type up letters/memos for them. All those secretary roles are now gone.
The unnecessary hyperbole ruins your argument. Not all of tech is about breaking social contracts. Whose livelihood is destroying the engineer that design better protein folding software? Linus made the world better and richer for everyone. Even the humble startup shipping yet another calendar tool isn’t harming anyone or being the direct cause of layoffs of other workers.
>Whose livelihood is destroying the engineer that design better protein folding software?
Hasn’t homology modeling essentially been abandoned by researchers at this point? Maybe their livelihood wasn’t completely ruined but if you had specialized in that technology, you were probably materially harmed by the introduction of AlphaFold. That harm doesn’t outweigh the obvious benefits, but I would be very surprised if the harm doesn’t exist.
>Even the humble startup shipping yet another calendar tool isn’t harming anyone or being the direct cause of layoffs of other workers.
If they’re undercutting and outcompeting an existing calendar tool, they very well could be contributing to layoffs at their competitors.
I think we both know that it’s not just Uber who is violating social contracts. AI companies are routinely violating laws that would have the feds knocking at my door. Facebook? Airbnb? Uber? Every meal delivery service? The list goes on. They’re all like this.
Oh, I think it goes further than that. Many of these companies would not exist without massive subsidies. Their business models were untenable without some monied interest pumping them up. And where did they get their money from? Mainly money-printing, rent-seeking, usury, or good ol' legalized fraud (which is what I consider "burying a right to sell your information to advertisers in the ToS, to the tune of orders of magnitude more value than you get from the service").
And it's not that their services were fulfilling a need, just at a large social cost. Many created a need by using those massive amounts of funding to destroy existing, sustainable services. They're a net negative for the economy and society because they replaced workable businesses (albeit with limited reach because the users bore the full cost) with businesses that will collapse because they're built around ubiquity and forcing non-users to shoulder part of the cost (the only way to break even while paying back investors).
Not at all. For example, arrival of Uber was very visible and destructive to taxi industries in many places; I witnessed it in Moscow, Russia where I lived for a few years back then. In 2012, if you needed a quick ride from an underground station to your home, you needed to bargain with some random dude waiting near the station in a very shitty car, and pay cash (good luck if you need change). Fast forward a year or two, and you can hail a ride from your phone using either Uber or a local Yandex.
I'm not going to deny the starting premise (tech breaks things, sometimes laws), but I don't think your follow-up is fair (we are responsible for all negatives).
Why is it our fault that governments have completely abdicated their responsibilities? Why is it our fault that everyday people literally refuse to become politically or economically literate and/or vote?
Tech has given the world, for essentially free, the entire wealth of human knowledge at their fingertips. We've given them ways to learn and communicate. We've overhauled transportation and logistics and payment. Fairly soon (decades), human labor may be obsoleted and who knows what good that may bring us.
And, yes, we also gave them mass surveillance and gig economies and hyper-addictive systems. Just like engineers gave us guns and chemists gave us poison and physists gave us nuclear bombs and doctors gave us lobotomies.
They had quite literally decades to recognize the threat. We screamed the dangers from the rooftops and in congressional hearings. We told people social media is poison. Betting sites are poison. You are the product. Watch out for market capture. You need to legislate us.
Normal folk called us crazy nerds and basically told us where to shove our concerns. But now it's our fault, naturally. We didn't do enough. We didn't perceive all possible outcomes, assume the world would be negligent, and refuse to make things we thought would be helpful - as if someone else wouldn't have thought of such Einstein breakthoughs as "socialize online" or "couch jumping online" or "taxis.. online".
And just to be clear, I'm speaking collectively just because you are. I make very boring stuff that is well within the confines of the law and only serves to help people.
All true, indeed. However, it does feel especially sobering realizing tech is hitting its own ouroboros point: a point where it starts to break social contracts that it designed to begin with.
> We hid our “we know better” hubris under the term “disruption” because the reality (breaking everything) was a little too unsettling for us.
That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing. The prevailing wisdom was that this "internet" thing was going to fundamentally change the structure of human society, and nothing would ever be the same again. We ignored the laws, and society broadly accepted that those laws weren't fit for this new world of abundance and information freedom anyway. Big tech was offered broad protection from any responsibility through laws such as Section 230, which basically says they can't be blamed for anything, as long as they structure their services as a "market".
