You're simply describing the end state of a hyper capitalist system, as outlined by classic Marxist theory.
The core operating principle of which says capitalism requires and promotes systems that enforce the separation of labor from the product they produce. This precludes fellow laborers from meaningfully communicating with each other; knowledge sharing could expose more of how the product "works" after all! Only in final combination, following an undisclosed (to the worker) larger plan, does the product become whole and provide utility.
So not knowing "what happens" in layers "above" and "below" you for your specific work unit is key. This is the "de-skilling" tenet of capitalism and is required for exploitation, conformity, at scale. As labor units become smaller, they require less skill and time to produce, rendering laborers "conditioned to a machine." In other words, workers must acquiesce their skills in the name of "progress" of the system itself. This can easily be sold to the laborers, couched by real world data highlighting the obvious efficiency gains, along with a heavy bonus of having to do less work yourself.
Only by making ever smaller parts of a whole, awhile hiding the utility of those parts produced, can capital rob labor of their value (their skill, their products, their output.)
This very same system lends itself to outcompeting private labor by way of parallelization: as it just so happens that smaller slices of work tend to parallelize better than larger ones. If you can operate at a scale that bespoke creators have no chance of replicating on their own, you "win!" The beautiful moat, the envy of all.
In other words, you're just describing being a worker in a highly efficient capitalist machine! Look! We're almost there! I can just about smell all the "winning" from here...
Fun fact: Shortly after MS Teams launched I created an internal "reconstituted" desktop Teams client for myself and the poor souls in my org that had MS Teams thrust upon them. It extracted resources from the (unminified!) electron app as well the js and CSS files from their web version, then repackaged it again via electron, wrapping into a standalone executable. Think like a really complicated greasemonkey/tampermonkey script.
My fork at the time replaced their criminal white space use and offered a more compact and information dense alternative using CSS and JavaScript, injected all post rendering. Ah, the silly things one is capable when faced with a minor inconvenience and a wandering mind...
Happy to hear Pidgin is still at it after all these decades. I still fondly remember using it when it was still called Gaim and only spoke OSCAR, back when Rob was involved before he started Asterisk. I lurked on IRC back then and even made a simple TUI when libpurple first came out.
Does matrix have decent 1:N client desktop broadcasting with low latency (and high fps) yet? I use discord for "watch parties", video and tabletop gaming...
I think this will be the kneejerk reaction of many, but then you'll have to face the consequences (de facto social isolation) and probably acquiesce.
I had the same reaction when platforms started asking for my cellphone number... after some years I just started giving it to them. Now I don't even think about it.
>but then you'll have to face the consequences (de facto social isolation) and probably acquiesce.
Nah I'm used to being lonely. Leaving these platforms shows how few truly deep friendships you have.
You get used to it.
>I had the same reaction when platforms started asking for my cellphone number... after some years I just started giving it to them.
Even when I gave Facebook my number, that wasn't enough. I drew a line at some point. If everyone else wants to sacrifice privacy for the sake of pseudo-community, so be it.
Then you and I are not the same. If a platform asks for more than I'm willing to give it, it's time to leave. I've done this enough times that it's simply routine. If it means I suffer "defacto social isolation", whatever that is, so beit. I'm old and I've cultivated a group of close nit friends that live nearby most of the year, we'll manage just fine without discord.
I don't socialize on Discord, I use it for work. That's why I don't care. I said that from the perspective of the people that are crying about Discord's move.
The weird thing is that you give your personal info, including your biometrics, to your government and your bank. You probably weren't thrilled when they asked you for your finger prints but eventually you gave them anyway because the alternative was not having a bank account. Everybody folds in the end.
What makes you think "corporations bad" but it's OK if governments and bankers do it? They're just as malicious and incompetent.
This is like being afraid to fly when you drive every day which is 200 times more dangerous.
Acquiescence is your solution whether you care or not. Your feelings are irrelevant to the matter. It's a binary decision in the end, you either play ball or walk out.
You clearly don't understand how this works. Social problems are not objective, like math problems. A lack of family support, for example, is something that many people label as a problem... but a lot of people just build strong social networks outside of their family and really don't care when someone says "family first!".
That's what I think about the cries around a lack of privacy.
I know I somehow ended up in a forum full of IT people and that might my problem, but: People are not software. You don't get to flag something as "problematic" on other people.
You must be unaware that you're your own best salesman. Only you buy the bullshit you sell, and you can't be shocked when others don't. There's a lot I could tackle here, as you're wrong in tons of ways, but objective facts reveal truth. Sadly that bot of yours won't work in the physical realm, so hopefully that's not the bullshitter.
Install cameras everywhere there's assumed privacy like the bathroom / water closet, bedrooms, or anywhere else. Can keep costs down by simply filming it as well. When anyone asks what you've been doing lately simply provide them those recordings. Might want to upload somewhere if easier, and freely post those too since you don't care.
