RE: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/116226720041425679

Louder for people at the back:

If ‘AI’ gives you a 20% productivity increase, in an economic system that rewards growth at the expense of everything else, the rational thing for any company to do is use that productivity increase to expand into new markets. This may involve some redundancies because you need different skills for the new opportunities but they will be matched by increased hiring in the other areas. If you and your competitors both see a 20% increase in productivity and you use it to make people redundant and they use it to ship more products in more areas, then they will grow at your expense. Their products will be better than yours and you will lose market share.

If you are claiming that you have redundancies because ‘AI’ is increasing productivity, then one of the following is true:

• Your leadership team does not understand market economics (in which case, investors should worry that the board has not replaced obviously incompetent leadership).
• You are an unchallengeable monopoly and have already filled all adjacent markets and have literally no possibility of growth (in which case, investors should take note and set their price predictions based on today’s revenue, with no expectation of future growth, which would wipe out over 80% of Meta’s market cap).
• You are lying about productivity gains (in which case, investors should worry about what else you’re lying about and should start prodding the SEC to investigate).

At #RealWorldCrypto this year, there was a session on "privacy-enhancing technologies".

The first talk in the session was about a new encryption method for Tor.

The next two were painful examples of "a person cannot be convinced of something when their salary depends on them not knowing it".

Advertisers wants to collect signals about populations without being individually identifying. So let's talk about differential privacy techniques to let them do that.

One example was "Meta wants to know what percentage of its teneage users blocked a contact today".

At no point did they address the elephants in the room.

• Why do they want this data in the first place?
• What are they even doing with this signal?
• Have you considered telling them to fuck off and not collect it in the first place?

As tempting as it might be to hand wave it, and say "well yes but their business model depends on it", I say to advertisers, "then perish".

I deactivated Google Play on my phone. The electricity company app was the first to be bricked. 'You must update.'

I wrote to them: ’I don’t have Google or Apple. Where else can I update the app?’ Nowhere else, they replied.

I wrote (politely) back: ’I can’t use your app any more then. It’s an odd requirement to make of your customers. A Norlys customer can only access all Norlys services if they are also a customer of one of two specific private for-profit US companies.’

#DanmarkSkifter

Be the grit. And be funny about it.

#bbc #resist #smallprophets