After 20 years, I think we've found that actually the structure of human society has remained largely the same. The things we all need are still the same. The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.
>The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.
Except for something like housing, the supply of which has been artificially constrained by policy since before the internet arrived on the scene, I can’t think of anything which is harder to produce or distribute since the advent of the internet. Particularly on distribution, I have far more access to goods and services than my parents did.
Agreed that this hasn’t changed the structure of society in any meaningful way. We’re still social animals with all the same strengths and weaknesses as before.
>That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing.
By the people not involved in the things breaking maybe. If you didn't drive a taxi or run a hotel the tech companies "disrupting" things by breaking laws didn't affect you directly. Now with LLMs, they do.
Luddites were complaining about having their lives upended and being thrown into generational poverty. That is what wide-scale "disruption" looks at the receiving end.
It seems obvious then that the answer is supporting the much smaller displaced people, not stopping progress for the entire population (and future generations).
The social contracts for taxis and hotels like most sucked anyway. They were in the best case socialism and in the worst case communism. We need more freedom, not less.
Though based on what I've heard it's ironic that nowadays Uber is mostly just like a plain old taxi company. Gone are the days of "ride sharing" when you could make some extra bucks if you wanted to.
Please take this in good faith, as I hope your own post is, but I interpret the thread you're replying to as focusing on the "everyday' part.
Share knowledge? I don't think anyone here is arguing against that in any way (or conversely arguing for hoarding knowledge).
The concern, one I share, is where the sharing has to happen publicly "every day" - so no matter how trivial, useless, niche, overly-specific the tip is (whatever, the list isn't exclusive), someone shares it.
That's the part that's not sharing knowledge for the benefit of others, but rather self-serving. I might even go so far as to say self-serving doesn't even need to be selfish; the person might genuinely believe they're doing good, but even there, self-serving.
TLDR: Share your knowledge, don't make sharing something every day, even when you don't have something valuable to share, your target.
PS - if this note irks anyone (are routine maxxers a thing?), make the goal to learn something every day, then share where appropriate.
> Treating a public channel like ye olde facebok wall? Mildly annoying.
Every team/department/org/whatever should have channels everyone should subscribe to, and channels individuals set up that are optional for everyone. The appropriate way to handle this is for the OP to write a few tips once in a while in the public channel, and if people seem to like it, announce that all future tips will be in that channel.
Even weather was/is comically bad. Ask it anything specific and it would fall over, repeating the broadest, least helpful version of weather data, even if all that data is clearly available in the ios weather app. Specifics on wind, precipitation hourly, etc.
So no, you can't really ask a homepod for the weather either - Homepod's weather was more like a shitty version of sticking your head outside and looking up at the sky.
Wouldn't most users considering or using Forgejo also have considered (or used) self-hosted Gitlab which would have the same opex / security costs (and much higher hardware requirements)?
Finder is indeed frustrating. "Recent" seems like an attempt to fix this without the need to use some giant camera roll?
The (hard) problem is that almost every finder alternative/add-on I've tried is someone else's ideal workflow that still doesn't sit well with me. I find KDE's Dolphin similarly frustrating - for very similar reasons.
Both work marginally better (for me) when used in concert with the quick-find tools like Alfred (or Spotlight) and KRunner. None of these are perfect.
Showerthought: maybe the "find files" interfaces aren't the worst offenders; maybe it's the "place files" workflows that are problematic and we're trying to solve the wrong problem?
If only recent actually worked. I see no rhyme or reason why something gets in recent. I guess finder has to be involved. So often I am working with files between apps, saving and opening and such and the files never appear in recent which defeats the purpose for me.
And then we have the spotlight deamon processes which seem to exist only to burn earth's precious resources.
High quality 500-600w bifacial n panels are between $200-300 in Canada at normal install sizes (12-32). We do lag behind the costs elsewhere, but still nowhere close to $1000 per panel.
Really? That's more expensive than I would've guessed. The US has substantial tariffs, and you can get a pallet of panels for $0.20-$0.30/watt. You can also pay a lot more, but I'm not sure why you would.
Thanks to marginal gains on MacOs (nee OS X) the Linux desktop gets closer more quickly than Apple can pull away.
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