Make copies of your ID, credit cards, phone number, and email addresses. Have some with two of those, some with three, and some with all four included. Mix it up in any carefree fashion you'd like. Next time one is required hand them copies, and then carelessly proceed about your business. Tell them to get over it, and move on, since that's their social problem of which you don't care regardless if they care you're a weirdo that doesn't care.
Every 90 days? Wow. Can you elaborate on how that logically works? Like what about for doctors offices having your number on file and other similar situations.
My doctor’s office has my email
and knows to use it. Half of the time I’m not even in the country where that phone number works.
I just buy 90 day prepaid SIM cards. At the end of the 90 days I’m usually in another country.
My Google Voice number is sufficient for authing to Signal, but I don’t give it out to vendors/services or use it for phone calls.
I never receive any voice calls to my SIM card itself. Anyone who would want to call me knows to reach me on Signal. Anyone else, I don’t need to speak to them.
Most of the time my voice conversations are in Google Meet calls, anyway. It’s almost always for clients who don’t like to type and would prefer to be synchronous instead of using their device’s built in dictation software.
I have a lot of medical records, in three different countries. All in the same name, which is the name on my passport and birth certificate and TSA precheck.
I’m not exactly sure where you went off the rails here.
Phone numbers and email addresses are used by data brokers and apps to track you across different accounts, services, and devices.
People in my country are being shot on the streets by the government. Let's not pretend that there are not in fact malicious actors out there who want you hurt for their amusement.
You're free to make your own choices on life, but I don't like you chastising others' lived experiences as if everyone has a cushy safe life with a government working for them.
"I used to resist the boot, too. Then I was successfully conditioned by the environment that's been engineered around me. Now I just lick it subconsciously."
I also thought like you when I was in my 20's.
However... the addolescent need to "rise up" is the first thing to go when you actually start a family and develop a well balanced social network.
If you play your cards right, soon enough, you won't care about all this.
If anything I'm more 'radical' pushing 50 than I was at 20. That "everyone gets more conservative as you age" adage is not universal.
For me I was 'radicalized' by raising children to adulthood and seeing the broken world we're leaving to them. Living in the US, my eldest daughter has less rights than her mother did growing up. Capitulating to the demands of fascists is not the way to a better future. Complacency has a high cost, regardless of whether it affects you personally.
"Racing the Beam" is a great book by MIT press that covers the specifics of the Atari 2600 platform. The 2600 sparked a number of innovations _largely because of_ the limitations of the platform forces you to think outside the box.
I have deep concerns surrounding LLM-based systems in general, which you can see discussed in my other threads and comments. However in this particular article's case, I feel the same fears outlined largely predate mass LLM adoption.
If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels: cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by farms of humans instead of farms of GPUs. The result is largely the same. The primary difference is that we've now subsidized (through massive, unsustainable private investment) the cost of "offshoring" to basically zero. Obviously that has its own set of problems, but the piper will need to be paid eventually...
EDIT: it has been rightfully pointed out that my above comment can easily be read as a racially charged overgeneralization of overseas workers of indo-asian descent. The "cheap spaghetti code" was meant as shorthand for "wildly variable code output with respect to quality and consistency, with no overarching architecture or plan", and was intended to target offshoring _agency_ output along with cheap labor systems that US companies created. These systems attempt to exploit workers at these agencies to avoid paying US salaries and are NOT a reflection on the actual individuals working in the aforementioned cube farms themselves. These workers are already subjected to a number of dehumanizing labor issues entirely outside of their control and I did not intend to further dehumanize. I apologize for my terse, careless wording.
I've worked with, trained and lived alongside workers overseas for months at a time and can say that there's no meaningful difference across racial divides, save for some variation on cultural norms. I would have assumed a more charitable interpretation of my words, but we live in uncharitable times. I'll do better going forward.
Instead of money flowing to lower income countries (by virtue of their cheaper labour), which helped those countries grow, money is now flowing to the already richest economy on earth. That's a big difference.
Interesting how your "structural critique of AI" requires you to characterize an entire workforce of engineers as producing "cheap spaghetti code" from "farms of humans" with a racial meme thrown in for flavor. Code quality tracks with investment and management, not ethnicity. You're not making the sophisticated point you think you're making
I'm specifically speaking of the "race to the bottom" offshore consultancies that exploit cheap labor in foreign, largely asian countries, for export to the US to bypass paying US wages. The preexisting meme I referenced is around corporate lies where their "AI" is largely backed by offshore labor. Think the latest Waymo news, etc. Regardless of those controversies, within the US at least, we've been offshoring technical labor overseas for decades.
I didn't mean to imply that anyone of asian descent is inherently generating "spaghetti code". If that's how it read, I apologize, that was not my intention.
