"I want to talk about an under-represented group on Fedi"
Young people? "No"
Africans? "No"
Less techie folks? "No"
Indigenous folks? "No"
Women? "No"
Non-English/German speakers? "No"
Anyone not white? "No"
South Americans? "No"
Minority religious folks? "No"
People with cognitive differences? "No"
Non-graduates? "No"
Working class folks? "No"
Retired people? "No"
Occupied people? "No"
Emmmm, the Sentinel Island people? "No"
Ok, who?
"Tech journalists who love AI"
Fuck all the way off.
Putting on my "not taking the piss" hat, I think sometimes people get frustrated, ultimately, by the fact that fedi isn't about shared values as much as it is overlapping values.
And it's cool cuz everyone can play their part in that context.
But there are tendencies that many of us are here to _escape_. Call it Big Bad Tech. Anti-BBT sentiment is a major, well-established building block of this thing.
And the LLM boom is a distillation of some of the worst BBT tendencies.
It's hard to be polite when people pretend not to understand what exactly people hate about this stuff.
I've been around so many tech debates over the years and LLM hype is the winner for patronizing absolute bullshit.
It comes down to people who want to do what they like, and still want to be liked. Sorry, but we're all adults, you have to pick one.
You can't fuck people over and still expect them to play with you.
Tagging on one more thing about "tech folks" and I technically am one so I'm allowed say it.
There's loads of intelligent, friendly people in tech who are so used to not thinking about certain things, that they think you're weird if you do.
- stealing from artists
- pollution for speculation
- causing psychological harm
- invading privacy
- participating in war crimes
- doing business with tyrants
"That's business! You're weird for thinking it's weird."
They spend half their career in companies which do the bad things and take a position of "I would have noticed. Everyone I worked with was lovely."
When you point out things, you're wrong.
When the CEO admits those things, "I'm shocked"
They will be shocked every one of the dozens of times this happens.
You're still a clown if you don't like the 3 employers they list on their bio.
"Business is business. I'm nice and so are my friends. There'd be no internet if you had your way."
"If you're so smart, why don't I see Google on your CV" is the tech industry's version of "If you're so smart why aren't you rich?"
That's why they're so hard to argue with. Any difference of opinion is evidence that your brain isn't as good as theirs. They worked with the smartest people ever you know. They were the Albert Einsteins of invasion of privacy.
> "If you're so smart, why don't I see Google on your CV"
Oh! Oh! I can answer that one!
Because after the on-site job interviews, I decided I didn't want to work like they offered me at the time (exploited while migrated to a foreign country and without a huge salary raise).
The recruiter told me I didn't look very excited, we discussed... and it ended there.
What do you mean working in Google is a mark of smart people?
Davey
Thomas
María Arias de Reyna
GinevraCat