To further clarity, I've dealt with a number of these offshoring agencies (the really inexpensive ones specifically), and their output is very similar to what AI produces today. They have extreme turnover rates, and team assignments change at random so lost context and variable output is common. They do operate cube farms just like US workers, though I'm not sure why that's pertinent to call out though.
I agree, however, that I'm not saying anything sophisticated or complex, merely stating an observation.
Cost of offshoring to ai isn’t zero. Chatgpt and such are businesses. They charge subscriptions. In fact whatever cost you’d pay offshoring to india is probably where chatgpt is hoping to price its subscriptions eventually. Anything less is just leaving money on the table for chatgpt.
I agree it's greater than zero, however, like a good drug dealer you get the first few hits for free (or at cost in the most charitable interpretation of current subscriptions.)
I get the feeling that we're not even close to paying for the _actual_ costs of our frontier GenAI models at current usage levels, with or without subscriptions in the picture. AFAICT we're all using a highly subsidized product, made possible by private capital on the promise of future returns that may or may not materialize.
Outside of a few vertically integrated companies (Google with their custom TPUs, possibly AWS with theirs) LLM companies like OpenAI have to rely on massive data centers via MSFT, Oracle and Nvidia deals to train their frontier models to stay competitive. Theres a lot to pay for when wielding 20 Gigawatts of compute on other folks' machines. For OpenAI we're talking 4+ trillion USD so far with no signs of slowing. That's a hell of a lot of subscriptions to make up for that spend and they have a long climb ahead of them to get there. Maybe their "killer app" will be their new "erotica" models, who knows (porn has lead several tech initiatives in the past.) But I wouldnt bet money on it working out for them.
It's estimated that OpenAI spends 3 USD for every 1 it makes. Obviously that will have to change to make them an actually viable company in the long term. In the end, I see the most likely scenario is we're left with the few large players like Google. They're the ones that have any hope on "winning" the GenAI race, as they're in the best position to not rely on someone else's shovels.
All that said offshoring started out with similar promises to GenAI and some things panned out with offshoring and others didn't. Only time will tell what shakes out of all this mess. I just hope we get a sane readjustment of expectations for GenAI before our next economic collapse (the massive GenAI investment has helped prop up our economy to an extent, at least in the US)
In short, a business exists to turn a profit and OpenAI has yet to do so. Perhaps they eventually will and be the new "offshore" solution going forward as you imply, but just like actually moving your technical talent overseas it comes with a significant amount of tradeoffs to consider (tradeoffs already outlined in parent and other posts on this thread.)
The thing with data center build out is it isn’t just lighting money on fire. You are building out infrastructure that you can then lease out to other users who no longer have to pay to build out their own infrastructure since yours exists and is for lease.
As far as I can tell, the rich have never stopped employing elaborate casts of servants; these servants just go by different titles now: private chef, personal assistant, nanny, fashion consultant, etc.
Those particular roles were voluntary arrangement for much of human history, simply because people who fill them tend to be significantly better off than those who don't directly serve the powerful (and instead serve their economic interests, like e.g. agricultural slaves or serfs).
Employing servants only recently fell out of favor in the years between WWI and WWII. Prior to WWI having servants was still in fashion for the wealthy. Naturally I meant paid servants. Enslaved and to some extent indentured servants obviously have little to no choice.
That said many of those employered in service industries and to some extent the gig economy have limited options and their participation is barely "voluntary" in modern capitalism.
Aside: seeing myself refer to the 1940s as "recent" is really highlighting my age. Soon I'll be relegated to a "grampa yelling at clouds" meme (but just the computer cloud variety)
The core operating principle of which says capitalism requires and promotes systems that enforce the separation of labor from the product they produce. This precludes fellow laborers from meaningfully communicating with each other; knowledge sharing could expose more of how the product "works" after all! Only in final combination, following an undisclosed (to the worker) larger plan, does the product become whole and provide utility.
So not knowing "what happens" in layers "above" and "below" you for your specific work unit is key. This is the "de-skilling" tenet of capitalism and is required for exploitation, conformity, at scale. As labor units become smaller, they require less skill and time to produce, rendering laborers "conditioned to a machine." In other words, workers must acquiesce their skills in the name of "progress" of the system itself. This can easily be sold to the laborers, couched by real world data highlighting the obvious efficiency gains, along with a heavy bonus of having to do less work yourself.
Only by making ever smaller parts of a whole, awhile hiding the utility of those parts produced, can capital rob labor of their value (their skill, their products, their output.)
This very same system lends itself to outcompeting private labor by way of parallelization: as it just so happens that smaller slices of work tend to parallelize better than larger ones. If you can operate at a scale that bespoke creators have no chance of replicating on their own, you "win!" The beautiful moat, the envy of all.
In other words, you're just describing being a worker in a highly efficient capitalist machine! Look! We're almost there! I can just about smell all the "winning" from here...
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